Research for this essay was supported by the American Council of Learned Societies’ Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, the American Councils for International Education, the National Humanities Center, and Swarthmore College. I gratefully acknowledge the editorial counsel of Slavic Review and its three anonymous reviewers, alongside the generous readings and comments extended by Niyazi Abdullayev, Laurie Bernstein, Jean-Vincent Blanchard, Farha Ghannam, Hikmet Hacizade, Lisa Hajjar, Maya Iskenderova, Atiga Izmailova, Paul Manning, Anne Meneley, Fikret Mirkerimov, Rachel Moore, Shemistan Nezirli, Serguei Oushakine, David Reeves, Nancy Ries, Leslie Sargeant, Seteney Shami, Julie Taylor, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, and Lale Yalcin-Heckmann. I first presented this essay to a joint session of the Russian and East European reading circles led by Maria Todorova at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; their excellent criticisms and colloquy have made this a better text.

The epigraph is taken from “Nuxa Rayon ZDS (Zahmatkaşlar Deputatlann Soveti) Icraiyyə Komitesi Məlumat üçün kənd sovetlərin iclas protokollar (1930),” Azarbaycan Baş Arxiv Idarəsi, Şəki Filiali (Azerbaijan Central Archive Administration, Sheki Branch, hereafter ABAI SF), f. 13, s. 1, i. 29, s. 41. Azerbaijan archives follow the Russian system of fond, opis', delo, list, and “ob.” by using the corresponding terms fond, siyahi, iş, səhifə, and “sa.” For footnoted references to Azeri language sources and terms, I employ the Latin alphabet adopted by the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1991. In the main body of the text, I romanize terms for typographical clarity, hence: Bash Shabalid rather than Baş Şabahd, Sheki rather than Şəki, and barakat rather than bərəkət.

1. The city of Sheki and its surrounding administrative districts were known as Nuxa under the Russian and Persian imperial administrations. Though the two names were used interchangeably throughout the period from the late nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century, the city was officially renamed Sheki in 1968.

2. In mapping the variously pitched recollections of a regionally famous event, I draw on the forms of historical fieldwork suggested by Amin, Shahid in his book, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922-1992 (Berkeley, 1995 Google Scholar).

3. Danilov and his colleagues cite figures from Moscow KGB archives that list 3,700 participants in the Sheki events, although Baku KGB files suggest higher numbers when they indicate that over 2,000 Communist Party and 576 Komsomol members alone joined in the counter-revolutionary movement. Danilov, V P. et al., eds., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Koltektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie. Dokumenty i materialy v 5 tomakh, 1927-1939, 5 vols. (Moscow, 1999-2003), 2:704 Google Scholar; Mir Cafar Baghirov, “Doklad o povstancheskom dvizhenii v Nukha-Zakatal'skom Okruge (po dannym na 12 maia 1930 g.),” Milli Təhlükəsizlik Nəzirliyin Arxivi, Azsrbaycan Respublikasi (Archive of the Ministry of National Security, Republic of Azerbaijan [formerly the Archive of the KGB, Azerbaijan SSR], hereafter MTNA), 1, 63. The file is catalogued as P177. The Baku security report indicated that 180 persons were killed, 150 were wounded, and 850 were detained (of whom 226 were arrested). Surveying anti-Soviet movements across Azerbaijan in the same period, historian David Reeves found that 2,686 persons were killed and 7,310 were detained in the same Sheki events. In his manuscript, “Islam, Banditry, and Popular Resistance to Soviet Power in Azerbaijan, Summer 1929,” presented to the workshop, “Russia/Eurasia in World Context: A Dialogue with Middle East Studies,” organized by the Social Science Research Council and Princeton University, April 2004, Reeves cites Azsrbaycan Respublikasi Siyasi Partiyalar və Ictimai Hərəkatlar Mərkəzi Dövbt Arxivi (Central State Archive of Political Parties and Social Movements of the Republic of Azerbaijan), f. 1, s. 74, i. 283, s. 75.

4. For this hermeneutic attention to questions of evidence and “self-evidence,” I am indebted to close readings of archival work from Russia and beyond in Dirks, Nicholas B., “Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History,” in Axel, Brian, ed., From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures (Durham, 2002), 47–65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kotkin, Stephen, “The State—Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists,” Russian Review 61, no. 1 (January 2002): 35–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. “History is a record of changes,” the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs once wrote. Memory, by contrast, “is a record of resemblances.” Halbwachs, Maurice, The Collective Memory (New York, 1980), 86 Google Scholar.

