russian history 41 (2014) 163-180

brill.com/ruhi

The Bronze Viceroy

Mikhail Vorontsov’s Statue and Russian Imperial Representation
in the South Caucasus in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Hubertus F. Jahn
Clare College, Cambridge
[email protected]

Abstract

This article explores representations of the Russian empire in the Caucasus in the
nineteenth century. It focuses on the monument of Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov, which
was unveiled in Tiflis in 1867. Questions of imperial aesthetics, symbolic meaning,
urban space, and mental maps among the Russian elites are discussed, as are contem-
porary interpretations of Russo-Georgian relations. It will be shown that the Russian
empire did not have a master plan for the representation and the popularization of
imperial power in its borderlands and that much was left to local and private
initiative.

Keywords

Russian empire – imperial representation – Vorontsov monument – Tiflis

One of the first of many adventures which I shared with David Goldfrank was
a hiking tour in the Bavarian Alps, where we climbed the highest German peak,
the Zugspitze. In the spirit of this memorable event, I am introducing this
chapter with another alpine scene, which I had experienced not long before
David and I first met. In June 1982, in the middle of the Caucasus, right behind
the Cross Pass, where the Georgian Military Highway reaches its highest point
at 2,395 meters, I stopped my car and stepped onto a large artificial terrace,
located on top of a cliff overlooking a range of majestic peaks. I had been

* I thank Khatuna Gvaradze for her help and Robert Crews, Harsha Ram, and Catherine
Evtuhov for their comments.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/18763316-04102004

164 Jahn

d­ riving south from Russia, and this was my first ever view of Georgia. Around
me on the terrace, workers were mixing concrete to build a belvedere, which
was officially opened a year later. Named the “Arch of Russo-Georgian
Friendship,” the monument recalled the Treaty of Georgievsk two hundred
years earlier, when the Eastern Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti put
itself under Russian suzerainty.1 It was decorated with large, colorful mosa-
ics, depicting scenes from Georgian history in the late socialist-realist man-
ner, and it was also one of the last monuments of its kind to be erected in
Georgia before the end of the Soviet Union. When I visited the place again
last summer, the belvedere was in a rather sad and utterly neglected state.
The mosaics had partly fallen down, pieces of the terrace had broken off, and
stray sheep were wandering about. The view, luckily, had remained the same.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, epitomized in this and many other crum-
bling monuments all over the former Soviet bloc, draws our attention to the
mixed fortunes of Russian imperial ambitions and points to the successes and
failures in the long history of Russia’s imperial relations with its component
parts. Georgia and the South Caucasus have always played a special, both stra-
tegic and cultural role in this history.2 This was an area of ancient Christian
civilizations and exotic Southern culture in a strategically highly important
location. Consequently, Russians related to this region with a mixture of
romanticism and the arrogance of a military conqueror. While in Western
Europe they found themselves in the role of backward, “oriental” Easterners, in
the Caucasus, they felt themselves as modern Europeans. This was their Orient.
And as a consequence (and a typical feature of their empire-building efforts in
general), the imperial and later the Soviet central governments attempted to
propagate and consolidate their power at the periphery in a “civilizing mis-
sion” that included inter alia the changing of urban spaces, the introduction of
new architectural styles, the promulgation of European cultural institutions
such as theaters, museums and libraries, the putting on of various ceremonies,
and the erecting of monuments.3
This article goes to the roots of Russian imperial propaganda and identity
politics by addressing the issue of local representations of imperial power in

1 For views of the arch, see Frédéric Chaubin, cccp – Cosmic Communist Constructions
Photographed (Cologne: Taschen Verlag, 2011), 284–287.
2 There are many studies about Russian expansion in and romantic transfiguration of the
Caucasus, for example by V.A. Potto, Susan Layton, Tom Barrett, Austin Jersild, Mikail
Mamedov, Harsha Ram and Ronald G. Suny.
3 Austin Jersild and Neli Melkadze, “The Dilemmas of Enlightenment in the Eastern
Borderlands: The Theater and Library in Tbilisi,” Kritika 3 (2002): 27–49.

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The Bronze Viceroy 165

the South Caucasus. Taking its inspiration from Richard Wortman’s Scenarios
of Power,4 it explores representational forms of the Russian empire at its south-
ern fringes by focusing on one particular monument and its opening ceremony.
As much as possible, it also includes local perceptions of and popular reac-
tions to these pedagogical efforts. While we do already know quite a bit about
the Caucasian educated elites’ social and national awakening, their multifac-
eted views of and numerous conflicts with Russian politics and culture,5 we
still know almost nothing about how ideas and representations of empire were
disseminated on a wider scale, both by state officials and cultural entrepre-
neurs, and how they affected the minds and actions of ordinary people in the
South Caucasus.
When on 25 March 1867 the first secular monument in the South Caucasus,
a statue commemorating the late tsarist viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov, was
unveiled with great pomp in Tiflis, as Tbilisi was then called, what kind of mes-
sage was sent out by this event and the statue itself?6 How did people react to
this extraordinary experience? This will be explored in this article. We should
not forget, however, that the Vorontsov monument was only one of many
examples of imperial representation in the Caucasus, most of which still
require investigation. What, for example, had happened just a few weeks
before the statue was unveiled, when the Caucasian Museum, the brainchild of
the German explorer, Gustav Radde, opened its doors to the public, after an
exquisite opening ceremony, featuring the viceroy and the high society of
Tiflis? The museum, which in its first three months was already visited by two
thousand people, presented colorful displays of ethnographic, zoological,
botanical and other materials and thereby shaped a peculiar image of the eth-
nic and natural environment in the Caucasus (and, by extension, the empire
which had annexed it a few decades earlier).7 This image may well have been
quite different from later representations of Caucasian nature, economic and
cultural achievements on display at the Tiflis Agricultural Exhibition of 1889 or
the Caucasus Anniversary Exhibition in 1901, celebrating hundred years of

