Paul W. Werth

From Resistance to Subversion: Imperial Power, Indigenous Opposition, and Their Entanglement

To the extent that colonial rule, with its arrogant pretensions of cultural and political superiority, has been construed by the academy as morally illegitimate, it has perhaps been natural for students of colonialism in Russia, too, to seek examples of indigenous resistance to that rule as a way of confirming its illegitimacy and locating among the oppressed a universal urge for liberation. The status of the Soviet Union among many Western observers as an oppressive order of dubious legitimacy could only further such imperatives, as did the search to uncover archetypal sources of Soviet behavior. In particular, émigré communities, inclined to construe their co-ethnics as historically “captive nations,” have been eager to underscore indigenous opposition as part of a narrative of “national martyrology.” As regards the tsarist period, this perspective at times curiously dovetailed with the imperatives of Soviet historiography itself, which sought to document the dual nature of oppression (both national and social) for nonRussians in the tsarist “prison of peoples” and thus to privilege examples of resistance, which would of course then serve as a counterpoint to a prevailing Soviet “friendship of peoples.” And now post-Soviet scholarship, retaining the “heroic” character of non-Russian resistance, has in many cases merely shifted the objects of indigenous discontent from the “feudal” and “capitalist” domination highlighted by Soviet studies to national and religious oppression (and indeed recast the former as a function of the latter). When we acknowledge the simple fact that opposition tends to leave more visible imprints in the archive than

Coercion and Conversion: Violence and the Mass Baptism of the Volga Peoples, 1740-55

This article concerns what may be regarded as the final step in the Christianization of Europe. In a short 15-year period in the mid-18th century the vast majority of the animist peoples of the Volga region, as well as a portion of its Muslims, were converted to Orthodox Christianity. Most historians of these conversions would agree that force and intimidation were crucial elements in the striking numerical success of this missionary campaign. Thus the Tatar historian Faizulkhak Gabdulkhakovich Islaev claims that, from 1741, “violence became state policy in the organization of missionary work.” In a slightly more modest formulation, Michael Khodarkovsky contends that under Empress Elizabeth (1741–62) the imperial government “put new emphasis on using force and legislative decrees, rather than teaching Christian doctrine.” Complaints filed by new converts confirm that some non-Christians indeed became victims of violence. A Chuvash petition of 1745, for example, describes how a certain archpriest, “together with other priests and peasants of the Dudin monastery, coming at night to Chuvash homes, and catching them, Chuvash, with their wives and children, mercilessly beat them and baptize them against their will, and likewise on the roads they catch Chuvash and subject those Chuvash to violent conversion.” The very fact that official prohibitions against the use of force