Muslims, society, and authority in Russian Empire and USSR: The Caucasus

2024/2025

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

3

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

Department of History

Course type:

Elective course

When:

2 year, 1, 2 module

Instructor

Bobrovnikov, Vladimir

Course Syllabus

Abstract

What role does the Caucasus play in modern history of peripheral Muslim societies from the late eighteenth through the beginning of the twenty-first centuries? How did Muslims from the Caucasus enter the hybrid multiethnic Russian polity? What political, social and intellectual effects had the colonial conquest of the region by the Russian empire and subsequent Communist modernization undertaken in the name of anti-colonial struggle? What was the relationship between Caucasian Muslims, Russian state, and society? How and why did the secularist Soviet state attempt to regulate Islam, and what are consequences of such regulation? How did Muslims answered challenges of colonial and Soviet transformation?The class aims to provide students with a greater understanding of the diverse ways of narrating and practicing Islam in Russia’s Caucasus, and to discuss their consequences for social identities, relations of power and creating symbolic universes where believers live. As such this course is envisioned as a final part of the two-year the central historical discipline of the Master’s program “Muslim Worlds in Russia (History and Culture)”.Students are expected to have basic skills of historical source analysis and knowledge of world history and the history of Russia obtained at the bachelor’s (or specialists) level, and on the historiography courses taught in the master’s program. Based on Caucasian materials the course will allow students to master the problems of new imperial history, postcolonial studies and other modern historical approaches. The course shows regional specificity and diversity of Muslim communities in the Russian Empire and the USSR, as well as the politics of power in them. A special attention is paid to issues of regional governance during the imperial period, national delimitation and nation-building during the Soviet period, relations between the center and the Muslim borderlands of the polity, and especially issues of Muslim politics in Russia’s Caucasus, regional Muslim practices and identities. Having attended the course, students get a more nuanced and complete picture of the place of region in the Muslim worlds of modern Russia.

Learning Objectives

• A student will know basic concepts and theories of Islamic and Russian studies and use them while analyzing social and religious issues in Russia’s Caucasus.
• A student will evaluate the impact of the Empire and Soviet Communism on the development of Muslim societies in modern Caucasus.
• A student will be able to analyze broader key problems of global history of empires including interdisciplinary fields of postcolonial studies, imaginative geography and historical anthropology on the Caucasian data.

Expected Learning Outcomes

• Students should analyse principal reference works, and critically evaluate contribution of this key literature in the development of Islamic and Caucasus studies
• Students must critically approach the aspects and stages of mental mapping of Islam in Russia’s Caucasus, and explain its importance for modern history of Muslim societies in the region
• Students are required to analyse diverse narratives of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. They must be able to analyze historical sources and literature on Muslim resistance critically.
• Students must systemise the paths for indirect and direct colonial rule in the Caucasus, and be able to compare them with similar regimes in Russia and abroad.
• Students must analyze cultural consequences of colonialism.

Course Contents

• Approaches to and views of Islam in Russia’s Caucasus revised following the Archival revolution in the 1990s
• Mental mapping of Muslim Caucasus in tsarist and Soviet Russia
• Muslim resistance in (post-)colonial political imagination
• Muslim shrines in cultural memory and political imagination
• Imperial governance of Muslim “aliens” in the inner frontier of tsarist Russia
• Orientalism in Russia’s Caucasus
• Caucasus Muslims in Soviet modernization and nation-building
• Islamic practices in a Soviet kolkhoz
• Islamic “revival” in the context of post-Soviet desecularization
• Rise and decline of jihadism in nowadays Caucasus

Assessment Elements

• Review paper
• Презентация
• Final essay
  Attendance is crucial for successful completion of the class. Students are allowed to have two unexcused absences for each course for the whole semester program. These allowed unexcused absences should be used for situations such as minor illnesses without a doctor’s note or personal situations that prevent the student from attending the class. Allowed unexcused absences should not be used in a planned way for travel or other activities. It is important that all students prepare course readings for the assigned date and come to class ready to analyze and debate issues raised by the readings. All reading materials will be made available to students in electronic form (pdf). Students are expected to participate actively in classroom discussions and prepare a review paper and one presentation the course (individually or in groups) on specific sets of seminar readings. These presentations are NOT summaries of the readings. Instead, students raise questions for discussion and comment on the discussion itself. A week their presentation students are required to send the instructors a review essay written in the form of the book review (800-1200 words). The take home final essay exam is essay-long discussion of randomly selected two questions from the list of exam questions. Exam asks students to debate across empirical material and different approaches covered in the course. Specifically, in answering each of these questions, students are required to use at least three individual pieces of writing from this course syllabus, not to repeat material in discussion of each of the two questions. In answering both questions, students are to draw on only one piece of readings that they presented on in class. Essay length is between 2000 and 3000 words. - late assignments will be marked down by 10% of the mark per day - if you plagiarize, you fail.
• Participation in discussions
  If student plagiarize, fails to submit a take home final essay or her/his essay is eventually rated as insufficient (grades 0–3), she/he has a make-up exam to be admitted to other examinations.

Interim Assessment

• 2024/2025 2nd module
  0.6 * Final essay + 0.2 * Participation in discussions + 0.1 * Review paper + 0.1 * Презентация

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

• For prophet and tsar : Islam and empire in Russia and central Asia, Crews, R. D., 2006
• Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Anderson, B., 2006
• Michael Kemper, & Stephan Conermann. (2011). The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies. Routledge.
• Russian orientalism : Asia in the Russian mind from Peter the Great to the emigration, Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, D., 2010
• The Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Baddeley, J. F., 2011

Recommended Additional Bibliography

• "Собственный Восток России" : политика идентичности и востоковедение в позднеимперский и раннесоветский период: пер. с англ., Тольц, В., 2013
• Jihad : the trail of political islam, Kepel, G., 2009
• Kalinovsky, A. M., & Kemper, M. (2015). Reassessing Orientalism : Interlocking Orientologies During the Cold War. Abingdon, Oxon [UK]: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=955727
• The Islamic threat to the Soviet state, Bennigsen, A., 2011

Authors

• BESSMERTNAYA OLGA YUREVNA
• BOBROVNIKOV VLADIMIR OLEGOVICH
• KHOMCHENKOVA VARVARA VALENTINOVNA
• IKHSANOV ANTON ROBERTOVICH