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Continued
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THE STORM GATHERS: 1894-1904
Tsarism under pressure--Accession of Nicholas
II--'Gri-Gri' Golitsyn--A Georgian anarchist--Populists and Marxists-The
Third Group--Sweated labour--Stalin's revolutionary youth--'Legal Marxism'
and the fighting underground--'Down with autocracy!'--Plehve and the Black
Hundreds
Tsarism under pressure
ALEXANDER III died in 1894. By sheer strength of character
and by refusal to make any concession to the new social forces and political
trends stirring in the Russian empire, Alexander had succeeded in maintaining
some semblance of order and stability. At the same time, he left a legacy of
resentment among both the masses and the élite which was finally to bring
down in ruins autocracy itself. The government had seemed to take pleasure in
humiliating the educated classes. In 1884, the University Statute of
Alexander II had been replaced by another which robbed the universities of
their autonomy. Student clubs and fraternities were banned, on pain of
conscription into the ranks of the army. Political trustworthiness was made a
criterion for the granting of bursaries, while the children of the 'lower
orders' were excluded from secondary schools. The censorship brooded over the
Press, and the law courts fell more and more under government control.
In rural Russia,
the growth of the population resulted in acute land hunger among the
peasantry. Particularly vexatious to the mass of the peasants was the law of
1889 instituting the land captains. These officials were appointed by the
Minister of the Interior from among the poorer gentry, and charged with
supervising every detail of peasant life and activity. The land captains were
justly regarded as agents of a new system of serfdom. They took over the
functions of justices of the peace and controlled the decisions of the
peasant judges and village elders, who ruled their fellows not by common law,
but by communal custom. To deal with rural unrest, the government evolved a
code of 'exceptional' or 'abnormal' law. There were three grades: 'exceptional
protection', 'increased protection' and martial law. Scarcely ever was there
not some province
of Russia under one or
other of these states of emergency.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia's
retarded industrial revolution gathered pace. The growth of industry created
a factory class, the nucleus of a true urban proletariat. Conditions in the
factories run by Russian and foreign entrepreneurs were bad. The
industrialists of Moscow,
where hordes of workpeople poured in from the surrounding countryside, paid
low wages. The workmen were ignorant and clumsy, so that productivity was
low; in fact, it often took three or more persons to carry out tasks which a
trained Western worker could perform single-handed. Between 1882 and 1886,
the enlightened Finance Minister, N. Kh. Bunge, enacted a series of factory
laws designed to suppress the more scandalous forms of exploitation, restrict
the hours worked by children and progressively remove causes of unrest and
discontent. Under pressure from the employers, Bunge was driven from office
on the charge of promoting 'socialism', and there was a return to full-scale laissez-faire.
Children of ten to twelve years of age could now be employed on night work,
while the manufacturers could resort to abuses such as substituting payments
in kind for wages in cash, imposing arbitrary fines, and forcing workers to
buy their supplies from the factory shop.
Such conditions provided a natural breeding ground for
radical agitation. The world of the factory, where masses of men and women
are herded together, and the spirit of disaffection can spread with lightning
speed to produce strikes and civil commotion, is more congenial to
revolutionaries than the rustic environment of the village community. The Populists
of the 1870's had discovered to their cost how difficult it was for the
town-bred intellectual to win the confidence of the muzhik, whose main
aim in life was to turn himself into a petty-bourgeois proprietor rather than
contribute to the consummation of any socialist utopia. The concentration in
urban centres of hosts of underfed and disgruntled factory workers provided a
hotbed, in which the seeds of sedition were not slow to take root.
Accession of Nicholas II
On succeeding to the Russian throne in November 1894,
Nicholas II took over no comfortable heritage. Not devoid of courage and
integrity, Nicholas had been overshadowed all his life by his domineering
father, and had become in many respects vacillating and easily influenced. He
had the fatal knack of following wrong-headed or biased counsel and would
sometimes dismiss loyal ministers in obedience to some whim of his foolish
consort, the Empress Alexandra. In January 1895, he received from the Zemstvo
or provincial assembly of Tver a congratulatory address on his marriage, in
which the hope was expressed that the voice of the people would be listened
to, and that the rule of law would stand above the changing views of the
individual instruments of the supreme power. Under the influence of his mentor
Pobedonostsev, Nicholas in his reply denounced 'senseless dreams as to the
participation of the Zemstvos in the internal affairs of the State', and
reaffirmed his unswerving adherence to the principle of absolute rule.
Pronouncements such as these, far from intimidating the
Russian public, merely exacerbated opinion. Liberals, moderate socialists and
clandestine revolutionaries alike set to work with a will to undermine the
Russian leviathan and topple it from its throne.
The development of a revolutionary situation in
metropolitan Russia
necessarily affected Georgia
and the Caucasus generally. Unrest when it
arrived was bound to assume an acute form in this imperfectly pacified area,
where Orthodox Georgian, Gregorian Armenian and Muslim Tatar had a long
tradition of mutual dislike, though sharing for the most part a common
animosity towards the alien overlord. In Georgia, of course, there had
been many sporadic rebellions against Russian rule, as well as peasant
insurrections against the landed proprietors. At the close of the nineteenth
century, there were many who had witnessed or heard tell of the conspiracy of
1832, the Gurian uprising of 1841, and the Mikava revolt in Mingrelia in
1857. Several leading Georgian writers had been imprisoned for their part in
the student demonstrations at St.
Petersburg in 1861. The movement of national revival
headed by Ilia Chavchavadze, Akaki Tsereteli, Niko Nikoladze and others
naturally fostered an attitude of mind highly critical of Russian autocracy.
'Gri-Gri' Golitsyn
Nicholas II and his advisers brought trouble upon
themselves by a particularly inept choice of Governor-General for the Caucasus. When the Grand Duke Michael retired from the
viceroyalty in 1882, Alexander III down-graded the post and appointed Prince
A. M. Dondukov-Korsakov to be merely Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief
in the Caucasus. Dondukov-Korsakov was
succeeded in 1890 by General S. A. Sheremetev, whose governorship continued
until 1896. Both these administrators were well acquainted with the spirit of
the Caucasian peoples and made themselves popular in Tbilisi by gracious behaviour and lavish
entertainments. Prince Grigory Golitsyn, who was appointed governor-general
in December 1896, was an individual of very different stamp: nicknamed
'Gri-Gri' in St. Petersburg
society, he was a man of the narrowest upbringing and outlook, owing his
appointment to the personal patronage of a member of the imperial family. He
had no understanding of the multiracial structure of Caucasian society and of
the flexible tactics needed to maintain peace and harmony. His one idea was
to russify the Caucasus politically and
culturally, not by persuasion and example, but by the crudest police methods.
Within a few years Golitsyn was as much loathed as his forerunners had been
respected, and the basis of Russian rule in the Caucasus
was fatally undermined.
By the time Golitsyn was appointed, the roots of the
Georgian revolutionary movement were already strong.
A Georgian anarchist
One of the first Georgian professional revolutionaries was
the anarchist Varlam Cherkesov or Cherkezishvili 62 (
1846-1925), a native of Kakheti. As a student at St. Petersburg, he associated with
Karakozov, who made an abortive attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II in
1866. Later he joined the Nechaev group, who planned a nation-wide plot
against the government. Tried with eighty-six others, Cherkesov was sentenced
to forced labour in Siberia. Escaping in
1876, he made his way to Switzerland
and joined in the literary and conspiratorial work of the Russian émigrés
there. However, he parted company with his Russian associates over the issue
of Georgian independence. He became a great friend and disciple of Prince
Kropotkin the anarchist. Cherkesov favoured the anarchist creed because it
promised greater freedom to small nations than did Marxist dictatorship and
centralist rule. From 1903, he and Kropotkin assisted another Georgian
revolutionary, Kamando or Giorgi Gogelia, alias 'K. Orgeiani', to edit one of
the first Russian anarchist papers, Khleb i Volya or Bread and Liberty.
