SOCIO-POLITICAL INTERCONNECTIONS OF LORDSHIPS AND SOCIETIES OF THE CENTRAL CAUCASUS IN THE 16TH - FIRST THIRD OF THE 19TH CENTURY: A DOCUMENTARY REVIEW

The authors of the article believe that a professional discussion in the academy of the “controversial issues” of regional history came to a head, so that the scientific consensus reached in this way can form the basis for an overarching interpretation of the history of Kabardino-Balkaria. One of such issues is the correct presentation of the place and role of each of the peoples of the region in its common history. The first step towards its solution is the revision and consolidation of the source material, which researchers of various aspects of the problem have relied on so far. The purpose of the article is to bring together the range of documents that were previously used selectively and fragmentarily in the literature in the context of certain research problems and to explicate the content of sources at the most possible degree, without trying to derive from them a definite solution to the problem itself. The analysis showed that the documents of the 16^th - the first third of the 19^th century testify to the continuous tradition of inter-social interaction in the region. Communications, exchanges, interactions with the external socio-political environment were an important factor in the reproduction of the economic, social and political life of local societies. The documentary evidence reflects three constant characteristics of the inter-social landscape of the Central Caucasus during this period. First, mountain societies had the most intense interaction not among themselves, but with the foothill and lowland zones. Secondly, the sources do not describe separately the economic, social and political relations, but the “cluster” state of relations between the socio-territorial units of the regional space. Thirdly, the parties or subjects of inter-social interactions in the sources are not ethnic groups, not peoples in the modern sense of the word, but local ethno-social organisms (communities) or socio-potestary formations (lordships). At the same time, a chronologically consistent review of the sources allows us to see the evolution of the content and forms of socio-political relations between the lordships and societies of the Central Caucasus. In the sources of the 16^th – 17^th centuries the picture of the formation of a system of inter-social interaction in the region is outlined. Documents of the first half of the 18^th century give a more definite idea of the firmly established dependence of mountain societies from Kabardian princes, which appeared now as tradition. In sources related to the last third of the 18^th century one can read out the crisis of the previously existing system of socio-political relations in the Central Caucasus, which acquired in the first third of the 19^th century irreversible character.

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