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Continued
from here
ON BORROWED TIME: 1906-17
The Georgians in
the Duma--The Viborg
Declaration--Social-Democrats and Anarchists--Stolypin
and the Second Duma--Murder of Ilia
Chavehavadze--The Georgian Church in crisis--Plight
of the Georgian peasantry--Industrial unrest—War declared, 1914--Mussolini
and the Georgian Socialists—The Georgian Legion--Caucasian battlefields--The
Turks on the defensive--Breakdown of Tsarist Russia--Literature, art and
intellectual life up to 1917
The Georgians in the Duma
THE EVENTS of 1905 showed that the
absolutist régime of Nicholas II had lost the
confidence of large sections of the Russian nation and its subject peoples.
By agreeing to convoke the Duma, the Tsar staved
off disaster in the nick of time. Once the emergency was past, the autocrat
and his entourage did their best to annul the concessions which had been
wrested from them. The promised admission of the nation to participation in
government was reduced to a farce. The few able men who might have steered Russia
towards modern constitutional statehood--notably Witte and Stolypin--were betrayed or undermined by palace intrigue.
The course of policy was influenced disproportionately by grand dukes,
second-rate courtiers and disreputable adventurers like Rasputin. In spite of
undeniable economic progress during the few years which preceded the outbreak
of World War I, the régime was living on borrowed
time.
The year 1906 was marked on the one hand by
reprisals against the demoralized remnants of the revolutionary movement, on
the other, by preparations for the convocation of the First Duma. Count Witte had in a moment of desperation extended
the franchise to virtually all classes and conditions of the people. This
would normally have been expected to produce increased representation for the
extreme left-wing parties. However, the Russian Social-Democrats decided to
boycott the Duma. In metropolitan Russia, therefore, the
Constitutional Democrats or Cadets under P. N. Milyukov
had the upper hand, and only a handful of Russian socialist delegates were
returned, under a variety of party tickets.
The one Social-Democratic regional party to
ignore the boycott and enter wholeheartedly into the election campaign was
that of Georgia,
where the native Mensheviks had ousted Lenin's local henchmen from control of
the party machine. In spite of intimidation and obstruction by the Russian
authorities, the Georgian Social-Democratic candidates were returned almost
everywhere with massive majorities. In the city of Tbilisi, 8,078 electoral votes were cast
for the Social-Democrats, against 4,173 for all other parties combined.
Consequently, 72 out of the 80 members of the Tbilisi electoral college were
Social-Democrats, and they in their turn elected Noe
Zhordania to represent them in the Duma. In the town of Batumi,
the Social-Democrats secured 2,477 votes, against 1,031 for all other
parties, while in Kutaisi
city, the SocialDemocrats got 983 votes against 639
for all others together. All the peasant electors of Kutaisi province turned out to be Social-Democrats,
with the result that the provincial assembly returned as its three nominees three Social-Democrats-Isidore Ramishvili, Dr. Gomarteli
and the advocate Japaridze.
When the First Duma
assembled on 27 April/10 May 1906 at the Tauride Palace
in St. Petersburg,
the well-organized Georgian Social-Democratic faction under Zhordania's leadership immediately assumed a dominant
role in the left-wing opposition. In the Upper House of the Duma, known as the Council of State, a prominent part was
played by the famous writer and public figure Prince Ilia
Chavchavadze, who had been elected by the Georgian
gentry and aristocracy. On his arrival at the Russian capital, Ilia declared that he intended to be not a defender of
sectional interests, but a champion of the Georgian national cause. 'The life
of our people,' he told the newspaper reporters, 'has been turned into a
hell. . . . I shall consistently endeavour while I am here to give a frank,
complete and true picture of the misery of our country.' This promise he
fulfilled on every possible occasion, denouncing what he called 'the
loathsome principles of a narrow-minded, bureaucratic régime,
which believes not that officials and government departments exist for the
people's sake, but rather that the people exist for the sake of the
government departments'. In spite of political differences, Ilia kept in touch with the Georgian deputies in the main
Duma, and joined them in giving voice to strong
criticism of the Tsarist administration in Georgia.
The Viborg Declaration
The radical temper of the First Duma brought it into constant conflict with the Tsar's
government, at the head of which the vigorous Count Witte had been succeeded
by the aged Goremykin, a quavering but wily veteran
of political manoeuvre. Goremykin declared to the Duma that most of its projected reforms were
'inadmissible', whereupon the Duma passed a
unanimous vote of censure on the ministers. In a Western democracy, the
government would have fallen. Since the Russian Duma's
rights did not extend to ousting the Tsar's ministers, a deadlock ensued,
which the Duma tried to solve by an appeal to the
country. The Tsar retaliated by dissolving the Duma
on 8/21 July 1906.
That night, some two hundred members of the
Duma, comprising virtually all the Cadet and Labour
members, proceeded over the border into the
autonomous Grand-Duchy of Finland
and assembled at the town of Viborg. With the active
participation of Zhordania, the Georgian leader of
the Menshevik faction, the famous Viborg
Declaration was drawn up, in which the country was urged to embark on a
campaign of passive resistance to the government, and refuse to pay taxes, or
send recruits to the army, until the Tsar reconvened the Duma.
Nothing had been done to organize any response from the nation as a whole,
and the appeal fell flat. The signatories of the Declaration were later
proscribed by the régime, forbidden to stand for
election to subsequent Dumas, and sentenced when caught to terms of
imprisonment. Zhordania and Isidore
Ramishvili, who were outstanding among the Georgian
Social-Democrats, had to go into hiding and were debarred from active
participation in public life.
Social-Democrats
and Anarchists
Another interesting political development
of the year 1906 was a determined but short-lived attempt by Kropotkinite Anarchists to win control of the
revolutionary movement in Georgia.