Smuggled into Russia,
this paper had an influential following. Its open advocacy of terrorism later
alarmed Kropotkin, who had relapsed in his old age into a more abstract and
contemplative approach to the revolutionary question. In 1907, Cherkesov
helped to organize a mass petition of the Georgian people against Tsarist
oppression, which was presented, though with scant result, to the
International Peace Conference at The
Hague. Cherkesov and his Dutch wife, Freda, had many
friends in English society and in European political circles. An
uncompromising critic of the doctrines of Marx and Engels, he is excluded
today from the Russian revolutionary pantheon. He died in London at an advanced age.
Populists and Marxists
During the 1870's, the Russian Populist or Narodnik
movement made considerable progress in Georgia, where the Populist dream
of social progress via the destruction of the Tsar's government and the
realisation of the moral and economic potentialities of the peasant class
seemed highly attractive. The Tbilisi Narodnik group held meetings in 1872
which were attended by students and others, who studied forbidden political
tracts, particularly the writings of the Russian Populists. By 1874, the
group counted about a hundred members; they had a small secret printing press
on the bank of the River Liakhvi, in the quarters of a priest named
Samadashvili, who had learnt type-setting at the Tbilisi Theological
Seminary. In 1876, the Georgian Narodniks held a conference at which,
according to police reports of the time, speakers proclaimed the impending
destruction of the autocratic régime, following which everyone would be
equal, and all property would be shared out equally.--Why, the Narodniks
demanded, should the famished masses bow down to kings, and themselves groan
in poverty and squalor? They should get rid of the Tsar and his agents and
laws, and then no one would extort taxes from them any more. Nor should the
priests be believed when they asserted that the Tsar was a protector set over
the people by God. This was a monkish lie inspired by the priests' desire to
curry favour with the government. In furtherance of their programme,
emissaries of the Tbilisi Narodniks visited outlying districts, particularly
in Mingrelia and adjoining areas, and urged the peasantry to hold themselves
in readiness for a general uprising. This movement was, however, soon nipped
in the bud. At the end of 1876, the government arrested over fifty of the
Georgian Narodniks, and many were exiled to Siberia.
Those Narodniks who escaped exile turned from radical
agitation and conspiratorial plotting to more peaceful methods of furthering
their ideals. They briefed advocates to defend peasants who were oppressed by
their squires, and campaigned actively against individual perpetrators of
injustice. In 1881, the Georgian Narodniks started to publish a journal under
the title Imedi (Hope), in which they inveighed against the liberal
bourgeois intelligentsia headed by Ilia Chavchavadze, whose ideas they
regarded as outmoded. The advance of Russia
and Georgia
along the path towards modern capitalism and an industrial society eventually
rendered obsolete the ideology of the Narodniks themselves, who were
increasingly thrust into the background by the more sophisticated adepts of
Marxism. However, many of the Narodnik ideas were subsequently revived by the
Russian and Georgian Socialist-Revolutionary parties. The 'S.-R.s', as they
were called, to distinguish them from the Marxist Social-Democrats or
'S.-D.s', were later to feature prominently as champions of peasant ownership
of the land, and opponents of the townbred Marxists and their schemes of
forced industrialization.
The Third Group
The first systematic Georgian Marxists were a band of
young intellectuals known as the Mesame Dasi (Third Group), which set
out to supersede both the so-called First Group, the movement headed
by Ilia Chavchavadze and his contemporaries, who had led the crusade against
serfdom a generation before, and the liberal Second Group of Giorgi
Tsereteli and Niko Nikoladze. Among the leaders of the Mesame Dasi
were Silibistro (Sylvester) Jibladze, an erstwhile pupil at the Tbilisi
Theological Seminary, expelled for assaulting the Russian rector of that
institution; Nikolai ('Karlo') Chkheidze, who was to become the Menshevik
President of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917; and Noe Zhordania, the future
President of independent Georgia.
In later years, Zhordania published informative memoirs,
which provide a wealth of insight into the mental evolution of Georgian
radical youth of that period. 63 Born
in 1868 near Ozurgeti (now Makharadze) in the south-western Georgian province of Guria, Zhordania came of a well-known
local family of petty gentry. Like Stalin after him, he received his
education at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary; but although destined for the
priesthood, he early lost faith in Christianity and found himself drawn step
by step into the role of a political agitator and reformer. He recalls how,
at the age of sixteen, he chanced on a Russian treatise on natural
philosophy, which convinced him that
'God is Nature herself; as for a white-bearded deity,
seated upon a throne, such a personage simply does not exist'. 'I thought to
myself: If Nature's lord and master is Nature herself, then who is the
rightful lord and master of mankind? The general opinion was that the Tsar
was lord over the people, and that the Tsar was himself appointed by God. But
if God did not exist any more, the Tsar could not be His representative. I
was therefore at a loss to understand by whose command and authority he sat
upon his throne.'
While still a prey to doubt, Zhordania made the
acquaintance of the Tbilisi publisher Zakaria
Chichinadze, who lent him two numbers of Herzen Kolokol (The Bell). The fiery
utterances of that stormy petrel of Russian radicalism dispelled the Georgian
student's last misgivings. 'The Tsar, I now realised, was just as much a
faked-up authority as God, and I looked upon them both with the same
sceptical eyes. Atheism and republicanism commended themselves to me as twin
doctrines of equal validity.' 64
While continuing with his classes at the Tbilisi Seminary,
Zhordania joined various clandestine discussion groups and took a leading
part, together with the future Bolshevik leader Philip Makharadze (
1868-1941), in student strikes and demonstrations against the Russian
management. To begin with, he and his friends came under the influence of the
agrarian socialism of the Narodniks. He read with avidity such books as
Chernyshevsky famous revolutionary novel Chto delat'? (What is to be
done?). But somehow the doctrine of the Narodniks failed to satisfy him.
In Russia, as Zhordania
saw it, rural life revolved round the peasant commune of the mir or obshchina;
in Georgia,
all the emphasis among the peasantry was on individual private proprietorship
of the land. The Narodniks' mission was to preach the gospel of peasant
revolt against the established hierarchy. But the peasant himself was nearly
always a monarchist at heart, a petty bourgeois in mentality, incapable of
response to the revolutionary vision of a new, socialist society. In short,
the achievement of democratic socialism through the agency of a mass of
benighted muzhiks seemed to the young Zhordania a highly dubious
undertaking.
A like dilemma had already helped to produce a split
within the revolutionary movement in metropolitan Russia. In 1879, a secret
conference of the Narodniks held at Voronezh
divided into two factions. One stuck to the time-honoured agrarian programme;
the other, led by G. V. Plekhanov, set out to graft on to the Russian
revolutionary movement the ideas of Western industrial socialism. Plekhanov
soon established himself as the foremost exponent of Marxist philosophy and
sociology in Russia.
He became the teacher of Lenin and of a whole generation of Russian, as well
as of Georgian revolutionaries. Plekhanov foretold that capitalist
industrialism was about to invade Russia and destroy the
patriarchal-feudal attitudes and relationships and the primitive rustic
communes on which the Populists desired to base their socialism. An urban
proletariat would arise in Russia,
which would embark on a struggle for industrial socialism very much on the
Western European pattern. The vision of a peculiarly Slavonic rural socialism
springing straight from pure feudalism and serfdom Plekhanov dismissed as
utopian. The revolutionaries, he urged, must prepare themselves without delay
to organize the urban working class of the future.
