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Continued
from here
SOCIAL CHANGE AND NATIONAL
AWAKENING: 1855-94
Alexander II and the liberation of the serfs--Shamil capitulates-The integration of Western
Georgia--The peasant question in Georgia--The rise of the Georgian
intelligentsia--Land hunger and peasant discontent--The edicts of 1864--The
War of 1877-78 --Commerce and industry--Russian Pan-Slavism and the lesser
breeds--Ilia Chavchavadze
and Georgia's re-awakening--Alexander III and Russian reaction--Great
Georgian writers of the late nineteenth century
Alexander II and the liberation of the serfs
RUSSIA'S NEW SOVEREIGN, Alexander II,
was at heart an honest conservative, forced by the logic of events to place
in the forefront of his programme the liberation of
the serfs. The humiliations of the Crimean War had exposed the bankruptcy of
the old order, while the growth of industry in Russia underlined the chronic shortage
of free labour. Enlightened public opinion, both at
home and abroad, clamoured for the abolition of a
system which reduced the bulk of the population of a European state to a
condition similar to that of the mediaeval villein,
or even to that of negro slaves on the American plantations. In 1856, on
announcing the conclusion of peace, Alexander directed all thoughts to
reform.
'May Russia's internal welfare be established and
perfected; may justice and mercy reign in her law courts; may the desire for
instruction and all useful work grow everywhere with new strength; and may
everyone enjoy in peace the fruits of honest labour
under the shelter of laws equally just to all, equally protecting all.'
To the Governor-General of Moscow, who expressed alarm at
the implications of these amiable generalities, the Tsar replied: 'Better to
abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to abolish itself from
below.' 52
For the next five years, both government and public opinion in Russia
were occupied with preparations for the peasant reform of 1861 which, after
some delay, was to be applied also to Russia's dominions beyond the Caucasus.
Shamil
capitulates
In the meantime, there remained in the Caucasus
defiant tribes who preferred their own native brand of liberty to any which
the Russian Tsar might graciously provide. The termination of the Crimean War
set free the Russian military command to terminate once for all the menace of
the warrior Shamil and his Murids.
Prince Baryatinsky, who succeeded Count Muraviev as viceroy of the Caucasus
in 1856, worked out a systematic plan for the reduction of Daghestan. Its rapid success took the Russians themselves
by surprise. Shamil's authority had for some time
been waning, so that the Russians, who had greatly improved their
communications system, were able to cut off the Murids
from their sources of supply and gradually to squeeze them out of one redoubt
after another. In August 1859, after a quarter of a century's desperate
resistance, the terrible Imam was brought to bay. Surrounded on the rocky
brow of Gunib, the surviving five hundred Murids put up a determined fight until, seeing the
situation to be hopeless, Shamil
surrendered to the Russian viceroy in person, and was sent into honourable exile at Kaluga
in Russia.
Simultaneously, the Russians were actively extending their grip over those
areas of western Caucasia which still
retained some vestige of independence.
The integration of Western
Georgia
It was at this period that Mingrelia,
the Colchis of the ancients, finally lost
its autonomy. It will be recalled that the Dadian
or ruling prince of Mingrelia had been placed under
a Russian protectorate in 1803, but had retained a large measure of authority
as a vassal of the cause, and organized a militia to help drive out the
intruders. This invasion imposed a severe strain on the Mingrelian
economy, and particularly on the peasants. When the Turks withdrew, the
landowners attempted to reimpose their authority on
their serfs, but were met with defiance. A peasant revolt broke out, led by a
blacksmith named Utu Mikava.
Most of Mingrelia was reduced to a state of
turmoil. In the end, both parties welcomed Russian intervention--the landowners
to safeguard their lives and property, the serfs in the hope of being
guaranteed a status approximating to that enjoyed by crown peasants in Russia.
Fate thus played into the hands of the Russian authorities, who sent in 1857
a commission to Mingrelia, and removed the Regent
Catherine from office. A Russian-dominated Council of Regency was set up,
nominally in the interests of the youthful heir, Nicholas Dadiani.
In 1867, when Nicholas attained his majority, he was compelled to cede all
his sovereign rights to the Tsar in exchange for 1,000,000 rubles, a grant of
estates in Russia,
and the title of Prince Dadian-Mingrelsky. The
principality of Mingrelia thus became an integral
part of the Russian empire.
A like fate soon overtook the free mountaineers of Upper Svaneti, high up in the Caucasus
range looking down over Imereti and Mingrelia. The Russians had long been irked by the
rebellious attitude of the Svanian princes, who
spent their ample leisure in prosecuting blood feuds against one another, and in intrigues with Omar Pasha's invading
Turks. In 1857, Prince Baryatinsky ordered Svaneti to be subdued by armed force, despite the existence
of the treaties of 1833 and 1840, which established a protectorate over the
principality of Western Upper Svaneti and the
self-governing tribal area of Free (Eastern Upper) Svaneti.
The ruling prince of Western Upper Svaneti was
exiled to Erivan in Armenia.
On his way to banishment, this Svanian prince,
Constantine Dadeshkeliani by name, came to Kutaisi for a farewell audience with the
Governor-General of Western Georgia, Prince Alexander Gagarin, a jovial man
and a good administrator, who had built a boulevard and two bridges over the Rioni at Kutaisi
and embellished the town with a public garden. At this interview, Constantine
Dadeshkeliani suddenly drew his dagger and stabbed
to death the Russian general and three of his staff.
When captured, he was summarily tried by court martial and
shot. In 1858, the whole of Upper Svaneti was
annexed to the Russian viceroyalty of the Caucasus.
