42 Orientalism and Empirefuture. Russians, Georgians, and many others emphasized the foreign,
non-indigenous, and therefore illegitimate character of Islam. The pro-
vocative notion of “restoration” was part of the name of the missionary
society founded in 1860, Obshchestvo Vostanovleniia Pravoslavnago
Khristianstva na Kavkaze. In this context the term had a Slavophile fla-
vour, suggesting that history had not been given its due respect. Au-
thentic tradition had decayed, betrayed by the indigenous peoples,
who failed to maintain it, and usurped by foreigners determined to
supplant it. Slavophiles such as Khomiakov and Kireevskii attributed a
similar problem to Russia itself after Peter the Great, which in their
view was even regularly producing “foreigners” in its own midst. Not
just Orthodox Christianity but tradition itself was the primary victim
of the rise of the Muslim empires. Administrators of both French and
Russian colonial regimes held similar notions about the significance of
tradition, and about the relationship of their rule to the preservation of
this imagined past. Islam, in both cases, was the enemy of cultural au-
thenticity. In the Russian case, however, missionaries looked to remedy
the issue through the promotion of quasi-Slavophile notions about
genuine faith, correct ritual, and the heritage of custom. Russian mis-
sionaries were guided by these ideas in other parts of the empire as
well. Among North Caucasus mountaineers, the “weakly Islamacized”
peoples such as the Mordvinians, Chuvash, and Cheremis of the Volga
basin, the Kazakh nomads of the steppe, and the native Siberians,
Russians attempted to counter the comparatively recent gains of Islam
by promoting native language literacy and education, understood by
officials and missionaries as crucial to the maintenance of indigenous
tradition.^25
the history of the society
In 1743 the Georgian archbishop Ioseb and other prominent Georgian
churchmen informed Empress Elizabeth that some 200,000 people
called the Ossetians lived not far from Kizliar and “at one time pro-
fessed the Orthodox faith,” evident from their old stone churches con-
taining Christian icons.^26 The efforts of the Ossetian Spiritual
Commission, which was founded in 1746, provided a base for the ac-
tivities of the Society for the Restoration of Orthodoxy as well as a pre-
cedent for treating the religious heritage of the Caucasus as
problematical. The Ossetian Spiritual Commission was accompanied
by a school for Ossetian children, which was set up in Mozdok in 1775
and functioned until the temporary closing of the commission in 1792.
Of the eight to forty-five Ossetian children per year who attended the
school, fifteen continued their education at the Astrakhan Seminary.^27