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THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Lyubov SATUSHIEVA
Ph.D. (Law), Assistant Professor at the Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law, Berbekov State University of Kabardino-Balkaria (Nalchik, the Russian Federation).
NATIONAL CULTURES IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE IN THE 19TH-EARLY 20TH CENTURIES
Abstract
The author traces the history of the legal status of the national cultures of the peoples who became integrated into the Russian Empire at different times (the North Caucasian peoples in particular). Whereas the Russian authorities had to accept Islam and establish legal rela-
tions with it as early as the 17th-18th centuries, they did not turn their attention to the national cultures until much later. In the Russian Empire, the rights of ethnic minorities to confess their own religion and develop their own cultures were only partially recognized.
Introduction
Many times throughout its history the Caucasus, a far from simple region, has been a pivotal point in Russian policy when Russian society entered a period of transition and revised its basic principles. In the 18th-20th centuries, the law, as a multifunctional social regulator, was an important part
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of Russia's Caucasian policy. In the last few decades, there has been an outburst of interest in legal regulation in the Caucasus in line with the transition period experienced by Russian society and the Russian state. While the South Caucasian states have been building their own legal systems, the Northern Caucasus, as part of the Russian Federation, has been going along with the rest of the state.
The current fairly complicated national and religious problems show that control over national and religious spheres is still very much needed. Today, the efforts of the radical Islamic leaders to replace the Russian legal system in the Northern Caucasus with the Shari'a have added new dimensions to the history of Russian law in the region. (The radical Islamic leaders argue that the Shari'a, the Islamic legal system, was and is much closer to the North Caucasian peoples, who find it much more understandable.)
Today, the question of the legal status of the national cultures of the peoples of the Russian Empire, which for some time and for several reasons remained outside the scope of the Russian laws, still stirs up heated debates and discussions.
■ First, national culture was identified with religious (mostly Islamic) culture.
■ Second, as Olga Belyaeva has written, "For historical reasons, the Russian Empire took shape as a unitary centralized multinational state.
State administration in the national regions took into account, to a certain extent, the historical, socioeconomic, cultural, everyday, and religious specifics of the regions' autochthonous population." The system of state governance geared at these specifics was never adjusted to the social, economic, and political changes in Russian society, the growing national self-awareness of the non-Russian peoples, and their mounting desire to achieve national-state self-identification.1
Legal Foundations for Preserving the Cultures of the North Caucasian Peoples in the Latter Half of the 19th Century
At the formal (official) level, the Russian imperial authorities declared that all peoples who joined the empire would preserve their specific cultures. In 1837, for example, the war minister instructed Velyaminov, who commanded the troops stationed on the Caucasian Line and in the Black Sea area, to inform the peoples of the Sunzha, Kabarda, and Kuban lines that "their rights to the lands, faith, and customs of their ancestors will be preserved and that His Majesty the Emperor asked that they be assured that no one had any intention of depriving them of these rights and that their loyal service would be rewarded."2 Private sources of the same period, however, such as memoirs of officers who served in the Northern Caucasus, showed that respect for the ethnic cultures of Caucasian mountain dwellers was an illusion. For example, in 1842, officer Sergey Bezobrazov had the following to say about the culture of the North Caucasian mountain dwellers: "The entire Caucasian Range and the numerous tribes who live there should not be regarded as a fortress, or an army, or a nation but, as I said in the very beginning, the shelter of proud and inveterate robbers."3 In his memoirs, Bezobrazov described the North Caucasian peoples as savage Caucasian tribes.4
1 See: O.V. Belyaeva, Voprosy gosudartsvennogo ustroystva v Gosudarstvennoy dume dorevolutsionnoy Rossii, Author's abstract of Ph.D. thesis, Moscow, 2004, pp. 11-12.
2 State Military-Historical Archives of Russia, rec. gr. 13454, inv. 2, f. 281, p. 1rev.
3 S.D. Bezobrazov, "Rassuzhdenie i mnenie o pokorenii Kavkaza 1842 goda," in: Kavkazskiy sbornik, Vol. 2 (34), Moscow, 2005, p. 141.