These ideas soon spread to the outlying regions of Russia, especially to Georgia. During the 1880's. the
Georgian intelligentsia began to study Marx Das Kapital. The book was
read even by Georgian political prisoners exiled to Siberia.
In 1886, the Georgian journal Teatri (The Theatre) published a
favourable review of the second volume of Marx's great book. Plekhanov's own
writings also became known in Tbilisi,
where they provoked lively discussion among the young intellectuals.
Meanwhile Noe Zhordania ended his studies at the seminary.
Refusing to enter the priesthood, he went instead to Warsaw to attend the veterinary institute
there. One of his fellow students introduced him to the writings of Karl
Kautsky, the German socialist. Kautsky's writings helped to produce a radical
change in Zhordania's outlook. 'I now realized for the first time that
Russian socialism was a thoroughly utopian and reactionary movement, and that
if it should ever be put into operation anywhere, we should be plunged back
into barbarism.' In Tbilisi,
there existed only the rudiments of a working class, its habits and outlook
still coloured by the traditions of the Oriental bazaar world. In Warsaw, on the other
hand, Zhordania found himself in a Western environment, where he could see
with his own eyes something of the life and manners of the industrial working
class of which Marx and Engels had written. Again, the Poles' deep-rooted
antagonism to Russian ways, language and religious dogma, more intense than
anything Zhordania had seen in Georgia, made him see that 'in subjugated
countries there must first of all take place a political revolution;
democracy must be established first, and only afterwards, by the furtherance
of economic progress and by extensive organizational work, can we proceed
towards social revolution'. The failure of the Narodniks to reach any form of
understanding with the inherently passive and bourgeois-minded peasantry made
it imperative to operate first on the more receptive mind of the factory
worker. Once the town worker was indoctrinated with the new ideas, he could himself
propagate them among his rustic cousins in terms they could understand. 65
From Warsaw,
Zhordania kept up a clandestine correspondence with friends in Georgia, such
as Sylvester Jibladze and the proletarian writer Egnate Ninoshvili
(Ingoroqva), whom he also kept supplied with Russian subversive political
literature. With Philip Makharadze, Zhordania formed a socialist group among
the young Georgians living and studying in Warsaw. Other Georgian student groups
operated in the various Russian university centres. In 1892, a conference of
Georgian students was held at Kutaisi in Western Georgia. In the following year, they founded a League
for the Liberation of Georgia, whose programme sought to reconcile the
'bourgeois-nationalist' and the Marxian 'class-struggle' trends in Georgian
progressive thought.
Zhordania returned to Tbilisi in August 1892. After what he had
seen in Poland,
he brought with him the conviction that the Georgians must make common cause
with their Russian and Polish brethren and work towards revolution on an
allRussian scale. By herself, Georgia
could never vanquish the Russian dragon. There was no sense in struggling in
isolation against the common foe--the Tsarist imperial régime.
In December 1892, there took place at Zestafoni in Western
Georgia the first meeting of the so-called Third Group, out of which
was to grow the Georgian Social-Democratic Party. The main organizer of the
conference was Egnate Ninoshvili, the young Georgian radical novelist.
Ninoshvili, whose real name was Egnate Ingoroqva, occupies an important place
in Georgian literature and social thought, as the first truly 'working-class'
writer, in which respect he may be compared with Maxim Gorky in Russia.
Born in 1859 of a poor Gurian peasant family, Ninoshvili worked for a time as
a village schoolmaster. He then moved to Tbilisi and became a type-setter in a
printing house. After many setbacks, he left Tbilisi
for Batumi on the Black
Sea, where he worked as a dock-labourer and then in the
Rothschild oil-drum factory. A contemporary who saw him at work there was
shocked to see this frail young intellectual dragging great planks about the
factory, with blood dripping from his torn fingers. Later on, Ninoshvili was
employed as a clerk at the manganese works at Zestafoni, where the fumes and
dust finally undermined his health. Meanwhile, Ninoshvili had been working at
his remarkable stories, which he used to read aloud to his fellow-workers.
Their publication won him fame, and permitted him at last to enjoy a little
relief from manual labour. But it was too late to save his life. In 1894, he
returned desperately ill to his native village in Guria, where he died in the
same year from tuberculosis.
Ninoshvili's stories give a vivid picture of the life of
the Georgian workers and peasants of that time and of their struggle against
bailiffs, landlords and officials. His historical novel, The Revolt in
Guria, brings to life the events of the Gurian peasant uprising in 1841
directed against the feudal magnates and the Russian occupying power. The
story, Gogia Uishvili, tells of a poor peasant flogged for defending
his wife and children from insult at the hands of the police, and then
committing suicide rather than survive such shameful punishment. Other tales
treat of such themes as a peasant knocked down and run over by a train while
engaged on forced labour on the railway, and of boatmen drowned while
shipping timber over a lake during a storm. The story, A Hero of Our Land,
tells of a parasitical debauchee squire, by name Tariel Mklavadze, who
finally meets his just deserts at the hands of a poor village school-teacher
for whose wife's death this Mklavadze is responsible. It is hard to read
Ninoshvili's stories without a feeling of indignation against the system
which produced such abuses and injustices. There is no doubt that they helped
to produce in public opinion a state of mind receptive to the socialist ideas
which Zhordania and his associates, with the active encouragement of
Ninoshvili himself, were preparing to propagate in Georgia.
At that first gathering of the Mesame Dasi at
Zestafoni in December 1892, the Narodnik element gained the upper hand. The
majority of the group felt unable to share Zhordania's confidence in the
possibility of effecting revolution through the medium of the yet immature
Georgian proletariat, and stuck to the old Populist formula of socialism via
the peasant commune. Undeterred by this, and encouraged by the support of
Ninoshvili and Jibladze, Zhordania wrote a comprehensive exposé of Marxist
economic doctrine, as applied to specifically Georgian conditions. This
document, entitled Economic Progress and the National Question, was
presented to the next meeting of the group at Tbilisi in February 1893, and met this time
with unanimous approval.
'The current evolution of Georgia,'
Zhordania wrote, 'involves two aspects, both of them fundamental, and closely
interdependent --namely the economic and industrial development of the various
regions of Georgia,
together with a growing inequality in the material living standards of the
Georgian people. Both of these trends arise from the stimulus of commercial
and capitalistic enterprise. In the early stages, a nation achieves unity on
the basis of the ideology of self-conscious nationalism; subsequently,
however, that same nation is bound to find itself divided through
self-conscious economic sectional interest. These two trends are born the one
from the other; the first summons the second into being, while the second
contributes to the development of the first. . . . The core of our
present-day life consists in economic growth, which in its turn has given
birth to national unity as well as to social cleavage. Georgia is one and indivisible;
nevertheless, she is divided into two sections in regard to wealth and to
poverty. If on the first point we are united, on the second we are divided.
If on questions relating to our internal way of life we are at loggerheads,
nevertheless we stand united against the external foe. . . . Capitalism has
changed the customs and manners of nations, destroyed the ancient juridical
and political framework, overturned idyllic patriarchal relationships, united
each individual nation as a separate entity, and brought the nations into
contact with one another. On the other hand, that same capitalism has divided
the nation into two factions-rich and poor, landowner and landless peasant,
bourgeois and worker--and implanted social friction, given birth to the class
struggle and summoned the working class into the political arena.'