4 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, 2 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995–2000).
5 Oliver Reisner, “Travelling between Two Worlds – the Tergdaleulebi, their Identity Conflict
and National Life,” Identity Studies 1 (2009): 36–50.
6 Otkrytie pamiatnika v Tiflise svetleishemu kniaziu Mikhailu Semenovichu Vorontsovu, 25 marta
1867 goda (Tiflis: Tipografiia glavnogo upravleniia namestnika kavkazskogo, 1867).
7 Undated report, “Vom Kaukasischen Museum,” handwritten by Radde, in Sakartvelos erovnuli
museumis arkivi / Georgian National Museum Archive, f. Kavkazskii muzei: Delo Kavkazskogo
Muzeuma s 1864 g. do 1867 g., ll. 156–156 ob.

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Georgia becoming part of the Russian empire.8 How did the visits of Alexander
II in 1850, 1861 and 1871 and of Alexander III in 1888 differ in style and message?
How should they be ‘read’ on a symbolic level? How did local people react to
these visits and the empire more generally? Many ordinary Georgian peasants
and townspeople, for example, were not impressed and made lots of deroga-
tory remarks.9 How, finally, were the anniversaries of Russian poets such as
Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Alexander Griboedov celebrated,
who had monuments erected in their honor in Tiflis and various other places,
paid with money donated by people from all walks of life?10 These are just a
few of the questions that still need to be explored in more detail if we want to
achieve a better understanding of how the Russian empire was represented on
a provincial level and how it affected and interacted with local identities.
By investigating in a vignette-like fashion such diverse phenomena as tsarist
visits, the building and unveiling of monuments, the opening ceremonies and
internal arrangements of museums and exhibitions in one particular geo-
graphical region, we are effectively taking a micro-historical approach to the
history of the Russian empire and its “scenarios of power.” All these events
presented the empire in one way or other on the provincial level. They occurred
in public spaces such as squares, streets, parks or public buildings like muse-
ums, most of which were themselves quite recent introductions (Tiflis, the
administrative centre of the South Caucasus, was rebuilt as a “European” city
under Vorontsov in the mid nineteenth century, Erevan in the 1880s). They
thus appealed to the imagination of the local populations, regardless of their
social status, ethnic background and religious belief. They invited these people
to make sense of an empire into which they had just been adopted. With this
incorporation in the early nineteenth century, the South Caucasus had become
part of a large, multiethnic autocratic state that initially paid surprisingly little
attention to what is now called identity politics. From the middle of the nine-
teenth century onwards, however, when Russian rule had been secured mili-
tarily and when Vorontsov introduced a more enlightened regime, official
representations of imperial power and civilizing achievements increased in

8 Voronezhskii, “Na iubileinoi Kavkazskoi vystavke sel’skago khoziaistva i promyshlennosti

1901 goda,” Kavkazskii vestnik 2, no. 12 (1901): 17–22 and “Kavkazskaia iubileinaia vystavka,”
Niva 41 (1901): 641–642.
9 There are countless cases of lèse majesté in the archive of the Tiflis gubernator and the
Tiflis police department: Sakartvelos erovnuli arkivi / National Archives of Georgia (sea),
f. 17 (Kantseliariia tiflisskogo gubernatora), op. 1 (Po chasti sekretnosti); f. 153 (Tbilisskoe
gubernskoe zhandarmskoe upravlenie), op. 1 (kniga pervaia).
10 Circular about collection for a Pushkin memorial in 1861 in sea, f. 84 (Upravlenie tbilissk-
ogo politsmeistera i gorodskoi politsii), op. 1, d. 843.

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The Bronze Viceroy 167

number, coinciding and potentially coming into conflict with an emerging

civil society, new national and social movements, and nascent urban life.
Furthermore, they were an integral part of a new kind of public culture that
emerged in other urban centers of the empire as well, but which has so far
been studied only for major cities in Russia and the western provinces.11
This new public culture was predominantly urban and increasingly com-
mercial. It included operas, theaters, and museums, but also low-brow enter-
tainments like amusement parks, circuses, cinemas, fairgrounds and street
festivals. Especially in these “democratic” venues, local identity could mani-
fest itself, often spontaneously, and older forms of local culture survived.
One of them, keenoba or “Khan’s day,” for example, was a carnivalesque
inversion of power, where people disguised themselves with masks, ridicul-
ing foreign invaders of Georgia. Not surprisingly, it was frequently used to
comment on the imperial authorities who, in turn, paid particularly close
attention to this event.12 But there were also more patriotic themes (from the
government’s point of view) on offer for the urban masses. The biggest circus
in Tiflis, for example, was run by entrepreneurs from Moscow, the Nikitin
brothers, who were famous for their jingoist programs, boasting all kinds of
Russian topics and heroic scenes from Russian history.13 Public culture in the
Caucasus was thus an area of mixed messages and competing identities,
where commercial, official and popular cultures met and where meanings
of empire and, for that matter, nation, ethnicity, region and city were
­constantly renegotiated.
When the former viceroy, Mikhail Vorontsov, had died on 18 November 1856
in Odessa, it took about a week for the news to reach Tiflis.14 Immediately, a
church service was held for him in Sioni Cathedral, with masses of people in

