106 Orientalism and Empireupravlenie) that had been established by Bariatinskii in the mountain
regions. The North Caucasus must be “ruled like the entire general
State Property of the Empire,” Tukheev wrote.^100 By the turn of the
century there was greater pressure from St Petersburg to abolish the
special courts and make uniform the judicial practices of the empire.
After the disturbances of 1905–07 such pressure came from the new
viceroy himself, Count I.I. Vorontsov-Dashkov, who was sent to the
Caucasus to apply political pressure on the many increasingly radical
groups of the region. Vorontsov-Dashkov told the Ministry of Justice
in 1907 that Russian courts could now be used in the North Caucasus
to help the mountaineers work toward “the beginning of a general-
Russian conception of law [pravosoznaniia].”^101 He continued to press
the issue six years later, by then disappointed that little progress had
been made.^102 It was possible, Vorontsov-Dashkov wrote to
I.G.Shcheglovitov in 1913, for Russians and mountaineers to partici-
pate together in the “general legal culture” of the empire.^103
Such was the goal of the commission chaired by N.M. Reinke of the
Ministry of Justice in St Petersburg in 1912–14. Besides the Ministry
of Justice, the ministries of War, Internal Affairs, and State Domains
and the office of the viceroy in Tbilisi participated in the study he
headed.^104 His commission criticized the functioning of the special
mountain courts. Reinke claimed that the special courts were slow to
act, possessed no authority among the population, usually sent the
guilty away free, and functioned poorly because of a dearth of quali-
fied deputies. All of this, he wrote, had created a situation of “legal
anarchy.”^105 In spite of his criticism of the courts, the commission was
oddly, perhaps cynically, optimistic about the state of mountaineer ju-
dicial consciousness. Reinke asserted that years of exposure to
Russian rule and culture had actually prepared the mountaineers for
full participation in the legal culture of the empire.^106 The special con-
cessions, he claimed, actually served to impede the further progress
of the mountaineers, since they preserved archaic forms of culture as-
sociated with the mountaineer past.^107 “In a conflict between groups
at two opposing moral and social levels, the higher world view can-
not subordinate itself to the lower,” Reinke maintained.^108 The end of
Russian tolerance and administrative concession was in the interest
of the mountaineers themselves.^109 Russian administrative practices
were to faciliate the “uniting [splocheniiu] of this borderland with the
centre of the state.”^110 The ethnographic and geographic diversity of
the region, presented in the introduction to his report, was offered,
not in the spirit of respect for the cultural differences that complicated
the administration of the region, but as an excuse for the inability of
the state to establish adminstrative uniformity in legal affairs.