63 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus Mountaineersmountainside to terrorize the plain.^26 Russian Romanticism and
European travel literature provided a ready formula for the visualiza-
tion of the mountaineers and the borderlands during the incorpora-
tion of the North Caucasus into the empire.
m.s. vorontsov, the state,
and enlightenment
Tsar Nicholas i was long frustrated with the Caucasus and the inter-
minable war, and he adopted a novel administrative approach by
granting extended authority and the special position of viceroy
(namestnik) to Mikhail S. Vorontsov in 1845.^27 Vorontsov possessed a
strong imperial vision concerning the European Enlightenment, the
role of Russia, and the integration of the borderlands. He was ex-
tremely wealthy, and was experienced in the borderlands as a result
of his tenure as governor-general over the province of New Russia in
the 1820s and 1830s. His father, Simon, had been Catherine’s ambas-
sador to England, and his uncle, Alexander Romanovich Vorontsov,
was the primary author of a charter of individual rights, a Russian
liberal response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen of the French National Assembly.^28 During these years Tbilisi
and its population grew dramatically, and the city emerged as a cen-
tre for the prosecution of the war against the mountaineers.^29
Vorontsov’s transformation of Tbilisi was in the tradition of the
Petrine state of the eighteenth century. Peter himself had initiated
the first issue of the Vedomosti on 2January 1703 , and had estab-
lished a theatre with a director and troupe supported from Danzig.^30
His administration posed new questions about the purpose of ex-
pansion with his support for the founding of the Academy of
Sciences and his interest in new fields such as geography and cartog-
raphy, which led to the great expeditions of the eighteenth century.
Scholars catalogued the flora and fauna of the distant borderlands,
and increasingly took interest in the peoples of the empire as well.^31
The Academy of Sciences was an expression of the enlightened
eighteenth-century state, its work shaped by emerging discussions
about obshchestvennost’ and grazhdanstvennost’.^32 The enlightened
state in Catherine’s day intended to take the lead in the production
of good citizens, as a school reader illustrates.^33 Educated Russians
understood the direction, tutelage, and impact of the state itself in
frontier regions as a crucial component of the civilizing process.
“Backward” borderland regions in particular offered officials the
perfect opportunity to witness progress in their promotion of the
“common good.”^34 By the early nineteenth century, innovative