Has Abrek Become a Social Bandit?

The article examines changing historical semantics of a specific Caucasian term of abrek in the context of the Russian colonial conquest and rule, until the Soviet de-colonization in the North Caucasus. Since the last third of the 19th and especially the first decades of the 20th centuries this word has come to mean a noble bandit who was usually outlawed by his native community and colonial state in cases of blood feud. Under the colonial rule the word losses the former meaning of outlawed exile and gets the new sense of a fighter against social injustice and a protector of subaltern masses. The author argues that one should not confuse concrete representatives of abrek gangs, whose “golden age” occurred between the end of the Caucasus war (1817–1864), and the two Russian revolutions (1905–1907, 1917), and their image as it was constructed and then spread by Muslim mountaineers and Russian military authorities. The word under study might be put in the range of other invented traditions expressed in controversial terms of the Russian colonial and then socialist discourses like “alien/inorodets”, “muridism”, “bourgeois”, “kulak, “white guard”, “parallel Islam”, etc. Relying on a wide range of archival, printed and field sources so written as oral evidence, the paper seeks for answers to the following research questions. Who was an abrek? Why and when did this image emerge in the East Caucasus? To what extent is it a timeless archetype rooted in mountain traditions before the Russian conquest, or is it a (post-)colonial concept? How did the reproduction of Abrekism take place before, during and after the Caucasian War in the 19th century? How did the mountaineers themselves and their colonial authorities treat the abreks? What were the relations of the abreks with (post) colonial authorities? Did their type change in tsarist and early Soviet Russia? What impact did abrekdom have on the society and culture of the modern Caucasus and Russia?