Thus ended the independent existence of this renowned nation of fighters and
hunters, mentioned with respect by Strabo and the ancients, but sunk in more
recent times into squalor and ignorance from which contact with European ways
has only lately begun to redeem them.
The Russians were now able to subjugate Abkhazia,
the autonomous principality situated immediately north-west of Mingrelia along the Black Sea
coastline. It will be recalled that the Lord of Abkhazia, Safar Bey or Giorgi Sharvashidze, had been received under Russian protection
as long ago as 1809, and confirmed in perpetual possession of his domains. In
the intervening period, Abkhazia had been frequently involved in the Russian
campaigns against the Circassians, with whom the
Abkhaz, many of them Muslims, had cultural, ethnic and linguistic connexions. During the Crimean War, the Turks stirred up
the Abkhaz against Russia
at the time of null Omar Pasha's invasion of Mingrelia.
Turkish envoys who arrived at the Abkhazian capital, Sukhumi, found the ruling dynasty of the Sharvashidzes divided: the Christian princes adhered to
the Russian interest, but Iskander (Alexander), a
Muslim, was prepared to help the Turks in return for permission to annex the neighbouring Mingrelian
district of Samurzaqano. Omar Pasha had
subsequently landed at Sukhumi,
from which he advanced south-eastwards into Mingrelia.
After the Crimean War was over, the Russians looked for a chance of extending
their direct rule to Abkhazia. In 1864, they deposed the ruling prince,
Michael Sharvashidze, and annexed his country by
force of arms. Two years later, the Abkhaz staged a general revolt against
their new masters, and recaptured their capital, Sukhumi. The Russians had to send 8,000
troops to quell this rising, which was suppressed with heavy loss of life.
The subjugation of Abkhazia coincided with Russia's
annihilation of the national existence of the Circassians,
that valiant North Caucasian people who had for a century been a thorn in the
side of Tsarist colonialism. Cut off since the Crimean War from contact with Turkey and the Western European powers, the Circassians were no match for Russia's military might,
especially after the surrender of Shamil and the Murids of Daghestan. In Chechnya
and Daghestan, the Russians were satisfied with the
submission of the local population to Russian law. But on the Black Sea coast, their plans involved the seizure of
the wide and fertile Cherkess lands to provide for
a part of the wave of Russian peasant migration which resulted from the
emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The Russian government conceived the
drastic project of enforcing the mass migration of the Circassians
to other regions of the empire or, if they preferred, to Ottoman Turkey. The
last shots in the long series of Russo-Circassian
conflicts were fired in 1864. Rather than remain under infidel rule, some
600,000 Circassian Muslims emigrated
to various regions of the Ottoman Empire,
where their descendants may be found to this day. Many of the Russian,
German, Greek and Bulgarian colonists who were endowed with the tribal lands
of the Circassians near the Black
Sea coast proved unable to endure the sub-tropical climate, and
the wilderness invaded the orchards and gardens once cultivated by prosperous
and highly civilized Circassian communities.
The peasant question in Georgia
While the emancipation of the serfs in European Russia did
not for the time being affect conditions in Georgia and other regions of Caucasia,
its application there was seen to be only a matter of time. We have already
spoken of the economic and social changes which took place in Georgia
towards the middle of the nineteenth century, and which gathered momentum
under the viceroyalty of Prince Vorontsov.
Patriarchal customs unchallenged over the centuries were breaking down as the
Georgian people came into contact with European ways and acquired new tastes
and habits. In 1858, the port of Poti was opened for Black Sea shipping, replacing the inferior anchorage of
Redut-Kaleh. Agricultural exhibitions were held
with increasing frequency, and silk, tobacco and cotton produced in
substantial quantities. More corn had to be brought in to feed the growing
population, while maize and wine were exported in bulk. From the 1840's
onwards, the Georgians grew potatoes, cabbages and tea--the latter being
introduced from China
in 1845. Foreign capital was put into silk farms in Western
Georgia. Iron foundries, brick works, glass works, a steam
sawmill, helped to provide new occupations for the townsfolk. Landowners
often loaned out their serfs to factories and plantations on a seasonal
basis, in return for a cash payment. Many peasants were able to save up and
purchase their freedom. There was an increasing tendency for feudal dues in labour or in kind to be commuted into a money payment.
The basis of the old manorial economy was correspondingly weakened, while the
improvidence of the Georgian gentry resulted in the forced sale or mortgaging
of a large portion of their estates.
The steady increase in the population of Georgia meant that by the 1850's,
land hunger was becoming acute. It is reckoned that at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the average peasant holding amounted to from ten to
twenty desyatins (one desyatin
= 2.7 acres); by the time the Georgian serfs were freed, in 1864, the average
holding had sunk to between five and six desyatins.
The position was made worse by the seizure of communal lands, forests and
pastures by the State and by powerful landowners. A class of rich peasants or
kulaks was starting to emerge, with the inevitable concomitant of a
poverty-stricken rustic proletariat. The so-called 'class struggle' in the
Georgian countryside resulted in sporadic revolts and deeds of violence.
Peasant unrest broke into disorders in Imereti in
1857, in Guria in 1862, in the Ksani
valley and around Surami in Kartli
in 1863, and near Tbilisi
itself in 1864.
The rise of the Georgian intelligentsia
The Georgian peasant had vigorous champions among the
younger generation of intellectuals, many of whom belonged to leading
aristocratic families. The freer access to Russian universities which was one
of the beneficial consequences of the educational policy of Alexander II in
his early years made it possible for Georgian students to study at Moscow and St.
