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The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance
By Elena I. Campbell Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2015 Elena I. Campbell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01454-2
CHAPTER 1
The Crimean War and Its Aftermath
The Question of Muslim Loyalty and Alienation
The Crimean War (1853–1856) proved to be the moment of truth for Nikolaevan Russia. Its humiliating outcome forced Russia's educated elites to identify the empire's problems and recognize the need for fundamental transformations aimed at modernizing and restoring Russia's position in the ranks of European powers. Historians have studied the role of the Crimean War as a catalyst for the reforms of Russia's social institutions: serfdom, justice, local self-government, education, and military service. More recently, scholars have also turned their attention to the impact of the Crimean War on the development of Russian nationalistic discourse, a discussion in which Orthodoxy occupied an important place. As this chapter suggests, the experience of the war and its aftermath also played a significant role in stimulating and shaping educated Russians' thinking about borderland policies and Russian–Muslim relations in particular.
The Crimean War represented the culmination of a continuing struggle among the empires of Europe, aimed at safeguarding their interests in the regions of the Black and Mediterranean seas. The proximate cause of the military conflict was a religious dispute between Russia and France over the privileges of the Orthodox and Catholic churches in Christian holy sites located in Palestine, which was then ruled by the Ottoman empire. The war began in October 1853, when the Russian emperor Nicholas I, countering Napoleon Ill's championship of the Catholic cause, sent his army to the Danubian principalities in order to assert his right to intervene on behalf of Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman power. A year later, France, Britain, and Sardinia joined the war on the Ottoman side against imperial Russia. The fighting took place on several fronts: on the Baltic Sea, the White Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and the Caucasus, but the main conflict was centered on the Crimean peninsula, where the allied forces attempted to capture the Russian naval base of Sevastopol.
As we will see, the war destabilized Russia's multiconfessional empire, provoked social anxieties, and raised questions about "trustworthiness" and "alienation" of Muslims in the Crimea and Volga regions. While the war provided a stimulus to the Russian empire's final subjugation of the Caucasus and further expansion into Central Asia, these actions tremendously increased the number of Russia's nonintegrated Muslim subjects. At the same time, the war brought into motion large-scale transformations of the empire's social and political system that ultimately raised questions about a potential new place for Russian Muslims in a modernizing imperial society.
Wartime Anxieties: Are Tatars "Trustworthy"?
In the preface to his archive-based study, Tavricheskaiaguberniia vo vremia Krymskoi voiny (The Tauride Province during the Crimean War; 1905), A. I. Markevich (1855–1942), a schoolteacher and historian of Crimea, wrote that the war brought a great number of terrible sacrifices and hardships to the diverse population of the Crimean peninsula. But among these, most importantly, the population of this borderland, which had been annexed to Russia only seventy years earlier, had "to prove its close and indissoluble connection with the great Russian state."
The annexation of the Crimean peninsula by the Russian empire occurred in stages that culminated in 1783 when Catherine II ordered an invasion of the khanate of Crimea, which led to the deposition of the khan. The population of this new borderland region was culturally diverse, consisting of Turkic-speaking Muslim Tatars and nomadic Nogays as well as a non-Muslim minority made up of Karaim Jews, Christian Armenians, Georgians, and Greeks. The former khanate was administratively integrated into the empire, and became Tauride province. Though many Tatars moved to the Ottoman empire during the conquest and the Russian government encouraged the colonization of Crimea by non-Muslims, the region's population remained diverse and included a significant portion of Muslims. By the time Crimea was annexed, the Kazan Tatars had already been under Russian rule for more than two hundred years. The experience of Russia's first encounter with Muslims in the sixteenth century, however, had largely been one of religious confrontation; the incorporation of Crimean Muslims took place during a different era, when Catherine II extended religious tolerance to Muslims and began to integrate their religious institutions into the state. Catherine's organization of religious administration in Crimea served as a model for integrating Muslim spiritual leaders, first in the Volga–Ural region and later in Transcaucasia.
The Crimean khans had been Ottoman vassals, and their subjugation to Russia marked an important point in the history of Russian-Ottoman rivalry over the control of the successor states of the Golden Horde. The Russian annexation of Crimea was thus a crucial event in international relations. Russia's arrival on the Black Sea, along with the ongoing decline of the Ottoman empire, helped produce one of the most significant international dilemmas of the nineteenth century. The Eastern Question generated intense struggle between Russia and the major powers of Europe over influence in the Ottoman territories. The Crimean War represented a culminating point in the escalation of this struggle. It was there on the Crimean peninsula that Russia received a blow to its imperial ambitions and faced a threat to the very integrity of the state.