4 See: Ibidem.
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In the early half of the 19th century, the Russian officials who put the main principles of state power into practice in the newly acquired regions frequently described them as national regions. In fact, they regarded religion and legal regulations established on customary law as national specifics rather than national cultures based primarily on the native language. Cultural assimilation was the obvious and dominant trend in the empire's outskirts with a non-Russian population. Russian political ideology stressed Russia's civilizational mission in the newly acquired lands. We can learn the details from notes left by numerous travelers who visited these parts in the first half of the 19th century. For example, the state opened a school in the fortress of Nalchik for boys of 13-14 from families of elders of Karachais, Kabardins, etc., where the pupils were taught in Russian. "The government, which opened the school, was guided by wise political considerations. Children of the local people will readjust their original ideas and gradually abandon their dislike of the Russians. They will return home more educated, more developed, and more receptive to European customs."5 "The children are kept in decent conditions and are dressed according to local customs. Under a Muslim mullah they observe all the fasts prescribed by the Koran, and the Russians are very far from the thought of converting them to Christianity." "Thanks to the efforts of the Russian government, their dispositions become softer, children of the local princes and uzdenes (common people.—Ed.) are educated in Russia and enter Russian service where they become aware of the advantages of civilization... The customs of these people (the Kabardins) can be changed only through civilization."6
The way the imperial authorities treated the local (traditional) elites of the mountain peoples serves as the best example of how the empire treated the culture of the peoples in the recently acquired territories. From the very beginning, Russia was interested in the North Caucasian elites; it tried to incorporate the mountain nobility into the imperial administrative-political system in order to adjust the Russian administrative structures to the local conditions. As a rule the local police (formed as a military guard) was based on the local elites. E. Bitova has written that members of all the Balkar noble families were in the Russian service. She has pointed out that "the constant Russian military presence in the Caucasus and the oaths of allegiance and service of the Balkar nobles in the Russian army not so much destroyed the traditionally high political status of the tau-bies (feudal lords.—Ed.) who possessed considerable administrative, military and judicial power in their societies as changed its quality. Those members of the mountain nobility who demonstrated loyalty to the Russian czar and ensured social and political stability in their societies could expect privileges according to the new principles considered legitimate by the Russian government. A certain, fairly small, part of Balkar society, its ethnic elite, was involved in the sphere of Russian culture."7
On the other hand, the legal status of the national cultures of the peoples recently incorporated into the Russian Empire was created by the imperial administration, which regarded the traditions made part of the governance system as an instrument for legitimizing Russia's power in the Northern Caucasus. Historians have confirmed this. E. Bitova, for example, has pointed out that at the first stage of incorporation of the Northern Caucasus into the Russian Empire (the 18th-early 19th centuries), the military administration was combined with local self-administration, local traditions, and the local institutions. This was done, writes she, to ensure a smooth transfer to the new system of governance and recognition of its legitimacy.8 Under Vicegerent of the Caucasus Mikhail Vorontsov,
5 J.-Ch. de Bess, "Puteshestvennik v Krym, na Kavkaz, v Gruziiu, Armeniiu, Maluiu Aziiu i v Konstantinopol v 1829 i 1830 godakh," in: Adygi, Balkartsy i Karachaevtsy v izvestiiakh evropeiskikh avtorov XIII-XIX vekov, Compiled by V.K. Gardanov, Nalchik, 1974, pp. 337-338.
6 I.F. Blaramberg, "Istoricheskoe, topograficheskoe, statisticheskoe, etnograficheskoe i voennoe opisanie Kavka-za," in: Adygi, Balkartsy..., p. 415.
7 E.G. Bitova, "Balkarskaia znat v usloviiakh vkliuchenia v administrativno-politicheskuiu sistemu Rossiyskoy im-perii," Istoricheskiy vestnik, Vol. 2, Nalchik, 2005, pp. 152-153.