Petersburg. Contact with the writings of such
pioneer radicals as Belinsky and Herzen, and the personal influence of the fearless
progressives Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov,
soon produced in these Georgian students a state of mind highly critical
towards Tsarist autocracy, the institution of serfdom, and the patriarchal
ways which they had taken for granted in their native Georgia. These young
Georgian intellectuals were known as 'Tergdaleulis',
signifying 'those who had drunk from the River Terek',
i.e., had crossed the Terek and gone for their
education to Russia; among them were Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, Niko Nikoladze, Raphael Eristavi, Iakob Gogebashvili--in fact,
almost all the young men who were to lead Georgia's literary, political and
scholarly life during the following half century. Several of them joined with
the Russian students at St.
Petersburg University
in the political demonstrations of 1861, and paid for their audacity with a
few painful months in Kronstadt fortress.
The first notable production of the new school in Georgian
literature was the short novel Suramis tsikhe (Surami Castle)
by Daniel Chonkadze ( 1830-60),
who was the son of a poor priest who had himself begun life as a serf. For
censorship reasons, this remarkable tale was given a mediaeval setting. Its
message was none the less clearly understood by contemporaries. Serfdom as practised in Georgia is depicted by Chonkadze, not without a measure of exaggeration, as the
rule of darkness and superstition, brutal violence and unchecked wickedness.
The princes refuse to recognize peasants as human beings. 'They imagine that
we are incapable of loving or hating, they deem us without hearts or the
faculty of thought.' In one chapter, a prince seizes a poor woman who has
tried to escape from his clutches, drags her home, yokes her to a plough with
the oxen, and then forces her to drag along a heavy threshing board, flogging
her the while until she falls dead to the ground. The poignancy of this
vividly written tale is more effective than any social moralizing. Chonkadze's story may be compared in this respect with Uncle
Tom's Cabin, or with Turgenev Huntsman's Sketches or Mumu.
After Chonkadze's early death,
his message was taken up by several other brilliant poets and writers of the
young generation. Prince Raphael Eristavi, who had
witnessed the Mingrelian peasants' revolt in 1857,
composed a poem called The Suppliant to his Judge, in which justice was
demanded for the peasant class. Ilia Chavchavadze and Akaki Tsereteli, both offspring of leading princely families,
published in the journals Tsiskari (The
Dawn) and Sakartvelos moambe (The GeoqianMessenger Messenger)
a number of remarkable articles and essays on social themes. Several of Akaki early poems, such as Glekhis
aghsareba (The peasant's confession), showed
indignation at the lot of the serfs. Indeed, Akaki
was denounced as a traitor to his class, and on one occasion an enraged
diehard, Prince Mikeladze, made a violent physical
assault on the young poet.
Ilia Chavchavadze
devastating novel Katsia adamiani? (Do you call this a man?), published in
1863, was another important literary expression of the crisis in Georgian
society. The motto of the book--'Criticize your friend to his face, your foe
behind his back'--shows the author's intention of depicting the seamy side of
Georgian life in the hope of stirring his countrymen to mend their ways. Ilia's novel may be compared with Gogol Dead Souls
or with the savage rustic satires of Saltykov-Shchedrin.
The writer shares Gogol's disgust with the poshlost--the
triviality and sordidness of life in the dim backwaters of the Tsarist
Empire, and his description of the domain of Prince Luarsab
Tatkaridze, a feudal lord of Kakheti,
is one of the most picturesque pages of Georgian literature. Dirt, indolence,
dilapidation are the prevailing features of the princely economy. 'The yard
was as dirty as the soul of a superannuated bureaucrat. To reach the
proprietor without getting filthy or collecting some kind of choice odour in the process was a great achievement.' The
aristocratic interior was equally squalid, His Highness's sitting room being
furnished with sofas spread with carpets kept in such a condition that every
excellent movement of Their Excellencies' excellent limbs sent clouds of dust
into the air, thus mercifully obscuring other sordid features of the
apartment. Chavchavadze pokes fun at all kinds of
hallowed features of Georgian life. His account of how the slow-witted Luarsab is tricked into marriage with the ugly Darejan, daughter of the most noble
Prince Moses, son of Noshrevan, provides a
hilarious commentary on the activity of the village match-maker. Little
wonder that Luarsab and Darejan
Tatkaridze became proverbial figures of fun, or
that many a Georgian squire should have cursed Ilia
and his clever young friends as harbingers of ruin and destroyers of
traditional values. Indeed, at a meeting where Ilia
was advocating the prompt emancipation of the peasants with their land, an
outraged proprietor armed with a kinzhal--the
deadly Caucasian dagger--hurled himself at the orator shouting: 'Let me get
at him! I'll kill him on the spot!'
Land hunger and peasant discontent
In spite of much opposition, the Georgian nobility were
eventually prevailed upon to accept a scheme for the liberation of the
peasantry with an allotment of land to former serfs. The manifesto of 1864
proclaimed the emancipation of serfs in the Tbilisi
area, while those of Imereti ( Western Georgia) were freed the following year. The Mingrelian peasants were liberated in 1867, those of
Abkhazia in 1870, and those of Svaneti in 1871. In
Georgia, as in Russia, the peasantry were saddled with redemption payments of
fantastic magnitude to be paid off by instalments
to their former owners, pending which they remained in an equivocal status
known as 'temporary obligation'. In addition, about a third of each peasant
plot was detached from the holding and handed back to the landowner by way of
additional compensation. The peasantry lost their free access to forests and
communal pasture lands. Former landless serfs, domestic bond serfs, and an
important category of migrant agricultural labourers
known as khizani were excluded from the
settlement, and were condemned to an impoverished existence. Even after the
reforms of 1864, the lot of the Georgian peasant could be summed up only too
often in the poignant lines of Raphael Eristavi
poem, Sesia's Thoughts:
Dust am I, to
dust I cling;
A rustic born, my life is one
Eternal strife and endless toil,
And endless woe . . . till life is gone.
