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Our Kyrgyz we now in need of Russian enlightenment and Russian brotherhood more than ever before.
Chokhan Valikhanov, ca. 1863 1
The "Native" Intelligentsia and Empire
Many non-Russians in the Russian Empire were active members of imperial educated society (obshchestvo), and they often conceived of the colonial advance of Russia as part of the march of the progressive West and "civilization" itself into the backward lands of the East. Reformist empire builders who criticized the brutal wars and population transfers that marked the conquest of the southern borderlands also emphasized the civilizing mission of the empire on its eastern frontier. This article explores the conception of Russia and its empire in the work of the Azerbaijani publicist Hasan Melikov Zardabi.2 Zardabi was genuinely enthusiastic about Russia and the prospect of an enlightened imperial future for the lands of the former khanates on the frontier of the Iranian and Ottoman empires. The unusual circumstances of his life, however, which included exile to his remote and native village of Zardob, a small fishing village on the Kura River to the west of Baku, compelled him to re-evaluate his estimation of Russia and the benefits of imperial rule. Zardabi learned from his experience in Zardob, and grew to rethink his earlier views about civilization and the Russian Empire.
The "native" intelligentsia that emerged in Azerbaijan in the latter nineteenth century was preoccupied with concerns similar to those of the more famous Ismail Bey Gasprinskii, the publisher of Terjuman from 1883 in Bahchesaray. Gasprinskii did not associate cultural backwardness with Islam itself, but blamed Muslim religious leaders who "stifled progressive ideas, placed thought in a vice, and closed the doors to scientific research."3 The emerging Azerbaijani intelligentsia similarly looked to Russia for access to the European Enlightenment, criticized Islamic educational curricula and practices, and promoted the use of Azerbaijani Turkic as a vehicle of local cultural expression. In their struggle for change and transformation, as Audrey Altstadt explains, the Azerbaijani intelligentsia grew to understand that it "need not, indeed could not, reject its own cultural heritage."4 Zardabi came to such a conclusion as a result of his long years in exile in the small village of Zardob.
The lesser known Zardabi actually beat Gasprinskii to the punch with...