8 See: Ibid., p. 145.
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it became the rule to appoint local people to official posts; they were involved in drafting laws and administrative decisions.9
Vladimir Degoev believes that Russian bureaucrats in the Caucasus, whom he calls the "enlightened 'colonial' bureaucracy," abandoned the arrogant Kulturträger (a bearer of culture) approach toward the spiritual life of the "savages" and the "temptation to compare it with Russian-European values in the context of the 'higher-lower' or 'better-worse' categories." Russian bureaucrats had in mind not absorption as E. Bitova, another expert in Caucasian studies, believes,10 "but shaping a phenomenon which Canadian historian H. Rhinelander aptly called a national-imperial culture. Finally, it was this rather than any other formula that triumphed in the late 19th and 20th centuries despite the objective and subjective obstacles."11 Vladimir Degoev has pointed out that the Russian authorities in the Northern Caucasus wanted to create an imperial supra-ethnic and supra-confes-sional identity of the local peoples... This policy is often defined by the not entirely correct or at least conventional term "Russification." In fact, it was a much wider, much more capacious, and more complicated civilizational process, which deserves a different term. I think that it was rather "imperial self-identification" of the individual, class, and society taking shape under the impact of explicit material and spiritual stimuli and the specific cultural and ideological environment, which presupposes a conscious and free choice.12 Degoev further writes that "national specifics were not squeezed out or suppressed; they were blended with imperial culture in a very natural way and augmented and enriched it."13 "While Russia was reinforcing its position in the Caucasus, the two cultures lived through the difficulties of mutual adaptation. The Russian generals regarded their 'civilizational mission' as an absolute boon and not infrequently identified it with their absolute right to bring the Caucasian peoples 'the light of reason and enlightenment.'"14 Vladimir Degoev believes that "despite the considerable civilizational distinctions between the Trans-Caucasus and the Northern Caucasus, Russia was pursuing similar policies in both sub-regions designed to achieve their geostrategic, political, sociocultural, ideological, and economic integration into the imperial system" through different means.15
Andreas Kappeler occupies a more flexible position on the legal status of the national cultures of the recently joined peoples. On the whole, he is convinced that Russia had no consistent national policy16 and turns to the theoretical model currently popular in the West. Formulated by K. Deutsch, E. Gellner, and M. Groch, it divided the nations of Europe into "small" and "large." The "large" peoples had their elite, developed culture and the living tradition of statehood; the "small" peoples, on the other hand, could not boast a fully developed social structure; their tradition of high culture and statehood was either non-existent or interrupted. There were also intermediary types.17 Andreas Kappeler regards the North Caucasian highlanders as a "small" people.18 In the 19th century, culture was as important as religion for the development of the mountain peoples. Kappeler, however, has pointed out that throughout the 19th century the peoples of the Russian Empire were drawn into national movements which the imperial authorities suppressed by limiting their cooperation only to the elites of the non-Russian movements. "The new national elements did not fit the
9 See: Ibid., p. 152.
10 See: Ibid., p. 141.
11 V.V. Degoev, "Kavkaz v sostave Rossii: formirovanie imperskoy identichnosti," in: Kavkazskiy sbornik, Vol. 1 (33), Moscow, 2002, p. 34.
12 See: Ibid., p. 38.
13 Ibid., p. 47.
14 Ibid., p. 40.
15 Ibid., p. 45.
16 See: A. Kappeler, "Natsionalnye dvizheniia i natsionalnaia politika v Rossiyskoy imperii: opyt sistematizatsii (XIX-1917)," in: Rossia v XX veke. Problemy natsionalnykh otnosheniy, ed. By A.N. Sakharov, V.A. Mikhaylov, Moscow, 1999, p. 107.
17 See: Ibid., p. 101.
18 Ibid., p. 104.
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traditional imperial principles, therefore Russia could not develop into a national state like France or Germany."19
Even though the Russian Empire was moving toward a law-governed state with dominating legal principles, it was still a country of political expediency; this is amply shown by the legal regulation of national-religious relations between the Russian authorities and the non-titular peoples (the term applied was inorodtsy, non-Russians), that is, peoples who became part of the empire in the 17th-19th centuries.
In the Russian Empire, national and religious relations were regulated by secular laws; the state was obviously determined to gradually transfer the rights of Russian subjects of the empire to all the peoples incorporated in it and to create a mechanism for observing these rights, i.e. a mechanism for realizing the rights of the Russian Muslims.
On the whole, the legal regulations applied to three groups of the population:
(1) regulation of legal relations between the state and the non-Russian contingent of the empire;
(2) limitation of the rights of non-Christians (mainly Jews and Muslims);
(3) disenfranchisement of certain nationalities (mainly Jews).
In fact, the rights and duties of the Muslim clergy and all the Russian Muslims were formulated by
(1) Russian secular legislation which partly took into account the regulations of the adat (customary law) and the Shari'a (Muslim law) and
(2) ad hoc instructions and other documents.