Zhordania went on to stress that in the new conditions
created by capitalism, it was the town and not the village which led the way
towards economic progress and social change. Once new ideas took root in the
towns, they would soon spread out into the villages of their own accord. Georgia,
he foresaw, was entering on the age of urban capitalism. This did not mean
that the peasant and the village community had no part to play. But it had to
be recognized that even village life was becoming to some extent coloured by
urban influences. The life of the Georgian people generally was being
Europeanized.
This meant that Georgians must think increasingly in terms
of new social philosophies--such as Marxist socialism--which had been born in
the economically more advanced West, but were becoming steadily more relevant
to Georgian conditions.
No sooner had Zhordania's programme been adopted as an
ideological basis for the new revolutionary school in Georgia than its author was
forced to flee the country. The Warsaw
police rounded up many Georgian and Polish students there on suspicion of
subversive activity. Zhordania received warning in time, and sailed from Batumi to Europe in May
1893, some weeks before a warrant arrived for his own arrest. He remained
abroad for over four years, until his return to Georgia in October 1897. He
visited Switzerland, one
of the main refuges for Russian revolutionaries, and met Plekhanov and the
redoubtable Vera Zasulich in Geneva.
In 1895, he went to Paris
and worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale, as well as making the acquaintance
of Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue and other French socialists. Later he went to Stuttgart to visit Karl
Kautsky, who became an enthusiastic supporter of the Georgian socialist
movement. ' Kautsky,' Zhordania recalls, 'made a deep impression on me by his
modesty, simplicity, clarity of thought and great knowledge.' Zhordania also
made the acquaintance of the political adventurer and financier Alexander
Helphand, known as Parvus, who was to play a leading part in international
politics during the World War and the revolutionary period. Early in 1897,
Zhordania left Germany for
London, where he met the Georgian
revolutionary Varlam Cherkesov, whose anarchist views did not entirely
coincide with his own; he also frequented the British Museum.
He sent back to Georgia
favourable reports on the British way of life, some of which were printed in
the Tbilisi journals, and contrasted the
benevolent British policemen with their less kindly counterparts in Russia.
Wherever he went on his travels, Zhordania was seeking for
solutions to Georgia's
many political and social problems, such as the national question, land
tenure, the political role of the urban proletariat and so on. Much of what
he saw was irrelevant to Georgian conditions. The countries of Western Europe (apart from special instances like that
of AlsaceLorraine) were free from foreign domination and the handicap of a
colonial régime. Individual liberty and national independence were, broadly
speaking, assured. Like other visitors before and since, Zhordania found the
structure of English society particularly baffling. Where were the peasants?
He found dukes and aristocratic grands seigneurs, middle-class farmers
who looked and behaved like members of the bourgeoisie, and hordes of
farm-labourers who were merely rustic proletarians. But of true peasants on
the Russian or Georgian model, no sign was to be seen. However, Zhordania's
years in Western Europe had considerable significance for the future
development of socialism in Georgia.
The personal contacts which he made enabled the Georgians to drink direct
from the wellsprings of European socialism, rather than simply imbibing the
muddy puddles of Russian revolutionary ideology. He brought back with him the
conviction that Georgia's political and economic progress could not be
assured without direct contacts with Western European culture, and a break
with the mingled Persian, Turkish and Russian influences in which the people
and even the intelligentsia had for so long stagnated.
Within Georgia,
the young Marxist intellectuals were in the meantime gaining strength and
adherents. They embarked both upon open literary work of a more or less
innocuous nature, and upon the formation of clandestine Marxist study circles
and revolutionary societies among workers and students. When Egnate
Ninoshvili died in 1894, his funeral was turned into a public demonstration
at which Sylvester Jibladze and other leaders of the movement boldly
expounded their social and economic theories and set forth the remedies they
proposed for the ills of Georgia.
The liberal writer Giorgi Tsereteli, prominent as leader of the so-called Meore
Dasi ('Second Group'), declared that a new epoch in Georgian social and
intellectual life had begun, and hailed the birth of this new school of
economic and political thought--the Mesame Dasi or 'Third Group'.
Within a decade, this group was to occupy a dominant position in the
country's whole political and social evolution.
Sweated labour
It may seem strange at first sight that a people so
largely made up of peasants and mountain clansmen, with a small industry and
a comparatively negligible and uneducated proletariat, should be attracted to
Marxian socialism. However, there were several factors which contributed to
this leaning. Following the abolition of serfdom and the break-up of feudal
and patriarchal forms of social organization, Georgia,
along with other regions of the Caucasus,
was undergoing commercial development on an increasing scale. As Lenin put
it, 'The country, sparsely populated in the years after the Reform, inhabited
by highlanders and staying aloof from the development of world economy, aloof
even from history, was becoming a country of oil industrialists, wine
merchants, grain and tobacco manufacturers.' 66 The
rich manganese ore deposits of Chiatura and the oil industry of Baku and
Batumi were being developed, largely by foreign capital. Whereas in 1886-87,
the total value of industrial production in the regions of Tbilisi
and Kutaisi
amounted to little more than 10,000,000 rubles, by 1891-92 the figure had
risen to 32,000,000. In the same short period the number of full-time
industrial workers rose from 12,000 to 23,000, in addition to those employed
on the railway. By 1900, the number of Georgian industrial workers was
reckoned at about 35,000, or up to 50,000 if one includes the railwaymen. It
may be reckoned therefore that industrial workers with their families formed
scarcely a tenth part of the population. But the fact that the workers were
concentrated at key centres of transport and communications gave them an
importance out of all proportion to their numerical strength. Tbilisi was the main junction on the railway connecting
the Caspian coast with the Black Sea. The
railway yards of Tbilisi and the oil-fields of
Baku were the birthplace of the militant
proletariat of Transcaucasia. As Tbilisi and Baku
were also the leading cities of the land, strategic hubs of administration,
education, journalism, publishing and commerce, they were places from which
industrial unrest could be stirred up and socialist propaganda diffused in a
most effective manner.
The conditions of work in the mines and factories of Georgia
themselves fostered dissatisfaction and discontent. A twelve-hour working day
was common. Workers were often forced to clean and repair their machines and
tools in their own time and without extra payment. Many workshops were
situated in ill-ventilated, noisome cellars or overcrowded sheds, without
adequate lighting or heating. Canteen and restroom facilities were
non-existent, and the workers ate and rested beside their machines. All the
classic abuses of old-style capitalism flourished unchecked. Arbitrary fines
were imposed by the management for minor misdemeanours; the factory hooter
was sounded half an hour before the official time in the morning, an hour
late at closing time in the evening; vouchers for monopoly-owned factory
shops were issued in lieu of wages in cash. Pitiable was the lot of the
manganese miners of Chiatura, who worked their seams with primitive
instruments down narrow shafts, in the light of open, unguarded kerosene
lamps, and on a diet of bread and water and maize porridge. Many observers
commented on the squalor prevalent in the Tbilisi match and cigarette factories, the
dye works, tanneries, and weaving mills, where frequent epidemics undermined
the workers' health. With unguarded and ill-maintained machinery and
overtired, underfed workers, accidents were common. The Batumi correspondent of Ilia Chavchavadze's
paper, Iveria, reported in 1890 that 'not a day goes by without one or
two workers being maimed and losing an arm or a foot. The crippled victim is
mercilessly kicked out into the street, like a piece of useless old rubbish.
