79 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus Mountaineerswith the realities of modernity, of course, as the debates over the pro-
cess of collection illustrate. Local officials from around the region in-
formed Tbilisi that locating the “genuine dress of the given
nationality [narodnost’]” would require significant expenditure and
effort, as few people wore or even possessed what the Academy of
Sciences identified as authentic and native to the people in ques-
tion.^140 Addressing this dilemma was one of the purposes of the
exhibit – the “preservation for the future of rapidly disappearing eth-
nographic particularities of the Caucasus peoples.”^141 Ethnographers
in Russia itself faced similar dilemmas.^142
The power to name, collect, and represent had its political conse-
quences. Russian representations of the region were backed by the au-
thority of imperial power, and hence proved quite durable. The literate
makers of texts shaped subsequent knowledge of borderland peoples
and Russian peasants as well. Svan elders were astonished at ethnogra-
pher A.I. Stoianov’s knowledge of their historic customs: “And the el-
ders in a whisper informed the others that I had a remarkable
notebook, in which was described everything about their church.”^143
The Chechens did not refer to themselves as Chechens, a word that de-
rived from the name of a village in the foothills on the Argun River, but
Nokhchi (singular, Nokhchuo).^144 Nearby communities each used a
different designation for the Chechens, complained researchers associ-
ated with the Geographic Society. The Kumyk called them Michikiz;
most Georgians used Kistebi (which could also refer to the Ingush); the
Salatavi of north Dagestan said Nakbak; and the Ossetians referred to
the Chechens as Tratsan.^145 Zisserman thus encountered Kistebi (Kist),
as he followed the term used by the Tushin, Pshav, and Khevsur with
whom he lived. Not just Romantic Georgian writers but the regime it-
self called the Tushin, Pshav, and Khevsur “mountain Georgians,” as
the makers of the 1897 census associated language with ethnic iden-
tity.^146 In a similar fashion, the census counted the “Lezgin,” which was
one of the primary languages used by the mountaineers in Dagestan.
Imperial representation, of course, did not need to correspond to
mountaineer conceptions of identity. Mountaineer ideas and stories
were dismissed by the Russians as legend and misleading hearsay,
mountaineer maps were different from Russian maps, and mountain-
eers did not even know their own ethnic names. As Adol’f Berzhe com-
mented in a footnote to one of his works on the region, “All these
names, including even the word Lezgin, are unknown to the Dagestani
mountaineers.”^147 And it was “highly probable,” he wrote of the
Chechens with prescience, that in time the tribal names would disap-
pear and the Chechens would “hold on to one general name for
themselves.”^148