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The Caucasus has been-and remains-a powerful theme in Russian popular culture. Remote enough from the Russian heartland to be exotic and mysterious, yet close enough to be an area of massive Russian settlement and a linchpin of the Russian empire, it was frequently contested, and continually "in the news." A Muslim borderland where hundreds of different peoples spoke mostly Caucasian and Turkic languages, the Caucasus had all of the exotic potential of the "Orient." Yet, contiguous to the Russian steppe and a part of Russian history since the early Middle Ages, it was not quite as distant as India, say, was to Britain.
As a region of Russian settlement since the sixteenth century, the Caucasus also played a role in Russian history similar to the "wild west" in America. In the social history of the Caucasus and in the Caucasus theme in Russian popular culture, here, too, we see the trail of settlers wagons; cattle rustling; trading posts; frontier justice; bandits, scouts, and spies; noble native warriors; and captivity in the hands of the "savages." The Caucasus was so "Western" that Russians sometimes compared the mountain people who resisted Russian encroachment to James Fennimore Cooper's Indian heroes.1 The great difference from the American West, of course, is that the native cultures continue to dominate in the Caucasus, and that the "natives" are still fighting Russian conquest.
With so much to choose from, it is no wonder that the Caucasus has been for two centuries arguably the single most prominent symbol of empire in Russian culture-popular, middlebrow, and high. From opera to circus, from romance to folk song, from canvas to woodcut, from literature to the penny press, the Caucasus suffused Russian culture. It may even be possible to speak of a "southernizing" of Russian material culture via the Caucasus. The Cossack uniform, weaponry, and style of trick riding which seem so typically Russian were adaptations from the peoples of the North Caucasus. Kefir and Caucasian mineral water-sold on every city street corner-entered Russian cuisine from the Caucasus in the nineteenth century.2 There is no smell more prominent at Russian street fairs than the Caucasian shashlik-popularized in the nineteenth century-and no drinking party would be complete without the Caucasian pickled wild ramson stems (cheremsha, Alium ursinum),...