From 25 March to 2 July 1906, there appeared at Tbilisi a 'legal Anarchist' weekly called Nobati ( The
Tocsin), edited and in large part written by M. G. (Mikhako)
Tsereteli (b. 1878), who used the pseudonym Bâton. Among the journal's contributors were Prince Kropotkin himself, Kamando
Gogelia, and the veteran Georgian revolutionary Varlam Cherkesov (Cherkezishvili). The Georgian Anarchists launched a vigorous
critique of Marxism and the ideological basis of SocialDemocracy;
they declared their opposition to state socialism and government monopoly of
the means of production. 'The State and the People,' they wrote, 'are two
perpetual and untiring foes.' 87 They
assailed the notion of dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, they would
have nothing to do with dictatorship of any political colour, identifying it
with slavery. They preached renunciation of private property, and the ideals
of 'voluntary co-operation' in both urban industry and rural life. In one of
the last numbers of the paper, Mikhako Tsereteli condemned the Marxists in strong terms, saying:
'For them, the social revolution must be
brought about by the agency of the State, within the frontiers of the State
and with the aid of the State; but for us, it must be brought about outside
the State, in opposition to the State, with the aid of completely new social
forces and principles. We shall see which doctrine is the truer and the more
effectual.' 88
The Georgian Anarchists lacked a broadly
based popular organization, and could not compete with the dominant SocialDemocrats. Before the Kropotkinite
movement faded out, however, leading Georgian Marxists spent much energy in
combating the Anarchist ideology, which they considered especially
pernicious. Stalin himself wrote at the time:
'Marxism and Anarchism are built up on
entirely different principles, in spite of the fact that both come into the
arena of the struggle under the flag of Socialism. The cornerstone of
Anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to its
tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the masses, the
collective body. According to the tenets of Anarchism the emancipation of the
masses is impossible until the individual is emancipated. Accordingly its
slogan is: "Everything for the individual." The cornerstone of
Marxism, however, is the masses, whose emancipation, according to the
Marxist view, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the
individual. That is to say, according to the tenets of Marxism, the
emancipation of the individual is impossible until the masses are
emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: "Everything for the
masses."' 89
Stolypin and the Second Duma
Meanwhile, preparations were going on for
the convocation of the Second Duma. The venerable Goremykin was succeeded as Prime Minister by the vigorous
and ruthless Peter Stolypin. The new premier set
himself on the one hand to crush revolution throughout the Russian Empire,
and on the other, to carry through economic reforms which he regarded as
overdue. Stolypin's field courts-martial shot or
strung up unruly peasants by the score. At the same time, he launched a
determined attack on the archaic system of collective ownership of land by
village communes, and did everything possible to favour the emergence of a
class of yeoman farmer composed of 'the sober and the strong'. Stolypin soon found himself between two fires. The Court
considered his ideas too radical, while the Social-Democrats and
Social-Revolutionaries belaboured Stolypin for
encouraging the loathsome kulaks (in Russian, literally 'fists'), as
the wealthier peasant farmers were nicknamed.
Stolypin did everything
possible to influence the Duma elections. Large
categories of voters were arbitrarily struck off the register, while the
police held up ballot papers, fixed impossible dates for polling, and did all
they could to discourage unreliable elements like Jews and Socialists from
voting. The result of this was the opposite from that intended by the régime. The exclusion of the liberals and radicals who
had signed the Viborg Declaration simply brought
about the election of downright revolutionaries, many of them former
political prisoners. The Social-Democrats withdrew their boycott of the Duma, with the result that the Labour group in the Second
Duma outnumbered the Constitutional Democrats
(Cadets) who had dominated the First. The Social-Democrats alone won
fifty-four seats. In Georgia,
this party was even more victorious in the elections to the Second Duma than in those for the First. The Tbilisi province
returned Archil Japaridze,
Katsiashvili, and Jugheli;
Kutaisi province elected Irakli Tsereteli,
Lomtatidze and Gerasime Makharadze; the Batumi district returned Konstantine Kandelaki,
subsequently Minister of Finance in the Georgian Republic; the city of
Tbilisi elected Zurabishvili (Zurabov).
The second Duma
met in St. Petersburg
on 20 February/5 March 1907. The new Georgian deputies worthily filled the
places of their proscribed comrades of the First Duma.
Irakli Tsereteli proved
himself an accomplished orator and parliamentary tactician, and was elected
leader of the Duma's Social-Democratic faction,
Russian and Georgian deputies alike acknowledging his leadership.
While the Second Duma
was in session, the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Party
took place in London
in May 1907. The Russian delegates were mainly Bolsheviks, but the Georgian
representatives, headed by Noe Zhordania
(under the pseudonym Castro), were solidly Menshevik.
The only exception was Stalin who arrived, as he had done at the previous
Congress, with forged credentials from a nonexistent Social-Democratic branch
in southern Georgia.
After some dispute, he was admitted to the Congress as an observer, but
without vote. The Menshevik block vote of the Georgian delegation was a sore
trial to Lenin and his followers, who had great difficulty in getting their
resolutions carried. Zhordania relates in his
memoirs that after one meeting, Lenin came up to him in the street and said:
'Look here, Castro--Why don't you Georgians
cease meddling in Russia's
affairs? You don't understand our people, their psychology, their ways and
customs. If only you would leave us alone to sort out our affairs in our own
way, we could soon get them straight. Just agree to accept autonomy for
yourselves, and do what and how you like in Georgia. We shall not bother you
so long as you do not bother us.'
Such a suggestion, coming from the leading
champion of international working-class solidarity, surprised Zhordania greatly. 90 In
1921, when the Russian comrades felt themselves secure, they were to prove
less eager to tolerate the independent ideas of their little brothers in Georgia.