The Caucasian War was one of the decisive factors that affected national and religious policy in the Northern Caucasus; it helped the empire to consolidate its power in the alternating periods of war and peace. In the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries, military authorities, which used military methods to rule the local people, predominated; civil authorities, in turn, tried to modernize the life of the North Caucasian mountain peoples through laws and legal reforms. This meant that the legal status of the North Caucasian Muslims was determined mainly by instructions and other documents issued by the military, which remained in force for indefinitely long periods of time.
The Legal Foundations for Preserving the Cultures of the North Caucasian Peoples in the Latter Half of the 19th Century
The way the Russian authorities treated the traditional system of power, viz. communal relations, revealed the general trend of Russia's policy in the cultural sphere. Khasan Dumanov deemed it necessary to point out that "the customary legal regulations relating to the functioning of the village community underwent considerable changes. The czarist administration, which preserved the community among the Kabardins, patterned it on the Russian community based on mutual responsibility of its members who answered not only for themselves but also for all the other members."20 Traditions were used in many other ways to improve the administrative systems. In 1894, a Temporary Statute on Measures Designed to Restrain the Local Population of the Terek Region from Plundering
' See: Ibid., pp. 101, 105, 108.
19 i
20 Kh.M. Dumanov, Obychnoe imushchestvennoe pravo kabardintsev, Nalchik, 1976, p. 20.
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and Especially from Using Violence against the People of Non-Local Origin appeared, which legalized the tradition of the mountain peoples: mutual responsibility for each case of stealing if no culprit was found. This rule was widely applied in the event of stealing from Russians living in the Northern Caucasus. V. Matveev believes that the traditional administrative structures in the Northern Caucasus preserved by the military-popular administration helped Russia to control the situation. The administrative system "relied on long-term political compromise," the final aim of which was to help the mountain people adjust to Russia and acquire a common Russian civil self-identity.21
Olga Belyaeva writes: "In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Russian Empire was a continental multinational state that ensured relative domestic security, external stability, and development for its population; it possessed enough economic potential and military might to maintain the balance of power on the world scene."22 "According to most historians of law and lawyers, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Russia was a unitary state. Constitutional law described a unitary state as an integral state with no state units, while administrative territorial units have no political inde-pendence."23 At the same time, multinational unitary states have certain specifics: "In states where different nationalities live compactly in their own territories, a certain degree of decentralization— autonomous administrative structures for certain peoples—is permitted."24
In the Northern Caucasus, Russia preserved communal organization and partly legalized traditional courts of justice, which used customary law. The Mountain Courts of Justice organized by the Russians applied the regulations of customary law in the Kuban and Terek regions. This judicial system replaced the previous Judicial Statute of 1864. The Decree which introduced it said the following: "...in places occupied by mountain peoples the vicegerent of the Caucasus is vested with the right to identify the time when magistrates can be introduced on an equal footing with those operating in places populated by Russians; before this happens the disputes between mountain dwellers (which the judicial statutes of 20 November, 1864 related to the competence of justices of the peace) should remain in the competence of the Mountain Oral Courts of Justice, which should acquire a new status as soon as the vicegerent of the Caucasus deems it timely."25 Under the Decree, so-called Temporary Rules were elaborated for the Mountain Courts and approved by the vicegerent of the Caucasus on 18 December, 1870. They were expected to function until the judicial statutes of 20 October, 1864 had been enacted; they functioned until 1917. There were three conditions that determined whether a case fell under the jurisdiction of the Mountain Courts: the litigant should belong to mountain tribe, the district should be within the territorial jurisdiction of the mountain court, and the type of case itself26; these courts dealt with criminal and civil cases. "On the whole, the Mountain Oral Court relies on the local customs and applies the general imperial laws in cases that have no precedence in the local cus-toms,"27 as well as divorces and cases of inheritance according to the Shari'a. There were also aul courts of justice which dealt with petty offences and insults in mosques.28
According to Dilyara Usmanova, whereas at the earlier stages limitations in Russian legislation were mostly related to the religious sphere, at later stages limitations for national reasons predominated.29 It seems, however, that the attitude toward the national cultures of non-Russians was much sim-
21 See: V.A. Matveev, "K voprosu o posledstviyakh Kavkazskoy voyny i vkhozhdenii severokavkazskihk narodov v sostav Rossii," in: Kavkazskaia voyna: uroki istorii i sovremennost: Materialy nauchnoy konferentsii, Krasnodar, 1995, p. 196.
