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Persian Studies and the Military in Late Imperial Russia (1863–1917): State Power in the Service of Knowledge?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Denis V. Volkov
Denis V. Volkov*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
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Abstract

This article pursues the goal of going beyond Saidian notions of Orientalism and Said's assumption of the “complicity of knowledge with power” to reach back to Foucault's initial postulations on the role of institutions and the intellectual in the interplay of power/knowledge relations. The article concentrates on the role of Russian military Oriental studies institutions and Orientologists in the context of discourses (the promotion of Russkoe Delo, the juxtaposition of Russia with the West and the Orient, etc.) that existed in late Imperial Russia and influenced the accumulation and development of scholarly knowledge on the Orient. Therefore, the significant contribution of the military domain to Russian Oriental studies on both the institutional and individual levels are examined from the angle of intra-Russian discourses in the period from the establishment of the Asiatic Section of the General Staff in 1863 up to 1917.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 6 , November 2014 , pp. 915 - 932
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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Footnotes

This article is based on his current PhD research on Oriental studies and foreign policy in late Imperial Russia and the early USSR: Russian/Soviet ‘Iranology’ and Russo-Iranian relations (1900–1941). In 2012, the archival research for this project was assisted by BRISMES, BIPS and BASEES. Link to his profile: http://manchester.academia.edu/DenisVolkov

References

1 See Kemper, Michael, “Integrating Soviet Oriental Studies,” in The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, ed. Kemper, Michael and Conermann, Stephan (London, 2011), 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also van der Oye Schimmelpenninck, David, “The Imperial Roots of Soviet Orientology,” in The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, ed. Kemper, Michael (London, 2011), 31–42Google Scholar; Khalid, Adeeb, “Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 691–699Google Scholar; Bartol'd, Vasilii, “Istoriia izucheniia Vostoka v Evrope i Rossii,” in his Sochineniia (Moscow, 1977), 9: 418–419Google Scholar; and Bartol'd, Vasilii, “Vostok i russkaia nauka,” in his Sochineniia, 9: 537–540.Google Scholar

2 See Vigasin, A.A. and Khokhlov, A.N., eds., Istoriia otechestvennogo vostokovedeniia s serediny XIX veka do 1917 goda (Moscow, 1997).Google Scholar

3 See Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

4 See the debate which took place on the pages of Slavic Review and Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History: Knight, Nathaniel, “Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?,” Slavic Review 59, no. 1 (Spring, 2000): 74–100.Google Scholar See also Knight, Nathaniel, “On Russian Orientalism: A Response to Adeeb Khalid,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 701–715Google Scholar; Khalid, “Russian History”; and Todorova, Maria, “Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 717–727.Google Scholar

5 Tolz, Vera, Russia's Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford, 2011), 19Google Scholar. Vasilii Vladimirovich Bartol'd (1860–1930), Rozen's disciple, professor at St. Petersburg University (1901), member of Russia's Academy of Sciences, secretary of the Russian Committee for the Study of Central and Eastern Asia (1903–18). He authored more than 650 works on Central Asian, Persian and Islamic studies. Valentin Alekseevich Zhukovskii (1858–1918), professor of Persian language and literature and Dean of the Faculty of Oriental Languages of St. Petersburg University. He was an associate member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the Section of Oriental Languages at the Foreign Ministry (1905–18) and also head of the Translation Section at the Foreign Ministry (1915–17). During the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s he undertook scholarly missions to Persia. He was an active promoter of Oriental studies within scholarly and state institutions.

6 Tolz, Russia's Own Orient, 21. See also Bartol'd, “Istoriia izucheniia Vostoka,” 226–7.

7 Engelstein, Laura, “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Goldstein, Jan (Oxford, 1994), 220–236.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 225.

9 Schimmelpenninck, David, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, CT, 2010), 9, 11.Google Scholar

10 Morrison, Alexander, “‘Applied Orientalism’ in British India and Tsarist Turkestan,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 3 (2009): 629.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 629.

12 Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1995), 342.Google Scholar

13 See Foucault, Michel, “Prison Talk,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Gordon, C. (Brighton, 1980), 52Google Scholar. See also Foucault, Michel, “Power,” in Power, ed. Faubion, James D. (New York, 2000), 120Google Scholar; Mills, Sara, Michel Foucault (London, 2005), 33;Google Scholar and Tolz, Russia's Own Orient, 70.