6. Hegel, G. W. F., Introduction to the Philosophy of History with Selections from the Philosophy of Right, trans. Rauch, Leo (Indianapolis, 1988), 29 Google Scholar. Alltagsgeschichte and the study of everyday life are prominently represented in Lüdtke, Alf, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton, 1995)Google Scholar; and Michel de Certeau, , The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1988)Google Scholar. For a more recent review, see Ries, Nancy, “Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror,” New Literary History 33 (2002): 725–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the Soviet context, this article takes inspiration from Sheila Fitzpatrick's recent study, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times; Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), where she focuses on an “extraordinary everydayness” (2-3) of practices that involve interacting with the state.

7. Quetelet in Ewald, Francois, “Norms, Discipline, and the Law,” in Post, Robert, ed., Law and the Order of Culture (Berkeley, 1991), 145 Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

8. In mapping political symbolism, I reprise Katherine Verdery's use of the semiotician Charles Saunders Peirce, who remarked that the most powerful symbols are the ones most available to multiple and competing audiences. Verdery, Katherine, “Whither ‘Nation' and ‘Nationalism'?“ Daedalus 122, no. 2 (1993): 37–47 Google Scholar.

9. I borrow the notion of “common property” from Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, 8.

10. This sketch relies on popular historical accounts of the Sheki rebellion, in Abdullayev, əbdurahman, “Şəkinin 30-cu il faciəsi,” Kommunist (Baku) (15 August 1989): 3 Google Scholar; Manafli, Həbibulla, Şəki üsyani (Baku, 2000)Google Scholar; §3mistan Nəzirli, “Bolsheviklərə qarşi üsyani“ (in 14 parts), Azərbaycan ordusu qəzəti, 2 April 2003 (pt. 1): 4; 5 April 2003 (pt. 2): 3; 8 April 2003 (pt. 3): 3; 9 April 2003 (pt. 4): 3; 19 April 2003 (pt. 5): 4; 10 May 2003 (pt. 6): 4; 13 May 2003 (pt. 7): 4; 14 May 2003 (pt. 8): 4; 17 May 2003 (pt. 9): 4; 21 May 2003 (pt. 10):4; 24 May 2003 (pt. 11): 4; 27 May 2003 (pt. 12): 4; 28 May 2003 (pt. 13): 4; 31 May 2003 (pt. 14): 4; Nəzirli, , Topoqraf- General Ibrahim Ağa Vəkilov (Baku, 2002), 158–65Google Scholar; Vahabzade, Baxtiyar, Şənbə gecəsina gedən yol (Baku, 1991), 257–59Google Scholar. While these four authors almost unfailingly portray Molla Mustafa as a politically nationalist leader in ways that are not consistently supported by Molla Mustafa's own biography, I draw on them in this section for common points shared in all accounts.

11. It was unclear from archival sources whether the Ittihad va Taraqqi in question was the movement founded in Turkey in 1896, as described by Lewis, Bernard, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Princeton, 1961), 194 Google Scholar; or one of the wings founded in Moscow, in 1899, according to Danilov et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, 3:909; or in 1920, according to Bennigsen, Alexandre and Wimbush, S. Enders, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago, 1979), 87, 218 Google Scholar. Ittihad va Taraqqi's goal of the creation of a pan-Turkic bourgeois state was, in any case, separate from the pan-Islamist Ittihad (Union) political party in Baku (1917-1920). See Swietochowski, Tadeusz and Collins, Brian C., Historical Dictionary of Azerbaijan (Lanham, Md., 1999), 70 Google Scholar.

12. “Band olma, provokasiyadir.” See for example Abdullayev, “§akinin,” 3.

13. Abdullayev, “Şəkinin,” 3; Nəzirli, “Bolsheviklərə,” pt. 4.

14. Among the best-known English-language monographs are Altstadt, Audrey L., The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule (Stanford, 1992)Google Scholar; Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Baku Commune 1917-1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1972)Google Scholar; Swietochowski, Tadeusz, Russian Azerbaijan 1905-1920: The Shaping of National Identity in a Muslim Community (New York, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Swietochowski, , Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition (New York, 1995)Google Scholar. In Russian, one of the most programmatic studies of Azeri rural life is Bagirov, M. N., Blagoustroistvo kolkhoznykh sel i byt krest'ian Azerbaidzhana (Baku, 1957)Google Scholar.