11 See contributions by Ted Weeks, Malte Rolf, and Karsten Brüggemann in Jörg Baberowski
et al., eds., Imperiale Herrschaft in der Provinz: Repräsentationen politischer Macht im
späten Zarenreich (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008), 121–195, and Malte Rolf, “Russische
Herrschaft in Warschau: Die Aleksandr-Nevskij-Kathedrale im Konfliktraum politischer
Kommunikation,” in Jenseits der Zarenmacht: Dimensionen des Politischen im Russischen
Reich 1800–1917, ed. Walter Sperling (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008), 163–190.
12 M.M. Gaprindashvili, “Gruzinskaia kul’tura v XIX v.,” in Ocherki istorii Gruzii, 8 vols.
(Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1990), 5: chapter 16. For derogatory comments about keenoba by a
Russian official, see Khelnatserta erovnuli tsentri / National Center of Manuscripts, Tbilisi,
f. Lichnyi Arkhiv Evgeniia Gustavovicha Veidenbauma, d. 60/6 (Dnevnik Veidenbauma
no. 2, 19 June 1889 to 28 May 1892), l. 107 ob.
13 Iu. Dmitriev, Tsirk v Rossii: Ot istokov do 1917 goda (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1977), 169–174.
14 For Vorontsov’s viceroyship, see Anthony Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov: Viceroy
to the Tsar (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).

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deep sorrow, “as if they had lost a relative.”15 Within weeks, an initiative to col-
lect money for a monument in his honor got underway, instigated by members
of the Georgian nobility, but also by “other estates,” as the press announcement
of the fundraising campaign underlined.16 Fedot Bobylev, editor and regular
feuilleton writer for the newspaper Kavkaz praised the idea of a monument as
a “big step towards Europe” and called it a “historic turning point.”17 The fund-
raising was launched in the spring of 1857 by the tsar himself with a donation
of 3,000 rubles, supplemented by 2,000 rubles from the Grand Dukes. Within a
year, over 25,000 rubles had been collected. By June 1866, after a second fund-
raising campaign had been launched in April 1865 in order to cover additional
costs for transport and the setting up of the monument, 32,983 rubles had
come together.18 The final result of the fundraising in early 1867 was 36,104
rubles, 44 and three quarter kopecks. This sum, the final report of the cam-
paign proudly proclaimed, was not only made up of the 5,000 rubles given by
the tsar and his family as well as the donations of wealthy people, who contrib-
uted thousands, hundreds, tens and single rubles, but it also included “modest
kopecks from ordinary people [iz sredy narodnoi] without means.” They all
gave out of “heartfelt admiration and gratitude” for Vorontsov.19 While one
might expect a bit of hyperbole in an official report, a look at the actual donors’
lists in the archives shows that indeed people from all walks of life in the
Caucasus had participated in the collection.20 Money came from as far as the
province of Novorossiia, where Vorontsov had been governor general and
where another statue of him had already been unveiled in Odessa in 1863.

15 “Pis’ma v S.-Peterburg,” Kavkaz (6 December 1856): 384–385.

16 The official permission for the collection was issued by the Kavkazskii komitet on 14
February 1857. See sea, f. 7 (Departament glavnogo upravleniia glavnonachal’stvuiushchego
grazhdanskoi chast’iu na Kavkaze), op. 1, d. 690 (“Ob otkrovenii v Tiflise pamiatnika
pokoinomu General-Fel’dmarshalu Kniaziu Vorontsovu”), ll. 24 ob.-25. It was announced in
“Pamiatnik v chest’ byvshago Namestnika Kavkazskago, pokoinago General-Fel’dmarshala
Svetleishago Kniazia Mikhaila Semenovicha Vorontsova,” Kavkaz (14 March 1857): 95.
17 B.B. [Fedot Bobylev], “Pis’ma v S.-Peterburg,” Kavkaz (14 March 1857): 95–96.
18 “O prikhode i raskhode summy, sobrannoi na sooruzhenie v Tiflise pamiatnika Kniazia
Vorontsova”, in sea, f. 8 (Departament obshchikh del glavnogo upravleniia namestnika
Kavkazskogo), op. 1, kniga 1, d. 4 (“Ob iskhodataistvovanii Vysochaishago razresheniia na
soorusheniia v Tiflise pamiatnika byvshemu namestniku Kavkazskomu Fel’dmarshalu
Kniaziu M.S. Vorontsovu”), ll. 100–105.
19 Supplement to Kavkaz (23 March 1867).
20 sea, f. 8, op. 1, kniga 1, d. 4, ll. 1–88. Among the donors was, for example, the current viceroy,
Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich with 2,000 rubles, many military units, 31 peasants from
villages in the Shemakha region, who together collected 19.5 rubles, and numerous other
individuals.

