ABSTRACT
In February 1905 Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias, appointed a frail and frightened old man viceroy of the Caucasus, in an effort to pacify a region that had continuously troubled the Tsarist Empire ever since its first acquisition just over 100 years before. The problems that faced the new viceroy, Count VorontsovDashkov (1837-1916), when he first came into office were not in themselves new by any means, but had recently begun to sharpen in intensity. There was clearly some hope in court circles that the elderly Vorontsov-Dashkov, as a relative by both bloodline and marriage to Count Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov, a previous, highly successful viceroy of the Caucasus, had inherited the abilities of a talented colonial administrator, and might therefore be ideally suited to help placate the region through the traditional means of finding an imperial modus vivendi with the local population. Vorontsov-Dashkov’s own earlier career, as we shall see, had entailed extensive military service in both the Caucasus and Central Asia, making him in some ways an ideal candidate for the post, although in practice the interval between his active service in these theatres and his return to the Caucasus as viceroy was a long one. However, he was destined to be the penultimate Tsarist viceroy of the Caucasus, with his reign – which ended in 1915, shortly before his death (from natural causes) – becoming associated instead with unprecedented political and social unrest that ultimately ushered in a new age.
