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" Imperial alchemy: Resettlement, ethnicity, governance in the Russian Caucasus, 1828–1865 "
Dana Lyn Sherry
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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54666
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| Doc. No
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TL24620
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| Call number
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3280641
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| Main Entry
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Dana Lyn Sherry
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| Title & Author
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Imperial alchemy: Resettlement, ethnicity, governance in the Russian Caucasus, 1828–1865\ Dana Lyn Sherry
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| College
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University of California, Davis
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| Date
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2007
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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2007
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| Page No
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165
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| Abstract
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This study traces the course of the two largest compact population movements in the history of Imperial Russia as experiments in social alchemy, whereby Russian officials sought to convert the Caucasus into a society of loyal, productive subjects. Resettlement opened avenues for increased intervention, and their experiments sought to achieve a two-fold transformation. First, closer supervision of indigenous ethnic groups would eradicate their undesirable qualities. Second, good administration would harness the virtues of each ethnic group by joining them into a cosmopolitan population united by loyalty to the tsar. However, imperial alchemy proved a volatile business, and by the 1880s, officials turned to more conservative, though equally utopian projects that emphasized the introduction of Russians to stabilize the region. The alchemy of migration reveals changing visions of the ideal population. The immigration of Persian and Ottoman subjects in 1828-1830 took place in a "traditional" mode. Thus, officials relied on personal knowledge of immigrants to ascertain their loyalty to the Russian state, and granted or denied them admission to the empire on the basis of those assessments. They sought to capitalize on political affinities, whereby communities loyal to Russia would become Russian subjects, and to incorporate Caucasians directly. The uprisings that met the sudden introduction of Russian-style administration in 1841 marked the beginning of the "colonial" period. The administration dreamed of introducing universal values drawn from Western models, and relied on scientific knowledge to guide them. Colonial difference in this case stemmed from the region's geography, which drew a line between colonizers and colonized. Ethnicity became the dominant category of analysis, as each group's natural abilities prepared them to fit them into appropriate places in the emerging order. The same logic of hierarchical incorporation inspired the forced relocation of communities from the Black Sea coast in 1864-65, though most Circassians emigrated to Turkey rather than settle in the lowlands. Officials attempted to repopulate the coastal region in accordance with geographic and ethnic principles, but in the event, they had to make do with Cossacks and Russian colonists, who proved as unsuitable in practice as theory had predicted they would be.
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| Subject
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Social sciences; Caucasus; Ethnicity; Governance; Migration; Resettlement; Russian; Russian history; 0724:Russian history
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University of California, Davis
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