Nicholas I's manifesto of 20 October 1853 presented the idea of defending Orthodoxy as Russia's official justification for the war. The eruption of the war fuelled patriotic sentiments cast in religious terms among some educated Russians. A well-known example of such is found in the writings of M. P. Pogodin (1800–1875), a historian and publicist from Moscow who advocated Russian liberation of the Balkan Slavs from Turkish rule and encouraged a seizure of Constantinople. He also presented the war as a historical conflict between Orthodoxy and Islam. In Russia's Black Sea region, the war mobilized local Orthodox clerics. Among them, the archbishop of the Kherson–Tauride diocese, Innokentii (Borisov; 1848–1857), was the most prominent preacher and enthusiastic supporter of the cause of Eastern Christians living in the Ottoman empire. In his sermons, delivered in Odessa and the various cities of Crimea, Innokentii interpreted the Crimean struggle as a holy war.
The war also strengthened anxieties and tensions among the empire's religiously diverse communities. These anxieties grew especially strong among the various Christian groups and Muslim Tatars of the Crimean peninsula as the region became transformed into a war zone. The Muslim elites' declaration of loyalty to the tsar reassured the Tauride provincial administrators. Even at the beginning of the war, however, rumors about a "hostile spirit" (vrazhdebnyi dukh) and "antipathy" (neraspolozhenie) among Crimean Tatars toward Russians and other Christians, as well as an "alarmist mood" (trevozhnoe sostoianie) of the local Christian population, reached Nicholas I. In November 1853, the war minister V. A. Dolgorukov requested that local authorities investigate these rumors. The Third Section of His Imperial Highness's Chancellery (the political police) investigated the reports, saying that gunpowder and lead were stored on the estates of the Tatar murzas (nobles), and that Tatars rendered assistance to the enemies. No evidence was found that these reports were true. Similarly, no evidence supported rumors about Muslim Tatar plans to attack Christians during church services or to kill and rob the Christian population.
In February 1854, the head of the Tauride chamber of the Ministry of State Property informed the Tauride governor that Tatars were obeying the authorities and did not yet warrant the government's mistrust. At the same time, he could not guarantee the future tranquility of the population, and recommended strengthening the Russian military presence in certain villages of the Crimean peninsula. A few months later, the Tauride governor-general, V. I. Pestel, wrote to the head commander of Russian forces in Crimea, Prince A. S. Men'shikov, stating that "the residents of all the places along the path of the Russian troops forgot the differences of their origins and joined as one Russian family" to greet the soldiers.
The authorities' concerns about Tatars' "trustworthiness" (blagonadezhnosf), understood above all as obedience to the government, increased with the expectation of the enemy's invasion of the peninsula and especially after enemy troops landed in Evpatoriia at the beginning of September 1854. Men'shikov failed to prevent the landing of the allied forces and could not defend Crimea. The allied troops defeated the Russian army at Alma Heights and marched toward Sevastopol.
The population of the coastal region left their homes in panic. Thousands of Tatars arrived in allied-occupied Evpatoriia. In turn, local officials reported on what they interpreted as a "change in mood" (peremena v nastroenii) and unrest among Tatars after the enemy landed. They pointed to instances of Tatar "treason," such as the spread of hostile rumors, assistance to the enemy, assaults on Russian officials, and robberies of Russian noble estates and state property. At the same time, official documents recorded examples of generous donations to and support for the Russian army and the government by Tatars of different social origins, as well as cases of Muslims assisting Christians. The Tatars, along with other Crimean residents accused of untrustworthiness (neblagonadezhnost') and bad behavior (durnoe povedenie), were exiled to the Russian internal provinces, while those who demonstrated political loyalty to the throne and fatherland were awarded medals. The war shook the Crimean multiconfessional society and aggravated tensions between its diverse communities, presenting imperial authorities with the challenging task of dealing with both the supposedly hostile mood of the Tatars and the alarmist state of the Christian population. Along with responding to the anxieties generated by the local Christian population, government authorities also had to handle cases in which Tatars were subjected to hostilities, terror, and marauding by Cossacks, Greeks, and Russians.
The uncertainties and anxieties of war were echoed in the culturally diverse Volga–Ural region, which had been a part of the empire for longer than Crimea. In the Orenburg and Viatka provinces, rumors circulated among the Russian population about the Muslim landowner and officer S. Tevkelev having instigated a rebellion among his own Muslim peasants; he was said to have provided them with gunpowder. Local gendarmes received information about secret directions from the Orenburg mufti (the head of a state-sponsored hierarchical Muslim establishment) to the mullahs to pray in their mosques for the Turkish sultan and his troops. At the same time, in Samara province, Tatars spread rumors about a governmental plan to use force to baptize Muslims. Local authorities were unable to confirm rumors about the subversive actions of the Tatars, and instead reported on the general tranquility and obedience of the local population. In May 1854, for example, the civil governor of Viatka province reported to the minister of the interior that "in Tatar mosques the appropriate prayers for the health and well-being of the Russian imperial family and for the success of the Russian army in the ongoing war are being recited."