14 See Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia,, 134, 138.

15 See Marshall, Alex, The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800–1917 (New York, 2006), 28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In this respect, the noticeable engagement of military officers with Russian and, to some extent, with West European scholarship only began at the end of the nineteenth century after the establishment of the Oriental languages officers' courses in 1883 (see Rozen, Viktor, “About Edward Browne,” ZVORAO 7 (1893): 370–375;Google Scholar see also Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 152–6).

16 See Baskhanov, Mikhail, Russkie voennye vostokovedy (Moscow, 2005), 126–127Google Scholar. See also Marshall, General Staff, 5–7.

17 See Tolz, Orient, 69–79. See also Marshall, General Staff, 9–10.

18 See Andreeva, Elena, Russia and Iran in the Great Game. Travelogues and Orientalism (New York, 2007), 1–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 5–6, 59. See also Khalid, “Russian History,” 691–9; and Kulagina, Liudmila M., Rossiia i Iran (XIX–nachalo XX veka) (Moscow, 2010), 128.Google Scholar

19 See Marshall, The General Staff, 108–9. See also Ter-Oganov, Nugsar, “Persidskaia kazach'ia brigada: period transformatsii (1894–1903 gg.),” Vostok. Afro-aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost', no. 3 (2010): 69–70.Google Scholar

20 Ter-Oganov, “Persidskaia kazach'ia brigada,” 69–70. See also Kulagina, Rossiia i Iran, 128.

21 General Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin (1848–1925), an eminent Russian Orientologist (including works on Persia), full member of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, in different periods served in Turkestan, was head of the Asian Department of the General Staff, head of the Transcaspian Region, war minister, governor-general of Turkestan. In 1895 A. Kuropatkin was sent to Tehran as a special envoy of the tsar at the Persian court. As war minister he took an active part in establishing Tashkent Officers' School of Oriental Languages and the Officers' Faculty at the Oriental Institute (see Russia's Military Historical Archive (henceforth RGVIA), f. 970, op. 3, d. 2262 (Kuropatkin's Record of Service), l. 48–48ob. See also Baskhanov, Russkie, 135–6).

22 See RGVIA, f. 165 “Kuropatkin's Personal Collection,” op. 1, d. 435 (Section on the Foreign Policy toward Persia). See also the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (further AVPRI), f. “Persian Desk,” d. 2308, l. 115ob.

23 See the Archive of Orientologists (St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts) (henceforth AV), f.155, op. 1, d. 152 (The Humble Report of Lieutenant-General Kuropatkin on his Trip to Persia in 1895), l. 26, 35–6. See also Andreeva, Russia and Iran, 5–6; and Kulagina, Rossiia i Iran, 129.

24 AV, f. 155, op. 1, d. 152 (The Humble Report of Lieutenant-General Kuropatkin on his Trip to Persia in 1895), l. 1.

25 See Andreeva, Russia and Iran, 1. See also Aliev, Saleh M., Istoriia Irana. XX vek (Moscow, 2004), 36Google Scholar; and Kulagina, Rossiia i Iran, 128–9.

26 See Ter-Oganov, N.K., “Zhizn' i deiatel'nost' Konstantina Nikolaevicha Smirnova in K.N. Smirnov,” in Zapiski vospitatelia persidskogo shaha (Tel Aviv, 2002), 6Google Scholar. See also Kulagina, Rossiia i Iran, 157; and Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 142.

27 In this sense and in application to Persia, “historical time reading” started from the “acquisition” of the Ardebil collection of manuscripts in December 1828 that was carried out due to the energetic efforts of the Associated Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Iosip Senkovskii. In 1828, shortly after the Russian troops captured Ardebil, he went there and persuaded General Paskevich to authorize the “relocation” of the collection. It is only later and, one should assume, merely for the sake of propriety, that it was stipulated in the reparation clause of the Turkmanchai Treaty (see Vasilii Bartol'd, “Obzor deiatel'nosti fakul'teta vostochnykh iazykov,” in his Sochineniia, 9: 58; Bartol'd, “Istoriia izucheniia Vostoka,” 468. See also Atkin, Muriel, “Soviet and Russian Scholarship on Iran,” Iranian Studies in Europe and Japan 20, no. 2/4 (1987): 226Google Scholar). It is even openly mentioned on the site of the Russian National Library that “during the first years of the existence of the library [since 1795] the most significant intakes took place due to the success of the Russian Army in wars with Persia and Turkey … The manuscripts in Persian, Turkish and Arabic amounted to 420 in the result” (http://www.nlr.ru/fonds/manuscripts/east.htm, accessed June 1, 2013). After that the most significant contributions were made by General Simonich, who was Russian minister to Persia after Griboedov, Consul Khanykov, closely connected to the Russian military, and Colonel Tumanskii, who in the wake of his multiple reconnaissance missions to Persia added a considerable number of the Babi manuscripts. On the twists and turns of Alexander Kun's “hunt for manuscripts” see also Morrison's “Applied Orientalism,” 637–9.

