18 Orientalism and Empireimperial ideology, where the state sanctioned the privileges of the no-
ble estate in exchange for its loyalty. Especially since Catherine the
Great, the state had attempted to strengthen the corporate identity of
the nobility, hoping to increase its role in the fostering of social creativ-
ity and productivity.^37 In the borderlands, as Kappeler in particular has
shown, the expanding old-regime state continued this practice and ac-
cepted non-Russian elites “as partners.”^38 The state historically invited
the nobility of non-Russian lands into the Russian service, including
Muslim Tatars from Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberia, Crimea, and the Nogai
Hordes, Kabard princes in the sixteenth century, and the Ukrainian no-
bility in the eighteenth century. After defeating Cossack hosts from the
frontier, the imperial state in time created a privileged nobility from
among Cossack elders, such as those of the Don. The seventeenth-
century Muscovite regime even permitted Tatar nobility in the former
khanate of Kazan to hold Russian peasants as serfs.^39 The Georgievsk
Treaty of 1783 granted the Georgian nobility prerogatives similar to
those of the Russian nobility.^40 Early officials such as Tsitsianov and
Ermolov granted a broad autonomy to Georgian nobles and Muslim
(Azerbaijani) khans, and provided positions in the Russian imperial
service to Georgian nobles and places in the military for their sons.^41
From the early nineteenth century the sons of the most powerful fami-
lies in the Caucasus were sometimes educated in St Petersburg.^42
Old-regime custom aside, securing the loyalty of the powerful made
for common sense on the part of regime policy. Local rulers who
submitted to the Russians presumably brought their “families and
subjects” with them, as the government of Paul i assumed at the end
of the eighteenth century.^43 Grigorii Shvarts understood the task be-
stowed upon him by Viceroy Vorontsov to be “to attempt to win over
to our side” those mountaineers with “influence upon the unsubju-
gated mountaineers.”^44 Much of the correspondence between Gener-
als Ol’shevskii and Raevskii on the Black Sea coast chronicled their
efforts to determine the reliability and authority of the various Adygei
and Abkhaz princes with whom they initiated negotiations.^45 After
Daniel-Bek, the Elisuiskii sultan, fell out with Shamil in 1845, Russian
officals such as General Gurko moved quickly to guarantee his per-
sonal safety and well-being in return for his loyalty and service.^46
Native elites had their reasons to be attracted to imperial service.
Money, payments in silver, the confirmation of landholdings, and ser-
vice careers offered “respectable” natives a variety of motives. These
were logical and realistic choices for small peoples between empires,
in a world where everyone was presumably subject to some big state.
Georgia’s nobility had long enjoyed the privileges of service careers,
and important families such as the Orbeliani, Chavchavadze, and