131 Book Reviews Jeronim Perović, From Conquest to Deportation: The North Caucasus under Russian Rule. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 456. isbn: 978-0190889890 Jeronim Perović’s From Conquest to Deportation. The North Caucasus under Russian Rule unquestionably deserves all the praises set out on the back of the hard-copy. Published in 2018, it enriches historical knowledge about the conflict-ridden region and puts one of the least-researched historic time-periods (1861-1944) into the broader context of the political processes that were taking place in the Greater Caucasus and Russia at that time. Furthermore, Perović’s focus on the years between 1917-1944 is particularly beneficial for readers, as there are very few studies that target this period in Chechen history, which must have presented a challenge for the author’s research. Perović refers to many brilliant works, summarising the knowledge accumulated before him, and reinforcing it with reference to scholarship in a variety of languages. The book is enriched by a large amount of archival material, making it ac- cessible to a broader range of audiences, who may not necessarily have access to it. The author’s approach to this immense amount of data deserves a sep- arate praise; it was a very rewarding idea to look at the history of the region through the biographies of prominent figures such as General Mussa Kunduk- hov, Sheikh Ali Mitayev, Professor Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov and a rebel, Khassan Israilov. Perović is slightly sceptical about the honesty of their person- al accounts—an approach that benefits every researcher. He applies this atti- tude to some existing studies too, criticising their ‘civilizational perspective’. The author claims to have tried to avoid this “civilizational” trap, making his study free from the so-called colonial approach. The study is very coherent. The brief closing remarks at the end of each chapter clearly correspond with the goals declared at the beginning of the chapters and lead into the conclusion, which responds to the overall objec- tive of the study—to analyse the failure of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union to integrate the North Caucasus and to “deal with the reasons of this failure” (p. 3). Perović argues that the reasons for this failure are to be sought in the “minimalistic state-building project” (p. 10) right after the conquest and in the “deep-seated” mistrust with which Imperial Russia regarded the people of the region. The Bolshevik project, according to him, failed for a different reason: the overwhelming demand for the “full loyalty” (p. 12) of the local pop- ulation and a crushing attempt to “transform the society completely” (p. 12), which the population did not accept. Indeed, neither of these projects suited the Chechens, who reacted with rebellions against Imperial and Soviet rule. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/22117954-12341414 Downloaded from Brill.com04/18/2020 08:34:40PM via University of St. Andrews