Konstantin Petrovich was born as the second eldest of four sons to Lieutenant General Peter Feodorovich von Kaufmann (1784-1849) and his wife, Emilie Watson-Priestfield-Aithernay (1790-1858).

[citation needed] Kaufmann entered the military engineering field in 1838, served in the campaigns in the Caucasus, was promoted to the rank of colonel, and commanded the sappers at the siege of Kars in 1855.

[3] Promoted lieutenant general in 1864, he became Governor-General of Vilna, where at that time the Tsarist state had begun a policy of expropriating the Polish aristocracy in an attempt to break its influence in the countryside.

[citation needed] This rapid absorption of these Khanates brought Russia into proximity to Afghanistan, and the reception of Kaufmann's emissaries by the Sher Ali Khan was a main cause of the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

In 1868 he contacted experts in Moscow to identify Alexei and Olga Fedchenko to create an expedition to document the countries natural history.

Kaufmann's team included statisticians, the Fedchenkos, the war artist Vasily Vereshchagin and later the educationalist Nikolai Ostroumov.

Kaufmann targeted the 1872 Moscow All-Russian Technical Exhibition as an opportunity to display the research of this new part of the Russian empire.

[7] Although Kaufmann was unable to induce his government to support all his ambitious schemes of further conquest, he was still in office when General Mikhail Skobelev, the hero of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, was despatched from Tiflis in 1880 and 1881 against the Turkomans of the Akhal-Teke Oasis.