ETHNOGRAPHERS WRITE ABOUT THE RUSSIAN EAST BY YU. Y. KARPOV. A LOOK AT THE HIGHLANDERS. VZGLYAD S GOR. MIROVOZRENCHESKIE ASPEKTY KUL'TURY I SOTSIAL'NYJ OPYT GORTSEV DAGESTANA [WORLDVIEW ASPECTS OF CULTURE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE OF MOUNTAINEERS OF DAGESTAN]. SPb: Peterburgskoe vostokovedenie, 2007, 656 p. B. GRANT. THE CAPTIVE AND THE GIFT: CULTURAL HISTORIES OF SOVEREIGNTY IN RUSSIA AND THE CAUCASUS. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2009. XVIII, 188 p. (Ethnographica Petropolitana)* "How much we have given them, and yet, wherever you look, you see how badly they have treated what they have received from us. How everything has changed now, after they decided that they don't need us anymore," a Ukrainian woman, a former graduate student at the Moscow Institute of Ethnography, complains about ungrateful Caucasians who have forgotten the benefits of Russia. She was struck by the chaos that prevails in post-Soviet Abkhazia, where she spent a happy Soviet childhood in the 1960s and 1970s and returned after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Abkhazian-Georgian war of the early 1990s. On the other side of the post-Soviet Caucasus, a native of Northwestern Azerbaijan complains that after the collapse of the USSR, silk production stopped and residents of the city of Shaki are out of work. But when he brings his American guest to the obligatory point of the local tourist program, the Khan's Palace, he is encouraged: for him, this is a visible symbol of the former greatness and prosperity of his native city on the Silk Road. Noticing the bewilderment on the face of his interlocutor, he smiles broadly in response: "Back in the ninth century, we were at the zenith of glory, while Russia did not rise to the level of Kievan Rus. What will the Russians tell you? They brought us culture.. So who civilized whom? " (Grant, p. IX, 112). A Dagestani from the Botlikh district self-critically blames his fellow countrymen for the moral decline: "As a child, I thought: how happ ... Read more