RUSSIAN-TURKISH FRONTIER IN THE REPORTS OF SECRET RECONNAISSANCE BY E.I. CHIRIKOV (1849–1853)

Abstract

The article focuses on the data gathered by a military survey officer Egor Ivanovich Chirikov along the Russo-Ottoman Caucasus frontier. Appointed as a leading Russian member of the International Demarcation Commission on Turkish-Persian border, E.I. Chirikov also participated in secret reconnaissance mission. Its results were summarized in a manuscript of military-topographical, strategic and partly ethnographical nature. Unlike the official papers and maps of the Commission, the manuscript was not intended to be published and was given to the Commander of Russian Black Sea Navy Admiral A.S. Menshikov in the eve of the Crimean war. Chirikov gathered information on the frontier according to the guide on setting up the descriptions of potential military clash theaters introduced to officers by the Imperial General Stuff. He paid special attention to the Ottoman fortifications in Bayaset, Erzerum, Trapezund and Samsun and presented his views on potential military strategies in the Russo-Turkish frontier zone of the Caucasus. The author was unable to abstain from Orientalist clichés, had to solve the problem of sorting out the reliable information together with the epistemological restrictions inherent to the essence of the very method of forming spatial knowledge via description of roads. The officer’s recommendations were not implemented in reality, but remained a relic of an ambitious imperial project. At the same time, they were the “political knowledge of the East” which, by the very subject of its study, influenced the adoption of further decisions by the country’s leadership.