28 See RGVIA, f. 400 “The General Staff,” op. 1, d. 228, l. 1, 3–10 (von-Kaufmann's correspondence with the War Ministry). See also van der Oye Schimmelpenninck, David, “Reforming Military Intelligence,” in Reforming the Tsar's Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution, ed. van der Oye Schimmelpenninck, David and Menning, Bruce W. (Washington, DC, 2004), 141–143.Google Scholar

29 On Miliutin's activities see his memoirs: Miliutin, D.A., Dnevnik. 1876–1878. 1879–1881 (Moscow, 2010)Google Scholar. Also see the relevant literature: Nikolaeff, A.M., “Universal Military Service in Russia and Western Europe,” The Russian Review 8, no. 2 (April 1949): 117–126Google Scholar; and Menning, Bruce W., Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914 (Bloomington, IN, 2000).Google Scholar

30 See Schimmelpenninck, “Reforming Military Intelligence,” 141–3. See also Marshall, The General Staff, 21–30; Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 135.

31 See Baskhanov, Russkie, 5–7. See also Marshall, General Staff, 48.

32 RGVIA, f. 846, op. 16, d. 18296 (A Note to the War Minister), l. 1ob.-20; d. 18297 (Blaramberg's Analytical Report), l. 6ob., 12–13. See Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 138–9.

33 See Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 139–41.

34 RGVIA, f.400 (Asian Section of the General Staff), op. 1, d. 3522 (Correspondence of the Head of the General Staff, 1907), l. 50–52.

35 On their graduation, Snesarev, Kosagovskii, Smirnov, Tumanskii, Kuropatkin and others received accelerated promotion for their academic excellence (RGVIA, f. 409, op. 2, p/s 338–604 (Snesarev's Record of Service), l. 3 (02/06/1899); d. 25711, p/s 317686 (Kosagovskii's Record of Service), l. 70 (29/03/1885); f. 970, op. 3, d. 2262 (Kuropatkin's Record of Service), l. 40).

36 AV, f. 115 (A.E. Snesarev's Private Collection), op. 2, d. 50 (Correspondence with General Shvedov, 1905); op. 1, d. 29 (Correspondence with Pavlovich, 1922).

37 RGVIA, f. 446 (The Military Scholarly Collection), op. 1, d. 52 (The Correspondence of the Russian Imperial Geographic Society with the War Ministry on the organization of scholarly expeditions to Persia, 1903). See also Andreeva, Russia and Iran, 64–7; Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 116, 134; and Marshall, General Staff, 9, 144–6.

38 Boris Leonidovich Tageev (1871–1938) (pseudonym Rostam-Bek), an officer-vostochnik, a scholar and a writer—he had a remarkable destiny, worthy of his epoch: after his military service in Turkestan and Afghanistan and his alleged severance from the Russian army he took part in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1904. Having been set free, he did not come back to Russia and had time to serve in the British Army and to work as a Daily Express front-line correspondent during World War I. After the war he struck up a close acquaintance with Henry Ford and worked for his newspaper syndicate, simultaneously cooperating with the weekly Soviet Russia published in the USA. In 1920 he returned to Russia and worked in structures affiliated with the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (Revvoensovet) and other state entities, before he was shot in 1938 on the charge, common for that time, of working for foreign intelligence services (see Abramov, V. and Frolov, V., “Voennyi uchenyi-vostokoved Tageev. Ob'ezdil polmira, a rasstrelian v Moskve,” Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal 4 (2002): 77–80Google Scholar. See also Baskhanov, Russkie, 231–2; and Marshall, General Staff, 145–6, 227).

39 See Tageev, Boris, Po Afganistanu. Prikliucheniia russkogo puteshestvennika (Moscow, 1904).Google Scholar The book contained scholarly information on geography and ethnology of mainly Afghanistan in 160 pages and was preceded by a series of articles in restricted journals Razvedchik and Voennyi al'manakh of the War Ministry that also included the military outcomes of the expedition.

