XXXI Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 23–25 июня 2021 г. Т. 2

316 XXXI Международный Конгресс по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки Секция XX involved in this mobilization program. By focusing on institutional conflicts and ever changing strategic conjectures, we will put into perspective several rival approaches to the Kurdish question which were reflecting the major discursive trends in the Russian Empire: the image of the Kurds as a « martial nation », the discourse on the Arme- nian « existential danger » and the classical orientalist vision of the tribal periphery, which was supposedly inhabited by the orientalist Other. The paper concludes that the persistence of this orientalist paradigm and its use as a legitimizing discourse accompanied the major strategic choices of the Russian authorities during the war and prevented them from effectively exploiting the nascent national feeling of the Kurds. Limited as they were by their regional policy, the Russians failed to establish long-term relations with the Kurds in the 1910s. Instrumentalization of the Kurdish national sentiment could be an option but the Russian academic discourse only viewed the Kurdish populations as a « martial nation » or as a counterweight to Armenian influence. However, this paper posits that the Russian orientalists’ discourse on the Kurds was mostly determined by regional imperial factors as well as by local con- flicts of interest rather than by the war time needs. First of all, Russian hegemony in the North of Iran facilitated the Russo-Kurdish rapprochement and reinforced the Russian academic discourse on the Kurdish martial skills. Second of all, the tsarist “laissez-faire” policy on the Irano-Ottoman frontier, which was mainly fueled by the fear of Ottoman intervention, found its another justification in the anti-Armenian discourse on the Armenian “existential danger” vis-à-vis the Kurdish populations. Furthermore, the Russian anti-Armenian “kurdophilia” was frequently linked to the imperial internal rivalries in the political and military circles. Finally, the Russian orientalists’ idea of the Kurdish “Islamic fanaticism” resonated with the tsarist paranoid fear of pan-Islam, which was particularly popular with the local Caucasian and Central Asian reformist movements. In addition, Russian diplomats-orientalists ( vostochniki ) Nikitin and Minorskii, who were especially active in the tsarist expan- sion in Kurdistan, perceived Islam through the prism of regional political dynamics such as Ottoman expansionism and Iranian internal instability during the years of the Constitutional Movement (1905–11). Hence, their discourse on the Kurdish reli- gious fanaticism had a double self-legitimizing function: it justified Russian imperial expansionism and it ignored the structural flaws of the Russian presence. At the end of the day, the Russo-Kurdish alliance did not turn out to be a long- lasting enterprise because of the tsarist discursive contradictions and vulnerable institutions, especially weakened by the ethno-religious conflicts in EasternAnatolia and in the West of Iran. Though tangible in the tsarist diplomatic correspondence, the idea of an autonomous Kurdish state was always discredited by the necessity to maintain the regional statu quo, while the Kurdish populations were being orien- talized in the tsarist academic discourse. The latter denied any political maturity to the Kurds, their image was being that of a noble savage who could be patronized by the imperial authorities but never taken seriously in his quest for independence.