22 O.V. Belyaeva, op. cit., p. 15.
23 Ibidem.
24 Ibid., p. 16.
25 N.M. Reynke, N.M. Agishev, V.D. Bushen, Materaily po obozreniiu gorskikh i narodnykh sudov Kavkazskogo kraia, St. Petersburg, 1912, p. 10.
26 See: Ibid., pp. 12-13.
27 Ibid., p. 15.
28 See: Ibid., p. 13.
29 See: D.M. Usmanova, Musulmanskie predstaviteli v rossiiskom parlamente 1906-1916, Kazan, 2005, p. 91.
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pler and much more understandable than the state's religious policy. In his article "O raznoplemen-nosti v naselenii gosudarstv" (On States' Tribal Patchiness) written in 1911, Dmitry Milyutin, Minister of War in 1861-1880, outlined the principles of the empire's national policy and pointed out that "Russia should remain united and undivided;" he denounced the centrifugal processes that were gaining momentum in the empire's outskirts.30 By the late 19th -early 20th centuries, the straightforward Russification policy bore its first fruit. National cultures in the outskirts, in the Northern Caucasus in particular, weakened while assimilation of the mountain peoples gained momentum. Early in the 20th century, several Moscow lawyers prophesied the following: "Over the course of time and as culture penetrated the mass of the mountain peoples and partly because of their natural assimilation with the Russians (even if barely discernible), many of the law-related customs of the highlanders lost their previous importance."31 Russia's policy in the sphere of education was the main issue in Russia's attitude toward the national cultures of non-Russians.
On the whole, documents of the latter half of the 19th century show that in the 1870s the imperial authorities began imposing the so-called Ilminsky system on the non-Russians based on a combination of the native and Russian languages. It had been tested in the Volga area and then moved to the Caucasus.32
Starting in the 1880s, those who ruled the Caucasian vicegerency concentrated on education "as the most effective method for raising the moral level of the local people and bringing them closer to the dominant nation."33 Early in the 20th century, Caucasian Vicegerent Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov was convinced that the Ilminsky system perfectly suited the Caucasus.34 He further wrote that "the task of the comprehensive schools in inland Russia is to raise the intellectual level of people. The comprehensive schools in the Caucasus should plant the Russian language among the people who speak their own languages; Russian is undoubtedly the most important factor in unifying the numerous autochthonous tribes with the empire."35 He was displeased with the desire of the North Caucasian Muslims to develop education in their native languages and teach the fundamentals of Islam. He also wrote that "under the general nationalist sentiments the local Caucasian society has awakened to the need to teach native Caucasian languages in secondary educational establishments."36 The Russian authorities intended to continue this policy. In his memorandum on the Muslim question, Minister of Internal Affairs Alexander Makarov suggested that educational efforts in Russian should be invigorated in the Muslim regions.37
In the 1990s, modernization of historical science and jurisprudence led to the emergence of several points of view among those academics who analyzed the imperial policies in the national outskirts among the non-Russians.
On the one hand, local, in particular North Caucasian, academics, believe that in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries the North Caucasian highlanders became victims of "cultural" genocide. Zhilyabi Kalmykov, for example, deems it necessary to point out that not until the 1990s "could [historians] liberate themselves from the Great Power ideological schemes of czarism and Stalinism." He goes on to say that the North Caucasian mountain dwellers "lived through a long period
30 See: D.A. Milyutin, "O raznoplemennosti v naselenii gosudarstv," Istochnik, No. 1, 2003, p. 51.
31 N.M. Reynke, N.M. Agishev, V.D. Bushen, op. cit., pp. 113-114.
32 See: Sbornik dokumentov i statey po voprosu ob obrazovanii inorodtsev, St. Petersburg, 1869.
33 Grand Prince, Vicegerent of the Caucasus Mikhail Nikolaevich, "Zapiska 'O meropriiatiiakh k vozvysheniiu urovnya grazhdanskogo blagosostoianiia i dukhovnogo preuspeniia naseleniia Kavkazskogo kraia' (1879 g.)," in Kavka-zskiy sbornik, Vol. 2 (34), Moscow, 2005, p. 154.