I plough, I sow, I labour on,
With muscles strained, in sun and rain.
I scarce can live on what I earn,
And tired and hungry I remain.
The owner of the land torments me;
Even the tiny ant's my foe.
For townsfolk, priests and native country
In blood-like sweat I plough and sow . . .
How long, O God, this endless grind,
This life of sorrow and of toil?
Alas! I fear that death alone
Will bring me rest within this soil!53
The land settlement imposed on the newly conquered Abkhaz
proved particularly onerous. The Russian authorities failed to distinguish
adequately between the various categories of free, semi-free and serf
peasants which had existed in that somewhat primitive tribal society. Under
the arrangements imposed in 1870, the landowners received up to two hundred
and fifty desyatins apiece, while the
peasants got only from three to seven per household, much of this being unfit
for cultivation. Contemporary Russian officials admitted that the Abkhaz peasantry were left with little more than rocky mountain
slopes and low-lying bogs. It is only fair to add that the Abkhaz peasantry
had shown little disposition to co-operate with the Russian land commission
sent to work out the details of the new arrangements, finally waylaying the
commissioners and exterminating them. After a series of insurrections, many
of the Abkhaz eventually joined the Circassians in
exile in Turkey.
The edicts of 1864
Whereas the freeing of the peasantry marked a decided, if
belated step forward in the evolution of Georgian society, the country still
lagged behind metropolitan Russia
in the matter of civil rights and local government reform. Georgia reaped no benefit from
the Zemstvo law of 1864, which laid the basis of
voluntary local government throughout European Russia. Instead, the peasant
communities had village councils headed by a rural bailiff who was
responsible to the Russian district authority for collecting taxes and
carrying out compulsory work assignments. These village councils had little
in the way of status, and were at the beck and call of the local Russian
military commanders and police. The Georgians were likewise refused the
benefit of the jury system as adopted in Russia in 1864. Legal business
continued to be transacted exclusively in Russian and judgement
enforced by administrators sent from St.
Petersburg.
The Viceroy of the Caucasus
from 1862 until 1882 was the Grand Duke Michael, brother of Tsar Alexander
II. The future Russian Prime Minister Sergius
Witte, who in his boyhood knew the Grand Duke personally, described Michael
as a broad-minded and dignified man with gentlemanly instincts. He made
himself extremely popular throughout the Caucasus, being a complete stranger
to the narrow-minded chauvinism which developed in Russia towards the end of the
nineteenth century and found expression in pan-Slavonic jingoism, anti-Jewish
pogroms and other unlovely manifestations. The Grand Duke considered rather
that since many of the Caucasian peoples had entered the Russian empire
voluntarily and were serving with loyalty in Russia's army and civil service,
there was no distinction to be made between them and the inhabitants of
European Russia.54 The viceregal palace
was always open to the Georgian aristocracy, while marriages between Russian
noblemen serving in the Caucasus and Georgian princesses were of frequent
occurrence.
The War of 1877-78
An important event of the Grand Duke Michael's viceroyalty
was the recovery during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 of substantial areas
of former Georgian territory which had been under Ottoman sway since the
sixteenth century. With their Georgian and Armenian auxiliaries, the Russians
had gained brilliant successes on this front during Paskevich's
campaign of 1828-29, and had acquitted themselves very creditably here during
the Crimean War. Each time, however, the complications of great power
politics had wrested the fruits of success from the Russians' grasp during
the subsequent peace settlements. This time, however, the Russians were able
to turn their victory on this front into a territorial gain which they held
until the collapse of the Tsarist Empire in 1917. While the main Russian and
Turkish forces were locked in their usual massive combat on the Balkan front,
the Grand Duke Michael captured Kars in
November 1877, and blockaded Erzurum.
The Congress of Berlin confirmed Russia in possession of extensive tracts of
territory which had centuries before formed part of the mediaeval Georgian
kingdom: Atchara-Kobuleti, with the port of Batumi,
Shavsheti, Klarjeti,
Kola-Ardahan, and the northern portion of Tao,
comprising the district of Oltisi. From the
military viewpoint, great importance attached to Russia's
acquisition of the fortresses of Kars
and Ardahan, controlling the approaches into
Turkish Anatolia.
Commerce and industry
The last thirty years of the nineteenth century saw the
beginnings of a minor industrial revolution in Georgia. This was accelerated by
improved communications. Roads were built, and the main towns of Transcaucasia connected by the telegraph in 1870. Two
years later, a regular service was inaugurated on the new Poti-Tbilisi
railway. A branch line to Kutaisi
was opened in 1877. Following the Russian annexation of the Black Sea port of Batumi
after the war of 1877-78, a line between Batumi
and Samtredia was opened in 1883, while Tbilisi was simultaneously connected by rail with the
great Caspian oil town of Baku.
The whole of Russian Transcaucasia was now spanned by rail from the Caspian
to the Black Sea coast. In 1886, a further
rail extension was built to link Kutaisi with
the rapidly expanding coal-mining town of Tqibuli in upper Imereti. The manganese industry set up at Chiatura in 1879 soon attained international importance.
