146 Orientalism and Empirestudy has explored a series of related stories about the identity of the
mountain peoples and the purpose and mission of Russian imperial
rule. These discussions emerged as a reaction to Russia’s long history
of destructive conquest on the early modern steppe, as well as the
very recent reminder of this heritage in the massive exile of many
mountaineers that accompanied the conclusion to the Caucasus War.
Frontier lands were historically inhabited by “evil” and “godless” in-
fidels, or they were places without people, “empty lands” where “till
now no fields have been ploughed, no homesteads have stood, and
no tax has arrived to the tsar’s treasury,” as Ivan the Terrible’s 15 58
charter suggested to Grigorii Stroganov.^4 The population transfers
from the North Caucasus again left “empty land,” as an 1860 impe-
rial decree put it, now to be used to reward the military service of
loyal Georgian princes in the course of the Caucasus War.^5 The mod-
ern and enlightened empire was to be based on something other than
the historic “gathering of the lands” of the Muscovite tsar, army, and
church.^6 Borderland communities such as educated society in the
Caucasus were the important voices that shaped the new conscious-
ness of empire which emerged in Russia from the middle nineteenth
century.
The makers of this empire were not only Russians, and even the
Russians were not so much “Russian” as they were members of im-
perial educated society, with names like Berzhe, Uslar, Zisserman,
and Radde. These “Europeans” served in numerous frontier locations
of the Russian Empire, the heirs of the transformative project of
Westernization and Enlightened rule initiated by the eighteenth-
century state. “I would not have guessed in 1700,” wrote Voltaire to
Catherine ii, “that Reason, one day would come to Moscow, at the
voice of a princess born in Germany, and that she would assemble in
a great hall idolaters, Moslems, Greeks, Latins, Lutherans, who
would all become her children.”^7 Imperial expansion was no longer
to be associated with the establishment of fortresses with imposing
names such as Groznyi (“menacing” or “terrifying”), but with the es-
tablishment of outposts of European culture on the borders of Asia.
The borderland communities understood Russia to be the cultural
conduit from Europe to the Russian frontier, in which the presence of
a transformative Russia might help to chart the path from savagery to
civil society. “Orientalism,” or the extended scholarly preoccupation
with the empire and its diverse peoples, emerged as a product of this
nexus of Europeanization, reform, and expansion.
Native peoples from the Caucasus contributed to the formation of
the empire. The multi-ethnic service elite of privilege and status was
well prepared to contribute to the discourse of empire as well. A