Back in St. Petersburg, the Tsar's government was
finding the Second Duma as intractable as the
First. Unable to silence the tribunes of the people, Stolypin
staged a political coup. The Social-Democrats were accused of plotting
against the régime, evidence of 'armed conspiracy'
being fabricated by agents provocateurs.
Stolypin demanded the exclusion of the
Social-Democrats from the Duma and the surrender of
twelve deputies to the police. The Duma refused,
whereupon the government dissolved it in the early morning of 16 June 1907.
All those Social-Democratic deputies who could be tracked down were arrested.
Thirty-one of them were sentenced to four or five years' exile or hard labour
in Siberia. Two of the Georgian deputies, Archil Japaridze and Lomtatidze, died in prison, though their comrade Irakli Tsereteli survived to
play an outstanding role in the events of 1917. An imperial manifesto was
issued, decreeing sweeping changes in the electoral law. The lists of
'electors' whose duty it was to select the actual members of the Duma were so manipulated that the country gentry
exercised complete predominance in rural areas. Central
Asia was disfranchized entirely. The
representation of Poland
was reduced from thirty-six to fourteen seats. In other parts of the Empire
where a non-Russian population was in the majority, similar measures were
taken to secure the return of Cossacks or Russian colonists. The number of
deputies allotted to Georgia
was reduced to three.
While the First and Second Dumas were in
session, General Alikhanov and his punitive
expeditions reduced the Georgian countryside to some semblance of obedience,
although strikes and sporadic unrest continued throughout 1906 and 1907. The
Caucasian revolutionary organizations were forced underground. The Russians
resumed their old campaign against Georgian middle-class nationalism and
upper-class 'separatism'. This campaign was not without its lighter side.
Thus, in February 1907, the poet Akaki Tsereteli was arrested and conducted to the Metekhi Prison in Tbilisi
for publishing a lampoon making fun of the governor, Rausch von Traubenberg. Within hours, news of the incident reached
every corner of Georgia.
A unanimous outcry arose from all classes of society. The next day, the
viceroy was compelled to set the poet free.
Murder of Ilia Chavchavadze
Far more serious and tragic was the fate of
Georgia's
other great man of letters, Ilia Chavchavadze. After his service in the Upper House of the
first two Russian Dumas, Ilia returned to Georgia
in the summer of 1907. On 28 August, he was waylaid and murdered by a gang of
assassins close to his country home at Saguramo,
near Mtskheta. His funeral was a national event.
Huge crowds followed the cortège from Saguramo to Tbilisi. Akaki Tsereteli, a lifelong
friend of Ilia, rose from a bed of sickness to
pronounce a sincere and touching funeral oration in which he underlined Ilia's inestimable contribution to the revival of the
Georgian nation, and held him up as an example to all future generations. The
Tsarist authorities hushed up the affair as much as they could. It was never
established whether the motive for Ilia's murder
was robbery, political feud or police provocation. At the time, it was often
held that the crime was the work of Georgian revolutionaries, whose methods Ilia had condemned. During World War II, some wretched
old man is said to have confessed to being employed by the Russian
gendarmerie chiefs to lead the attack on Ilia. A
belated official investigation was conducted by the Soviet authorities and
the blame laid at the door of the Tsarist
administration. A handsome obelisk now marks the spot where Ilia fell.
Whatever the truth concerning Ilia's murder, the summer of 1907 was marked by a revival
of Bolshevik terrorism in the Caucasus.
Lenin was determined not to let his organization fade away for lack of funds,
and found banditry a useful adjunct to revolutionary campaigning. On 23 June
1907, there took place the famous raid on the Tbilisi State Bank, led by the
resourceful Armenian Kamo (Ter-Petrossian).
The Tbilisi adventure yielded a quarter of a
million rubles, which were duly conveyed to
Bolshevik headquarters in Western Europe.
The notes were in large denominations, and their numbers were circulated to
banks all over the world. As a result, several leading Bolsheviks, including
Litvinov, the future Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, were arrested
while trying to change the money. A great uproar ensued among the various
Social-Democratic factions. Trotsky, then a Menshevik, joined with other
rivals of Lenin in accusing the Master of reducing socialism to the level of
brigandage and highway robbery. Many of Lenin's critics later became
Bolshevik Commissars, and forgot the scruples which they evinced in these
early days. The Master's real fault lay in his possessing greater realism and
less cant than most of his disciples.
The Georgian Church in crisis
While the Russian police were busy
protecting their banks and convoys from Bolshevik bandits, fresh trouble
arose from a different quarter. The Georgian Church,
which had long been brooding over its wrongs, became more and more vociferous
in demanding restoration of its ancient free or 'autocephalous' status, of
which it had been arbitrarily deprived by the Russian government in 1811. The
Georgian bishops pointed out that under the Russian exarchs
sent down from St. Petersburg to run Georgia's ecclesiastical affairs, the
Georgian Church had been robbed of some 140 million rubles'
worth of property and estates; ancient icons had been stripped of precious
gems, sold to line the pockets of Russian governors and army commanders;
unique Gospel manuscripts had been ripped from their jewelled bindings and
left to decay; Church schools had been closed down, and the use of Georgian
in the liturgy discouraged; twenty episcopal sees
lay vacant and seven hundred and forty parishes were without pastors. The
conference of Georgian clergy which met at Tbilisi in 1905 had been broken up by
police and troops. Later, many leading spiritual leaders who protested
against the dictates of the St. Petersburg Synod were subjected to
disciplinary action and downright persecution. Bishop Kyrion
was removed from his diocese, stripped of his episcopal
title and deported to Russia,
where he was shut up in a cell in Tambov
province. Another eminent churchman, Archimandrite Ambrosius,
was banned from celebrating the liturgy and confined in the Troitsky Monastery at Ryazan.
