Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sultan Mendali Piraliyev: The History of a Hoax

2012; Ab Imperio; Volume: 2012; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/imp.2012.0009

2164-9731

A. V. Remnev,

Eurasian Exchange Networks

In this article translated from Russian, Anatoly Remnev explores the journalistic hoax by the well-known Russian scholar of the Orient V. V. Grigor'ev. In the course of the 1860s-1880s, Grigor'ev published a series of articles in the Russian press using the persona of invented Kazakh Sultan Mendali Piraliyev. In these articles, the "Sultan" expressed his loyalty to Russia and criticized Kazakh backwardness. The "Sultan" criticized Russians' reliance on Tatar intermediaries in the steppe and maintained that Kazakhs were "Mohameddans in name only." In his analysis of the hoax, Remnev maintains that Grigor'ev, who served as a tsarist administrator in the steppe, needed a pseudonym to express critical views of current policies. Remnev also suggests that Grigor'ev's resort to the persona of a Kazakh Sultan reflected his broader ideological and scholarly concerns. While he did not reject many "orientalist" premises of European scholarship, Grigor'ev resented the perceived dependence of Russian scholarship on Western ideas. Through the persona of the Sultan, Grigor'ev attempted to bring home to the Russian reader the complexity of Russia's imperial project and to defend the view of the latter as a "civilizing" force in Russia. Remnev interprets Grigor'ev as a mediator between the worlds of power, scholarship, public opinion, and the "Asians" proper, and proposes that his efforts be seen in the context of efforts by "subaltern intellectuals" such as the Kazakh scholar and Russian officer Chokan Valikhanov, who was an obvious prototype for Sultan Mendali Piraliyev.