The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus

212 Pages·2009·4.189 MB·English

by  Bruce Grant

The Captive and the Gift
To view this image, please see the printed book.
Prometheus Bound by Peter Paul Rubens. Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with the
W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1950.
The Captive and the Gift
Cultural Histories of Sovereignty
in Russia and the Caucasus
Bruce Grant
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
A volume in the series
Culture and Society after Socialism
edited by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries
A list of titles in this series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Copyright © 2009 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2009 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2009
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grant, Bruce, 1964 –
The captive and the gift : cultural histories of sovereignty in Russia and
the Caucasus / Bruce Grant.
p. cm. — (Culture and society after socialism)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4304-6 (cloth : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-8014-7541-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Caucasus—Civilization. 2. Caucasus—Relations—Russia.
3. Russia—Relations—Caucasus. 4. Caucasus—Relations—Soviet
Union. 5. Soviet Union—Relations—Caucasus. 6. Sovereignty—
Social aspects—Caucasus. 7. Sovereignty—Social aspects—
Russia. 8. Sovereignty—Social aspects—Soviet Union.
I. Title. II. Series: Culture and society after socialism.
DK509.G724 2009
947.5—dc22
2008052552
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible
suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing
of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks
and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly
composed of nonwood fi bers. For further information, visit our website
at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jean-Vincent
Enchainment is a condition of all relations based on the gift.
Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xix
1. Promethean Beginnings 1
2. Histories of Encounter, Raidings, and Trade 19
3. Noble Giving, Noble Taking 43
4. Rites of Encounter: Brides, Brigands, and Fire Bringers 63
5. Captive Russians 91
6. Caucasian Refl ections 124
7. From Prometheus to the Present 156
Glossary 163
References 165
Index 185

Preface
“We gave them so much” (Stol'ko my im dali ). A Ukrainian friend with
whom I had once studied in Moscow wrote me a few years back to describe
her return to a seaside resort in Abkhazia, in the Republic of Georgia, on
the Black Sea coast. She had spent time there as a child in the early 1970s
and was taken aback by the declining state of basic infrastructure after
years of post-Soviet economic stress, exacerbated by the struggle between
breakaway Abkhaz and central Georgian forces. “We gave them so much,
and yet, everywhere you looked, you could see what they had done with
what we gave them. It was clear how things turned once they decided that
we were no longer needed.”
She underlined the word “we” in a familiar and genuine turn of phrase
that I heard spoken this way more than once in Russia, to distinguish the
Slavic majority from a Caucasus region that seemed to show little re-
morse for the collapse of the USSR. Twenty years earlier, “we” signaled
all Russians, Ukrainians, Abkhaz, and Georgians under a shared Soviet
project. Yet for all its remarkable internationalism, it was a project that
x Preface
never entirely convinced most populations at the Abkhaz and Georgian
ends of the list that they were full partners alongside the rest. The “we”
in the letter I held in my hand was a different kind of iteration, casting
as spurned givers those of purportedly superior civilization and economy,
whose efforts to better the lives of others were no longer appreciated. So-
viet political rule had ended, but for my correspondent, so too had the
mandate for cultural supervision that went with it, a cultural supervision
that was widely understood, as in this letter, as a form of generosity, a form
of giving. For all the intense forms of belonging generated in the USSR,
however, this kind of giving is one that has of course been regularly ques-
tioned by most non-Russian peoples.
In scholarship, Russia’s relations with the Caucasus are most conven-
tionally expressed through politics, in works that focus on how treaties
were drawn up, wars were fought, and lands were surrendered or annexed.
This is easy enough to understand, as rapid political shift in the Caucasus
was the order of the day at both the opening and the close of rule by im-
perial Russia and its Soviet successor, from the opening of the nineteenth
century to the close of the twentieth. But as so many cases of imperial rule
and its reincarnations around the world have shown, individual leaders
and those who follow them more often than not legitimate sovereign rule
on grounds of altruism rather than pure force. Claiming sovereignty over
another entails the burden of giving. This is the gift of civilization, or, in a
phrase that I believe better captures the political importance of this gesture
in the Russian nineteenth century, “the gift of empire.”
The investment of Russian imperial and later Soviet centers in the
Caucasus region may have been variously motivated, but no one disputes
that the time, money, and soldiers committed to the cause were consider-
able. Investment and sacrifi ce in this context were clear. But as the letter
in my hand reminded me, this kind of gift comes not only from calcu-
lated gain but from a self-perceived noblesse oblige. It is the gift of so-
cial advancement. Montesquieu was among the fi rst to identify this as a
mission civilisatrice, a civilizing mission. But in Russian this became better
known as a kul'turnaia missiia, a cultural mission, a project of advancing
those under one’s dominion. “We gave them so much,” and look at how
things turned out. The effective message was, they never really understood
what we were offering. Or perhaps, they took what we gave, but they took
inappropriately.