. . .' 67
The active working life of a Georgian industrial labourer averaged little
more than fifteen years. Trade unions were proscribed, strikes forbidden and
suppressed by the police and militia. The appeal of the 'class struggle' was
reinforced by feelings of national solidarity. Few of the Caucasian
industrial magnates were Georgians. It was therefore all the easier to whip
up hatred of the Armenian merchants and money-lenders, the British, French
and Jewish capitalists, and the Russian officials who, so it was represented,
formed an unholy alliance to exploit the Georgian workers and peasants, and
draw fat dividends from their sweat and tears.
It is true that industrialization affected as yet only a
relatively small proportion of the population and that Georgia was still a predominantly
agricultural and pastoral land. But the agrarian problem itself had
revolutionary potentialities. The reforms of the 1860's, while abolishing
serfdom as an institution, did virtually nothing to improve the peasant's
economic lot. A striking proof of this is the fact that the system of
'temporary obligation'--a form of servitude to which a peasant was subject
pending final settlement of redemption dues in respect of land acquired from
his former lord--was not abolished until as late as 1912, many years later
than in metropolitan Russia. In 1891, the peasants of Eastern Georgia
possessed 134,796 desyatins of land (1 desyatin = 2.7 acres),
whereas the landowners had 961,502; the peasants of Western
Georgia owned 210,779 desyatins, the landowners 815,321.
This was at a time when the peasantry formed 85 per cent. of the population
of Eastern Georgia and 86 per cent. of that
of Western Georgia. The landowning gentry,
on the other hand, made up only 2.89 per cent. and 6.78 per cent. of the
populations of Eastern and Western Georgia
respectively.
However, the largest landlord of all in Georgia was the Russian crown. In
1900, after just a century of occupation, the Russian government had
swallowed up more than half the landed estates in the country. Statistics of
the time reckoned Georgia
to contain some 6,120,000 desyatins of exploitable land, or about
16,524,000 acres. This was distributed as follows:
Russian government: 3,535,544
des.
Landowners: 1,914,214
des.
Peasants: 382,697
des.
Merchants and others: 148,885
des.
Russian imperial family: 116,299
des.
Church domains: 22,361
des.
6,120,000
des.
These figures show that the Russian imperial government
owned some 58 per cent. of the land, the landed proprietors 31 per cent.; of
the remaining 11 per cent., a substantial slice, as will be seen, belonged
personally to individual members of the Russian imperial family. The
peasants, forming some 85 per cent. of the population, had to content
themselves with just over 6 per cent. of the land, and were weighed down into
the bargain by redemption payments, tithes and sundry taxes. They were in
fact caught in a vicious circle. For the most part, they could afford neither
to increase their holdings nor to introduce improved methods of cultivation.
Pauperization of the villages was accompanied by a drift of dispossessed
peasants into the slums of the towns, where they lent a ready ear to
socialist agitators. Nor did the attitude of the Georgian landed gentry do
much to alleviate the position. To quote a presentday Georgian writer by no
means friendly to Communist ideas:
'If our princes and country squires had renounced their
sectional interests in time, and risen to the occasion by making some genuine
response to the general interests of the nation, Marxist ideas could never
have taken root. Our aristocracy prepared the ground for socialism by its own
policy. Its many oppressive acts cleared the way for Socialist propagandists.
In the end, the impoverished squirearchy itself became the backbone of this
movement, in the person of its most eminent representative, N.
Zhordania.' 68
Like many middle-class socialists, however, Zhordania and
his associates failed to realise that the 'class struggle', for the
intensification of which they enthusiastically campaigned, would result in a
holocaust of which they themselves would be among the victims.
Under the promise of an amnesty, Zhordania had returned to
Georgia from Western Europe in 1897. He and his friends soon gained
control of the liberal newspaper Kvali (The Furrow), which became the
regular organ of Georgian 'legal Marxism'. In this paper Zhordania and his
disciples proclaimed that bourgeois capitalism had already taken root in Georgia,
and that the country was thus in the intermediate stage between feudalism and
socialism. They criticized the older generation of Georgian patriots who
concentrated their efforts on a revival of the use of the Georgian language,
on cultivating Georgian literature, and on supporting the Georgian national
Church as a focus for the country's moral and spiritual life. The young
socialist zealots depicted even the great Ilia Chavchavadze as a
dyed-in-the-wool reactionary and criticized the management of such
institutions as the Land Bank of the Nobility, the Society for the Spreading
of Literacy among the Georgians, the National Theatre and the independent,
voluntary Georgian schools as 'bourgeois' or 'aristocratic'. In Zhordania's
view, the idea of a Georgian national revival within the framework of Russian
tsardom was absurd. The salvation of Georgia lay, he believed, in
solidarity between the Georgian and the Russian and international working
classes. Implicit in Zhordania's reasoning-- though such ideas could not be
expressed openly in print--was the conclusion that only after the overthrow
of the Russian imperial system could Georgia hope to achieve national
fulfilment through democratic socialism, in which 'effete elements' such as
princes, priests and capitalists would have no share.
Such views were anathema to Ilia Chavchavadze and the
other leading Georgian nationalists, who were not slow in taking up
Zhordania's challenge. In a series of outspoken articles, published
pseudonymously in 1900, Ilia roundly castigated Zhordania and his followers,
whom he declared to be ignorant, illiterate, conceited and infantile.
Zhordania, in Ilia's view, was nothing but a charlatan, a man claiming to be
'sent into the world to alter the axis on which the globe revolves, and make
heaven and earth turn according to his will and pleasure'. 69 It
is ironic therefore to note that while reeling under Ilia's thunderbolts,
Zhordania, Chkheidze and the other 'legal Marxists' who formed the majority
of the Mesame Dasi group were simultaneously being assailed by the
extremist wing of their own party as lukewarm intellectuals, unable and
unwilling to lead the nation in an active revolutionary campaign against
Tsardom. They were wrong, it was said, to bide their time while limiting
themselves to the peaceful propagation of Marxist ideas, and to ignore the
need for setting up illegal, revolutionary printing presses, instigating
violence, and organizing a massive political upheaval of the working classes
against the Tsar and the bourgeoisie.
Stalin's revolutionary youth
Prominent among the left-wing, extremist minority of the Mesame
Dasi was Lado Ketskhoveli, the future friend and mentor of Stalin.
Expelled with more than eighty other students from the Tbilisi Theological Seminary
in 1894, Ketskhoveli went to Kiev,
where he made contact with clandestine groups of Russian socialists and
became initiated into the underground revolutionary movement. Arrested in
1896, he was sent back to his birthplace to be kept under police surveillance.
He came back to the Caucasus eager to free
the revolutionary movement in his homeland out of its provincial swaddling
clothes by setting up a secret printing press and embarking on terroristic
campaigns. In 1898, another former student from the Tbilisi Theological
Seminary joined the militant wing of the group. His name was Joseph
Jughashvili-the future Stalin. The nineteen-year-old novice was immediately
taken in hand by Ketskhoveli and another thorough-going revolutionary,
Alexander Dsulukidze, and set to work on running Marxist study circles for
the Tbilisi
industrial workers. His task was to lecture on socialism to the tobacco
workers, masons, shoemakers, weavers, printers and the conductors of the
local horse trams. The workers met in small groups, a dozen or a score in
each, in some obscure slumdwelling, while one member watched outside to make
sure that the police had not got wind of what was afoot. In those days,
education was the privilege of the few, so that the young student volunteers were
treated with respect by the workers, often older men, and accepted as mentors
and guides.