34 See: Vorontsov-Dashkov, Vsepoddaneyshaia Zapiska po upravleniiu Kavkazskim kraem, St. Petersburg, 1907, pp. 108-109.
35 Ibid., p. 103.
36 Ibid., p. 115.
37 See: A.A. Makarov, "Ob'yasnitelnaia zapiska po 'musulmanskomu voprosu'," Istochnik, No. 1, 2002, p. 64.
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when the traditional social and political institutions of the Kabardins and Balkars were violently broken down to be replaced with colonial law and order."38
Ekaterina Vorobyeva argues that in the 19th century the Russian Empire steered toward an "integral" state based on the idea of state unity, a single nation, and the policy of drawing peoples closer together, while the peoples, on the contrary, were striving for national development.39 These ideas and trends became especially prominent in the latter half of the 19th century when "imperial policy demonstrated a trend toward cultural and administrative unification. This presupposed that the imperial authorities interfered much more than before in the lives of the non-Russian communities, the cultural specifics of which came to be regarded as an obstacle on the road toward integration." Furthermore, "the mounting national movements, on the one hand, and the changed imperial project, on the other, created a new problem—the 'non-Russians' issue, a mosaic of smaller elements such as Polish, Finnish, Jewish, Muslim, etc."40 Successful implementation of the autocratic strategy would have transformed the Russian Empire into an "integral" state. Imperial policy meant unification of the empire and sustainable unity. Ekaterina Vorobyeva has written the following: "In the multinational Russian Empire unification of the state into a single entity meant that the empire should be unified administratively, socially, and culturally. Though never consistent and never equally applied to all non-Russian subjects, the principle of 'state unity' became dominant in imperial ideology and practice... This ideology served as the prism through which the Russian Muslims were scrutinized, the cultural specifics of whom proved an important impediment to integration."41
On the other hand, many Russian historians (A. Avramenko, O. Matveev, P. Matyushchenko, V. Ratushnyak) contest the very formulation of the problem. "Recently, it has become popular to accuse Russia of genocide. While agreeing that the Caucasian War was a tragedy which shaped the historical fates of the Adighes, the authors doubt that the term 'genocide' is applicable to the way czarism treated the Adighes... Genocide presupposes deliberate extermination of certain groups because of their ethnic, racial, religious, or other affiliations. In the course of the Caucasian War, Russia fought only those who refused to lay down their arms and obey Russian autocracy. Those Adighes who did this and agreed to move to the Kuban and Laba preserved their language, culture, and self-administration. Even before the revolution they were educated in St. Petersburg and joined the Russian intellectual elite. There was no intention of scattering the Adighes across Russia; they have been preserved as an ethnic group; in Turkey, on the other hand, much was done to assimilate them."42
Large-Scale Eviction of the North Caucasian Highlanders to the Middle East
This means that the academic community is divided over the question of whether the mass eviction of many of the North Caucasian mountain dwellers to the Middle East was "cultural genocide" and whether the national cultures survived. Here is how different authors answered the questions in the 1990s-2000s.
38 Zh.A. Kalmykov, "Administrativno-sudebnye preobrazovania v Kabarde i gorskikh (balkarskikh) obshchestvakh v gody russko-kavkazskoy voyny," in: Kavkazskaia voyna: uroki istorii i sovremennost, p. 116.
39 See: E.I. Vorobyeva, Musulmanskiy vopros v imperskoy politike rossiiskogo samoderzhavia: vtoraya polovina XIX veka—fevral 1917 goda, Author's abstract of Ph.D. thesis, St. Petersburg, 1998, p. 5.
40 Ibid., pp. 6-7.
41 See: Ibid., p. 169.
42 A.M. Avramenko, O.V. Matveev, P.P. Matyushchenko, V.N. Ratushnyak, "Ob otsenke Kavkazskoy voyny s nauchnykh pozitsy istorizma," in: Kavkazskaia voyna: uroki istorii i sovremennost, p. 39.