Overall, neither the rumors nor the denunciations concerning Tatar sympathies toward Turkey managed to shake the government's trust in the Muslim spiritual and social elite. The Orenburg governor-general wrote as follows about the antigovernment intentions ascribed to Tevkelev:
It is unlikely that the rich landowner is associated with such activities, as he owns a few hundred Muslim souls; these actions would first of all not benefit Tevkelev himself, because he would be the first to incur losses from the rebellion of his own peasants. In addition, over his entire service up until now there has been no reason to suspect him of any feelings others than those of a loyal subject.
The subsequent appointment of Tevkelev in 1865 as head of the Muslim Ecclesiastical Assembly in Ufa was proof of the government's trust in him.
During the war, imperial authorities approached Crimean Tatars with increased suspicion, viewing them as a security risk. At the same time, some officials realized the importance of preserving order among the borderland's religiously diverse communities as well as of maintaining a sense of trust among Muslim Tatars. The rumors spread by both local Christians and Muslims were not only sources of officials' information and anxieties, but in the government's view also represented a form of unrest among the population that could be harmful to the existing confessional and social status quo and political stability of the empire. Therefore, local authorities not only investigated reports about Tatars' "treason," but also tried to suppress the circulation of unverified denunciations, and in certain cases hindered the very process of investigation. Although, as the imperial authorities themselves recognized during the war, in many cases Tatars were arrested and exiled on the premise of false accusations, some local officials tried to prevent the criminalizing of Tatars en masse and worked to deescalate tensions between the local communities.
The Crimean War ended with the Treaty of Paris on 30 March 1856. On 26 August of that year, the day of his coronation, the new emperor, Alexander II, issued a charter in which he expressed gratitude to the "loyal subjects" (vernopoddannye) of all the estates of Tauride province for their sacrifices to the "holy cause of the fatherland" (sviatoe delo otechestva). The imperial charter was delivered to Simferopol, where it was received "by the province and district marshals of nobility, cities' mayors, volost heads [volostnye golovy], deputies from Crimean colonists, and Tauride's mufti with honorary Muslim clergy." After a reception at the governor's house, the charter was transferred to the Simferopol cathedral of Alexander Nevskii.
Yet the end of the war and the foreign occupation on the Crimean peninsula brought new challenges to the local population and imperial authorities. Immediately after the war, Russian military authorities received information about the attempts of some 4,500 Tatars from Balaklava to move to the Ottoman empire. Local officials brought this matter to Alexander II, who ordered them not to create obstacles for the emigration of the Crimean Tatars. Their voluntary relocation might, he advised, serve as a "favorable circumstance to get rid of the harmful population." As several historians noted, the new governor-general of New Russia, A. G. Stroganov, reinterpreted the tsar's statement by presenting the Tatars' departure as "necessary" instead of just "advantageous." Soon, requests for emigration came from Volga Tatars as well.
The provisions of the peace treaty forced Russia to cede the mouth of Danube River and part of Bessarabia to the Ottomans, accept the neutralization of the Black Sea, and give up its claims to protect Orthodox Christians living in the Ottoman empire—all serious blows to educated Russians' sense of their state's role as an imperial power.
The end of the Crimean War, however, allowed Russia to expand its influence in the Caucasus and then Central Asia. In 1859, Russian troops commanded by Prince A. I. Bariatinskii captured the legendary Imam Shamil (1797–1871), thus ending the organized resistance of Muslim tribes in the eastern Caucasus. Fighting in the western Caucasus continued until 1864 and was especially brutal. The establishment of Russia's domination in the Caucasus caused a mass exodus of the Muslim population, especially Circassians, to the Ottoman empire. Alan Fisher estimates that between 1855 and 1866, at least 500,000 Muslims left their homelands in Crimea and the Caucasus.
In response to the Crimean defeat, educated elites in Russia sought to restore their empire's status as a great power by identifying and addressing domestic "ills." This internal examination was carried out in an international environment hostile to Russia, one that had only worsened after the Polish rebellion of 1863. The emigration of the tsar's Muslim subjects to the Ottoman empire also resonated in Europe. The mass departure of Tatars and the simultaneous influx of a new Christian population, including refugees from the Ottoman empire, to Russia in the wake of the Crimean War altered the confessional balance between Christians and Muslims in Crimea. As Mara Kozelsky argues, the decline of Islam allowed some Russians to reimagine Crimea as a locus of Russian religious identity and paved the way for the Christianizing process. But not all Muslims left the empire. While attempting to modernize Russia's social and administrative institutions, educated Russians both inside and outside the government turned their attention to the problem of imperial governance of the empire's Muslim population.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance by Elena I. Campbell. Copyright © 2015 Elena I. Campbell. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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