The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains

Abstract

Almost daily, the Caucasus hits the front page. War in Chechnya, the struggles of breakaway republics, oil politics, security issues, and the election of autocrats are among the stories that bring the region to our attention. Much of recent scholarship has focused on these issues in which violence, as it so often does, speaks for itself. At best, one finds a language of challenge and riposte in which conflicts are read as retributive justice for past violence in a dialectical exchange of blows. Yet the more common practice after years of the Chechen war, in Russia and elsewhere, is to venture that the peoples of the Caucasus are by nature violent or corrupt. In this article, I argue for a close reading of the lived experience of violence in the Caucasus in the patterned artifacts of Russian popular culture that have been keystones of knowledge for Russians and Caucasians alike. Asking how diverse genres of Russian popular culture have come to constitute the Caucasus as a zone of violence to Russian audiences not only illuminates these particular logics of sovereign rule but invites a more nuanced view of violence and its consequences in this region. For almost two hundred years, Russian poets, short story writers, novelists, journalists, choreographers, opera librettists, and filmmakers have narrated a remarkably persistent story of kidnapping in the Caucasus. Taking the social, political, and economic dislocations of Russia's early 19th-century imperial campaign as its setting, this tale of two star-crossed lovers-the kidnapped young Russian man-in-chains and the Caucasian woman who sets him free-presents one of the dominant means by which successive generations of Russian publics have come to know and understand the fractious populations living along their mountainous southern border. This story builds on a recursive set of encounters in the serrated southern edges of what was once the colonial Russian empire, then the socialist Soviet Union, and what is now a more fragmented commonwealth of newly independent states. From the 19th-century poetics of Aleksandr Pushkin to the cinema screens of a post-perestroika Russia, the detailed renderings of this specific colonial encounter have changed surprisingly little. Yet for all the well-studied vectors