40 In this respect a very useful and interesting study was carried out by Elena Andreeva in Russia and Iran in the Great Game. However, the genre of travelogues that became the selective basis for the works analyzed in the book, formed a community of people the bulk of whom had been extremely little (or not at all) familiar with Persia before visiting it and this Orientological illiteracy predetermined their negative attitudes toward it. The works of such authors were not regarded as valuable contribution and were heavily criticized by Russian scholarship, as was, for example, the case of Evgenii Belozerskii whom Andreeva frequently referred to (pp. 78, 86, 92, 104, 109, 110, 121, 129, 139, 154, 163–4). Suffice it to mention Belozerskii's statement about the “inner emptiness” of the Iranians in comparison to the Europeans who had a “rich individual psychological life.” On the criticism of Belozerskii's activities in Persia and of his writings see Valentin Zhukovskii's manuscript (AV, f. 17 (V.A. Zhukovskii), op. 1, d. 24 (Review of Belozerskii's Report)).

41 In this respect, Tumanskii's eagerness to go in for Persian studies is worth noting. He was admitted to the Academy in 1884 but was expelled in 1985 because of his failure in the translation exam. In 1887 he again tried to pass the entrance exams but was not admitted because of the lack of places. Finally, he succeeded in entering the Academy in 1988. He graduated in 1891 with merit and was assigned to the General Staff. Given his scholarly achievements, in 1911 he was appointed head of the Tiflis Officers' School of Oriental Languages (see RGVIA, f. 409, op. 1, d. 172812, p/s 148–610 (Tumanskii's Record of Service), l. 18–20ob).

42 See Baskhanov, Russkie, 242. Ignatii Iulianovich Krachkovskii (1883–1951), professor of Arabic studies (1918). He was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1921) and knew Arabic, Persian and Turkish. In the 1920s he produced a translation of the Qur'an that remained the only reputable one throughout the whole Soviet period.

43 See Tumanskii, Aleksandr, Kitabe Akdes. Sviashennaia kniga sovremennykh babidov (St. Petersburg, 1899).Google Scholar

44 In 1897 Bartol'd separately mentioned the great impact of this discovery and Tumanskii's translation (see Bartol'd, Vasilii, Otchet o poezdke v Sredniuiu Aziiu s nauchnoi tsel'iu, 1893–1894 (St. Petersburg, 1897), 3–4Google Scholar). However, it was published due to Professor Bartol'd's efforts only in Soviet times, in 1930. In 1937, Vladimir Minorskii, then a professor of Persian Studies at the University of London (SOAS), but in the early twentieth century Tumanskii's colleague in the Russian diplomatic service, made an English annotated translation of the manuscript (AV, f. 134, op. 2, d. 116 (Minorskii's private notes on the translation, dated September 26, 1937), l. 1–2).

45 Vasilii Bartol'd, “Iran. Istoricheskii obzor,” in his Sochineniia, 7: 330.

46 Ibid.

47 See Bartol'd, “Istoriia izucheniia Vostoka,” 467. See also Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 139–41; and Marshall, General Staff, 26.

48 RGVIA, f. 446, op. 1, d. 47, l. 27–30 (Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs to the Head of the General Staff, 11/03/1894). See also Andreeva, Russia and Iran, 63.

49 Vladimir Andreevich Kosagovskii (1857–1918), lieutenant-general. Between 1894 and 1903 he was the chief-commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade and 1905–8 he served as head of the Transcaspian region. He is the author of multiple works on economy, finance, governmental set-up, history, geography, military forces of Persia. He retired in 1909 and lived on his private country estate. After 1917 he had to resort to farming, and after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks burdened him, a “class-alienated landowner,” with extremely high taxes, which would have bankrupted him had they not been voluntarily paid by the peasant population of five neighboring villages as a mark of respect towards their former landlord. They also saved him several times from being arrested by the Bolsheviks, but he was finally executed in 1918. His Persian diaries are kept in RGVIA, Collection 76 (Kosagovskii's collection), op. 1, d. 217 (1899–1909), l. 1–417 (see also Baskhanov, Russkie, 126–7; and Ter-Oganov, “Persidskaia kazach'ia brigada,” 69–79.)