15. Viola, Lynne, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York, 1996), 105 Google Scholar. For comparable events in Georgia, see Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 11. For mappings of considerable resistance and revolt in the early Soviet periods, see Danilov et al., Tragediia sovetskoi derevni; Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; and Viola, Lynne, ed., Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar.

16. In a 3 April 1924 interview with the Tbilisi newspaper, Zaria Vostoha, Baghirov reported that while fifty-eight rebel groups had been active in the Azerbaijan SSR in May 1922, only five groups remained in March 1924, and a further seventeen men had surrendered just days before his arrival in Georgia. “At this time the entire republic has been cleaned of criminal groupings, as well as SR, Müsavat, and monarchist organizations.“ Baghirov in Nəzirli, Topoqraf, 161. Audrey Altstadt and Tadeusz Swietochowski qualify Baghirov's assertion by writing that wide-scale armed resistance to Soviet power in Azerbaijan continued “to at least” 1924. See Altstadt, The Azerbaijani Turks, 111; Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 190; and Russia and Azerbaijan, 102-3. The most encyclopedic source on anti-Soviet rebellions in Azerbaijan is Baberowski, Jorg, DerFeind ist überall: Stalinismus im Kaukasus (Munich, 2003)Google Scholar. Azeri historian Ziya Bunyadov sketches accounts of armed rebellion of 1930 in nearby Naxchivan in Qvrmizi Terror (Baku, 1993), 21-32.

17. In the eastern Caucasus, şeyx is a term loosely used to designate the leader of a religious community, a well-known preacher, or venerated local saint. In Arab societies it can carry a more formal political significance. Though Sheykh Ehmed is widely held to be a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, I did not hear him referred to by the alternate titles of sarif (lit., the honorable one, a term more common among Sunni Muslims predominant in northwest Azerbaijan) or səyyid (lit., master, the term more common among Shi'i Muslims across eastern Azerbaijan). Martin van Bruinessen's work, Agha, Shaikh, and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan (London, 1992) provides a helpful discussion of the blurring of these terms in a different setting. With similar flexibility, the term molla can designate someone particularly knowledgeable in Islam, or someone from a famously pious family, as in the case of Molla Mustafa, rather than someone who carries the limited clerical responsibilities of the Muslim faith.

18. The village has at least three other pirs—sites where visitors tie small ribbons of cloth to branches of bushes or trees, leave money, or simply come to invoke aid. The other sites include Dis piri, for dental problems, Öskürək piri, for coughs, and Yet Baba, an open space of forest. For a fuller discussion of the role of pirs in contemporary Azeri society, see Meshchaninov, I. P., “Piry Azerbaidzhana,” Izvestiia gosudarstvennoi akademii istorii material'noi kul'tury 9, no. 4 (1931): 1–17 Google Scholar; and Saroyan, Mark, Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar, chap. 5.

19. I spent ten months in Azerbaijan over the course of three visits in 1999, 2001, and 2002, including three months in Bash Shabalid proper. The interviews in this section were done in Azeri with translations into Russian when older male residents, many of whom had learned Russian when they served in the Soviet army, were present to extend help.

20. The following three extracts are from an interview with Hacibala (Qada) §ükürov, 28 July 2002.

21. The Soviet republic of Azerbaijan was promulgated on 28 April 1920.

22. This and the following extract are from an interview with Abdul Lezar Gurməmmədov, 27 August 2002.

23. “Nikolay vaxti” (lit., the time of Nikolay), or more simply “Nikolay,” was standard shorthand for talking about the tsarist period.

24. Abdul Lezar used the Russian word kaban (wild boar) after I did not understand the Azeri donuz (wild hog). Abdul Lezar did not explain how a religious figure such as Sheykh Ehmed could counsel hunters to look for animals that are forbidden (haram) in Islam, though the practice among Muslims in the eastern Caucasus of hunting them was not uncommon in hungry times in any case.

25. The following four extracts are from an interview with Zemfira Həsənova, 3 October 2002.

26. For one elaboration on baraka, see Geertz, Clifford, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago, 1971), 44 Google Scholar. For more extended discussions see Schimmel, Anne Marie, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, 1975)Google Scholar; and Sells, Michael A., ed., Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur'an, Mi'raj, Poetic and Theological Writings (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

27. The period when the territory of Azerbaijan was conquered by Arabs in the late seventh century is not well studied in Russian- or Azeri-language literatures. Many argue that the Arabs rapidly assimilated into local society, in the same way that later Turks did. The names of the smaller central Azeri cities of Ismailli and Kürdamir (which includes 3rabxana district) recall these distant arrivals. Many refer to Sheykh Baba's tombstone to conclude that he came from Saudi Arabia, but Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey are invoked just as often. Sheykh Ehmed died in 1898.

