30 Orientalism and EmpireChechnia is for the mutineers, and only awaits their appearance in or-
der to openly act against us.”^138 By August newly pronounced imam
and rebel leader in Dagestan Alibek-Khadzhi Aldanov commanded
an army of 30,000, and by October the Russian population was flee-
ing to safer havens, such as Astrakhan and Temir-Khan-Shura.^139
The extensive character of the rebellion, covering 504 different loca-
tions in Dagestan alone, prompted among Russians a reassessment of
the legacy of Russian rule in the North Caucasus after 1859.^140 “We
are unable to say that the region has been subjugated and that we,
Russians, are the complete masters here. The sad circumstances sug-
gest the exact opposite,” an editor in Kavkaz noted in the wake of the
rebellion.^141 The readiness on the part of the mountaineers to act in
concert with Turkey raised further questions about the viability of
Russian rule over Muslim regions that bordered Muslim empires. In
the Middle Volga, by contrast, officials only noted the prevalence of
rumours among the Tatars about Russian plans for their religious
conversion.^142 But in Ichkeriia (Chechnia), rebellious mountaineers
gathered immediately after Alexander ii’s announcement of the be-
ginning of another Russo-Turkish War on 12 April.^143 Fazli-pasha ar-
rived in Sukhumi (Abkhazia) with an explicitly religious appeal to
his Muslim “brothers” to oppose the enemy “Muscovites,” who
wished to “wipe Islam from the face of the earth.”^144 The Turks main-
tained control of Sukhumi from May through July of 1877.
The 1877 rebellion was again a revival of the tradition of religious
warfare, the efforts of Soviet scholars to depict the uprising as moti-
vated by grievances of a social and economic nature notwithstand-
ing.^145 Russian administrator N. Semenov recalled in his memoirs of
the event that he and other officials noted an increase in Sufi activities
in Chechnia in early 1877.^146 And the rebellion was neither isolated
nor local. Chechnia and Dagestan were most active in the rebellion,
but it was also felt in Ossetia, Ingushetia, Abkhazia, Svanetia,
Kakhetia, Mingrelia, and the provinces of Baku and Elisavetpol’.
Georgian prince Chavchavadze, the military governor of Dagestan,
later reported that the imperial administration in a district such as
Kazi-Kumukh completely disappeared in the course of the rebellion.
The rebels destroyed the materials and documents of the district com-
mander, who worked out of his home in any event, and easily over-
powered the local police force, a contingent of forty men for the entire
district.^147
Officials were dismayed that they had to divert forces from the war
with Turkey in order to quell a rebellion in the rear. General Komarov
converged upon southern Dagestan, General Murav’ev upon central
Dagestan, and Colonels Tukhonov and Kvisinsk upon the west. By