156 Orientalism and EmpireCyrillicized alphabets, built schools to replace the Muslim medresses
and mektebs, and attempted to foster the growth of a new “native”
intelligentsia.^7 “It’s as if the mountaineer peoples were beginning
their history anew,” wrote the editors of a new journal, founded in
192 8, Revolution and the Mountaineer.^8
The ultimate sign of progress and contrast to the imperial past, in
the Soviet view, was the genuine flowering of the native traditions of
the region. Theatrical productions, newspapers, and literature in the
native languages of the Caucasus were important instruments for the
realization of the Soviet conception of progress in the region, as Stalin
himself affirmed on many occasions.^9 “We must write our own litera-
ture,” explained a teacher of the Adygei language, Paranuk Karim, to
ethnographer A.M. Ladyzhenskii, “and show our faces [to the
world].”^10 The first Chechen newspaper was established in 19 25.^11
The new regime sponsored cultural festivals and informational meet-
ings about mountain cultures, and chastised the educated public for
failing to appreciate sufficiently the unique cultures of the North
Caucasus.^12 Drawing upon the experience of Uslar, close to 40per
cent of the schools in the North Caucasus by the late 1920s possessed
teachers who knew and taught in the local language.^13
Again as in the nineteenth century, Islam to administrators posed
the spectre of illegitimacy, an alien tradition divorced from the genu-
ine folk traditions of the region. In spite of the reduction in Muslim
schools and mosques, the brotherhoods of Sufi Islam possessed a re-
markable ability to retreat “underground” and continue their activi-
ties, which for many of them even included armed opposition to the
regime.^14 Rumours about the return of Kunta Haji’s, the Kumyk who
had introduced the Sufi Qadiriya order to the North Caucasus in the
185 0s and who was prominent in the rebellion of 1877, persisted into
the 1930s in spite of the fact that he had died in the late nineteenth
century.^15 Like its imperial predecessor, the Soviet regime worried
about the continuing popularity of the holy places and preachers of
Sufi Islam.^16 Drawing upon the experience of the tsars, the Soviet rul-
ers maintained Muslim Ecclesiastical Administrations to administer
the profession of the faith. No longer interested in the “restoration” of
a presumed Christian past to the North Caucasus, and even more
fearful of any independent form of religious, social, or political ex-
pression, the new regime extended the reach of the ecclesiastical
administration to the North Caucasus. The four Muslim Ecclesiastical
Administrations (Musul’manskie Dukhovnye Upravleniia) were or-
ganized in 1942, based in Tashkent, Ufa, Makhachkala, and Baku.^17
Throughout the Soviet era, state and party officials worried about the
activities of “unregistered cult members” in places such as Dagestan,