Matters reached a head in 1908, when the
Russian Exarch of Georgia, Archbishop Nikon, was
murdered on 28 May at his residence in Tbilisi
by unidentified assassins. Nikon was said to sympathize with the cause of the
Georgian Church,
and his murderers were alleged to be hooligans from the Russian extremist
Black-Hundred gangs who feared that Nikon would intercede for the Georgian Church
with the authorities in St.
Petersburg. On the other hand, the chauvinists of
the Russian Patriotic League, led by the fanatical Fathers I. Vostorgov and S. Gorodtsev,
accused Georgian clerics of being behind the crime, and great bitterness was
engendered on all sides.
These events aroused world-wide comment
among churchmen of all denominations, who were virtually unanimous in
championing the Georgians against their Russian persecutors. The British
Bishop of Gibraltar intervened with the Russian Synod on behalf of the Georgian Church. The Papacy, which had
established a Roman Catholic bishopric at Tbilisi as early as 1329 and counted many
Georgian Catholic converts, also lent support to the Georgians. In 1910,
Father Michael Tamarati (Tamarashvili),
a Georgian Catholic priest, brought out in Rome a detailed and well
documented history of the Georgian Church, written in French, in which he
showed how this important branch of Christendom, which neither Arabs,
Mongols, Turks nor Persians could exterminate, had finally been subjugated
and crushed by Russian fellow-Christians of the Holy Orthodox Church. The
Russian Embassy in Rome
bought up and destroyed as many copies of this important and revealing work
as it could. The dispute dragged on indecisively for years, until the
outbreak of World War I relegated it temporarily to the background.
The dissolution of the Second Duma in 1907 evoked a general mood of lassitude and gloom
in Russian political circles. The elections to the Third Duma
were rigged by agents of the government and produced a gratifying swing to
the Right. This time, Georgia
was permitted to return three deputies only. The nobility elected Prince Sharvashidze, while the popular vote returned Nikolai (Karlo) Chkheidze (d. 1926), the
future leader of the Petrograd Soviet, and the young lawyer Evgeni Gegechkori ( 1882-1954), future Foreign Minister of the independent Georgian Republic. The witty and jovial Chkheidze soon became the main spokesman of the twenty
Social-Democrats in the Third Duma. The polished
but vain Gegechkori also made his mark, once
inviting the Tsar's ministers from the floor of the Duma
to change the police spy stationed within the building 'because he had got
tired of the man's face'. The Fourth Duma, which
sat from 1912 until the Revolution of 1917, was of a similar complexion to
the Third. Gegechkori was replaced by Akaki Chkhenkeli, another
Menshevik who was head of the Transcaucasian
government of 1918 and later Georgian Minister in Paris; Prince Sharvashidze
was succeeded by Prince V. Gelovani, a member of
the Georgian Federalist party, who perished on the Caucasian Front in 1915.
Plight of the
Georgian peasantry
One of the few issues on which the Georgian
Social-Democrats and the Russian Viceroy of the Caucasus
were agreed was the need to alleviate the agrarian problem and relieve the
depressed state of the Georgian peasantry. Particularly unfortunate was the
lot of a category of peasant known as khizani,
originally free migrant peasants who settled on a lord's estates for a period
and entered into share-cropping and other contractual relationships with the
local squire. The liberation of the peasantry had been effected
in 1864 without sufficient regard for the interests of the khizani, who were passed over in the general
scramble for land. Unable to find enough work in Georgia's nascent industry, the khizani together with the former domestic serf
class were reduced in course of time to a pitiable condition. The situation
of the remainder of the peasantry was, as has previously been noted, far from
enviable. Lack of capital and of education prevented any improvement in
farming techniques. Too often, the agricultural worker would be seen year
after year turning the same shallow furrow in dry and stony ground with a
primitive wooden hand-plough. Many were still vainly trying to pay off the
redemption dues with which they had been saddled by the Russian government
nearly half a century earlier, in consideration for the land which they or
their fathers had acquired from their former feudal lords.
In 1912, after agitation by the Georgian
deputies in the Duma and much discussion between
Count VorontsovDashkov and the government at St. Petersburg, the
residual redemption payments were at last written off. The status of
'temporary obligation', or semi-serfdom, in which peasants had remained
pending full payment of these instalments, was formally abolished. This long
overdue reform could not, however, solve the land hunger of the Georgian
peasantry. So long as the Russian Crown, the grand dukes, various foreign concessionnaires, Russian and German colonists, together
with the native aristocracy, clung to the lion's share of the land, the
grievances of the Georgian peasantry were bound to remain alive. It must be
admitted that the estates cultivated by the more enterprising landowners and
foreign colonists were precisely those which yielded the best crops and gave
the best promise for the country's future prosperity. It was difficult for
any responsible government lightly to hand over well-run plantations,
vineyards and arable land to an impoverished and backward peasantry whose
methods of farming did not rise above bare subsistence level and provided no
surplus for export or for the provisioning of urban centres. Such was the
unresolved dilemma which faced Georgian society and the Russian
administration until 1917, when revolution imposed its own radical solutions.
Industrial unrest
The period under review was also marked by
renewed unrest in Georgian industry. A number of strikes and demonstrations
took place in Georgia in
1912, in protest at the massacre of workers on the Lena goldfields in Siberia. In Georgian mining centres, justifiable
agitation for better working conditions was rife. In 1913, strikes at Chiatura brought the output of manganese to a standstill
for weeks at a time, and provoked armed intervention by the Russian
authorities. The port workers at Poti and Batumi came out in
sympathy. This massive demonstration of working-class solidarity forced the
proprietors of the mines to make substantial concessions.
