by Ulfat Abdurasulov, Vienna
In 1722 two Trans-Caspian Empires crossed paths in Bukhara. In that year Florio Beneveni, a Russian diplomat on a mission to Central Asia, found himself in direct competition with the Safavid envoy who was visiting Bukhara and slandered the Russian mission at every possible opportunity. The Safavid diplomat, furthermore, did everything in his power to discourage Bukharan officials from receiving the Russian envoy. Both parties were displaying remarkable hypocrisy was paramount, in fact. After all, the Safavid Shah regularly sent his men to the Russian court, and we know that Russia and Savafid Iran were otherwise on friendly terms. So, once being asked to explain his obstructionism, the Shah’s ambassador replied: “without the Caspian Sea between us, the Shah would never maintain relations with the Russians”. This reply may have been little more than a figure of speech, but it is nevertheless quite revealing, for by the Safavid envoy’s own formulation, the sea enjoyed the agential capacity to bring peoples along its shores into contact with one another, or to separate them.
Let me now tell a different story coming from the opposite side of the Caspian. We are now in Gilan, in February 1731, that is a few years following the Russian occupation of the Safavid province. The head of the Russian administration, General Vasily Yakovlevich Levashov (1667–1751) reported to his superiors in St. Petersburg about a party of Russian rebels who had fortified themselves in a nearby village. To suppress the insurgency, the Russian general employed a group of local mercenaries. Levashov did not have high hopes, initially: you get what you pay for, in the end. To the Russian commandant’s surprise, his Gilani fighters threw themselves into the battle—gun blazing— with a terrifying cry: Urus! [Let’s destroy] Urus! What a remarkable moment: the very Gilānīs fighting for the Russian cause were now chanting a battle cry to kill the Russians. For these Gilani mercenaries, Tsardom was not some distant unknown: it was a Caspian power. Evidently, however, the raids of the Don Cossacks must have traumatized the Gilānīs and therefore shaped their perception of things Russian.
In 2019 I had the good fortune to attend the Yale conference titled The Caspian in the History of Early Modern and Modern Eurasia, organized by Prof. Abbas Amanat, Dr. Kevin Gledhill and Dr. Kayhan Nejad. It was a superb scholarly forum which put emphasis on the idea of connectivity: how to historicize the Caspian as a conduit rather than as a barrier. What connected people on the opposite sides of the Caspian? What was the nature of that connectivity? This agenda was part of a broader intellectual reorientation, which in recent years has brought to the fore a new mode of historical analysis known as connected history, connectedness, entangled histories – just to name a few of its avatars. Indeed, as the conference papers showcased, the world of the Caspian coastline was profoundly entangled, and the caravans, diplomatic missions, spies, fugitive slaves, Jesuits missionaries and occasional wayfarers of various walks of life traversing the littoral facilitated communication, of course. Harbor stages along the coastline, such as Astrakhan and Karagan, Niazabad and Derbent, Anzali and Astarabad each in its own right served as hubs of cultural intersection of the type envisioned by transregional histories, especially those which look into the connective role of the bodies of water. It was perhaps owing to the level entanglement that in the Khivan sources the Caspian was often labelled as Ḥājjī Tarkhān Dingīzī or Baḥr al-Qazvīn in some Dagestani texts, whereas in Russia it was long known as Khvalynskoe more.
There is no question that connectivity is a vital as much as a fascinating agenda. Yet, I can’t help feeling that connectivity alone is less than half the story. While going through travelogues crafted by ship captains, diplomats, or merchants, we frequently come across a sense of anxiety and frustration at the remoteness of harbors and the mystery surrounding the shape of the costal line, all places that were “challenging to get to, unyielding, and difficult”. The Caspian was understood by historical actors as a frontier, sometimes so remote as to be inaccessible. It was a zone of encounters and exchange, but also a place of diplomatic debacles and mercantile failures. Regional, confessional, linguistic and geographic lines were not always so easily traversable. To paraphrase Erica Monahan, “doing business on the Caspian in modern period was tough going”. All these closures and dis-connections pose an inevitable challenge: why should we favor cases of encounters and exchanges over instances of debacles and failures? Connectivity, after all, ought to be an area of inquiry, not a foregone conclusion.
But how to qualify disconnections and historicize failures? We can begin to answer this question by noting that obstructions manifest themselves also in writing. Ponezhe dalnost’ otpiski ne terpit [“for the distance does not tolerate written communication”]: this is how Peter I in 1721 attested the quality of information delivered to or from the Caspian region. The distance, in Peter’s opinion, produced inevitable distortions in the reliability of information. The Russian-Soviet scholar Mikhail Polievktov published a study in early 1930s, with the revealing title: “Muscovy’s economic and political information-gathering in the 17th century”. In this work, he addressed the question of the news-delivery between the Caspian and the Russian metropole. According to his estimation, delivering a message from Moscow to the Terek took from 1000 to 2500 hours, and as such the distance should be estimated as being 35 times greater than what it came to be in 1930 (given the new facilities). Indeed, information about the Caspian was truly hard to access, and the little that was available was mostly outdated. The reports which our Florio Beneveni sent from Bukhara and Khiva, for example, did not reach the Russian imperial centers until after Peter I’s death. Another example is the Khivan ambassador Allāh Shukūr-Bāy, who in 1762 appeared in Astrakhan with a letter to the Russian Empress Elisabeth. By the time he made it to Astrakhan, the empress had been replaced by Peter III. When upon the insistence of the Russian authorities Khivans delivered another letter to Astrakhan, which was addressed to the new ruler, Peter III had in the meanwhile been dethroned by the next Russian sovereign Catherine II.
