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Originally Posted by ariel
All true.
Caucasian weapons ( Shashka and kindjal) were initially individually acquired by neighboring Cossacks and later by Russian officers serving in the Caucasus, most actively during the Murid Wars.
Then both started to be manufactured in St. Petersburg and various other cities in Russia and Ukraine, using classical Caucasian forms and decorations.
Then they were modified to become regulation weapons of the Russian imperial army, having very little in common with the Caucasian originals but preserving their original names.
A similar story happened with Caucasian clothes: from occasional individual acquisition to mass fashion statement : even Russian Tsars had their official portraits painted wearing full Caucasian garb, from hats to weapons in minute detail.
I know of no other example where military victors so fully adopted external accoutrements of the vanquished.
Certainly, people all over the world adopted some details of their neighbours’
weaponry ( “ weapons do not know borders” principle), but such a massive transformation has no precedent in the “vanquished-to-victors” direction.
It is as if British high society, royalty included, would have started wearing Indian saris and Zulu loinclothes and the British military officially adopted khandas and katars.
My IMHO theory: this peculiar behavior of the Russians might be due to the absense of their own tradition. They got their weapons from Vikings or Mongols ( and later from acquiring Persian, Turkish, Polish or W. European examples, singularly or en masse), and their own clumsy boyar coats and women’s sarafans were banned by Peter I and substituted for W. European garb. A chance to dress like some unknown to the world Caucasians and wield peculiar Caucasian weapons gave them identity they so much yearned for.
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I rather agree with much of this. Although I lack literature at the moment (in storage) I am under the impression that the final destruction of the Circassians by the mid 19th C. saw the beginnings of the widespread appropriation many aspects of of the Circassian and wider Transcaucasian material culture by the Russian military and upper classes. Would love to see more discussion of this, maybe even as a new thread, although I lack the knowledge or references to start such a thread at the moment. (Apologies if such a thread already exists here). I would add that the appropriation of Caucasian stylistic elements does rather echo the 'orientalist' obsessions in their various waves in Western Europe, see for example the fashion for 'Zouave' uniforms in the mid 19th C.