99 Customary Lawincluded the intrusion of Islam, the absence of literacy, and a failure
among mountaineers to respect the traditions of their own culture.
mountaineer criminality
In describing these character defects of the individual mountaineer,
the chief of which might be summed up as a general absence of re-
straint, Russian administrators and ethnographers developed a com-
posite picture of mountaineer criminality. Russian interest in the
question of mountaineer “savagery” (dikost’) was hardly new. As a
sign of exoticism, it was a staple of Romantic literature. The Caucasus
War also provided plenty of material for Russian newspapers and
popular pamphlets, which featured detail on characters such as the
naib Adalo, supposedly accustomed to killing defenceless women
and children in his raids of Georgian villages, parading around vil-
lages with heads on stakes, cutting bodies in half, and so on.^59 Prison-
ers of Shamil, the widely read story by M. Verderevskii, discussed in
the following chapter, featured the intrusion of such savagery into the
domestic setting of the genteel Chavchavadze estate.^60
Crimes in the North Caucasus were not a product of the Orientalist
imagination. District reports from the region suggest that local offi-
cials spent the bulk of their time pursuing perpetrators of “robbery”
and “banditry.”^61 The isolated criminal event, however, was rendered
by ethnographers, statisticians, and various regional scholar-officials
into a story about mountain culture and the problems it posed for the
administration of the empire. The Caucasus Mountain Administra-
tion played a key role in this transformation, in particular with its
journal Sbornik Svedenii o Kavkazskikh Gortsakh (Collection of informa-
tion about the Caucasus mountaineers), edited by the ethnographer
and statistician NikolaiI. Voronov. This journal frequently published
collections of vignettes on mountaineer crimes, under the heading of
“mountaineer criminal statistics.” These were short stories rather
than statistical compilations in the modern sense and were published
without editorial comment, as if to suggest that the moral of the story
was self-evident – obvious to the educated reader. The archival re-
mains of the Mountain Administration reveal that the journal pub-
lished the court reports almost verbatim.^62 Officials wanted the
proceedings to be known beyond the confines of the court, because
they apparently believed that the judicial encounter revealed truths
about mountain culture that justified imperial rule. The stories por-
trayed the mountaineers as excessively proud, quick to violence, and
extremely jealous and overprotective in matters of family and sexual-
ity. The quantity of literature inspired by the question of mountaineer