28. Murid means religious adherent, or follower, although it also once signaled the Islamist Murid movements across the Caucasus and Central Asia in the nineteenth century, most popularly captured in the rebel figure Shamil. See Gammer, Moshe, “Shamil and the Murid Movement, 1830-1859: An Attempt at a Comprehensive Bibliography,” Central Asian Survey 10, nos. 1-2 (1992): 189–247 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. The following three extracts are from an interview with Molla Mahir, 4 October 2002.

30. Molla Mustafa's infant son died of illness shortly after his family's arrival in Tashkent. I was told that local mollas established a shrine to his son and that his family left the grave there because it, too, received visitors.

31. Baghirov, “Doklad,” 22.

32. Zelkina, Anna, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufi Responses to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York, 2000), 48, 100–105 Google Scholar. See also Bennigsen, Alexandre and Wimbush, S. Enders, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union (Berkeley, 1985), 9–10 Google Scholar. Among die few studies of Sufi practice in northwest Azerbaijan are Datunashvili, I. I., “Materialy k kharakteristike sovremennogo sostoianiia religioznosti v Belokanskom, Zakatal'skom i Kakhskom raionakh (Azerbaidzhanskaia SSR),” in Konkretnye issledovaniia sovremennykh religioznykh verovanii (Moscow, 1967)Google Scholar; and Neimatova, M. S., Azarbaycamn epigrafik abidahri (XVII-XVIII ssrlsr) (Baku, 1968)Google Scholar. While interested in the framing language by which contemporary residents of Bash Shabalid discussed the rebellion, I found no evidence to suggest that Sufi structures of belief themselves determined resistance to Soviet rule, not least when the seizure of property, political mayhem, and the closing of mosques offered more than enough incentive on their own. For a careful review of the many and problematic essentializations of “political Sufism” in imperial Russia and the former Soviet Union, see Alexander Knysh, “Sufism as an Explanatory Paradigm: The Issue of Motivations of Sufi Resistance Movements in Western and Russian Scholarship,“We Welt deslslams 42, no. 2 (2002): 139-73.

33. Nora, Pierre, “Between Memory and History,” in Nora, Pierre and Kiitzman, Lawrence D., eds., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1, Conflicts and Divisions (New York, 1996), 7 Google Scholar.

34. Ibid., 1.

35. Aeschylus, , Prometheus Bound, ed. Griffith, Mark (New York, 1983), 81 Google Scholar.

36. “Albanian” is one of the many geographic terms used to designate the eastern Caucasus in die pre-Islamic period. The essays in Suny, Ronald Grigor, ed., Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia (Ann Arbor, 1983)Google Scholar, are among the best in mapping these shifting identifications.

37. Storfjell, J. Bjornar, “The Church in Kish: Carbon Dating Reveals Its True Age,“ Azerbaijan International 11, no. 1 (2003): 32–39 Google Scholar. Some Azeri historians have disputed the Georgian connection, relying on much later nineteenth-century census figures that marked the Sheki uezd as 99.9 percent Tatar (Muslim). The clearest statement of this position is Mamedova, Gulchokhra, “Church in the Village of Kish Is the ‘Mother of Albanian Churches,'” History of the Caucasus (Baku) 1 (2001): 29–32 Google Scholar. For demographics, see Trointsskii, N. A., ed., Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ naseleniia rossiiskoi imperii, 1897 g. Tom LXIII: Elizavetpol'skaia guberniia (St. Petersburg, 1904)Google Scholar.

38. Mil'man, A. Sh., Politicheskii stroi Azerbaidzhana v XIX—nachale XX vekov: administrativnyi apparat i sud;formy i melody kolonial'nogo upravleniia (Baku, 1966), 44–45 Google Scholar.

39. Qarayev, Yaşar, ed.,Azerbaycan folklor antologiyasi. Tom lV: Şeki folkloru (Baku, 2000), 137–39Google Scholar.

40. Smitten, “Kratkii istoricheskii ocherk prisoedinennykh k Persii, musul'manskikh chastei sostavliaiushchikh teper'o Derbentskii i Shemakhinskii gubernii,” Azarbaycan Respublikasi Dövlət Tarix Arxivi (State Historical Archive of the Azerbaijan Republic [formerly GAI ASSR], hereafter, ARDTA), f. 998, s. 1, i. 13, s. 8.

