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A Documentary Narration about the Steppe Slavery or a Colonial Narrative: Essay “Ivan Vasil'evich Podurov” by S.N. Sevast'yanov
Authors: Artyom Yu. Peretyatko
Number of views: 8
The article is dedicated to the essay by S.N. Sevast'yanov “Ivan Vasil'evich Podurov”, describing the captivity of the Cossack officer in Middle Asia. This essay, reprinted in 1999, is assessed differently by different researchers: from “purely documentary narration” to a narrative with glaring mistakes that demonizes the “Kirgiz” (as Kazakhs were called in the Russian Empire’s tradition). Nevertheless, even though a number of authors turned to it in the 20th century (N. Zhetpisbai, T.M. Zhaplova and A.Zh. Saibulova, E.K. Sozina), none of them conducted a systematic analysis of this text. This article undertakes an attempt at such analysis, which is important for understanding how reliable in general are the descriptions of slavery in Middle Asia by the Russian pre-revolutionary amateur historians, especially by members of the Orenburg Scientific Archival Committee, of which S.N. Sevast'yanov was also a member and commanded authority.
The article shows that, in his text, S.N. Sevast'yanov definitely relies on three categories of sources, none of which could be considered reliable: on the folk tales of the Orenburg Cossacks; on the stories of I.V. Chernov, who was born two years after the described events, but presumably heard about them from I.V. Podurov himself; on the manuscript of G.F. Gens, a contemporary of the events, Russian official and an amateur orientalist, who was extremely critical towards the “Kirgiz”. It is unknown whether S.N. Sevast'yanov was working with the originals of the documents about the capture of I.V. Podurov or provided them based on the manuscript of G.F. Gens. But in any case, we managed to find direct forgery in a document cited in the essay, form which information was excluded that negatively characterized Russian authorities. As a result, some data provided in the essay is based on unreliable sources, and the reliable sources are misrepresented either by the author of the essay or by those on whose descriptions of the events he was relying.
Furthermore, by comparing the narrative of S.N. Sevast'yanov with archival documents it becomes evident that: 1) the image of I.V. Podurov is extremely heroized, for example, in the primary sources his heroic resistance against captors and his heavy wound are not mentioned; 2) the “Kirgiz”, on the contrary, are demonized, information presenting them from an ambiguous side was excluded (for example, the fact that they were capturing Russian officers not for ransom, but to set free the father of one of the captors); 3) nothing confirms the story reported by I.V. Chernov about the daughter of the “Kirgiz” khan falling in love with I.V. Podurov, and the image of this Muslim maiden is deprived both of any particular features (even name) and of any subjectivity. All this allows us to confidently say that the essay “Ivan Vasil'evich Podurov” does not document the events of 1820s, but translates the image of these events that formed among the Orenburg Cossacks by the end of the 19th century, which makes it a valuable source on the historical memory of the Orenburg Cossackdom.