It was not long before Ketskhoveli, Dsulukidze and Stalin
constituted a well-organized 'action' group within the Tbilisi
Social-Democratic organization, parting company more and more with Zhordania
and the other moderates. A positive impetus to their movement was provided by
a series of well planned strikes which broke out from 1898 onwards in various
sectors of Georgian industry. In December 1898, the main Tbilisi railway depot came out on strike in
protest against a reduction in wages, the abolition of free railway passes
for railwaymen and their families, and other vexatious measures. The strike
was directed by both the local Georgian socialists and by workers of
revolutionary sympathies who had been deported from Russia; it lasted a week and led
to the arrest of forty-one ringleaders. The following year was marked by
strikes in a Tbilisi tobacco factory, at the
horse tram depot, at the Adelkhanov shoe factory, at the Sharadze printing
works, as well as in Batumi
at the Rothschild oil refinery. The first of May 1899, was celebrated by the
first May Day demonstration to be held in the Caucasus.
Between seventy and eighty railway and industrial workers and socialist
agitators assembled at a spot called Ghrma-Ghele (Deep Ravine) on the
outskirts of Tbilisi.
They were addressed by Lado Ketskhoveli and other orators, who stressed the
significance of May Day as a symbol of the international solidarity of the
toiling masses. The participants took a solemn vow beneath a red flag to
close their ranks and fight with all their strength in the death struggle
against Tsarism and capitalist exploitation.
'Legal Marxism' and the fighting underground
The only leading member of the Mesame Dasi who was
equally at home in the militant underground and in the more respectable world
of 'legal Marxism' was Sylvester Jibladze. The other legal Marxists, such as
Zhordania and Chkheidze, took no direct part in the strikes and other incidents.
Their aloofness provoked accusations of 'opportunism' and faint-heartedness
on the part of the revolutionary agitators, and signs of an impending breach
between the moderate wing, the future Mensheviks, and the militant
revolutionary wing, the future Bolsheviks, were already apparent. The Russian
authorities, curiously enough, showed an amazing degree of toleration towards
Zhordania and his group, who were now in control of the newspaper Kvali,
in the columns of which they preached the forthcoming collapse of capitalism
and the intensification of the class struggle. The Russian Governor-General
of the Caucasus, Prince Golitsyn, was more
concerned with combating Georgian nationalism and 'separatism' than with
preventing the spread of economic doctrines, however potentially explosive.
It is known, indeed, that the Tbilisi censors
received a special circular from St.
Petersburg, directing them to pay exclusive
attention to manifestations of local nationalism. They devoted their
attention to harassing patriotic citizens like Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, men
of substance and respectable liberals, whose demands amounted to little more
than home rule for Georgia,
education in the national language, civic rights, trial by jury, and so on,
within the general pattern of the existing imperial system. The authorities
failed to see that the revolutionary ferment spreading all over Russia
was a greater danger to the régime than any such symptoms of local pride. 'It
was clear that the Censorship Committee was far more afraid of patriotic
verses than of discussions on economics.' 70 This
situation, with its paradoxical features, was aptly summed up by a
contemporary foreign observer who wrote:
'We find in Georgia the same tendency to encourage
Socialism as an antidote to middle-class Constitutionalism and Liberalism as
in Russia itself, where the famous Zubatoff movement of the Moscow workmen
was actually organized under the auspices of the secret police. Prince
Golitsyn and the bureaucrats of the Plehve school were less afraid of Social
Democracy than of the Nationalism of the Georgian nobles and intellectuals,
whose aims were in the direction of constitutional government, and therefore
incompatible with autocracy, of national autonomy which might lead to
separatism and the break-up of the Empire, and of an autocephalous Church,
which naturally aroused the fears of M. Pobiedonostzeff. . . . 71 Prince
Golitsyn hoped to create a breach between the Georgian Nationalist upper
classes and the peasantry, and to introduce a mild milk-and-water Socialism,
sufficient to weaken the autonomists, but docile and friendly to the
authorities.' 72
This strange and uneasy alliance between the Tsarist
gendarmes and the Georgian leaders of the labour movement could not last.
Whenever it came to a clash, it was the workers and not the nobles or
capitalists whom the Cossacks attacked with their guns and whips. From 1900
onwards, Georgia, like the
rest of Russia,
was caught up in the backwash of a worldwide economic depression. This had a
catastrophic effect on Georgia's
budding industrial enterprises. The output of manganese at Chiatura was
drastically curtailed. The export of petroleum products from Batumi was reduced and
the workers put on to short-time working. Many factories in Tbilisi,
Batumi, Kutaisi,
Poti and Chiatura had to close down. In the Tbilisi province alone there were over
4,000 unemployed. To make things worse, the harvest in 1901 was bad. Starving
peasants invaded the towns in search of work, adding to the chaos and misery.
The manufacturers cut wages and laid off staff, which in
turn provoked a wave of strikes and boycotts. In March 1901, the police
rounded up and imprisoned the leaders of the militant socialist wing in Tbilisi, including
Lenin's disciple Victor Kurnatovsky. Among the few who escaped arrest was
young Jughashvili-Stalin, then a clerk at the Tbilisi Observatory, who now
went into hiding. From the 'underground', he played a prominent part in
organizing opposition to the authorities. Many of his comrades being under
arrest, it fell to him to carry through the plans which had been made for a
May Day demonstration far more audacious than the inoffensive gatherings of
1899 and 1900.
'The workers of the whole of Russia,' declared a revolutionary
broadsheet of the time, 'have decided to celebrate the First of May openly--in
the best thoroughfares of the city. They have proudly declared to the
authorities that Cossack whips and sabres, torture by the police and the
gendarmerie hold no terror for them! Friends, let us too join our Russian
comrades! Let us join hands, Georgians, Russians, Armenians; let us gather,
raise the scarlet banner and celebrate our only holiday--the First of May!' 73
The demonstration was fixed for 22 April 1901 (Old Style).
At midday, the sounding of the noon cannon shot from the Tbilisi arsenal gave the signal for action.
The red flag was unfurled on the Soldatsky Bazaar (the present-day Kolkhoz Square),
near the Alexander Garden. The fiery words of revolutionary orators were acclaimed
by some 2,000 workers with cries of 'Down with Autocracy! Up the Republic!
Long live Liberty!'
Before the demonstrators could march on the main boulevards, they were set
upon by police and Cossacks. A savage battle ensued. The Governor of Tbilisi
hastened to the scene. Reinforcements were called in. At the end, fourteen
workers lay dead on the square. Fifty arrests were made. Abortive though it
was, this demonstration was of great significance. Lenin commented in his
paper Iskra (The Spark): 'The event which took place on Sunday 22
April, in Tiflis is of historic import for the entire Caucasus: this day
marks the beginnings of an open revolutionary movement in the Caucasus.' Following the disturbance, the police
rounded up many leading socialist intellectuals whom they had previously
treated with tolerance, including Noe Zhordania, who spent several months in
the Metekhi fortress jail in Tbilisi.
Despite all repressions, the Georgian revolutionary
movement continued to gather momentum. Lado Ketskhoveli proceeded to Baku, the great oil-producing centre in Azerbaijan
on the Caspian, and set up an illegal printing press on which he produced the
first issues of Brdzola (The Struggle), the organ of the Tbilisi
Social-Democratic organization. Ketskhoveli also made Brdzola into a
local mouthpiece of the all-Russian SocialDemocratic movement, adopting the
programme of Lenin's Iskra, with its emphasis on the creation of united
all-Russian party to co-ordinate political agitation and work for the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Ketskhoveli and his assistants printed
broadsheets addressed to the army, inciting the troops to mutiny--'which
manifestoes,' according to a gendarmerie report of the time, 'were very
widely circulated among the troops'. 74 Ketskhoveli
soon afterwards handed over the Baku
secret press to another Georgian revolutionary, T. T. Enukidze who passed it
on in 1904 to his namesake, Abel Enukidze. This Abel Enukidze later became a
close friend of Stalin, who betrayed him and had him shot during the purges
of 1936-37.