Click here   for the detailed administrative map of the South Caucasus, as of 1913.
War declared, 1914
On 1 August 1914, Imperial Germany declared
war on Russia.
The people of the Caucasus, who realized
that sooner or later Ottoman Turkey would become embroiled in the struggle,
greeted the news with markedly divergent emotions. Russia's
Muslim subjects, exempt as they were from military service, remained passive,
though many hoped for Russia's
defeat by the Central Powers. The Armenians on the other hand looked forward
eagerly to the annihilation of the hated Turk and the establishment of an
independent Greater Armenia carved out of the Ottoman Empire and Russian
Transcaucasia. The Tsar and his government did everything possible to
encourage the Armenians in their wishful thinking. In response to an appeal
from the Armenian Catholicos-Patriarch, Nicholas II
replied: 'Tell your flock, Holy Father, that a most brilliant future awaits
the Armenians.' In the event, as we know, World War I turned out to be
catastrophic for the Armenian people, whose fate became a disgrace to the
conscience of the world.
The reaction of the Georgians to the
outbreak of war was mixed. As Christians, many shared the Armenians' fear and
loathing of the Turk and were happy to support the Russian war effort.
Others, including extremists both on the nationalist wing and among the
revolutionary groups, hoped for a Russian defeat at the hands of Germany and Austria, to be followed
eventually by a new order for the peoples of the Tsarist empire.
Mussolini and the Georgian Socialists
The Georgian Menshevik leader Noe Zhordania was in Western Europe at the outbreak of war. Hastening back
to Russia, he stopped at Milan where he had an
interview with Benito Mussolini, then editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti
and a militant foe of Austro-German imperialism. The two socialist leaders
had a frank exchange of views on the likely outcome of the war and the
correct policy for Social-Democrats to adopt towards it. Zhordania
told Mussolini that most of his colleagues prayed for a repetition of the
military débâcle which had precipitated the Russian
revolution of 1905, and doubted whether the Tsarist régime,
undermined by revolutionary agitation among the masses, the opposition of
liberals in the Duma and the corruption and
effeteness of the Court, could stand up to the might of the Kaiser and the
Austrian emperor. Mussolini listened for a time and then burst out: 'We shall
not permit Germany to
crush France!'
The Italian socialist made it clear to Zhordania
that however much Germany
might appear to the Tsar's subjects in the guise of a liberator,
many socialists of Western Europe could not reconcile themselves to the
prospect of republican France
and democratic Belgium and
Britain
being trampled underfoot by the Prussian jackboot.
Pondering on this paradox, Zhordania returned to Russia. He found the
Social-Democrats, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, strongly Germanophile in mood and quite uninterested in the fate
of the Western democracies. Some Russian and Georgian socialists genuinely
regarded Imperial Germany as more 'progressive' than France, pointing to the
superior state of German industry, the excellent organization of the German
Trade Union movement and the strength of the German SocialDemocratic
party, compared with all of which France appeared a stagnant preserve of
backward bourgeoisie. Zhordania, who had lived for
some years in France and England,
parted company on this issue with some of his Menshevik colleagues, notably Noe Ramishvili and Noe Khomeriki, and lively
arguments in Georgian socialist circles continued for some time. The Russian
Bolshevik party and its Georgian adherents adopted from the first a strongly
anti-war line. Under Lenin's direction, the small band of Georgian Bolsheviks
carried on an active policy of propaganda and sabotage in the Caucasus. In 1915, a leading Georgian Bolshevik, Prokopi (Alesha) Japaridze ( 1880-1918), was
arrested and exiled to Siberia. However,
other Georgian Bolsheviks carried on the struggle, fomenting mutinies among
the Russian troops on the Caucasus front and
strikes on the railways and in the factories.
The Georgian Legion
Many Georgian émigrés and students in Western Europe also seized the chance to strike a blow
against the Tsarist régime. In 1914, a Governing
Committee of Independent Georgia was formed under the patronage of the German
government, with branches in Austro-Hungary and in Turkey. The chairman of this committee
was Petre Surguladze;
other members included Prince Giorgi Machabeli, Mikhako Tsereteli (who had given up Kropotkinite
Anarchism in favour of extreme Georgian nationalism), Leo and Giorgi Kereselidze, and the
Muslim Georgian Kartsivadze (otherwise known as Meliton or Osman Bey). In 1915, a German Caucasus expedition was formed,
incorporating a body of Georgian volunteers, some seven hundred strong, known
as the Georgian Legion. The Legion's first commander was Lieutenant Horst Schliephack, later succeeded by Count F. W. von der Schulenburg, a former German Vice-Consul at Tbilisi and an expert on
Georgian affairs, who also acted as German liaison officer with the Turkish
Third Army. In January 1916, a star-shaped badge, the Order of Queen Tamar,
was introduced for issue to military men and civilians who distinguished
themselves on behalf of the independence of Georgia. During the RussoTurkish campaign of 1916-17, the Georgian Legion was
stationed in the mountains east of Tirebolu, on the
banks of the Harshit river not far from the Black Sea. The headquarters of the Georgian Committee
at that time were in Samsun,
and later in Kerasunt. The legion was officially
disbanded in April 1917, after relations between the German-backed Georgian
Committee and the Turkish government had become strained. Earlier, Mikhako Tsereteli had been
landed in Georgia
from a German submarine with instructions to make contact with the leaders of
the Georgian Social-Democratic movement and to foment unrest and rebellion
within the country. A secret meeting between Mikhako
Tsereteli and Noe Zhordania took place in Kutaisi, but Zhordania
refused to have anything to do with a movement which he foresaw might have
disastrous effects for the Georgian people.
