The paper focuses on solving a very important challenge -setting an access to new primary sources on vague regional issues for Russian-speakers. Although the modern Caucasus studies in Russia have a long list of accounts related to Russian authors there seems to be a lack of foreign-based sources. It particularly concerns the early XIX c. - the sources that covered the experience of people before the Russian-British rivalry on the Caucasus. The author scrutinises the diary entries of the British Lieutenant Colonel John Johnson who took off India for Britain in 1817 and made his way trough the Middle East and Caucasus. He put the experience in the diary that had been never translated into Russian. The article focuses on his descriptions of the South frontier routine together with Johnson's conclusions concerning the Caucasus military and civil authorities. The entries include some additional information about the Yermolov's Embassy to Persia, Russian towns and dwelling places in the region, the beauty of the Mountain Caucasus nature and merits of its inhabitancies. He also described the way of travelling through the Caucasus and the quarantine service. The analytic part of the entries shows the positive experience of Russian militaries in setting up the pattern of the territories acquisition within the Empire together with the absorption of the local elites. The experience is shown as an argument for questioning the way the Ost-India Company used to exploit the Subcontinent. Finally, the author generalises the way we can use the European explores accounts on the Orient as a primary source for our studies.