The efficiency of the delivery system wasn’t the only problem. To assess the quality of information was also difficult: distortions accumulated along the way because of the competing interests of those transmitting the information. Florio Beneveni for instance reported that both in Shamakhi and in Isfahan he needed to struggle with false rumors circulated by the Julfian Armenians about the Russians supposedly being at war with the Holy Roman Empire. Outdated and unverified knowledge left significant room for anxieties, which had the effect of dis-connecting knowledge in what is today commonly assumed to have been a sea of connectivity.
Furthermore, all information gathering regimes imposed their own agendas and biases. We know that centuries before Russia conquered the Caucasus and Central Asia, Muscovy produced a deep diplomatic archive documenting an active relationship with people along the Caspian littoral. While substantial in scope, the knowledge amassed in that archive was heavily constrained by the very formulaic and repetitive character of record-keeping. The sanitizing process of archival practices tended to iron out the subtleties of localism and efface ever-changing circumstances on the ground. And where the bureaucratic gaze stopped, there were middlemen of privileged knowledge and information masters who took over and monopolized communication. This was the case, for instance, with Anisim Gribov, an Astrakhani merchant who came to the helm of the Russian diplomatic mission by accident, due to death en route of the actual envoy. After reaching the harbor in Mangyshlaq by sea, the mission came under fierce attack from the local Turkmens. Gribov managed to do what even the Khivan and Bukharan envoys, who accompanied him, failed to achieve. In fact, he managed to pacify the bellicose Turkmens by bringing into negotiation a holy man, a certain ishān from Khorezm, who commanded authority over the Turkmens. We also find Dmitry Petrichis, a Greek by origin, who was hired by Prince Artemy Volynsky, an envoy to the Safavid realm in 1715–1718, because of his language skills. When Volynsky reached Shirvan, Petrichis turned to be an instrumental asset in the Russian envoy’s negotiations with the (then distinctly hostile) Khan of Shirvan.
Were such individuals endowed with privileged knowledge willing to share their know-how? Apparently not. These brokers based their power on exclusive access to information and had vested interested in preserving the integrity of their privilege. Suffice it to say that the selfsame Dmitri Petrichis a few years later in Shamakhi would beat to the pulp the envoy of Kalmyk Auki Khan, for daring to come to Shamakhi without his consent. For the same reason, he furthermore attempted to undermine the credibility of Florio Beneveni in the eyes of the authorities in Shamakhi. Why would he have done this? Clearly, people like Dmitry Petrichis did whatever they needed in order to retain their informational monopoly, even when it may have come at odds with the interests of their superiors in Moscow and Petersburg.
When writing the history of the Caspian littoral one should take into account a certain degree of cultural incommensurability, a factor that compounded upon unreliable narrators working across vast distances. Oath-taking ceremonies of allegiance stand as a vivid example of cultural difference. The Russian state tended to codify its relationship with the people on its expanding frontiers through an elaborate diplomatic ritual. Although these ceremonies were understood by the Russians simply in terms of suzerain-subject relations, Michael Khodarkovsky compellingly shows that they could have borne completely different, if not opposite meaning for their interlocutors. The circumstances of the mission to Khiva led by Prince Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky in 1715–1717 may be invoked as perhaps the quintessential example of the incommensurability across the Caspian Sea. More than a hundred years’ experience of diplomatic fact-finding and amassed expertise related to the people and geographies of the eastern Caspian littoral seem to have been disregarded by the Russian authorities. In addition, lack of mutual understanding informed exchanges between the Russian mission, Khivan authorities, Astrakhani administration, and the Kalmyks all the way.
How are we to conceptualize this? We need not to argue for radical difference, of course. What I would like to suggest instead is that the lens of connection needs to be better attuned to the impact of isolation and disconnection. As the South Asian specialist Mana Kia has recently put it, sometimes what we face may be an incommensurability, and we can learn as much from what is incommensurable as from what is comparable. Following this line of reasoning, I suggest that to put emphasis on cases of disconnection may lead to better comprehension of the quality and relative salience of the connection. The debacle of the mercantile trade in Magyshlaq in 1758-1760 due to Vorontsov’s Company asserting its own exclusive monopoly on the eastern Caspian not only affected the prices on the markets of Bukhara and Khiva, but also entailed a significant blow to the commercial ventures of the Armenian entrepreneurs in Astrakhan, and furthermore contributed to the power struggle in the Russian imperial court. Rumors about the failure of Bekovich-Cherkassky’s expedition to Khiva set in motions chains of events along entire Caspian littoral. The log of Prince Volynsky, the Russian envoy to the Safavid court, clearly shows how even traveling on the opposite side of the sea at the time, nearly on every step of his journey, the Russian envoy had to deal with the various ramifications entailed by those rumors, in Tarki, Shamakhi, Rasht or Isfahan.
As a final remark I would like to invoke a passage from the Russian-Iranian Treaty of 1717 between the Safavid Shah Sultan Husayn and Peter I: “even though the great sea is being agitated, the friendship and propensity between us never ends”. Indeed, while the Caspian Sea may look turbulent and unpredictable, the actions of the peoples leaving along its littoral were nonetheless historically significant: and it is the task of the historian to rescue them from the oblivion of the archives.
Bibliography
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