Order of Queen Tamar introduced for
issue to the personnel of the Georgian Legion.
Caucasian battlefields
Though secondary to the main battlefields
on Russia's western
frontier, the Caucasus front played an
important role in World War I, as it had in the earlier Russo-Turkish wars of
1828-29, of 1853-55 and of 1877-78. Far greater bodies of manpower were
deployed than on those earlier occasions. Poor communications combined with a
severe climate made large-scale operations highly arduous, especially as
neither the Russian nor the Turkish Army was up to date in its technical
organization. In 1914, railway communications on the Russian side of the
frontier ended at Sari-Kamish, some forty miles
southwest of Kars
and fifteen from the Turkish border. On the Ottoman side, six hundred miles
of rough roads and tracks separated the armies operating in the Erzurum area from the nearest railhead at Ankara or the nearest station on the Baghdad
railway north-west of Adana.
During September and October 1914, the Turkish Third Army, 100,000 strong,
assembled in the vicinity of Erzurum.
Hostilities began late in October, when Turkey
opened the campaign by a naval bombardment of Russian ports on the Black Sea. Liman von Sanders,
head of the German military mission in Turkey,
proposed landing a Turkish force at Odessa.
The Turks, however, preferred to concentrate on regaining the territory lost
to Russia in 1877-78,
notably the great fortresses of Kars
and Ardahan.
The Turkish supreme commander and War
Minister was Enver Pasha, who conceived a grand
strategy which would, he believed, open the way to the expulsion of Russia from the entire Caucasus.
His first objective was the Russian railhead at Sari-Kamish.
In spite of the lateness of the season and the remonstrances
of his advisers, Enver insisted on launching the
attack without delay. The routes by which his army was to advance were
snow-covered mountain tracks, and the bulk of the Turkish transport and
artillery had to be left behind. Yet such was the endurance and courage of
the ill-fed and badly equipped Turkish soldiers that they almost achieved the
impossible. While the main Russian force defending SariKamish
was engaged with the Turkish 11th Corps, the 10th Corps further to the north
made to cut the railway between Sari-Kamish and Kars. At the northern
end of the front, a Turkish detachment from Trebizond
drove the Russians out of Ardahan.
Click here  for the detailed map of the Caucasus battlefields, as of XII.1914 - I.1915.
The Turks on the defensive
The Russian commander, Myshlaevsky,
was in a panic and talked wildly of evacuating Transcaucasia altogether and
withdrawing the Russian Army north of the Caucasus
range. His Chief of Staff, General Yudenich, saved
the situation. He mustered his forces for a counter-attack, defeated and
virtually destroyed the Turkish 9th and 10th Corps and then repulsed the 11th
Corps from its advanced position. The losses of the Turkish Third Army are
said to have amounted to 85 per cent of its strength. In spite of Yudenich's brilliant victory, this Turkish incursion into
Caucasia caused great alarm in St. Petersburg
and led to agitation for Anglo-French intervention against Turkey. This in turn helped to
bring about the illstarred Gallipoli expedition.
During the following year, the Caucasian
front reverted to secondary importance in the global strategy of World War I.
While the Turks' attention was centred on the Dardanelles,
they also built up their shattered Third Army facing the Russian border. On
the other side, fresh units were recruited to strengthen the Russian front
line. In April 1915, Turkish units supported by Muslim Georgian Laz and Atchar irregulars
attempted a raid on the Black Sea port
of Batumi, but were
repulsed. To the south, the Russians advanced their left into Turkish Armenia
and occupied the historic town of Van.
The Russians were enthusiastically seconded by detachments of Armenian
irregulars, while the Turks wreaked terrible vengeance on the Armenians
dwelling within the Ottoman borders. The same year, Vorontsov-Dashkov
sent General Lyakhov to slaughter the Muslim
Georgian Laz and Atchars
as a punishment for their pro-Turkish attitude. Lyakhov
ravaged and depopulated the entire Chorokhi valley
up to Artvin, in the vicinity of which only 7,000
out of a previous population of 52,000 Georgian Muslims were left alive.
Count Vorontsov-Dashkov,
who had reached the age of seventy-eight, was succeeded as viceroy in
September 1915 by the former commander-in-chief on Russia's western front, the Grand
Duke Nicholas. The arrival of the new viceroy soon brought spectacular
results. In February 1916 the Russians captured the great citadel and supply
base of Erzurum,
from which the Turks retreated in disorder with heavy losses in men and
material. Two months later, the Russians occupied the Turkish port of Trebizond
(Trabzon) on the Black
Sea. The Turkish High Command were just preparing for a
counteroffensive when Nicholas launched another massive blow at the remains
of their Third Army, which was completely routed. In July 1916 the Russians
occupied Erzinjan--about the furthest point within
the Turkish dominions in Anatolia ever
captured by a Russian army. A new Turkish force, the Second Army, attacked
the Russians from the south-west in the Lake Van
sector, but was firmly held. This in turn helped to bring about the illstarred Gallipoli expedition.
Click here  and here 
for the detailed maps
of the Caucasus battlefields, as of II.1915
-VIII.1915.
During the winter of 1916-17 no fresh
developments of note occurred. The appalling climatic conditions in those
windswept and snowbound uplands of Armenia
and eastern Anatolia caused terrible
suffering to both sides. The transport of troops and supplies was attended by
grave difficulties. The Russians strove to extend their railway from Sari-Kamish to Erzurum,
but their railhead was still some distance short of that city on the outbreak
of the March Revolution. On the southern flank, they hoped to link up with
the British in Mesopotamia. Plans were
worked out for a Russian thrust on Mosul to
coincide with the anticipated British capture of Baghdad, which took place at length in
March 1917. All hope of energetic action on the Russian side was by now gone.