By 1892, Chiatura manganese represented 38 per
cent. of the entire world production of this
essential mineral. Baku being on the
land-locked Caspian, Batumi became the main
outlet for Baku
oil. In 1888, 21 per cent. of the world supply of
oil passed through that port on its way to Russia and other consumer
countries.
The population of Georgia continued to increase. In
1866, it totalled 1,300,400, in 1886, 1,731,500, in
1897, 2,034,700. There was a constant drift from the countryside to the towns.
Between 1865 and 1897, the population of Tbilisi more than doubled --from 71,051 to
159 590. The capital of Georgia became more and more of a cosmopolitan city,
complete with European amenities such as hotels, a horse tramway, new
bridges, paved streets, a piped water supply, schools, and other municipal
and government institutions, housed in imposing stone buildings.
Economic change brought with it changes in social
relationships and habits of mind. Many Georgian intellectuals greeted these
readjustments with approval, and were glad to see the old ruling class
stirred from its torpor into fruitful enterprise. In 1874, the liberal
journalist Sergei Meskhi noted 'a new and general
trend and impulse' throughout Georgia,
manifested as a craze for business activity and money-making.
'So long as the feudal system persisted in our land,
everyone relied on the peasants' unpaid labour and
concentrated on living in a carefree way. The landlord proudly declared:
"What do I want with business, what do I want with money? My peasants' labour is my money!" Since the abolition of serfdom,
our circumstances have altered: the erstwhile feudal lord has been deprived
of his unpaid labour force and with it, of his
effortless income and the means of living a carefree life. The smaller
proprietors have come to feel with special acuteness, on their own hide, the
impact of the fact that those days have passed away for ever when what they
termed "business" consisted in hunting and revelry, and when they
had need of cash only to gratify their desires in the direction of
superfluous luxuries. Everyone has come to feel that the era when it was
possible to live an insouciant, idle existence at the expense of other
people's efforts has vanished completely, or is at least on the way out. . .
. Times have changed indeed!'
Latterly, Meskhi went on,
everyone has been engaged in a mad rush to think up some lucrative enterprise
which will enrich him in a few years. One man is building a wine warehouse to
supply the city with drink, another is trying to make a fortune out of
milk--there is no limit to these bright ideas, and all their promoters are
naturally keen to secure financial backing from the bank! In the wake of this
mad bustle, there must be many disappointments, many false starts. But in the
end, this burst of feverish activity may have the good effect of teaching the
Georgians that there is no substitute for diligent learning, steady work and
the careful thinking out of feasible projects and undertakings. 55
If the 1870's were, for Russia
as for Georgia,
a time of new ideas and new possibilities, they were also a period of
frustration and disillusionment. The reign of Alexander II was drawing to its
tragic end. The emperor whose accession and early reforms had aroused the
most sanguine hopes, who had freed the peasants from servitude and carried
through so many promising reforms, was spending his last years hunted like a
beast by revolutionaries, and hiding in his palaces in a vain effort to ward
off their bombs and guns. The landlords had never forgiven him the reform of
1861, while the peasants found that the yoke of serfdom had been replaced by
the burden of poverty and debt. The intelligentsia, whose evolution
Alexander's early reforms had done much to foster, were
seething with resentment at the dead weight of autocracy which excluded them
from participation in government, and deprived public opinion of all
influence on the course of affairs. Symptomatic of this frustration was the Narodnik or Populist movement of the 1870's, in the
course of which thousands of idealistic students and intellectuals abandoned
homes and professions and tried to settle as peasants among the country folk
to enter into communion with them and prepare them for the coming of the
revolutionary utopia. But the muzhik refused
to respond to the advances of these town-bred zealots, most of whom were rounded up and imprisoned or deported to Siberia. The hard core of the revolutionary
intelligentsia turned to terrorism and conspiracy. One group of the Land
and Freedom party broke away and formed a new body, known as The
People's Will. In 1879, a rapid succession of spectacular acts of
violence took place, in which the Governor of Kharkov was shot dead, and the
Tsar narrowly escaped two attempts on his life. Neither arrests, executions,
deportations, nor the prospect of constitutional concessions could save the
emperor from his fate. In 1880, a workman blew up the imperial dining room at
the Winter Palace. The following year, on 1
March, the bombs of the Nihilists reached their targets and Alexander II, the
Emancipator, died a ghastly death.
Thinking people in Georgia
could not avoid being affected by the general tension and malaise affecting Russia.
'What has come over us, what has happened to us?' asked the veteran poet and
administrator Prince Grigol Orbeliani
on the morrow of the war of 1877-78.
'What invisible agency has been exercising so lamentable
an effect upon us, so that we are all heading for general ruin precisely at
that moment when the external enemy no longer exists for us? From every side,
from every household is heard nothing but the sound of weeping and wailing.
Misery has stricken everyone, down to the lowest class of society. Where are
we to look for a deliverer? This terrible thought keeps sorrowing me and
adding to my weight of years.' 56
Russian Pan-Slavism and the lesser breeds
Particularly ominous for Russia's
minority peoples was the alarming growth of official chauvinism, which came
at a time when the intensification of self-conscious and articulate
nationalism among the subject nations of the great multiracial
empires--Austro-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey and Russia --confronted governments
with new problems and demands. The liberation of Italy from Austrian rule had been
a great fillip to this movement, while increasing restiveness was shown by
the Hungarians as well as by the Czechs, Poles and other Slavonic peoples
under Hapsburg rule. The Ottoman Empire, long in decline, faced continual
trouble in the Balkans, where nationalist sentiment was inflamed by agents of
imperial Russia
spreading the sacred message of Orthodoxy and PanSlavism.