50 RGVIA, f. 446, op. 1, d. 47 (Correspondence between the Head of the Caucasian Military District and the Head of the General Staff, February 4, 1894), l. 6–8, l. 10.

51 AVPRI, f., “Persian Desk,” d. 2308 (Kuropatkin's correspondence, 1900), l. 117Google Scholar.

52 Though the Soviet and present-day historiography, for unknown reasons, prefer to spell Kosagovskii with “o” in the middle and an established expert on the Persian Cossack Brigade, Nugzar Ter-Oganov, does the same, I adhere to the way Kosagovskii himself would write his name, and so did his direct commander, head of the Caucasian Military District, General Sergei Sheremetev (for example, RGVIA, f. 446, op. 1, d. 47, l. 6–8, 44). The same spelling with “a” is also adopted in Baskhanov's Russkie voennye vostokovedy (pp. 126–7).

53 RGVIA, f. 76 (Kosagovskii's Reports to the Military Learned Committee), op. 1, d. 48 (General Report on Trips around Persia and Kurdistan); d. 255 and 256 (Officers' Reports). Delo 254 (1901) demonstrates that Kosagovskii used to entrust even native agents with composing reports on the local life in their towns and villages.

54 See Frye, Richard N., “Oriental Studies in Russia,” in Russia and Asia. Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples, ed. Vucinich, Wayne S. (Stanford, CA, 1972), 43–44Google Scholar. See also Marshall, General Staff, 30, 43–5; Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 137–41.

55 See Vasilii V. Bartol'd, “Pamiati V.A. Zhukovskogo,” in his Sochineniia, 9: 689. See also Bartol'd, “Istoriia izucheniia Vostoka,” 472; Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 128; Marshall, General Staff, 17.

56 See Bartol'd, “Istoriia izucheniia Vostoka,” 446. See also Marshall, General Staff, 24, 164–5, 168; Vigasin and Khokhlov, Istoriia, 128–9.

57 See Bartol'd, “Pamiati Zhukovskogo,” 700–701.

58 On Zarudnyi's activities in Russia's War Ministry see RGVIA, f. 446 (correspondence on expeditions to Persia), d. 552 (1903). See also Bartol'd, “Istoriia izucheniia Vostoka,” 469–70.

59 On Ostroumov's activities see Geraci, Robert, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (New York, 2001), 47–115Google Scholar, 223–63. See also Geraci, Robert and Khodarkovsky, Michael, eds., Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversions, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 See Khalid, “Russian History,” 691–9. See also Knight, “Response to Khalid,” 701–15. It should be mentioned that the cultural civilizing of Persians, namely the inculcation of European civilized mentality, was meant to be done with a simultaneous strong emphasis on the Russian cultural and political component (see Tolz, Vera, “Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 268Google Scholar).

61 The Foucauldian capability of “civilian” scholars, using the capacities, emanated from state, to benefit from state interests by means of creating discourses, necessary for pursuing their own interests, often aimed at the institutional advancement of their scholarly field, was also studied in Krementsov's work, though mostly for the early Soviet period (see Mills, Foucault, 33, 58. See also Krementsov, Nikolai, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 4–5Google Scholar, 29–30).

62 See Geyer, Dietrich, Russian Imperialism. The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860–1914 (Hamburg, 1987), 334–335Google Scholar. See also Kulagina, Rossiia i Iran, 132–6; Aliev, Istoriia Irana, 46; and Shirokorad, Rossiia-Angliia: neizvestnaia voina, 1857–1907 (Moscow, 2003), 402.Google Scholar

63 RGVIA, f. 400, op. 4, d. 279, l. 9–10 as quoted in Ter-Oganov, “Persidskaia kazach'ia brigada,” 76–7.

64 The Georgian National Centre of Manuscripts (henceforth GNCM), f. 39 “Konstantin Nikolaevich Smirnov,” d. 78, “Gartvig's letter to Smirnov,” dated August 2, 1909, with Smirnov's later remarks, dated 1933. See also Konstantin Smirnov, Zapiski vospitatelia persidskogo shaha (Tel Aviv, 2002). Military Orientologist, Colonel Konstantin Nikolaevich Smirnov (1877–1938) authored a considerable number of works on Persian history, ethnography, geography and economy. Having graduated from the officers' courses of Oriental languages he served in the Intelligence Unit of the Caucasian Military District Staff and was appointed as Soltan Ahmad Mirza's, the later Ahmad Shah Qajar's personal tutor (1907–14). He participated in World War I and after the Russian Civil War he worked as an interpreter in the Bolsheviks' Army in the Caucasus. In the 1920s–30s he worked as a research associate in the Academy of Sciences of Georgia before he was repressed in 1938 (Ia. Vasil'kov, V. and Sorokina, M. Iu., eds., Bibliograficheskii slovar' vostokovedov-zhertv politicheskogo terror v sovetskii period, 1917–1991 (St. Petersburg, 2003)Google Scholar).

