49 The Society for the Restoration of Orthodoxyincomprehensible to both the students and their audience.^72 The lan-
guage barrier was not just a problem for Russians. Georgian teachers
in Abkhazia found themselves with a similar dilemma and often re-
quested a transfer from the area.^73
Numerous missionaries in the mountains thus pushed for native
language instruction. A (Svan) Restoration Society missionary to the
Svan, for example, complained that church services “were exclu-
sively conducted in Georgian,” which made them “understandable”
to the Svan but unable to inspire genuine conviction. Instead, “as is
done in Ossetian parishes,” the services should be conducted in Svan,
he argued.^74 Similarly, an Abkhaz missionary reported in 1886: “If
church services were conducted in a language comprehensible to the
population, then it would not be difficult to maintain among them
the rules of our Holy Faith.” This missionary was unusually explicit
about the implications of the “Il’minskii method” for regional auton-
omy and more: missionary work, he wrote, might serve as the “chief
means of facilitating a comprehension of the national [natsional’nyi]
language.”^75 This was still an unusual use of this term on the frontier
at this time, and his reasoning was of course anathema to a develop-
ing Russian conservatism.
Regional autonomy, separatism, and nationalism, however, were
far away on the horizon. The missionaries and officials were visualiz-
ing and constructing an empire. Nation-building was still unimagin-
able at this time. Missionaries posed the question of language, not in
the spirit of self-determination, but as a means to gain access to the
true faith. Like Il’minskii, Restoration Society missionaries drew on
the experience of the Apostle Paul, the original Christian evangelist.
Paul had offered the message of Jesus to everyone, emphasized soci-
ety missionaries, but how could they accept what they could not un-
derstand? Like the Roman Empire, the Russian Empire contained
peoples without access to the message. “The Gospel has never been
translated into the mountain languages, and without priests it re-
mains lifeless and stale, especially as a result of the present illiteracy
of the mountain tribes.”^76 Access to the Gospels in one’s native lan-
guage would allow for a genuine and enduring Christianity, making
Russia’s imperial subjects on the edges of Islamic culture immune
from the possiblity of “apostasy” (ostupnichestvo) or conversion back
to Islam among the newly baptized Christians of the Middle Volga.
This term was less frequently used in the North Caucasus than in
the Middle Volga, but the issue was similar. Calls to prevent the fur-
ther Islamization and Tatarization of small Middle Volga peoples and
Kazakhs and Bashkirs from the Kazan Tatars were frequent through-
out the imperial era. In the Caucasus, Governor-General G.S.