On 11 November 1901, the first conference of the Georgian
branch of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party took place in Tbilisi. The personnel
of the branch was virtually identical with that of the Georgian Mesame
Dasi or Third Group, though some members had reservations about
joining any organization with an all-Russian label. The committee of nine
elected at this conference included Stalin and Sylvester Jibladze, though the
latter was soon afterwards arrested and exiled to Siberia.
Stalin was sent to Batumi to stir up
revolutionary activity among the workers at the important Black
Sea port and oil-refinery. It was a promising assignment. The
oil pipe-line between Baku and Batumi had recently been
completed. Batumi
counted over ten large industrial enterprises, including the petroleum
container factories of Rothschild, Mantashev, Nobel and others, two tobacco
factories, an iron foundry, a nail works, a mineral water bottling depot and
several oil loading stations. There were some 11,000 industrial workers, a
motley, polyglot mixture of Christians and Muslims, with some of the riffraff
always to be found in ports and dockyards. Conditions of life were generally
poor. The working day averaged fourteen hours, compulsory overtime bringing
it at times up to sixteen hours. Wages were from sixty kopecks to one ruble
per day. There was obvious scope for socialist agitation. In fact, a small
Russian Social-Democratic committee had functioned in Batumi for a time, until broken up by the
police in 1898. The promotion of the workers' interests was then taken over
by two founder members of Zhordania's Mesame Dasi party, Karlo
Chkheidze and Isidore Ramishvili, 'legal Marxists' who abstained from violent
measures and engaged for the most part in work of an educational nature and
in practical welfare.
When Stalin arrived in Batumi, he was welcomed coldly by Chkheidze
and Ramishvili, who were opposed to clandestine conspiracies and acts of
terrorism. Nothing daunted, Stalin convened a meeting of militant elements
among the local workers and intellectuals, who assembled on New Year's Eve,
1901. A Batumi Social-Democratic organization was formally constituted on the
Leninist model, and eleven workers' circles set up in the principal
factories. Stalin set to work writing leaflets and printing them off on a
primitive hand press in his lodgings. His efforts soon produced results. In
January 1902, a strike at Mantashev's ended in victory for the workers, the
management being forced into important concessions.
In the following month, a strike broke out at Rothschild's
over the dismissal of nearly four hundred workers suspected of subversive
activities. The Military Governor of Kutaisi
arrived on the spot and ordered the arrest of thirty-two ringleaders. Stalin
and his associates organized a mass demonstration of workers, who paraded
through the streets on 8 March 1902, demanding the release of their comrades.
Three hundred arrests were made. When it was learnt that all the detainees
were to be deported from Batumi,
an even larger crowd of demonstrators, including workers from the Rothschild
and Mantashev factories, the docks and the railway yards, in all about 6,000,
set out for the barracks where the prisoners were held. The military
commandant refused to hand over his charges and ordered the workers to
disperse. A company of the 7th Caucasian Rifles were called out to clear the
square, but were met with jeers and stones. Then the prisoners inside managed
to break out and join their comrades outside the barracks. Finally, the
troops opened fire, killing fourteen workers and wounding many others. The
incident was widely reported in the Russian and foreign press.
The Tsarist secret police or Okhrana redoubled its
efforts to track down the leaders of the Batumi revolutionary cell. In the end, they
succeeded in discovering and raiding a meeting of the Batumi revolutionary committee. Stalin and
others were arrested. After spending eighteen months in various Caucasian
jails, Stalin was deported for three years to the Irkutsk
province in eastern Siberia. However, he
promptly made his escape and was back in Tbilisi
early in 1904, ready to play his part in the upheavals which shook the Caucasus during the revolution of 1905. In the
meantime, his comrade Lado Ketskhoveli, who had been seized and confined in
the Metekhi prison at Tbilisi,
was shot dead in his cell by the Tsarist police. Another leading Georgian
Bolshevik and friend of Stalin, Alexander Dsulukidze, died of consumption in
June 1905, at the age of twenty-nine. At the same time, daring and determined
young men were continually reinforcing the revolutionary wing of the
Social-Democratic party in the Caucasus.
Particularly militant were some of the Armenian revolutionaries, who formed
several secret societies, some of a nationalist and others of a socialist
hue. The animosity of the Armenian community, normally reserved for the
Turks, was vented on the Russian government also after 1903, when Prince
Golitsyn confiscated the property of the Armenian national Church and
perpetrated other discriminatory measures against the Armenians, who were
very numerous in Tbilisi
itself. The ineptitude of Tsarist policy in Caucasia
was strikingly exemplified by this decree of confiscation, which was signed
by Tsar Nicholas II at the insistence of Golitsyn and the minister Plehve,
but against the vote of a majority of the imperial council of ministers, who
justly regarded the proposal as iniquitous and fraught with political danger.
The result of this measure was that Stalin's group was reinforced by several
daring Armenian terrorists, including the celebrated TerPetrossian, known as
Kamo. In 1903, Kamo caused a public sensation by scattering socialist leaflets
among the audience at the Tbilisi Armenian theatre. He led the hold-up of the
Tbilisi State Bank in 1907, and followed this up by a series of escapades
which won him an international reputation. 75
Side by side with the revolutionary movement among the
industrial workers, a spontaneous and concerted resistance campaign was
gathering momentum among the villagers. Losing hope in a solution from above
to the problems of land tenure and the general impoverishment of the
countryside, the peasants began to impose their own solution from below. They
would make life unbearable for the local squire by various forms of boycott
and provocation, until he left of his own accord for the nearest city. In
some cases, they would politely escort their former feudal master to the
railway station and bundle him on to the next train for Tbilisi. The movement was particularly
strong in the south-western province
of Guria, where the
small size of the peasant allotments gave rise to an often quoted saying: 'If
I tie up a cow on my bit of land, her tail will be in someone else's!' To
keep themselves and their families, 80 per cent of the Gurian peasantry were
forced to look for permanent or seasonal jobs in the towns, in search of
which they travelled as far afield as Odessa
and Rostov in southern Russia. Guria
was directly affected by the strikes and socialist agitation which were
convulsing nearby Batumi.
It was not mere coincidence that Guria produced the first Georgian
proletarian writer, Egnate Ninoshvili, and the founder of Georgian Marxism,
Noe Zhordania.
In 1902, matters came to a head with a direct challenge
thrown down by the Gurian peasantry to the Russian authorities and to their
own landed proprietors. The Gurian movement began with a series of demands
for reduction of rent, and with protests against the usurpation of peasant
land by the state. The peasants refused to pay taxes to the government or
tithes to the priests. They boycotted unpopular squires as well as all organs
and representatives of the Russian administration. The village headmen were
powerless to keep order, and were in any case overwhelmingly in sympathy with
their stubborn compatriots. The Russians reacted at first with mass arrests and
repressions. They sent troops to round up the ringleaders, who included the
majority of the local village schoolmasters and a number of socialist
agitators who had arrived from the towns. Noe Zhordania, who had just been
released from custody and returned to his native Guria, was rearrested; Noe
Khomeriki the agronomist, future Minister of Agriculture of independent Georgia, was
also taken into custody. The fortresses were filled with captives and many
were sent into Siberian exile.