Breakdown of Tsarist Russia
It is not necessary to trace here the
events which led up to the March Revolution and the ignominious collapse of
the titanic structure of Tsarist absolutism. Under the vacillating but
obstinate Tsar Nicholas II, Russia
had been an autocracy without a real autocrat, while the Rasputin scandal had
discredited the imperial court in the eyes of the nation and of the world. In
the end, a scramble for bread in the streets of Petrograd
was the signal for the downfall of the régime,
which fell amid the jubilation of millions who saw its passing as the dawn of
a better era.
Even before the news of the fall of the
Romanovs reached Georgia,
the morale of the local population had sunk to a low
ebb. As a result of poor communications with European Russia, and the
intolerable strains which World War I imposed on Russia's relatively immature
economy, the peoples of Transcaucasia themselves had to bear much of the
burden of supplying and provisioning Russia's large forces engaged on the
Turkish front. A severe shortage of grain made itself felt by 1916 throughout
the country. In January 1917, the town of Kutaisi went without bread for a fortnight
owing to the breakdown of the Transcaucasian
railway system. Prices of all commodities rose steeply in the bazaars, where
the merchants and stall-keepers reverted to the primitive system of trade by
barter. Inflation ensued and the value of money depreciated rapidly. Hunger
was rife in Tbilisi
and other cities, and deaths from famine occurred in country districts. The
Caucasian revolutionary societies resumed their clandestine plotting. To
counter the revolutionary menace, the Russian Minister of the Interior sent
to Tbilisi a special emissary empowered to
deport from Georgia
any individual suspected of defeatism or subversive activities, with the sole
exception of the viceroy himself. In March 1917, the Russian secret police
planned a wholesale round-up of Georgian political leaders of all shades,
including the chief of the Georgian Social-Democrats, Noe
Zhordania. Before this plan could be carried into
effect, the news reached Tbilisi
on 15 March 1917 that the imperial régime had
ceased to exist.
Literature, art and intellectual life up to 1917
Before finally turning our back on the
Tsarist period of Georgian history, it is worth while pausing to survey
developments in literature and the arts, where the picture is far less sombre
than one might have expected.
A number of outstanding Georgian writers
came to maturity in the early years of the twentieth century. Among these may
be mentioned Vasil Barnovi
( 1856-1934), author of historical novels, tales of old Tbilisi, and
realistic stories based on contemporary Georgian life, and Shio Aragvispireli ( 18671926),
revolutionary agitator, veterinary surgeon and author of powerful short
stories in which he exposed the social evils of his time. Even better known
was David Kldiashvili ( 18621931),
a writer whose forebears belonged to the squirearchy
and who served as an officer in the Russian Army before his outspoken
sympathy with the Georgian national cause led to his disgrace and dismissal.
Endowed with a sharp and observant eye for character and situation, and
profound insight into human psychology, Kldiashvili
is acclaimed as one of the great masters of Georgian realism, and the
authentic chronicler of a vanished era in Georgian society; he also wrote
several successful plays. Other important literary figures were the essayist
and dramatist Shalva Dadiani
( 1874-1959), and the novelist Leo Kiacheli, born
in 1884, whose novel Tariel Golua gives a vivid picture of the impact of the 1905
Revolution on a typical Georgian village.
In poetry, the revolutionary tradition was
maintained by Irodion Evdoshvili
( 1873-1916). From 1910 onwards, however, a reaction
against patriotic and civic modes in poetry set in, under the leadership of a
group of youthful poets and novelists whose début took place under the
fashionable banners of Symbolism and Decadence. They formed a coterie known
as the Company of the Blue Drinking Horn (Tsisperi
Qandsebi), which included such talented young
men as Titsian Tabidze,
Paolo Iashvili, Valerian Gaprindashvili,
S. Kldiashvili, Razhden Gvetadze, Shalva Apkhaidze, Giorgi Leonidze and others. Their early, and now seldom
republished works were characterized, according to a Soviet literary manual,
by 'mysticism, lack of political content, absence of ideas, extreme
individualism, the cult of Bohemian life, the aesthetics of deformity and preciosity'. 'Later on,' the manual tells us, 'thanks to
the stimulating influence of the mighty successes of Socialist industrial
progress, the best representatives of the Blue Drinking Horn school, liberated
from decadence, played a significant role in the evolution of Georgian Soviet
literature.' 91
Several of the group, however, perished in the Stalin purges of 1936-37.
From the 1890's onwards, a great revival
took place in the Georgian theatrical world. Both in Kutaisi
and in Tbilisi,
the Georgian stage was in a flourishing condition and often served as a
tribune for the symbolical expression of the nation's suppressed political
yearnings. Georgian music also revived under the inspiration of Zakaria Paliashvili, whose
melodious opera Abesalom and Eteri ( 1913), based on an
ancient Georgian poetic legend, is universally beloved and frequently
performed throughout Georgia
to this day. In painting, a refreshing reaction against the historical
realism of the Russian Repin school was launched
almost single-handed by the inimitable primitive painter Pirosmani
(Niko Pirosmanashvili,
18601918). Unappreciated during his lifetime, Pirosmani
eked out a life of misery, painting panels for inns and executing chance
commissions for any who would employ him. He died in squalor at the height of
the Revolution. Only posthumously did fame come his way. His compositions now
occupy an honoured place in the Tbilisi Museum of Arts, which is housed in
the premises of the old Theological Seminary where Stalin studied; they evoke
with their naïve and colourful humour and vivid portrayal of costume and
manners a bygone era in Georgian society.
Education and scholarship also made
considerable strides during the early years of the twentieth century.