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The Bronze Viceroy 169

While the fundraising got underway in and around the Caucasus, coordi-
nated by the office of the then-viceroy, Prince Aleksandr Bariatinskii, a
group of Caucasophiles in St. Petersburg began to discuss the shape of the
monument and to organize its construction. The two main players were the
famous writer, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sollogub, and the state councilor,
Ivan Fedorovich Zolotarev. Both of them had once served under Vorontsov
in Tiflis. Sollogub was the first to come up with the idea of an equestrian
statue, which he tried to sell to Bariatinskii in a letter from 7 June 1858.21
According to Sollogub, such a statue would be preferable in the Caucasus,
“where a man is nothing without his horse” (où l’homme n’est pas complet
qu’à cheval). Furthermore, since people (in the Caucasus) would not under-
stand complicated symbols and allegories, simplicity would be crucial. As
it happens, Sollogub had already approached the “premier sculptor” in
the capital, Nikolai Stepanovich Pimenov, who had kindly provided him
with a drawing of such a statue. To bolster his case, Sollogub attached the
drawing to his letter (see Figure 1). While Pimenov might be more expensive
than Peter Klodt (who later famously created the horse figures on Petersburg’s
Anichkov Bridge and the monument to Nicholas I in front of St. Isaac’s
Cathedral), he enjoyed a very high reputation as an artist, Sollogub
concluded.22
Bariatinskii was not impressed. Although the fundraising campaign for a
monument was proceeding successfully, he was clearly shocked when he heard
about the price tag of the proposed equestrian statue – 41,000 rubles. He asked
his office chief, Alexis Kruzenshtern, to inquire about a statue of a standing
figure. It seems that Pimenov took offense at such penny pinching. He never
responded to the inquiry. Eventually, the viceroy’s office chased him down and
finally got an answer through Zolotarev in March 1859, who had visited
Pimenov in his studio and asked him in person for a new, non-equestrian
sketch.23 Pimenov, with the indignation of a long-serving and (self-) important
professor of the Imperial Academy of Arts, said he could of course produce a
standing figure, but he still thought that an equestrian statue would be better,
and that the tsar himself would also have liked such a monument in the

21 sea, f. 8, op. 1, d. 8 (“Ob iskhodataistvovanii Vysochaishago razresheniia na soorusheniia v

Tiflise pamiatnika byvshemu namestniku Kavkazskomu pokoinomu Fel’dmarshalu
Kniaziu M.S. Vorontsovu”), ll. 41–45 ob.
22 Pimenov was the son of an even more famous sculptor, Stepan Stepanovich Pimenov. He
is mostly known for his statues in St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. See Pamiatniki
arkhitektury Leningrada (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo literatury, 1958), 162–63.
23 sea, f. 8, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 48–49.

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Figure 1 Nikolai Pimenov’s Sketch for an Equestrian Statue.

Caucasus. It would have best represented Vorontsov’s personality. He would

have sat on a simple mountain horse, with a simple saddle. To support his argu-
ment for an equestrian monument, he then listed the statues of Wellington in
London, of the Duc d’Orleans in Paris, and of Jeanne d’Arc in Orleans. He might
of course have referred to an altogether more conspicuous equestrian statue,
the Bronze Horseman, the famous monument erected for Peter the Great by
Catherine the Great and immortalized in a poem by Alexander Pushkin, which
he would have seen every day across the river from his window in the Academy,
but since Vorontsov was not of royal or imperial status such a comparison was
obviously not deemed appropriate. What matters more here is the argument of
both Sollogub and Pimenov that Vorontsov on horseback would better suit the
tastes and traditions of the people in the Caucasus. In other words, the former
representative of the empire should be represented in a way that took local
customs and ways of life into consideration. While for financial reasons this
could not be achieved with the monument that was eventually built, the
unveiling ceremony of it displayed a similar attempt to include local peculiari-
ties, as we will see shortly.
The construction of the monument took longer than anticipated. Pimenov
fell ill in 1863 and died in 1864, leaving behind only a model of the statue, which
was kept in a wooden shed in the main court of the Admiralty. It fell to his
pupil, Vasilii Kreitan, to cast the actual bronze figure, supervised by a council

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The Bronze Viceroy 171

of members of the Academy.24 The pedestal, in the meanwhile, also encoun-

tered problems. It had to be built twice. The first version, planned and erected
between 1862 and 1864 under the supervision of Provincial Secretary Rais and
made out of stone from the village Garichvari, near Gori, was not only very
expensive because of the long transport route, but its base also turned out to
be too large, seriously impeding coach traffic on the square where it was set up.
It was demolished in 1865, its large blocs were chopped up into cobble stones,
and a new, smaller and more delicate pedestal was built with less expensive
stones from Algeti during the summer of 1866 under the supervision of Court
Counselor and Academician Simonson. He, however, also had his share of dif-
ficulties, as he was running up against a cartel of Tiflis stonemasons who made
it almost impossible to stay within reasonable financial limits.25
Meanwhile in St. Petersburg the finished bronze figure was disassembled,
packed in eight large boxes, and shipped via London and Constantinople to
Poti, then up the Rioni River to the village of Opiri. From there the boxes were
taken on special carts to Tiflis, where they finally arrived in early September.26
Nothing happened over the winter. When the weather was getting better, four
builders from St. Petersburg arrived in February 1867, assembled the statue
and, within two weeks, put it on the pedestal.27 Obviously, since this was the
first major monument to be erected in the Caucasus, native builders did not
yet possess the necessary skills to carry out the appropriate procedures. The
pedestal thus was the only local contribution to the monument whereas
­everything else was built in and imported from St. Petersburg.
Figure 2 shows the opening ceremony of the monument on 25 March 1867.
The photograph itself is a rare early snapshot of Tiflis from the collection of the
writer and local historian, Ioseb Grishashvili. It was taken by an officer of the
Russian Army, a lieutenant Korzhinov, whose name is scribbled in red pencil

