157 Afterwordcarefully appointed the most important figures in the Muslim reli-
gious hierarchy, and limited and regulated the hajj, or pilgrimage to
Mecca, among Muslim believers from the borderlands.^18
While discouraging and restricting Islamic expression, officials of the
mature Soviet state simultaneously and constantly emphasized their
support for the nativistic practices of cultural nation-building. The
Western example of Wilsonian self-determination in the wake of the
Treaty of Versailles was an important source of inspiration, but more
significant were the terms of debate and ideas about cultural authentic-
ity and identity familiar to Soviet officials from the pre-revolutionary
discourse on empire. The “rooting” of peoples accompanied the clos-
ing of mosques. Soviet scholars explained that the hierarchy of cultural
development progressed from “tribe” to “narodnost› to “nation”
(natsional’nost’). Though some narodnosti were closer to becoming a
nation than others, all of them possessed the potential for such devel-
opment, in particular as a result of the progressive policies of Soviet
rule.^19 Economic development was judged to be crucial to this process,
as well as “self-awareness of ethnic background,” which grew as a re-
sult of Soviet rule.^20 Always but usually incorrectly distinguishing
themselves from their imperial predecessors, Soviet officials were
proud to exhibit “the extent to which the former borderlands of tsarist
Russia had ... in the course of one generation finished with backward-
ness, poverty, disease, and ignorance,” as they declared at an interna-
tional exhibit held in Moscow in 1967.^21 The Soviet exhibit showcased a
“Pavilion of the Soviet Republics.”
By the 1960s and 1970s Soviet scholars were proud to note what
they called the “consolidation of peoples” stimulated by the revolu-
tion and Soviet rule. In place of pre-revolutionary “ethnic fragmenta-
tion,” and in contrast to the course of national development in the
West, they believed that Soviet rule had resulted in the formation of
“socialist peoples” (narodnosti), a prelude to the formation of “social-
ist nations” and then the eventual “fusing of nations” (sliianie natsii),
which meant the disappearance of nations within the international
community of “Soviet people” (Sovetskii narod).^22 Khadzhi-Murat
Salmanov, for example, heralded the “new self-conception of
‘Dagestani,› which united the more than thirty ethnically different
and isolated groups of pre-revolutionary Dagestan.^23 N.G. Volkova, a
Soviet historian of the North Caucasus peoples, emphasized that an
oppressive Ottoman Turkish nationalities policy in the nineteenth
century had resulted in a loss of the “national distinctiveness” (samo-
bytnost’) of many of the North Caucasus peoples who emigrated from
the Russian Empire.^24 In the Soviet Union, by contrast, she implied,
samobytnost’ endured and flourished. Nativistic culture-building