Within Russia itself, the authorities lent their support to a sort of
mystical Messianism, designed to enhance the
prestige of the imperial dynasty and of 'Holy Russia' as champions of
Christendom, and to stifle heresy and dissent at home and abroad. Pan-Slavism
inside Russia
was an ugly growth. Poles, Ukrainians and other Slavonic lesser breeds were
coerced into conformity with Muscovite ways and ideas, while every attempt
was made to assimilate Russia's
Asiatic subjects and bring them into line. These efforts, needless to say,
had scant success in the long run. The pride of the minority peoples was
offended by official refusal to countenance use of local languages as the
media for education or state business, and by the scorn poured by the
dominant race on the cultural heritage of the smaller brethren.
Such resentment was especially keen in Georgia which had, after all,
formed an independent and highly civilized kingdom within the Greco-Roman
world when the ancestors of the Russians were still nomads wandering about
the draughty steppes. The Georgians had accepted Christianity more than six
centuries before the Russians, had been a bulwark of Christendom in the East
for a millennium and a half, and had entered voluntarily under the Russian sceptre--only to be treated now as if they were
barbarians. Thus, from 1871 the study of Georgian language and literature in
State Schools was replaced by compulsory Latin and Greek. Admittedly,
Georgian could be studied as a voluntary extra, but it was deprived of its place
on the official time-table. In 1872, an inspector arrived from St. Petersburg and
banned the use of Georgian as medium of instruction in the Tbilisi
Theological Seminary, the main training college for the Georgian priesthood.
The seminary thereafter became more and more a centre for nationalist
resistance to Russian rule. It gained nation-wide notoriety in 1886, when an
expelled student named Laghiashvili assassinated
the rector, Chudetsky, a bigoted Russian who
described Georgian as 'a language for dogs'. In his rage at this incident,
the Russian Exarch of Georgia cursed the Georgian
nation with a wholesale anathema. A venerable Georgian writer, Prince Dimitri Qipiani, who ventured a
protest against the prelate's intemperate mouthings,
was deported to Stavropol in the North Caucasus, where he was soon afterwards murdered
in mysterious circumstances.
Ilia Chavchavadze and Georgia's re-awakening
Georgian patriotic resistance at this period was headed by
Ilia Chavchavadze ( 1837-1907), the poet, novelist and orator, who had
gained prominence as a firebrand at the time of the liberation of the serfs.
With growing maturity, Ilia's stature as a
responsible public figure rapidly increased. In 1875, he was elected Chairman
of the newly founded Land Bank of the Nobility in Tbilisi, an institution
designed to put the impoverished landed gentry on their feet by providing
credit and capital, as well as fulfilling ordinary day to day banking
functions. From then onwards, Ilia's life was devoted
to practical activities of all kinds. In 1879, he helped to found the Society
for the Spreading of Literacy among the Georgians. He financed new schools
and supported the Georgian national theatre. In 1877 he launched the
newspaper Iveria, an organ which played an
outstanding part in reviving Georgian national consciousness. The Tbilisi gendarmerie
could report with truth that
'the principal leader of the
movement which aims at the intensifying of nationalistic trends is Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, Chairman of
the Tbilisi Bank of the Nobility. . . . Prince Chavchavadze
is a man of exceptional intellect and standing, and enjoys great ascendancy
over the Georgians in general, and over free-thinking elements in
particular.' 57
Ilia Chavchavadze
and his associates were known as the Pirveli
Dasi or First Group, to distinguish them
from the more radical Meore Dasi or Second Group, founded in 1869 by GiorgiTsereteli Tsereteli and Niko Nikoladze. Both these
early Georgian social and literary movements were, however, far more moderate
in their aims than the young Marxists who later banded themselves together as
the Mesame Dasi
or Third Group, and formed the basis of the Georgian revolutionary Social-Democratic
Party.
Chavchavadze's ideology at this stage of his
career could justly be described as bourgeois-nationalist. One of his
objects, which aroused criticism in radical circles, was to reconcile the
various classes of Georgian society in the interests of national solidarity.
In a series of articles which appeared between 1877 and 1881 under the title Life
and Law, Ilia preached that the antagonisms
which existed in other countries between rich and poor, high and low, either
did not exist in Georgia, or could be easily dispelled thanks, apparently, to
some superior, moral qualities vouchsafed to the Georgian nation. There was, Ilia taught, no real obstacle to a complete understanding
between the different social classes. After Ilia's vigorous campaign on behalf of the serfs
against their feudal masters not two decades previously, this doctrine
appeared to many as novel and disconcerting. As one contemporary put it, Chavchavadze's aim was apparently to turn prince and
peasant into brothers and inspire them both with a single common purpose--the
peasant to ministering to the prince's stomach, the prince to ministering to
his own stomach. This happy consummation would indeed remove all conflict of
interest between them. 58 Such
an interpretation of Chavchavadze's ideas does them
less than justice. Ilia's real aim, which under the
Tsarist censorship could not be proclaimed in print, was to unite his fellow
countrymen, regardless of social status, into a closely knit national
community capable one day of winning independence from the Russian overlord.
The efforts of publicists and authors like Ilia Chavchavadze were
powerfully seconded by the new generation of Georgian school teachers and
pedagogues. While forced to instruct their flock in the uncongenial idiom of
Russian, the teachers drummed into their pupils
contempt for alien ways and pride in their native Georgian heritage.