24 Letter by Pimenov about his illness from 31 August 1863 in sea, f. 8, op. 1, d. 8, ll. 208–209,
and correspondences between the director of the Academy, Grigorii Gagarin, and
Zolotarev from 31 January 1865 and 29 May 1865 in sea, f. 8, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 150–152. Zolotarev
also served as the middleman for the final payments to Kreitan. See sea, f. 10 (Finansovyi
department glavnogo upravleniia namestnika Kavkazskogo), op. 1, d. 3487, ll. 1–3.
25 An engineer’s report about the first pedestal in sea, f. 8, op. 1, d. 8, l. 241; for the setting up
of the second pedestal, see several reports and calculations in sea, f. 8, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 90–91,
94–98.
26 See reports about the shipment and telegrams between Zolotarev and the new head of
the viceroy’s administration, Baron Aleksei Pavlovich Nikolai, sea, f. 8, op. 1, d. 4, ll.
118–127.
27 The bill of 827 rubles for travel, pay and daily allowances of these workers is in sea, f. 7,
op. 1, d. 690, ll. 12–13.

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172 Jahn

Figure 2 Opening Ceremony of Vorontsov Monument in Tiflis.

on the back.28 As we can see, Vorontsov was indeed very popular, a­ ttracting a
rather large crowd. Although it is impossible on such an old photograph to
actually make out individual persons, it is clearly visible that there were quite
a number of people from different backgrounds present. And indeed, as we
know from contemporary newspaper reports, apart from the official guests
and the local population, over 400 village elders from various regions traveled
to the city and took part in the unveiling ceremony.29 They joined the current
viceroy, Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich, several military units, representa-

28 The photo is kept in an unnumbered folder in the Ioseb Grishashvilis biblioteka-muzeum

in Tbilisi. For a digital version on a “virtual wall” of the library, see: http://www.sciencelib
.ge/en/node/34 (last accessed on 24 April 2014). I thank Nodar Grigorashvili of the
museum and the film director Giorgi Gersamia for their help.
29 The following paragraphs are based on a very detailed contemporary description of the
opening ceremony and the ensuing feasts by N. Dunkel’-Velling, “Otkrytie pamiatnika
Kniaziu Mikhailu Semenovichu Vorontsovu,” Kavkaz (30 March 1867): 143–46.

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The Bronze Viceroy 173

tives of various religious denominations, Tiflis honorary citizens, members of

the guilds (amkari) and the nobility. Before assembling around the monument
in meticulously prescribed order (eventually over 1,000 honorary guests had to
be squeezed onto the small square), the festive community had started the day
at 10 o’clock in the morning with a religious service in the St. George Kashueti
Church.30 Everyone then moved in a solemn procession across the Mikhailov
Bridge, which, together with the adjacent streets, had been closed off to traffic
already since 8 o’clock in the morning. The bridge, which had been built during
Vorontsov’s reign, was lavishly decorated with greenery, colorful flags, pen-
nants and numerous shields on which Vorontsov’s achievements were
inscribed “in Russian and the local languages.”
When the Grand Duke arrived at the scene, a choir sang Dmitrii
Bortniantskii’s “How glorious is our Lord in Zion” (Kol’ slaven nash gospod v
Sione), the unofficial spiritual anthem of Russia. After the music had finished,
Baron Nikolai, the head of the viceroy’s administration, read the official
instruction to build the monument (hundreds of copies of this instruction
were later distributed as souvenirs among the crowds.) At his last word, the veil
was pulled away from the statue, the military units stood to attention and an
elaborate religious ceremony got underway. With the crowds listening “silently
and devoutly,” the “harmonious choir of the clergy” proclaimed a long life to
the tsar and the whole imperial family, eternal memory to the deceased field
marshal and a long life to the heroic Russian military. The religious ceremony
ended with Exarch Evsevii blessing the statue and the surrounding troops with
holy water. After he and the clergy had left, the army units and the numerous
veterans, who had served under Vorontsov, in a ceremonial march passed by
the monument and the viceroy, who was positioned next to it on horseback,
and saluted them both simultaneously. They then proceeded “in orderly col-
umns” and to the tune of the Gerzel’ Aul march across the bridge to the
Alexander Gardens, where a supra, a typical Georgian feast, was held.31
The soldiers and veterans took their seats at tables on the upper terrace of the
Gardens, behind the Kashueti Church, where food and drink was catered by a
Collegiate Assessor, Mirzoev, while the village elders and amkari were hosted
in the lower part of the Gardens by the Tiflis Hereditary Honorary Citizen,
Babanosov. The approximately 3,500 men were soon joined by their wives and

30 For a list of the official participants in the ceremony, see sea, f. 7, op. 1, d. 690, ll. 23–23 ob.
31 For the supra as a culturally distinctive feature of Georgia, see Florian Mühlfried,
“Celebrating Identities in Post-Soviet Georgia,” in Representations on the Margins of
Europe: Politics and Identities in the Baltic and South Caucasian States, eds. Tsypylma
Darieva and Wolfgang Kaschuba (Frankfurt: Campus, 2007), 286–289.