'Down with autocracy!'
The Cossacks and gendarmes could not be everywhere at
once. The ferment spread throughout the province and into neighbouring
regions as well. Mansions were burnt down. Demonstrations took place, red
flags were waved, and the cry of 'Down with autocracy!' was repeatedly to be
heard. The priests were forbidden by their flock to repeat in church the
prayer for the imperial family, and portraits of Tsar Nicholas II were torn
down and burnt. Bodies of murdered policemen and soldiers were refused church
burial and had to be discreetly interred by the police themselves. In those
centres where the district governor, chief of police, magistrates and other
paraphernalia of Muscovite bureaucracy managed to survive at all, they were
paralysed and ineffective. The people set up their own popular tribunals,
which dealt with all forms of crime and immorality in an effective if
rudimentary fashion. They worked in shifts to maintain the roads and bridges.
Nobles, priests, peasants and shopkeepers all manfully did their turn of
work.
The success of this peasant communism in Guria gave a
sudden stimulus to those Georgian revolutionaries who harked back in their
outlook to the old Narodniks or Populists, and whose programme was based on
agrarian socialism of a utopian variety, with emphasis on peasant ownership
of the land. These agrarian revolutionaries formed the Georgian
Socialist-Federalist Revolutionary Party, allied to the Russian
Social-Revolutionaries or 'S.-R.s'. The leading spirit in this party was
Archil Jorjadze, who convened its first conference at Geneva
in 1904 and brought out a newspaper Sakartvelo or La Géorgie
which appeared at Paris
in Georgian and French. Proscribed in Georgia itself, the fiery
pamphlets of the Social-Revolutionaries were smuggled in, and contributed to
exacerbate the growing tension in the Georgian countryside.
Plehve and the Black Hundreds
All these local developments in Georgia
must, of course, be viewed against the general background of Russia's
general political state. Throughout the empire, the situation was
deteriorating under the vacillating yet oppressive rule of Nicholas II. A key
factor in the situation was the rivalry between the able Minister of Finance,
Count Sergius Witte, and the sinister Von Plehve, Minister of the Interior.
Plehve's recipe for maintaining authority was compounded of pogroms against
the Jews and the forced russification of other national minorities, floggings
and shootings of unruly peasants and factory workers, combined with a
programme of chauvinistic militarism in the Far East,
whereby patriotic zeal would be rallied to the Tsar and attention diverted
from troubles at home. In July 1903, a general strike broke out in the
southern provinces of Russia,
beginning at the great oil city of Baku.
Soon the provinces of Kiev,
Ekaterinoslav, Odessa and Nikolaev were
largely strike-bound, as well as the Georgian governorates of Tbilisi and Kutaisi.
The Tsar sent the Governor-General of the Caucasus,
Prince Golitsyn, a personal telegram, demanding 'the most energetic action'
to put an end to the disorders. In several Georgian towns, strikers engaged
in violent combat with Cossacks and gendarmes, casualties being heavy.
These outbreaks helped to bring about Witte's dismissal
from the Ministry of Finance in August 1903. Plehve's influence now became
dominant. All criticism of the government was suppressed. Students were
forbidden to gather or converse in the streets. Espionage was rampant in
universities and schools, and agents provocateurs were active in industry and
in society. Before any social gathering could be held, permission had to be
sought from the police. Witte declared that such policies would one day bring
about Plehve's assassination. To this, the all-powerful minister retorted
that the country was now on the verge of revolution, and that the one way to
avert it was 'a small victorious war'. In the meantime, he kept up the
pressure on Russia's
minority peoples. By persecuting the Georgian Church
and ignoring the warnings and representations of the moderates among the
Georgian aristocracy, Plehve and Prince Golitsyn between them effectively
rallied all classes of Georgian society against the régime.
When war broke out between Russia
and Japan
in February 1904, the Georgian Social-Democrats immediately set to work to
exploit the new situation. Leaflets were distributed wholesale, denouncing
Tsarist militarism and calling on the workers to rally against the
chauvinistic and ultra-patriotic Russian movement of the 'Black Hundreds',
which the local authorities frequently incited to acts of violence against
the minority communities of the empire.
'During the entire month of February,' we read in a
document of the time, 'there was evidence of the growth of the revolutionary
activity of the Social-Democratic organization, political meetings were held
with increasing frequency, broadsheets with various titles in Russian,
Georgian and Armenian have been scattered about not only in the streets, in
factories, schools, and in the main workshops of the Transcaucasian railways,
but even in churchyards and inside the churches themselves. . . . The local
Social-Democratic organization has renewed its criminal activity among the
workers of the main railway depot, the printing works in the city of Tbilisi, among the
salesmen of various shops, in the Adelkhanov tannery and other factories.
Propaganda is carried on, as before, at gatherings in which people debate
from every angle the burning question of today--Russia's
war against Japan;
in the same spirit, the Russian government is condemned in all the printed
manifestoes. The immediate aim of this propaganda is the desire at all costs
to hold an anti-government demonstration on or about 18 April (Old Style:
i.e. the First of May), to show that the workers censure the government for
pursuing an unnecessary war with Japan, and that they have only one aim:
"Down with autocracy!"' 76
By placing the city under martial law, the authorities in Tbilisi nipped in the
bud the projected May Day procession there. Numerous incidents and strikes
took place in other Georgian centres, leading to clashes with the police and
the military in which a number of workers and peasants lost their lives.
In July 1904, Governor-General Golitsyn, who had been
wounded in a terrorist attack, left the Caucasus
on leave, never to return. On the 28th of that same month, the minister,
Plehve, was assassinated in St. Petersburg by the SocialRevolutionary,
Sazonov. Russia and Caucasia alike were sliding fast down the slope leading
to revolution.
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62. It was
fashionable in the nineteenth century to replace the Georgian name endings in
-shvili and -dze (both meaning 'son of') with the Russian termination in -ov,
e.g. Baratashvili into Baratov, Tsitsishvili into Tsitsianov, and many
others.
63. Noe Zhordania,
Chemi dsarsuli. Mogonebani (My Past. Reminiscences), Paris 1953.
64. Zhordania, Reminiscences,
pp. 11-12.
65. Zhordania, Reminiscences,
p. 26.
66. Quoted by I. Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography, Oxford 1949, P. 20.
67. Quoted by I. A.
Chakhvashvili, The Working-class Movement in Georgia 1870-1904,
Tbilisi 1958, p. 63.
68. A.
Manvelishvili, Sakutreba; Midsis sakitkhi Sakartveloshi (Property; The
Land Question in Georgia),
Paris 1956, P. 42.
69. Ilia
Chavchavadze, Tkhzulebata sruli krebuli (Complete Works), tom. VI, Tbilisi 1956, p. 242.
70. Zhordania, Reminiscences,
p. 48.
71. K. P.
Pobedonostsev ( 1827-1907), Head Procurator of the Russian Holy Synod; a
well-known obscurantist.
72. L. Villari, Fire
and Sword in the Caucasus, London
1906, pp. 75-74.
73. Quoted by L. P.
Beria, On the history of the Bolshevik organigations in Transcaucasia
(English edition), Moscow
1949, p. 33.
74. Beria, On
the history of the Bolshevik organizations in Transcaucasia,
p. 60.
75. See David Shub,
"Kamo--the Legendary Old Bolshevik of the Caucasus",
in Russian Review, Vol. XIX, No. 3, July 1960, pp. 227-47.
76. Chakhvashvili, Rabochee dvizhenie v
Gruzii p. 303.
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