3 Orthodoxy: The Society
for the Restoration of
Orthodoxy in the Caucasus
I don’t remember the crosses, but I heard that we once professed
some other faith, but as to what it’s called I don’t know.
elderly Chechen to Nikolai Dubrovin, 1871^1orthodoxy and islam on the frontier
Conservative writers such as the Slavophiles were famously preoccu-
pied with the past, of course, and studied Russian history for unique
traditions that, in their view, also heralded a special future. As numer-
ous scholars have shown, thinkers such as Ivan Kireevskii and Alexei
Khomiakov explored the special Russian traditions of social harmony,
communal peasant institutions, customary law, the Muscovite heri-
tage, and the Orthodox faith, which they felt served as a reservoir of
Russia’s special “narodnost›and “originality” (samobytnost’).^2 While
there is obviously not a direct connection between the classical archi-
tects of Slavophile thought such as Kireevskii and Khomiakov and dis-
tant colonial communities on the frontier, a series of general
conservative notions about tradition, the past, and cultural authenticity
predominated among borderland communities and hence shaped the
expansion and formation of the empire. “Conservative” thought was
especially important on a frontier where officials and members of edu-
cated society were intent on conserving Orthodox tradition in the face
of a historically expansive Islam.
For Slavophiles, Orthodoxy in particular held the key to Russia’s
special future. Khomiakov, for example, deplored a Western tradition
in his view centred on rationalism, legalism, and the worship of
“science” as an end in itself. Orthodox Christians, by contrast, “stand
on entirely different soil.”^3 Russia’s special promise for Slavophile
thinkers was a product of its fidelity to genuine Christian tradition.