On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus by Firouzeh MostashariReview by: Alexander MorrisonThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 86, No. 4 (Oct., 2008), pp. 728-730Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25479283 .

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In chapters organized by genre ?

comedies, historical plays, and comic

operas ?

O'Malley also tries to maintain a chronological approach in order to highlight the emotional, intellectual and policy concerns that informed Catherine's dramatic writings. She begins with five comedies written around

1772 and then moves on to discuss the later comedies, including three anti Masonic plays, written in the period 1785-90. In the comedies, Catherine

emerges as an Enlightenment moralist adept in the application of neo-classical artistic forms. From the comedies and French dramatic proverbs, O'Malley shifts our gaze to the Shakespearean plays of 1786

? one comedy and two historical plays

? which reveal a Catherine open to artistic innovation

(willing to abandon neo-classical symmetries), appreciative of Russian cultural

traditions, and skilled in the use of baroque pageantry to assert political power. Finally, in the last chapter of the book, O'Malley examines Catherine's comic operas, written between 1786 and 1790, which pay 'homage to Russian folk forms by stitching together fairy tales, by liny, popular songs, and even a witch' (p. 200). In the comic operas, Catherine's ability to write Russian verse also becomes evident, as does her talent for treating serious, even disturbing, subject matter with humour and grace.

O'Malley's study is based on a close reading of Catherine's published plays, and she makes good

use of secondary sources, letters, diaries, memoirs and a

smattering of archival documents. Her main point is to show the centrality of

Catherine's theatrical activities to her life and reign. Present-day readers can

all too easily dismiss the dramatic works of eighteenth-century Russia as

stilted, moralistic, imitative, and unoriginal. Only a handful of eighteenth century plays

? for example, the comedies of Denis Fonvizin ? are today read with any pleasure. But in the course of O'Malley's insightful and unob trusive analysis, the dramatic works of Catherine the Great come to life. Catherine's technical talent as a playwright and social acumen as a moralist assume their rightful place alongside her many other recognized gifts. As

O'Malley notes, the plays of Catherine convey a message of hope, optimism and good

sense. When we enter the empress's presence, whether through

scholarship or direct reading of her works, it is impossible not to feel the

power of the myths that she (and her panegyrists) so ingeniously constructed.

Although Catherine liked to downplay the significance of her own writings, and she would not have thought of herself as a modern propagandist, O'Malley reminds us that in reality the empress's plays were 'full of purpose' (p. 185).

Department of History E. K. Wirtsghafter

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Mostashari, Firouzeh. On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus. International Library of Historical Studies, 32. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2006. xvi + 203 pp. Maps. Notes. Selected

bibliography. Index. ?45.00.

This is a welcome addition to the growing monograph literature on the non

Slavic areas of the Russian Empire before 1917. Mostashari's focus is on the

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REVIEWS 729

region which now constitutes Azerbaijan between the period of the Russo Persian wars of 1804-13 and the 1917 Revolution. As such it complements Tadeusz Swietochowski's pioneering Russian Azerbaijan igoj-ig20 (Cambridge, 1985), but Mostashari has had access to archives in Baku, Moscow and St

Petersburg which Swietochowski was unable to work with, and her study is more concerned with the nature of Russian imperialism in the region rather than the development of Azerbaijani national consciousness and revolutionary feeling, although she does not neglect these areas. The book will serve as a

strong corrective to those historians who still believe that the Russian Empire was an administrative unity, with no distinction made between Russian and

non-Russian regions as in the other European empires. Although she occa

sionally contradicts herself (p. 11), in general Mostashari argues firmly that this was not so, and that Russian policies in Muslim Transcaucasia must be under

stood as distinctively colonial (pp. 3-4, 28-35) ? her language on this point at

times seems a little intemperate. After an excellent account of the Russo

Persian Wars, the conquest of Azerbaijan and local resistance to it (pp. 8-25), Mostashari describes in detail the policy debates and dilemmas which confronted the fledgling Russian administration in the region (pp. 27-63). On the Religious Frontier is at its most interesting where Mostashari is examining

Russian attempts to reach an accommodation with the landowning elites of Muslim Transcaucasia (Beks and Agalar). She charts the contradictions and u-turns of a policy which saw these groups marginalized and stripped of their

hereditary privileges under General Ermolov in 1818-20 (p. 21), and finally denied any role in rural government by an Imperial edict of 1840 (p. 80). This was then rescinded six years later as Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, the new Namestnik or Viceroy embarked on a new policy of creating a privileged soslovie

(estate) amongst the Muslims whose interests would be closely tied to those of the Imperial state, and their rights were confirmed in a rescript in 1846.

