67 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus Mountaineersaround the empire “lies around unused,” as an early Geographic
Society proclamation emphasized.^56 In time, the society would pro-
vide intellectual coherence to the chaos of the frontier.
If the Geographic Society proposed to make sense of the empire’s
vast expanse, the Archaeological Commission promised to compose
order out of the imperial past. This group routinely issued calls to
borderland communities to aid in the collection of numerous ob-
jects, from ancient church icons to paintings, mosaics, and musical
instruments.^57 The commission, emphasized Baron A. Nikolai to the
viceroy in 1864, was transforming “a mass of paper” into scientific
collections covering statistics, history, geography, politics, law, and
“administration in the broad sense of [this] word.”^58 Such a project
held special significance in the “savage” North Caucasus, where the
story of Russian rule would illustrate the continuing development
of “civil administration.” The Caucasus Archaeological Commis-
sion was formed on 11 March 1864. Under the editorial direction of
A.P. Berzhe, it diligently but selectively published archival docu-
ments in the multi-volume Akty Kavkazskoiu Arkheograficheskoiu
Kommissieiu.
Adol’f Berzhe’s very name and personal experience illustrate the
important role played by the peculiar Russian service nobility and its
“European” background in the formation of the empire. Berzhe was
born in Russia, but of a father from France and a mother from
Germany. In his training and practice he thought of himself as part of
a general European Orientalist community. Besides his work as chair-
man of the Caucasus Archeological Commission, his many scholarly
posts in the colonial administration included the editorship of
Kavkazskii Kalendar’, chargé d’affaires of the Caucasus Department of
the Geographic Society, and director of the Tiflis Public Library.^59 For
his labour he was decorated by the more prominent scholarly and
Orientalist societies in Europe, such as the Société orientale de France
and the Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft.^60 He was part of the
Caucasus delegation that brought its knowledge, artifacts, and even a
few mountaineers, including a Chechen, to the Third International
Congress of Orientalists, held in 1876 in St Petersburg.^61 Like the cod-
ification of legal documents as an illustration of administrative regu-
larity and the growth (for some) of legality, Berzhe and his
commission’s production of the massive volumes (Akty) served wit-
ness to the emergence and development of “civil rule” and society it-
self in a land historically struggling to join the community of
“civilization.” Scholars conceived of all of their respective but hardly
distinct disciplines in a similar fashion. New statistical work, an-
nounced Nikolai I. Voronov, would improve the administration of