William D. Shingleton, "Book Review: Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917," Demokratizatsiya Summer 1998
Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper, 368 pp.
In writing about Russian empire-building, most authors focus on decisionmaking in St. Petersburg. Russia's Orient uses not only the traditional method but also examines the situation in Russia's newly acquired territories. Using these parallel lines of analysis, the authors of the book's fourteen essays attempt to bring the Russian colonial experience more into line with accepted theories on colonization.
The first of the book's two sections deals with the perceptions and policies of the Russian government with regard to its new subjects in Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The unchallenged history claims that St. Petersburg was a harsh ruler with no appreciation for the peoples on Russia's periphery. The authors of this volume clearly believe otherwise. They claim that the Russian government did employ some flexibility in its policies. The authors in secion 1 arrive at this conclusion from a variety of angles: Michael Kardakovsky from the construction of non-Christian identities by tsarist officials; Yuri Slezkine from the writings of intellectuals on ethnic minorities; Don Yaroshevski from citizenship policies in the borderlands; Susan Layton from Russian literary images of Caucasian mountaineers; Austin Jersild from Russia's Kiplingesque views on its civilizing mission; Daniel Brower from ethnicity and Russification policies in Turkestan; and Robert Geraci from the Orthodox-Muslim relationship.
The second section focuses on the situations in the imperial borderlands, which may not have been as confrontational as indicated by prior scholarship. Again, the authors use analysis of differing regions and events to paint a coherent picture of colonial rule. Essays in this section include Edward Lazzerini on resistance and accommodation in Crimea; Adeeb Khalid on the jadid movement, which hoped to reform education and society in Turkestan; JoAnn Gross on representations of Bukhara's defeat; Thomas Barrett on the Terek Cossaks' actions in the Caucasus; Agnes Kefeli on the apostasy of Elyshevo villiage; and Bruce Grant on Russian ethnography regarding the Giliak.
Russia's Orient stands as a major piece of scholarship because of its use of native writings to examine colonial rule. However, because most of the known existing documents are about Muslim areas, a reader hoping to find a great deal of scholarship on eastern Siberia will be disappointed to find that the majority of the book focuses on the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Turkestan. Moreover, Russia's Orient focuses on the conflicts between societies because of colonization; sadly, it often ignores the conflicts that Russian rule created within native societies. For example, the essay on Turkestan's jadid movement only casually mentions the traditionalist clergy who came to resent the innovations of the jadid movement. The question of why anyone would oppose a supposedly positive reformist movement goes largely unexamined.
Overall, Russia's Orient is one of the best books to date to examine Russia's colonial reality from both the center and the periphery. Its essays are most remarkable in the cumulative description of how that reality functioned. Through its use of documents from both the colonizer and colonized, the book provides a unique perspective on Russian colonial rule. Although there are significant omissions, the authors have put together a formidable collection of available data, making Russia's Orient a valuable work for anyone interested in the motivations and effects of Russia's colonial policies.