Vorontsov's successors were.less enthusiastic about the policy, and pursued it

half-heartedly. Although a very small number of Beks were finally granted hereditary nobility in 1901, unlike the Georgian nobility they were never fully incorporated into the Empire's ruling elite (pp. 83-84). This is particularly sig nificant as it represents the moment where the earlier principle of assimilating the elites of conquered regions (such as the sluzhilye Tatars or the Kabardian

princes) was abandoned and replaced by the more rigid ideas of European superiority and exclusiveness which, together with a deep suspicion of Islam

would come to predominate in all the borderlands of the Empire from the

1850s. Her account of the complex process of land reform is also enlightening, and it is a pity the constraints imposed by the publisher prevented her from

examining the role of the 'ulama and the Muslim judiciary under colonial rule at greater length (pp. 85-90). She shows very clearly how additional limits

were placed even on those few representative institutions created after the

great reforms because of a fear of Muslim preponderance (pp. 69-70). The book is weaker where Mostashari is examining social, economic and

intellectual change. The transformation of Baku into one of the great boom towns of the nineteenth century is barely acknowledged, and she puzzlingly describes it as a 'prototypical [sic] colonial city, with its segregated native and

European quarters' on the eve of the First World War, whilst in the next

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730 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008

sentence saying that by this date the number of Russians in Baku actually exceeded the numbers of Azeris (p. 108). In 1870, she writes, Muslims had been in a majority, but whilst she mentions peasant setdement in passing she does not tell us how this urban demographic reversal took place. She does not reflect sufficiendy on the implications for her argument about Azerbaijan's subordinate colonial status of the fact that Azeri and Armenian entrepreneurs dominated the oil industry in Baku (pp. 124-25), whilst the working class was

mostly Russian. Similarly I would cast doubt on her assertion that Azeri peas ants were taxed seven times more heavily than Russian peasants in the inner

guberniyas of the Empire (p. 99): this may be true in terms of the basic land tax, but she has failed to take account of the heavy redemption payments which Russian peasants had to pay after their emancipation from serfdom, having acknowledged herself that 'in Baku guberniia redemption had turned into a myth', and the peasants had never made any payments (p. 68). In general whilst the borderlands of the Empire were denied most of the fruits of the

great reforms of the 1860s, such as the zemstva, elected municipalities and the new civil code (a process she charts very ably by and large on pp. 65-77) they were also spared its financial burdens in the interests of military security. It would be very surprising if Azerbaijan were an exception. Despite her denunciations of colonialism, she also shows too little awareness of how the

other European Empires functioned, taking at face value a statement by Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich in 1878 that by introducing primary schools to the region and educating the population in their own language the Russians

were acting with a magnanimity unknown in French Algeria or British India. Mostashari describes this as 'yet another example of the uniquely Russian

approach to the administration and education of colonial subjects', apparently unaware that this practice was common in missionary schools in India. In any case, as she herself shows clearly later on (pp. 72-77), the Russians actively discouraged independent educational initiatives whilst their own achievements in this field were negligible.

It is unfortunate that what is in some respects so valuable a book should have been sent to the publishers as camera-ready copy by the author without

any subsequent proof-reading or editing. This is a pernicious practice by academic publishers who still have the nerve to charge ?45 for monographs produced in this manner, and the results are all too plain to see. The structure

of the latter part of the book is confused, as clearly the chapters on

'Officialdom, Russification and Revolution' and 'The Azerbaijani Intelligen tsia, Nationalism and Revolution' belong together, whilst it is hard to see why 'Muslim Society and its Response to Russification' (the tide of the chapter

which separates them) needs to be dealt with separately from the other two

themes. The grammar is sometimes shaky, and there are some slightly embarrassing spelling mistakes which a copy-editor would have spotted, notably 'marshal law' (p. 106).

Despite these caveats, this is a fascinating monograph in a field, Russian

Imperialism, which needs more of them.

All Souls College, Oxford Alexander Morrison

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