The most remarkable of these teachers was Iakob Gogebashvili ( 1840-1912), who studied at Kiev
University and became familiar with Darwin's evolutionary
theory and the political ideas of Russian radicals such as Herzen, Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. Returning to Tbilisi, Gogebashvili
taught arithmetic and geography in the ecclesiastical school and later in the
seminary. In 1868, he was appointed inspector of the ecclesiastical school,
but was dismissed a few years later on orders from the Synod in St. Petersburg.
From then onwards Gogebashvili
became a free-lance and devoted his energies to spreading education and
enlightenment among his fellow-countrymen and their children. He played a
prominent part in the work of the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among
the Georgians. He was intensely proud of Georgia's language and
literature, and wrote essays in which he urged people to show themselves true
patriots in the educational sphere. He contrasted Georgian patriotism with
the chauvinism of the great powers, and particularly with the Russian
reactionary Pan-Slavists, whose ideal Russian
patriot was a man who would crush all the smaller nations which Russia had annexed, and enslave all countries
of Europe situated outside the frontiers of
the Tsar's domains.
'Our patriotism is of course of an entirely different
kind: it consists solely in a sacred feeling towards our mother land; . . .
in it there is no hate for other nations, no desire to enslave anybody, no
urge to impoverish anybody. Our patriots desire to restore Georgia's right to
self-government and their own civic rights, to preserve their national
characteristics and culture, without which no people can exist as a society
of human beings.'
For Gogebashvili, there could be
no revival of self-respect among his fellow-countrymen without a revival of
interest in the Georgian language. 'The status of the Georgian tongue in
Georgian scholastic institutions may be compared with that of a wretched
foundling, deprived of all care and protection. Georgia's native language is
treated just as a spiteful stepmother treats her stepchild.' 59 Throughout
his life, Gogebashvili spared no effort in
remedying this situation. His masterly introduction to Georgian for children,
Deda Ena (Mother
Tongue) has been republished several dozen times since its first
appearance in 1876, and in modified form serves to this day as a manual in
Georgian schools.
Alexander III and Russian reaction
After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II and the
accession of Alexander III ( 1881-94), relations between the Russians and
their Georgian subjects continued to be strained. A feature of Alexander III's reign was an increased persecution of everything
which diverged from the officially accepted national type. Dissenting sects,
the Uniat
Church and the
Lutherans in the western provinces, Lamaist Kalmuks, Buryat Mongols, and
especially all Jews, suffered a systematic campaign of persecution and
denigration. Under the influence of reactionaries like Katkov
and Pobedonostsev, the Russian Press was
effectively muzzled. Every effort was made to stifle the growing
revolutionary movement and destroy the remnants of the revolutionary
organizations. All manifestations of independent public opinion were treated
as signs of sedition.
The intensification of Russian reaction had unpleasant
repercussions in Georgia.
Added obstacles were placed in the way of the Georgians' progress towards
full civic rights. The government in St. Petersburg
habitually sent to Georgia
the dregs of the Russian civil service. Oliver Wardrop,
one of the English pioneers of Georgian studies, visited the Caucasus in 1887. Most Georgians, he noted, knew Russia
only as a foreign power that sent them tax-collectors, justices of the peace
and other bureaucrats, many of them obnoxious. Russian magistrates, according
to this observer, were arrogant when sober and odious when drunk. Wardrop himself once witnessed the reception accorded to
a fine, tall mountaineer who came humbly to present a petition to a puny,
besotted Russian magistrate. 'The representative of law and order was drunk,
hopelessly drunk, and treated the suppliant in such a manner that I blushed
to be in his company.' 60
In Western Europe at
least there were signs of growing sympathy with Georgia and her people.
Arthur Leist in Germany
and Professor Morfill at Oxford were influential advocates of
Georgian literature and culture. A special place in the affections of the
Georgians is occupied by Oliver Wardrop's sister
Marjory, who translated into English one of the most nobly conceived of Ilia Chavchavadze's poems, The
Hermit, and later, Shota Rustaveli's
classic epic, The Manin
the Panther's Skin in the Panther's Skin. In 1894 we find Ilia
writing to Marjory Wardrop:
'The renowned land of England knows little enough about
our unfortunate country and orphaned people, which at one time had its own
heroes, scholars, writers and poets, and through their endeavours
steadfastly resisted the barbarian enemies of enlightenment.
Every Georgian will feel gratified that you and your
respected brother have conceived a love for our universally forgotten land, ands desire to convey to your countrymen its bad and
good sides, with all that affection and sympathy which so adorn a human being
and are the priceless consolation of those who are oppressed by fate. It is
to be wished that the noble and powerful people of England should know that
even in our little country, the mind functions and the heart beats in a human
way; that even here, men have their longings and their hopes; that even here,
there exists faith and painful striving towards better days; and that this
people of ours feels nothing human to be alien to it.
