From Conquest to Deportation: The North Caucasus under Russian Rule by Jeronim Perovic

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine. 2010. Oxford University. Illustrated. 

The title of Jeronim Perović’s From Conquest to Deportation: The North Caucasus under Russian Rule refers to the Russian imperial exile of the North Caucasus mountain peoples to the Ottoman Empire in 1864, and then to the Soviet-era deportations of these peoples to Central Asia in 1943–1944. Perović resists the idea of this tragic history as simply exploitive or “colonial” and instead tries to highlight cases and characters that illustrate collaboration and Russia’s incorporation of frontier nobilities into a multiethnic service elite, which has been described by Andreas Kappeler and many other scholars. Russia’s “integrative strategies,” however, were largely unsuccessful, and the history of the North Caucasus was shaped by opposition and rebellion (10). In the nineteenth century only a “thin layer” of North Caucasus society, he writes, worked as teachers, businessmen, officers, and others who might qualify as an “intelligentsia” (99). Highly privileged figures who offered their allegiance to Russian rule often viewed the matter as a temporary alliance, or as a means of “protection from third parties through association with a strong external partner” (28). Musa Alkhazovich Kundukhov, for example, a Muslim of Ossetian origin, became a general in the Imperial Army and the chief administrator of Vladikavkaz Military District and then Terek Oblast (largely inhabited by Chechens). He left the region for the Ottoman Empire, however, along with some five thousand families, with the majority comprising Chechens. Two of his brothers had fought with Shamil in the war against Russia, and he eventually fought on the Ottoman side in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878.