The report of Ruslan Mamedov on the Seminar of the Research Group for Interdisciplinary Studies of Autobiography
On September 14 the HSE autobiography Research and Study group held its first seminar. The speaker, Ruslan Mamedov, a third year history student at HSE, presented a paper on “Amanat as a mediator in Russian imperial policy in the North Caucasus. The memoirs of Musa Kundukov”.
As Ruslan explained, “amanat” referred to the practice of educating the sons of leading Caucasus families in prestigious military academies in imperial Russia’s capital cities so that, having been instilled in the culture and institutional life of imperial Russia, young members of the local elite returned to their place of origin and acted as leaders in promoting imperial loyalties and practices. The speaker chose this practice as a frame for his discussion of the memoirs of Musa Kundukhov since Kundukhov was the son of an influential Ossetian family who was sent to a Cadet Academy in Saint Petersburg. After serving the Tsar loyally from the mid-1830s through to the late 1850s, Kundukhov was involved in peace negotiations between the rebel leader Shamil and the Russian state, not least because Kundukhov’s brother Khizbulat supported Shamil. After Shamil was removed to Saint Petersburg, Musa Kundukhov asked for, and was granted, permission to lead a convoy of remaining rebel “gortsy, or highlanders, into exile in the neighbouring Ottoman Empire. During the subsequent Russo-Turkish War in the Balkans of 1877-8, Kundukhov took up arms against the Russian army, leading to denunciations that he had betrayed his former officer comrades facing him on the Russian side.
Kundukhov started on his memoirs in the 1880s in response to a desire to share with his family and, undoubtedly, with posterity an account of how he saw his life-story. Written in Russian, his memoirs were first published in a French translation in Paris during the 1930s, and first appeared in the Russian original in the 1990s. While the choice of Russian may seem surprising, Ruslan explained that Russian remained the language of official communication among the exiles who left Russia under Kundukhov. This was because the “gortsy” consisted of a diverse patchwork of local national groups, each with their own language, who lacked an alternative common language other than Russian. As a result, the descendants of rebels from, for example, Cherkassia, often lost their mother-tongue but did cultivate their knowledge of Russian. Thus, the choice of Russian should not be interpreted to mean that Kundukhov was addressing himself to Russian readers across the border.
Although Kundukhov was addressing himself to a potential circle of readers among the “gortsy,” his focused his narrative on his reminiscences of his earlier life in Russia. Ruslan’s key argument accordingly concerned the character of the feelings that Kundukhov reported in his relations with his former Russian interlocutors. Throughout, including in his comments on the Russo-Turkish war, Kundukhov stressed that he got on with members of the Russian officer corps, who shared his strongly felt commitment to honour (doblest’). Indeed, so at home was Kundukhov in the aristocratic military mores of the imperial court that when Nikolai I toured the North Caucasus in 1837, Kundukhov was charged with accompanying him. He recounted how proud local chieftans submitted their expressions of loyalty towards the Tsar, only to find the Tsar aloof and brittle. With the benefit of hindsight, Kundukhov claimed to find the Tsar alienating. If he had felt such frustration with the Tsar at the time, he did not show it, continuing to serve in the army in an exemplary manner, for which he was awarded a series of medals and honours. His service included, notably, a tour of the Austro-Hungarian empire to put down the Hungarian revolution in 1849.
In addition to the key theme of honour, Ruslan identified some of the paradoxes in Kundukhov’s narrative. Firstly, Kundukhov claimed that in the 1830s it would have been possible for the imperial authorities to peacefully integrate the nationalities of the North Caucasus into Russian national life, yet, seemingly arbitrarily, the memoirist then declared in the late 1850s that such a path was excluded. Secondly, in justifying his demand for the voluntary exile of rebel fighters, Kundukhov argued that his motive was freedom and liberty from Russian autocracy. Yet at the same time he did not express the slightest unease about his role in putting down the Hungarian revolution of 1849, when he was implicated in stamping out precisely the aspiration for freedom that he claimed to privilege subsequently. In alluding to a pattern in Kundukhov’s comments, which were characterised by an appeal to emotional authenticity rather than a sober realism or self-critical logic, Ruslan underlined that Kundukhov further shifted his position unaccountably in the late 1850s when he declared that the North Caucasus should be a stronghold of Islam. Such a purist religious position clashed with the sentiment of his own brother, Khizbulat, the ally of Shamil referred to above, who believed that Christian peoples such as the Armenians and Georgians had a place in the region.
These inconsistencies in Musa Kundukhov’s account are relevant to the question of how he constructed his self-representation in his text. To repeat, his intention in writing his memoir was to explain his life as he saw it for the benefit of family and posterity, thereby justifying the role that he played in a transitional period in the history of the Caucasus. However, in justifying his role, the author did not seek to set down an over-arching worldview, on the basis of which he interpreted retrospectively his earlier actions. Instead the focus was repeatedly on how the memoirist reacted in what he considered to be a noble way to events that he found himself in. There would thus appear to be scope to study Kundukhov’s testimony from the perspective of the history of mentalities.
Rather than consider the differences in how Kundukhov accounted for himself in comparison with assumptions that we bring as researchers in reading his text today, the discussion turned on the theme of betrayal. Given his earlier loyalty to the Tsar, was Kundukhov really oblivious to the charge that he had betrayed Russia? In answering this question, Ruslan stressed that the Russian government willingly accepted Kundukhov’s request to lead a convoy of rebels across the border. The context to this event was the aftermath of the Crimean War, when the Russian government was worried about Muslim populations in the Black Sea region, including the Crimea, who could serve as auxiliary forces in support of the Ottoman Empire in the event of future military conflict. In response, the government forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people from the region. Rather than clashing with the official position, Kundukhov was actually working in line with Russian policy.
On the contrary, the speaker clarified, to the extent that Kundukhov may have guilty of betrayal and, as a result, felt pangs of conscience, this would have been in relation to the “gortsy” that followed him across the border. He had promised them that they would live compactly, near the border with the Russian empire, thus able to preserve a distinct regional identity. But this was not what happened. Russian diplomacy protested at the prospect of having in effect a ready army constantly on their border, and the Ottoman authorities took on board their complaint. Moreover, the Ottoman government dispersed the “gortsy” throughout its territory in order to assimilate them the more effectively.
One particular follow-up question here touched on the attitude of disappointed “gortsy” in the Ottoman empire to their leader. Since Kundukhov’s memoirs only appeared in French translation in the 1930s, there was no opportunity for his contemporaries to express disagreement or articulate counter narratives in response. However, Ruslan mentioned a case of “gortsy” breaking into his house and trying to steal from him, in an indication of the anger they felt about their poverty and his comfortable situation in exile.
In conclusion, Ruslan was able to reiterate his argument that applying retrospective national boundaries to an interpretation of Kundukhov’s text would be to miss the point. Kundukhov’s narrative crossed boundaries. Indeed, in recounting his early career he perhaps may not even have recognised them, though he did identify later a religious divide. In alluding to the unfixed, contingent nature of national identities, Ruslan agreed with speakers who cited Benedict Anderson’s discussion of imagined communities. In endorsing this line of inquiry Ruslan’s academic supervisor at HSE, Olga Iurev’na Bessmertnaia, suggested that more work should be done in moving beyond national identity indicators, focusing for example on evolving social identities.
It is to be hoped that future debates within the research and study group will pick up this critique of rigid national boundaries. Yet it is still necessary to have some boundaries, some context in relation to which given autobiographical texts are read and interpreted. Within such a comparative, transnational perspective an intertextual reading of other first-person accounts can enrich the study of Kundukhov’s self-testimony and, in turn, receive new angles of inquiry.