'All this has permeated our little literature, in so far
as our burdensome situation permits . . .' 61
Great Georgian writers of the late nineteenth
century
Despite official discouragement, the last decades of the
nineteenth century witnessed a Georgian literary revival in which there
emerged writers of a stature unequalled since the Golden Age of Rustaveli seven hundred years before. Ilia
Chavchavadze himself excelled alike in lyric and
ballad poetry, in the novel, the short story and the essay. Apart from Ilia, the most universal literary genius of the age was Akaki Tsereteli. Known as 'the
immortal nightingale of the Georgian people', he was as versatile as Ilia, and also a prominent public figure. Many of his
lyrics have been adopted as folk ballads and popular drinking songs. In his
historical lay Tornike Eristavi, he conjured up the heroic days when
Georgian arms played a part in the mighty wars of Byzantium. Akaki
lost no occasion of expressing his contempt for Tsarist autocracy. In 1871, Ilia Chavchavadze devoted one
of his most fiery poems to the downfall of the Paris Commune, which he
mourned as a victory for tyrants and oppressors of the people. Ten years
later, Akaki Tsereteli
greeted with enthusiasm the news of the assassination of Alexander II, whom
the Georgians by now regarded as among the chief tyrants of the age. 'Today a
swallow brushed with its wings against my window. Spring! Spring! its bird-like chatter seemed to say, and hope sprang up afresh
within my heart.' These verses were part of a poem entitled Spring
which appeared in a Tbilisi paper,
and within a few days was being recited all over Georgia. The Russian authorities,
waking up too late to the true significance of the verses, threatened to send
the audacious bard to Siberia. Later on, Akaki translated into Georgian The Internationale,
the revolutionary hymn of the proletarians, and greeted the 1905 uprising
with militant poems and slogans.
Another important poet of the period was Vazha-Pshavela ( 1861-1915), a
true child of nature, who spent the greater part of his life in a small
village in the Georgian highlands. The majestic mountain scenery, the ways
and customs of the hill folk, their virile, jealous and combative spirit, and
their rich folk-traditions, were important elements in Vazha-Pshavela's
artistic inspiration. In his epics and heroic lays, Vazha-Pshavela
depicts human characters of titanic power, locked in elemental struggle with
supernatural forces, and torn by profound psychological conflicts. With
unerring and often sublime touch, he transmuted the popular idiom of folk
poetry into artistic form. In different vein, he excelled as author of nature
stories, many of which have become children's classics.
The development of the Georgian romantic novel received
powerful stimulus from the work of Alexander Qazbegi
( 1848-93). Qazbegi was a
scion of the princely family which for centuries held sway over the upland
region near the Daryal
Pass and Mount Kazbek, where the
Russian military road passes over the Caucasus
range. Sent to complete his education in Moscow, he fell into bad company, and
returned disillusioned and broken in health to his native mountains. There he
sought refuge from worldly temptations by taking to the life of a simple
shepherd, in which condition he passed seven years. Then followed a period of
success and literary renown in Tbilisi, after
which Qazbegi took to acting and travelled round Georgia as a strolling player.
Overtaken in the end by poverty, he went out of his mind, and died after four
sad years in Tbilisi
asylum. Among his best-known novels are Elguja
and Khevisberi Gocha.
The setting of the former is the Georgian peasant uprising of 1804, in which
the hill clansmen wreaked vengeance on their Russian oppressors. Khevisberi Gocha
is an historical novel set in seventeenth-century Georgia; it exalts the concepts
of liberty, patriotism and moral duty. Gocha, a
patriarchal figure of heroic stature, slays his own son rather than forgive a
betrayal of the national cause, even though that betrayal arose from weakness
and not from any traitorous intent. In his descriptions of the wild and
grandiose scenes of the Caucasus mountains, Qazbegi evokes with masterly power the inner conflict of
the human soul. This tormented genius created many characters which live on
in the minds of the Georgian people, as symbols of the days when free men and
women loved and died among the eagles and the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus. He also wrote several fine dramas. Like virtually
every important Georgian man of letters of those days, he was constantly
harried by the Russian censorship, which prevented some of his best works
from being published during his life time.
Between 1855 and 1894, during the reigns of Alexander II and
III, the revival of Georgian national consciousness proceeded with rapid
strides. The emancipation of the serfs dealt a massive blow to the decaying
feudal order. The growth of capitalism, the spread of education, and the
emergence of a vocal intelligentsia focused attention on the inadequacies of
Tsarist rule, and heightened popular dislike for alien domination. The
appearance of magnificently gifted writers gave the Georgians a new
intellectual self-confidence. All this helped to pave the way for active
participation by the Georgians in the revolutionary struggle which culminated
in the events of 1917.
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52. Sir Bernard
Pares, A History of Russia,
revised edition, London
1947, p. 396.
53. Quoted in the
translation by Venera Urushadze,
in Anthology of Georgian Poetry, 2nd edition, Tbilisi 1958, p. 99.
54. S. Yu. Witte, Vospominaniya (Reminiscences), Vol. I, New
edition, Moscow
1960, pp. 38-41.
55. S. S. Meskhi, Nadserebi
(Collected essays), tom. I, Tbilisi
1903, pp. 211-14.
56. Quoted by V. I.
Kotetishvili, Kartuli
literaturis istoria, XIX
s. (History of Georgian Bterature in the 19th
century), Tbilisi
1959, p. 405.
57. Quoted by V. Gol'tsev, Stat'i i ocherki (Essays and sketches),
Moscow 1958,
pp. 258-59.
58. Gr. Uratadze, Sazogadoebrivi
modzraoba Sakartveloshi
1821-1921 ds. (The Social Movement in Georgia 1821
to 1921), Paris 1939, P. 19.
59. Ia. S. Gogebashvili, Izbrannye
pedagogicheskie sochineniya
(Selected pedagogical writings), Moscow
1954, pp. 13, 18.
60. J.O. Wardrop, The Kingdom
of Georgia, London 1888, pp. 162-63.
61. Translated and
cited by D. M. Lang, in Georgian Studies in Oxford, Oxford Slavonic
Papers, Vol. VI, 1955, p. 126.
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