This book is about a region on the fringes of empire, which neither Tsarist Russia, nor the Soviet Union, nor in fact the Russian Federation, ever really managed to control. Starting with the nineteenth century, it analyses the state's various strategies to establish its rule over populations highly resilient to change imposed from outside, who frequently resorted to arms to resist interference in their religious practices and beliefs, traditional customs, and ways of life.
Jeronim Perovic offers a major contribution to our knowledge of the early Soviet era, a crucial yet overlooked period in this region's troubled history. During the 1920s and 1930s, the various peoples of this predominantly Muslim region came into contact for the first time with a modernising state, demanding not only unconditional loyalty but active participation in the project of 'socialist transformation'. Drawing on unpublished documents from Russian archives, Perovi? investigates the changes wrought by Russian policy and explains why, from Moscow's perspective, these modernization attempts failed, ultimately prompting the Stalinist leadership to forcefully exile the Chechens and other North Caucasians to Central Asia in 1943-4.

Jeronim Perovic is Professor of Eastern European History at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He specialises in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as the history of the Balkans. He has previously held scholarships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University.

Foreword: What this book is about
1 Introduction: Russia and the peoples of the North Caucasus
1.1 Identifying problems areas in the historiography on the North Caucasus
1.2 The establishment of Russian rule
1.3 Objectives and methods of this study
2 Conquest and resistance
2.1 Russia and the North Caucasus in the eighteenth century
2.2 Chechen idiosyncrasies
2.3 Life and death on the 'Line'
2.4 The 'Great Caucasus War' and Shamil's imamate
2.5 Russia's victory and historiographical controversies
3 Musa Kundukhov and the tragedy of mass emigration
3.1 Emigration and colonization
3.2 Between two worlds: General Musa Kundukhov
3.3 Kundukhov and the Chechens
3.4 Emigration and the aftermath
4 The North Caucasus within the Russian Empire
4.1 The establishment of 'informal' rule: Ideals and realities
4.2 The 'last jihad'
4.3 Cossack rule and segregation policy
4.4 The North Caucasus on the eve of revolutions
4.5 Controversial assessment
5 Revolutions and civil wars
5.1 The February Revolution and the dawn of nations
5.2 The October Revolution and independence aspirations
5.3 Path to violence
5.4 The Bolsheviks and their state-building projects
5.5 The North Caucasus after Denikin's arrival
5.6 A missed opportunity
6 Illusion of freedom: Chechnya in the early 1920s and the case of Ali Mitaev
6.1 The foundation and dissolution of the Soviet mountain republic
6.2 Autonomy for the Chechens
6.3 Meeting with Ali Mitaev
6.4 Under the secret police's observation
6.5 Mitaev's arrest and the opening of the power struggle 1
6.6 Disarming Chechnya
6.7 The end of illusion: Bolshevik policy in the Muslim periphery
7 State and society
7.1 Dilemmas of Sovietization
7.2 Village life between stasis and change
7.3 The town-country divide: The case of Abkurakhman
7.4 Failed experiment: The creation of a Chechen proletariat
7.5 Struggle over space
7.6 Chechnya in the late 1920s
8 The North Caucasus during collectivization
8.1 Preface to tragedy: The Baksan uprising of 1928
8.2 Patterns of peasant resistance
8.3 Collectivization between utopia and violence
8.4 Abandoning collectivization, crushing rebellions
8.5 Aftermath of a brutal war
8.6 Assessing the campaign
9 At the fringes of Stalinist mobilizing society: The path to deportation
9.1 Terror, bandits, and the ambivalence of modernity
9.2 In Moscow's sight
9.3 Weak state, difficult mobilization
9.4 The Nazi-Soviet war - and the regime's fear of its own citizens
9.5 The tragedy of deportation
10 Conformity and rebellion: The case of Khasan Israilov
10.1 Israilov as reflected in historiography
10.2 The Israilov diaries
10.3 From Qur'an student to resistance fighter
10.4 Assessment: Resistance during Stalinism and war
11 After deportation: History, Memory, and War
12 Conclusion: Precarious rule and contested loyalties
12 Bibliography and list of references
12.1 Archival sources
12.2 Published documents, memoirs, diaries, and other first-hand accounts
12.3 Secondary works
4.1 Encyclopedia / general reference works