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children, raising the number of guests to almost 5,000. Yet everyone was wel-
comed at this “truly Homeric feast” and treated lavishly to food and drink by
the two generous hosts. Unfortunately, the contemporary report says nothing
about the actual dishes served at the occasion. But since this was the high time
of Lent, the menu probably consisted of bread, beans and perhaps fish rather
than the normal supra fare of Georgian cheese bread (khachapuri) and suck-
ling pig, decorated with parsley and radish in snout.
While the feast in the Alexander Gardens was already well underway, the
top brass and the highest civilian ranks arrived on the other side of Golovin
(today’s Rustaveli) Prospect at the viceroy’s palace for a festive dinner. In the
great hall of the palace, a picture of Vorontsov was hung opposite the portrait
of the tsar and decorated with greenery and flowers. Around the picture stood
a number of non-commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers of Vorontsov’s
former regiment, forming an honorary guard. Once the dinner had started,
Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich gave the first speech. After drinking to the
health of the tsar, he proposed a toast to the memory of Vorontsov, expressing
his happiness at seeing so many of the field marshal’s former officers, who “had
witnessed his beneficial activities in the region.” He was also glad that he had
been able to participate in the opening of the monument, which had been
erected as a sign of the “gratitude of the whole Caucasus.” He expressed his
conviction that the good work begun by Vorontsov will bring “abundant fruits
of welfare to the Caucasus, which is so dear to us all.” He finished his speech
with the toast: “May the memory of Count Mikhail Semenovich live long in the
Caucasus; may this region prosper, which he loved so much and which we all
also love so truly.”
After the speech of the viceroy, Baron Nikolai praised him for his kind words
and his continuation of all the beneficial work initiated by Vorontsov.
Providence had destined him, Mikhail Nikolaevich, to present to the region
many of the blessings that Vorontsov had so much cared about. The war, to
which Vorontsov had dedicated so much effort, had come to an end after the
capture of Shamil in 1859 and the defeat of the Western Caucasus in 1864;
industry and trade were flourishing, roads were being built and Tiflis was
becoming wealthier. With the unveiling of the statue, a renaissance of the
happy days of Vorontsov’s rule was now celebrated. And everyone was happy
for the region to be under the care of the current viceroy.
After this toast to Mikhail Nikolaevich, a toast to Vorontsov’s widow was
proclaimed, followed by a poem, written for the occasion by major-­general
V.V. Domantovich. While his verses have little literary value, they still reveal
the flavor and a quite specific understanding of the events ­surrounding the
opening of the monument, in which Georgia has a very prominent place:

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The Bronze Viceroy 175

[…]
“All of Georgia, in awe,
Before his image
Bows her head!
Glory to Him! Of all blessings
Was he the truthful deliverer!
[…]
He turned steppes into paradise,
He advanced and enlivened Odessa,
And Georgia, happy land,
He moved to fame and progress.
Glory to you, oh Georgia!
We thank you deeply
For that you appreciate highly
Your rulers’ deeds;
In this, your recognition shines
Your devout loyalty to the tsar;
Russia applauds you
For the monument to the hero!
May live forever in the Caucasus,
In your valiant people,
And in Russian military tales,
The memory of him!
We unite in spirit and in heart,
Oh brothers, at this glorious day!
Lovingly hovers over us
The late hero’s shadow;
And in hallowed greeting to it
Roars excitedly the Kura,
May he hear the to him familiar cry,
Always victorious – Hurrah!

After two more toasts, the feast came to an end. According to the newspaper
report, everyone felt like being “part of a family.” People talked to each other long
into the evening, remembering the days of Vorontsov. When the southern night
set in, torches were lit on the Mikhailov Bridge, the embankments, adjacent
houses and squares were illuminated, and the lamps around the pedestal of the
monument were turned on, “making the statue appear in a tremulous light….”
But this was not yet the end of celebrations. On the next day, the 26th of
March, another festive lunch for 42 military and civilian officials who had

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176 Jahn

served under Vorontsov was held in two beautifully decorated pavilions in the
Mushtaid Gardens.32 These gardens, initially established in the 1830s by a high-
ranking Shiite cleric in Russian service and still popular today among Tbilisi
residents, had been acquired by the state during Vorontsov’s time as viceroy
and, like similar parks elsewhere in Russia, turned into a pleasure garden for
the local population, with restaurant, open-air theater and other attractions.
Now they were the setting for what the reporter of the newspaper Kavkaz
called a “family holiday” for Vorontsov’s “service family.” The pavilions were
delightfully decorated in mostly red and white, the colors of Vorontsov’s coats
of arms. The walls were covered with greenery, fruit baskets and lots of flowers,
symbolizing Vorontsov’s initiatives to “enhance the fertile nature of Georgia
through the establishment of gardens and vineyards.” Between these gifts of
nature, the names of north-Caucasian villages were inscribed, where Vorontsov
had distinguished himself militarily. The main pavilion, finally, displayed a
portrait of Vorontsov, framed in a laurel wreath, while the second pavilion con-
tained a bust of him and a painting of his wife.
The lunch started around 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The first toast, as cus-
tomary, was dedicated to the tsar, followed by the anthem “God Save the Tsar,”
sung by all the guests. Then Baron Nikolai gave the first speech in which he
likened the unveiling of the statue to the resurrection of a cherished past. “We
are all the children of the same common fatherland,” he proclaimed, “we are all
living in the Caucasus, be it as natives or as adopted sons….” This set the scene
for a rather long eulogy of Vorontsov’s military career which, as the speaker
underlined repeatedly, was closely linked to the Caucasus; and of his genuine
popularity as a modest and down-to-earth administrator during his time as
viceroy in Tiflis, when he became famous for riding through the town on a
small mountain horse and tending to anything that needed attention, from
quarrels between people in the streets to the building of the Mikhailov Bridge
and the restoration of the city more generally. After Baron Nikolai had finished
his speech, Dmitrii Kipiani, the Marshall of the Nobility, took the stage. Kipiani,
who in his youth had participated in the anti-Russian conspiracy of 1832 and
who throughout his life was an ardent supporter of Georgian language and
culture, spoke on behalf of the Georgian nobility who, after all, had initiated
the building of the monument. With its opening ceremony, he remarked, a
heartfelt wish had now come true, which was shared by the whole population
of the region. The statue expressed the grateful memory of everyone for
Vorontsov, whose “statesmanship and sacred patriotic intentions had led to
good and healthy beginnings in everything,” had extinguished the seeds of evil

