73 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus Mountaineerswas similar. In 1858 the editors announced the creation of a special
“rubric” of the newspaper, to be devoted to the “study of our inter-
esting region.” The editors looked for reader response. “[L]et every-
one bring their stone to the construction of this building,” they
suggested, the edifice for a future “museum of the nature, peoples,
and history of the Caucasus.”^95 Ethnographic description promised
to create a form of order out of the chaos of the frontier.
The military in particular was sympathetic. Military officials such
as Nikolai Raevskii, Admiral Serebriakov, Lieutenant Stamm,
Kashutin, and others criticized the overly aggressive tactics of the
Russian army and devised plans for peaceful forms of cooperation
with the mountaineers.^96 Raevskii had a long career of service in the
borderlands, in his younger years a general in the Black Sea Shore
Line and many years later a supporter of Pan-Slavism and General
Cherniaev in the Balkans. His experience on the Black Sea Shore Line
prompted him to rethink imperial policy and the prosecution of the
war. Toward the end of a two-hour battle with about a thousand
Adygei along the Shakhe River in 1839, for example, Raevskii was ap-
proached with a request from their elders to allow them to bury their
dead. He knew the elders by name and understood that to deny such
a request would needlessly antagonize the mountaineers, since they
had taken various pledges to bury their fallen in battle. “As I did last
year, I informed them that I do not profit from the dead and will re-
turn them at no cost,” Raevskii reported. He ordered his soldiers to
offer carts and help as necessary to collect the dead, and generally
tried to convince the elders that “poddanstvo” to Russia, or the
“favours they could expect, if they would subject themselves to our
Sovereign Emperor,” was far better than needless military conflict.^97
Raevskii became an active critic of the military and even departed the
region because of these concerns. As we have seen, in 1841 he in-
formed the minister of war in St Petersburg, A.I. Chernyshev, “Our
activities in the Caucasus are reminiscent of the many tragedies of the
early conquest of America by the Spaniards,” and he expressed the
hope that the experience would not leave a similar “bloody legacy”
to Russian history.^98
The military officials understood increased ethnographic knowledge
as the key to an improvement in the prosecution of the war and to the
formulation of more appropriate Russian military policy. To them,
mountaineers were more than simply the “enemy,” as General
Emmanuel wrote to General Paskevich in the late 1820s.^99 Such officials
imagined an empire populated by a diverse number of peoples. In
their view, a culturally, linguistically, and even territorially defined
narod, safely situated within an empire and led by the more developed