41. Adol'f Petrovich Berzhe, ed., Akty sobrannye kavkazskoiu arkheograficheskoiu komtnissiieiu (hereafter, AKAK), 13 vols. (Tbilisi, 1866-1904), 9:217-18, 227-28, 318-19.

42. Dumas, Alexandre, Adventures in Caucasia (1859; Westport, 1962), 163–70Google Scholar. Dumas added, whether for accuracy or for dramatic effect, “Nowhere else, even in Algeria, even in the Atlas Mountains, have I found traveling so exhausting, so fraught with danger, as in the Caucasus” (173).

43. Nicholas Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers: Religious Dissent and Russian Colonization of Transcaucasia, 1830-1890” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998); Firouzeh Mostashari, “Colonial Dilemmas: Russian Policies in the Muslim Conquest,” in Geraci, Robert P. and Khodarkovsky, Michael, eds., Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 2001), 229 Google Scholar. For wider-ranging works, see Baddeley, John F., The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London, 1908; reprint, London, 1999)Google Scholar; Berzhe, ed., AKAK; and Suny, ed., Transcaucasia.

44. Document no. 163, dated 27 May 1839, in Berzhe, ed., AKAK, 9:127. On similar Russian destabilization strategies elsewhere in the Caucasus, see Bournoutian, George A., A History of Qarabagh: An Annotated Translation of Mirzafamaljavanshir Qarabaghis Tarikhe Qarabagh (Costa Mesa, 1994), 12 Google Scholar; and Swietochowski, Russia and Azerbaijan, 12.

45. ARDTA, f. 998, s. 1, i. 13, s. 15-25; Il'ia Petrushevskii, Petrovich, ed., Kolonial'naia politikarossiiskogo tsarizmav Azerbaidzhanev20-60-khgg. XIXv., 2 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936-37) 1:134–42,2:187-204Google Scholar.

46. Mostashari, “Colonial Dilemmas,” 247. Partly due to illiteracy, clerics across the eastern Caucasus used finger-ring stamps in lieu of (Arabic-script) signatures, a practice that further frustrated their Russian correspondents. ARDTA, f. 289, s. 1, i. 40, s. 11-12.

47. ABAI SF, f. 102, s. 1, i. 2, s. 47sa.

48. ABAI SF, f. 102, s. 1, i. 5, s. 32.

49. ABAI SF, f. 102, s. 1, i. 2, s. 46; Azsrbaycan Respublikasi Dövlət Arxivi (formerly Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Oktiabr'skoi Revoliutsii Azerbaidzhanskoi Respubliki, orTsGAORAzSSR; hereafter ARDA), f. 379, s. 1, i. 7595, s. 52.

50. Baghirov, “Doklad,” 4.

51. Ibid., 22.

52. Ibid., 31, 28. By 2 April 1930, 17.2 percent of district households had joined the collective farm system.

53. Nəzirli, “Bolsheviklərə,” pt. 4.

54. Abdullayev, “Sskinin,” 3; Manafh, fekiüsyani, 32-34; Nəzirli, “Bolsheviktara,“pt. 2.

55. MTNA, “Sheykh Zade Molla Mustafa Mamed Oglu,” (filed as Delo 24 1/358) ss. 23-25.

56. Ibid., s. 82.

57. Ibid., ss. 91-95.

58. Manafli, $aki üsyani, 34.

59. Rehabilitated for Soviet audiences in the early 1960s, the Molla Nesreddin phenomenon is discussed in Firidun Hüseynov, “Molla Nəsrəddin” və Nəsrəddinçilər (Baku, 1986); N. B. Kondyreva, , ed., Molla Nasreddin (Moscow, 1970)Google Scholar; Paksoy, H. B., “Elements of Humor in ‘Central Asia': The Example of the Journal Molla Nasreddin in Azerbaijan,” in von Mende, Erlin, ed., Turkestan: Als historischerFaktor und politische Idee (Cologne, 1988), 164–80Google Scholar; and Dzhalil Mamedkulizade (Mammadquluzada), hltrannyeproizvedeniia v dvukh lomakh, ed. Abbas Zamanov (Baku, 1966).

60. Molla Nəsrəddin, no. 4 (28 April 1906): 42; MTNA, “Sheykh Zade,” 38sa.