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According to Oleg Matveev, the Russian military and civilian authorities in the Northern Caucasus did a lot to promote and develop the local cultures. "An analysis of the ethno-political and socio-cultural impact of the Caucasian War proves that Russian statehood and the Great Power and imperial principles not only preserved but also created new ethnic communities. The latter acquired imperial thinking to serve as the vehicles, builders, and guardians of Russian statehood rather than becoming narrow-minded separatists."43
Many authors are devoted to obviously pro-Russian imperial positions and tend to justify everything that was done. Fedor Troyno, for example, deems it necessary to point out that "cultural influence proved beneficial: this was first time in their history that the mountain peoples acquired a national intelligentsia. Many village communities asked the authorities to open secular schools and collected money to maintain them. Young mountain dwellers mainly from privileged social groups were educated in grammar schools and universities in Russia. The Caucasian peoples gained access to the achievements of world civilization and contributed to Russian culture."44 Valery Maltsev, in turn, pointed out that "the traditions of administration of the time of the Caucasian War—military-administrative structures, legislative limitations, limited rights of part of the empire's population—caused by the government's vacillations and its counter-reformist course in the last decade of the 19th century slowed down the process of integration of the Northern Caucasus into the social, political, and economic structure of the Russian Empire and revealed its 'specific situation' of sorts in this respect."45 Alexander Siver has admitted that there were attempts to acculturate the North Caucasian mountain dwellers, although, first, it was a natural process when a stronger culture engulfs a weaker one; and second, the assimilated peoples profited from this. He writes that "in the Russian Empire acculturation of the Adighes proceeded in two key directions: natural acculturation realized through acceptance of novelties and targeted acculturation realized by the Russian authorities; in fact, these intertwined phenomena cannot be separated. Indeed, targeted acculturation confirmed the dominant position and high prestige of Russian culture, which contributed to natural acculturation."46
Conclusion
It should be said that the Russian Empire partially recognized the rights of non-Russians to confess their religions and cultivate their ethnic cultures.
The bourgeois-democratic reforms of the 1860s-1870s changed the entire system of civil and criminal law; all physical persons (with the exception of women), all subjects of the empire (formally irrespective of their ethnic and religious affiliation and social status) became entities of civil law. An analysis of the principles on which the state and the individual cooperated revealed that the Russian state granted all of its peoples, first, personal rights as subjects of the empire and, second, collective rights and duties as peoples belonging to non-Russian ethnic groups with different religious affiliations.
The legal status of Islam in different regions of the Russian Empire was different; it depended on the time when different Muslim peoples became incorporated into the Russian Empire. The Northern Caucasus became part of Russian statehood much later than the other regions; this explains why the region lacked a legal system for regulating the status of Muslims.
43 O.V. Matveev, Kavkazskaia voyna na Severo-Zapadnom Kavkaze i ee politicheskie i sotsiokulturnye posledstvi-ia, Author's abstract of Ph.D. thesis, Krasnodar, 1996.
44 F.P. Troyno, "Kavkazskaia voyna i sudby gorskikh narodov," in: Kavkazskaia voyna: uroki istorii i sovremen-nost, pp. 87-88.
45 V.N. Maltsev, "Vliianie Kavkazskoy voyny na administrativno-sudebnye reformy na Severnom Kavkaze vtoroy poloviny XIX veka," in: Kavkazskaia voyna: uroki istorii i sovremennost, pp. 265-267.
46 A.V. Siver, Shapsugis. Etnicheskaia istoria i identifikatsia, Nalchik, 2002, p. 110.
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A careful analysis of the Russian laws revealed that, on the whole, they never prevented non-Russians from gaining the same civil rights as the Russians, even though there were many exceptions (acquiring the status of a Russian noble, etc.), a sure sign that in the 17th-early 20th centuries the Muslims were discriminated against because of their religious or ethnic affiliation.47
The failures in applying Russian laws in practice in the Caucasus should be carefully analyzed to avoid possible blunders when establishing correct relations in North Caucasian society and between it and the external world and when adjusting Russia's laws to different societies.
A historical-legal analysis of how religious specifics were taken into account in the empire's Muslim regions (in the Northern Caucasus in particular) suggests that in the course of current modernization of Russian legislation, the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religion should contain articles on the special legal status of Russian Muslims. In a contemporary secular state, Islam (which is both a Muslim legal system and the doctrine of a Muslim state) is inevitably limited, while these limitations should be set forth in separate legal documents.
' See: D.M. Usmanova, op. cit., p. 91.