65 GNCM, f. 39 (K.N. Smirnov's Private Collection), d. 11 (Diaries, 1907), l. 18, 21; d. 12 (Diaries, 1909), l. 43ob.–46; d. 13 (Diaries, 1910), l. 26ob.–27, 95–6, 142.

66 Ibid., d. 13 (Diaries, 1909), l. 4ob.

67 See Belozerskii, Evgenii, “Pis'ma iz Persii ot Baku do Ispagani, 1885–1886,” Sbornik geographicheskikh, topographicheskikh i statesticheskikh materialov po Azii 25 (1887): 1–108.Google Scholar

68 See Dostoevskii, Fedor, Dnevnik pisatelia, 1881, http://az.lib.ru/d/dostoewskij_f_m/text_0530.shtml (accessed August 21, 2012).Google Scholar

69 RGVIA, f. 446, op. 1, d. 48 (Kosagovskii's Reports on Trips around Persia and Kurdistan to the Military-Learned Committee), l. 48–51.

70 The Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, f. 94 “The Secret Cryptographic Section on Iran,” op. 2, d. 2, papka 1, l. 3ob. See also Aleksandr, Father Superior (Zarkeshev), Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov' v Persii-Irane (1597–2001) (St. Petersburg, 2002), 110–115Google Scholar; Shishov, Aleksandr, Persidskii front (1909–1918) (Moscow, 2010).Google Scholar In this sense, the research, conducted in 1998–2001 by the Father Superior of St. Nicolas Church in Tehran Aleksandr (Zarkeshev), is worth mentioning. The author made significant efforts in order to reconstruct the history of Russian religious missions to Persia from the reign of the Shah Abbas I (1587–99) to now with the help of the archives of AVPRI, scattered fragments of documents related to missionary activities and the reminiscences of the Russian residents of advanced age in Iran. It resulted in publishing a book, containing, for example, the details of General Baratov troops' interaction with Persian population in 1915–17 or the devastation of the Orumiyeh Orthodox Mission and the massacre of the Assyrian Christians by Turks and Kurds after the evacuation of Russian troops. Although the work is not devoid of self-serving discursive connotation concerning the superiority of the Orthodox Christianity towards Islam and of all things Russian towards the Persian and, in this sense, could be placed in one row with the militant “anti-Islamic” works of famous Russian clerical scholars such as Il'minskii, Ostroumov and Mashanov, it still remains the only relatively comprehensive though rather brief research on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in Persia/Iran.

71 See Andreeva, Russia and Iran.

72 See Tolz, Russia's Own Orient, 5, 30.

73 AV, f. 115, op. 1, d. 70, l. 5–6 (manuscript of Snesarev's article “Attitudes toward the Asiatic World”).

74 Tolz, Russia's Own Orient, 5. The term vostochniki derives from Vostok (“the East” or “the Orient” in Russian) and officially was used in late Imperial Russia for differentiating the military officers and the employees of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs from their colleagues who had not received the appropriate Oriental studies training. It can be translated as “Orientalist.” Since the early 1920s a term vostokoved (“Orientologist”) has officially been used for everyone professionally trained in Oriental studies. The latter sounds more scholarly in Russian.

75 Wachtel, Andrew, “Translation, Imperialism, and National Self-Definition in Russia,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 52.Google Scholar

76 Ibid.

77 RGVIA, f. 846, d. 18296, l. 1ob.-20 (Analytical Note to the War Minister).

78 The term goes back to the expression an awkward triptych coined by Nathaniel Knight in this context (see Knight, “Response to Khalid,” 707).

79 Todorova, “Russian Soul,” 720.

80 See Knight, “Grigor'ev,” 100.

81 Foucault, Michel, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Gordon, C. (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 98.Google Scholar See also Simons, Jon, Foucault and the Political (London, 1995), 82;Google Scholar Mills, Foucault, 33, 58; and Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 4–5, 29–30.