32 N. Dunkel’-Velling, “26 Marta v Tiflise,” Kavkaz (2 April 1867): 151–53,

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The Bronze Viceroy 177

and harm, and had inculcated through moral more than material forces, a soli-
darity between the rulers and the ruled. “We saw that all his deeds emanated
from these high moral standards”; Kipiani finished, “we saw that from there
emanated his appreciation of and respect for our beliefs, our ideas, for all that
is sacred to us in the past and the present.” The wish to acknowledge this grate-
fully and to preserve his fame for future centuries had now been fulfilled.
State Counselor Platon Iosseliani followed with a rather long and flamboy-
ant speech, in which even the forces of heaven and earth were repeatedly
invoked. An eminent historian and scholar of Georgian medieval manuscripts,
who during Vorontsov’s administration was the publisher of Zakavkazskii vest-
nik, the leading periodical in the Caucasus, Iosseliani, among many other
things, repeatedly stressed the unity between Georgia and Russia, praised
Vorontsov as a “man of the people” and declared the monument a symbol of
the love and gratitude of all hearts and souls in the region. Even the Caucasian
sky and soil “feel the shining glory associated with the name Vorontsov.” Yet
this monument also speaks to the glory of Russia, which had adopted the
region under its mighty protection. According to Iosseliani, the statue was
erected by the “hands of all” in the region. It is like a “popular shrine, it speaks
the language of the masses, is the embodiment of the voice of the peoples and
tribes, a symbol for contemporary and future gratitude of all of society.” “With
good reason does Mount Kazbek look at it so majestically, this representative
of the Caucasian mountains, under whose shield the whole expanse of the
land, from its peaks down to the valleys, greets the statue and forms a harmoni-
ous choir to sing a song of praise to the great man.” Vorontsov’s love for the
Caucasus tied the golden chain of commonality and union between this region
and Russia, while he himself stands out “like the highest mountains in the
Caucasus, the Alps and the Himalayas.”
Iosseliani’s speech and those preceding it had all the ingredients for a
nascent cult around Vorontsov and his statue. They presented him as a father
figure, placed him in an otherworldly environment, linked him to the forces of
nature and the majesty of the highest mountains, and turned him into some
kind of Übermensch. And indeed, soon afterwards some of these motives
appeared again in other settings, while the statue itself was meticulously cared
for and cleaned annually with the help of funds set aside in the Tiflis municipal
budget.33 Vorontsov’s portrait began to embellish journals and magazines, and

33 Many photographs of the monument show a ladder next to the pedestal, which was used
to reach the statue for cleaning. Around 1900, the sum reserved for the annual cleaning
was 500 rubles. Major repairs of the statue, including the removal of green stains resulting
from bird droppings, were necessary at that time: sea, f. 192 (Tiflisskoe gorodskoe

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178 Jahn

he became the subject of works of literature long before he appeared in

Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat.34 In a poem from 1870, for example, which was pub-
lished posthumously in 1871 in the main literary journal of the time, Tsiskari
(Dawn) under the title “To the Vorontsov Monument,” Ekaterina Eristavi, a
member of an old Georgian noble family and the granddaughter of the last
Imeretian king Solomon II, proclaimed that all the Caucasian nations had
erected the monument for this modest, liberal and just man, who was the pro-
tector of oppressed people.35 He brought happiness and joy to the Caucasus
and attracted every Georgian’s heart. “Look at the monument, which we
erected for him! And give it your devotion. He loved us like a father…. I stand
here, the witness of his deeds, at his monument. I owe him to pray for him
forever. I want to hug him and weep, as signs of my gratitude.”
The examples of praise for Vorontsov have so far been confined to members
of the Georgian nobility and the Russian military and civilian administration.
Unfortunately we do not know what was said or done during the opening cer-
emony or at the supra by the many common people who participated in these
events. But we do have a description of how ordinary residents of Tiflis reacted
when they first saw the statue.36 While the lunch in the Mushtaid Gardens was
underway on the second day of the celebrations, curious locals apparently in
large numbers flocked to the new monument. According to the newspaper
report, many of them bowed in front of the statue, kneeled down, prayed, and
some even kissed the pedestal. It is of course hard to know whether this was
done out of genuine gratitude to Vorontsov or whether other motives were
behind this peculiar behavior. Most likely it occurred for a rather simple rea-
son. Since these people had never seen a secular monument before, they
reacted to it in the way they generally reacted to venerated objects, that is
as if they were in church, in front of an icon. In that respect, the transfiguration
of Vorontsov into a saint-like figure was not only a matter of eulogies among
the elites.
The opening of the Vorontsov monument was by far the biggest and most
magnificent ceremony that Tiflis had experienced for a long time. Its drama-
turgy, at first glance, resembled similar events in St. Petersburg or, for that mat-
ter, the unveiling of the Vorontsov monument in Odessa – a religious service,

obshchestvennoe upravlenie), op. 8, d. 87 (“Ob ispravnom soderzhanii pamiatnikov kn.

