Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus

Church History, March, 2007 by Stephen K. Batalden

Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia's Empire in the South Caucasus. By Nicholas B. Breyfogle. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. xxiii 350 pp. $49.95 cloth.

While the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been marked by massive refugee resettlements and migrations, it is well to remember that the era of great migrations originated earlier with imperial colonization efforts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Heretics and Colonizers is the very well-written historical analysis of one of the more unusual such resettlement and colonization movements of the nineteenth century--namely, the effort of the Russian Empire to resettle "especially pernicious" religious dissenters (sectarians) in the Transcaucasian region now comprising the independent states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

By tsarist decree of Nicholas I in October 1830, thousands (the author is never very clear about the precise numbers) of Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks were relocated from their Russian and Ukrainian villages to lands south of the Caucasus Mountains. The overland migration occurred largely in the 1830s and 1840s, although the movement of sectarian settlers into Transcaucasia continued throughout the middle of the nineteenth century.

The book's title and the author's thesis are built around the irony that, although the resettlement began as an attempt to isolate religious dissenters ("heretics") who had broken away from the dominant Eastern Orthodox state religion of the Empire, most of the migrating sectarians managed to overcome the initial hardships of their resettlement and ultimately came to be viewed by the Russian authorities as effective, productive colonizers of the newly acquired Russian territories of Transcaucasia. Although the author has not found published reference to the sectarians as "colonists" until later accounts written at the turn of the century, he demonstrates that already by the middle of the nineteenth century Russian imperial authorities in the south Caucasus had begun to view the sectarians rather more ambivalently as both sectarian dissenters and productive allies in the state-building enterprise.

The account extends well beyond the confines of imperial strategies, however, providing in the process one of the better accounts to date of the rich social and intellectual world of these communitarian Russian religious dissenters. In the final third of the volume, the author is particularly effective in lending agency to one particular subgroup of the migration--namely, the oppositionist Russian Dukhobors of Transcaucasia who, motivated in part by religious revival, launched in 1895 an insurgency movement directed against the imposition of universal military conscription. While not all Dukhobors were of one mind, the "Large Party" Dukhobors ultimately broadened their attack into a direct challenge to tsarist authority and state modernizing efforts in the region. Public burning of weapons, refusal of military service, and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience came to be normative for much of the sectarian community of the region. From "ethnic Russian," "loyal subject," and "model colonist," the transplanted sectarian suddenly became the nonconformist insurgent and renegade threat to imperial security and stability.

The issue of Russian ethnicity is set alongside the important relations that developed between the settlers and the indigenous Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani people. Nevertheless, Heretics and Colonizers never really develops for the indigenous people of the Transcaucasia the "agency" that is accorded the author's main protagonists--the sectarians. There are subtle ways, however, in which the author manages to blur the lines between "the dominated" and the "dominators" by noting the way in which the Russian settlers of Transcaucasia occasionally found themselves subordinated to indigenous non-Russian elites of the region. The result is a volume that offers a nuanced view of Russian state-building (the author adheres to the view that Russian empire-building was largely pragmatic and accommodationist in character), while also treating the issue of religious dissent and frontier politics with subtlety.

One of the most important contributions of the work is its reconfirmation of the rich documentary record still largely untapped for study of migration and religious movements in Russia. The work utilizes effectively the relevant central state archival repositories of Moscow and St. Petersburg alongside local, regional, and emigre collections in Tbilisi, Ottawa, and Toronto.

In a day when the migration process has clearly reversed direction, with thousands of migrants moving each month from the "near abroad" into Moscow for employment, Heretics and Colonizers reminds us of an earlier formative era when migration, religious dissent, and empire-building converged on the Eurasian frontier, as much as at its center.

Stephen K. Batalden

Arizona State University