Vorontsovu i Pushkinu v gor. Tiflise”), ll. 1–3.
34 See his portrait on the front page of Illiustrirovannaia gazeta 20 (25 May 1867).
35 Ekaterina Eristavi, “Vorontsovis dzeglsa,” Tsiskari 3 (1871): 149–50. I thank Zeinab Lomjaria
for the biographical information about Eristavi.
36 Dunkel’-Velling, “26 Marta v Tiflise,” 151–53.

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The Bronze Viceroy 179

troops standing to attention, members of the imperial family, representatives

of the clergy and of different estates, token common people.37 Yet in Tiflis,
local traditions, like the supra, were integrated in the ceremony as well, the
inscriptions on the shields on the bridge were “in the local languages,” presum-
ably Armenian and Georgian. Many references were made to the beauty of
Caucasian nature, mountains and rivers, and family metaphors were used pro-
fusely, with Vorontsov as father figure and Georgians as children or Georgia as
a brother of Russia. In a way, these were all gestures towards local sensibilities,
just like the monument itself. In place of the venerated Vorontsov, the imperial
authorities could simply have put up a statue of field marshal Ivan Paskevich,
the conqueror of Erevan and one of the more ruthless Russian administrators,
who, from their perspective, had likewise achieved huge successes in the
Caucasus. And yet, the Vorontsov monument was also something of a provoca-
tion. It was part of a colonial reform of public space, which had already started
earlier, under Vorontsov, with the rebuilding of the city itself. The statue was
meant to introduce a new iconography (obviously not quite understood yet by
those people who kissed it), a new aesthetic category of representation, which
in that form had not existed in Georgia before and which was itself an expres-
sion of the new political and social order.38 The geographic location and the
spatial symbolism of the monument make this even more evident, as an analy-
sis of Figure 2 will show.
We are looking southward onto the scene. Because of the passé-partout it
seems as if we are looking from afar, like through a binocular. The perspective
of the viewer lies on a vector that has its origins further north, for example in
St. Petersburg. In front of our eyes is Tiflis, with a few newly erected buildings.
Vorontsov, the statue, also looks at what he has accomplished, including the
bridge that he had built, a symbol for his role as mediator between Russians
(north of the river) and Georgians (with their capital on the other side). Beyond
the mountains, further south, lie Persia and the Ottoman empire. It is towards
these distant countries that Vorontsov and our virtual St. Petersburg observer
look as well. And as it turns out, this observer was not only a virtual one. A few
weeks before the ceremony, on the 4th of February, a Caucasian evening was
held in St. Petersburg, where Vladimir Sollogub, with typical panache, gave the

37 The organizers of the Tiflis event had requested information about the Odessa ceremony
from their colleagues there: see the letter from Upravlenie Novorossisskago i Bessarabskago
General Gubernatora to Baron Nikolai and the attached detailed description of the
Odessa ceremony in sea, f. 7, op. 1, d. 690, ll. 14–16.
38 Zaal Andronikashvili, “Denkmalkultur in Georgien,” Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren
Berlin. Bericht über das Forschungsjahr 2008, no. 13 (Berlin, 2009), 73–75.

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180 Jahn

main speech.39 In it, he praised the Russian achievements in the Caucasus,

announced the imminent opening of the monument and then passionately
proclaimed: “And don’t we see the statue from here? The monumental, unwav-
ering bronze man towering above the roaring Kura?” With these words Sollogub
effectively summarized the position which the monument held in the mental
maps of the Russian elites. It signaled, albeit on a smaller scale, an imperial
message similar to that of the Bronze Horseman in St. Petersburg. The empire
in the back, he stands at its periphery, steadfastly defends a new outpost, and
looks forward to new conquests. The fact that a temporary fence around the
Vorontsov monument was soon replaced by one made of Turkish trophy can-
ons that were stuck into the ground as pillars and connected with chains,
clearly underlines this imperial message.40
The popularization of the empire at the periphery started relatively late. As
the example of the Vorontsov statue in Tiflis has shown, there was clearly no
master plan and much was left to the initiative of individual people, both in
the capital and in the regions. While civilian and military authorities took part
in the organization and implementation, they were not necessarily the driving
forces behind the project. There was also no master plan about how the empire
should be represented aesthetically at its periphery. While widely used
European styles of imperial symbolism were the obvious choice, resulting in
an aesthetic translatio imperii from St. Petersburg, individual and local fea-
tures, like the Turkish canons and the Georgian aspects of the opening cere-
monies, were also incorporated. Further study will show whether this kind of
relatively soft aesthetic imperialism continued to be pursued across the divide
of 1917 and all the way up to the crumbling Arch of Russo-Georgian Friendship.

39 “Sed’moi Kavkazskii vecher v Peterburge,” Russkii invalid (12/24 February 1867): 3.

40 Letter to the office of the viceroy about the delivery of the canons from the Tiflis arsenal,
dated 4 April 1867, in sea, f. 7, op. 1, d. 690, ll. 33–33 ob.

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