Alongside the official Russian network of schools and seminaries, there grew
up an unofficial system of independent, purely Georgian scholastic
institutions. The Society for the Spreading of Literacy, founded by Ilia Chavchavadze, Gogebashvili and others, continued its useful work.
Despite the Russian government's refusal to set up a university in the Caucasus, a number of local pedagogues banded together
and organized an unofficial People's University of their own. The tireless
archaeologist Ekvtime Taqaishvili
( 1863-1953) began his regular expeditions
throughout Georgia,
in which he collected countless ancient inscriptions and registered and
described hundreds of ancient buildings and monuments. In 1907, Taqaishvili and others founded the Georgian Historical
and Ethnographical Society, whose publications attained a high scholarly
standard, and included editions of historical charters, folklore and dialect
studies and other valuable material. Not less important was the academic work
carried on by Georgians in the universities of Russia,
notably at Moscow and St. Petersburg. The most brilliant of these
Georgian professors was the late Academician Nicholas Marr (
1864-1934). Before embarking on his controversial Japhetic Theory and
other speculative linguistic hypotheses, Marr gained a solid and world wide reputation as editor of ancient Georgian
texts, and as a brilliant philologist and archaeologist. Among his disciples
were Ivane Javakhishvili,
the first volumes of whose monumental but unfinished History of the
Georgian People appeared at Tbilisi
in 1913-14, and Akaki Shanidze,
the leading grammarian and expert on the history of the Georgian language.
It would be unjust to belittle the support
given by the Russian government and by Russian learned societies to the study
of Georgian and Caucasian antiquities. During the latter years of the
nineteenth century, the Caucasian Museum in Tbilisi
(now the State Museum of Georgia) made great strides under its energetic and
talented German director, Dr. Radde. Particularly
fruitful was the help given to Georgian antiquarian and ethnographical
studies by Countess Praskovya Uvarova
( 1840-1924), who succeeded her husband, Alexey Uvarov, as President of the Imperial Moscow
Archaeological Society in 1884. She sponsored a magnificently produced serial
publication called Materials for the Archaeology of the Caucasus. She
financed this and other valuable works both out of her own pocket and by
means of subsidies which she obtained from members of the imperial family.
The manuscript of Countess Uvarova's own important
treatise on the miniatures in mediaeval Georgian Gospel manuscripts was
unfortunately destroyed during the 1917 revolution, and she herself died in
exile in Serbia.
In spite of the repressive features of the Stolypin era in Russian history, the Tsarist government
could not annul all the concessions which had been wrung from it during the
revolution of 1905. Among these were freedom of publication, assembly and
association. Consequently, the decade before 1917 witnessed a great growth of
journals of all shades of opinion and a proliferation of clubs and voluntary
philanthropic societies. A new type of journalist and intellectual began to
flourish in the cafés and on the boulevards of Tbilisi,
Kutaisi and
other large towns. This new class was recruited in large part from scions of
the old Georgian aristocracy. The latter were no match for the growing class
of kulaks or wealthy peasant farmers and rural entrepreneurs. These
shrewd and hardened individuals usually outclassed in business ability their
former feudal lords, who tended to drift into the cities where they felt more
at home than in the dilapidated châteaux of the remote countryside.
The rise of the Georgian kulak, the
life of the Georgian aristocratic intellectual and dilettante, and the impact
on them both of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 and 1921 have never been
more successfully depicted than in the masterly novel by Mikheil
Javakhishvili ( 1881-1937),
Jaqos khiznebi
(Jaqo's Guests), first published in
1924-25. With devastating realism and many humorous touches, Javakhishvili contrasts the swashbuckling Jaqo, swindler, seducer and false bonhomme,
with his victim, Prince Teimuraz Khevistavi, the amiable and ineffectual philanthropist
whom Jaqo robs of his fortune, his wife, and even
of his sanity. In the person of Teimuraz Khevistavi we follow the decline and fall of the old
nobility. Abandoning his tenants to the good offices of the grasping Jaqo, Teimuraz spends his time
in Tbilisi, immersed in the affairs of his journal--a journal, needless to
say, published in a very limited edition--of the modest co-operative society
with which he concerns himself, in the shaky literary society to which he
belongs, in the folk theatre, in free evening classes for working men, and a
dozen other good causes. This sprig of the nobility is a radical of advanced
social views. His lively pen is always in demand for the drafting of political
memoranda, his advice sought on the burning questions of the day.
'Whatever turn the conversation took--the
irrigation of the Sudan, British policy in regard to Devil's Island, German
colonies in Africa, the disputes concerning the port of Jibuti,
the death of the Sultan of Zanzibar, the Chartist movement, the electoral
rights of the women of New Zealand, the discovery of a new planet, some fresh
scientific invention, the policies of Combes or
Lloyd George, or the significance of any oration pronounced by any public
figure in any country--then Teimuraz was regularly
consulted for his authoritative and final opinion.'
While the worthy Jaqo
falsified the estate accounts and plotted the ruin of his trustful lord:
' Teimuraz was writing a treatise in three volumes on
the history of Georgian civilization, composing dozens of leading articles,
reports, judgements, researches and memoranda; at the same time, he used to
attend secret political meetings and, in company with so many of his
contemporaries, he went on gnawing and sawing away busily day by day at the
mighty branch upon which he nonchalantly dozed and cheerfully fluttered
about.'
That mighty branch, of course, was the
Tsarist Empire itself. For all its faults, it was a régime
towards which a few years hence, under Communist dictatorship, many of its
erstwhile opponents would look back with a certain nostalgic affection.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
87. Nobati, No. 2, 2 April 1906.
88. Nobati, No. 12, 18 June 1906.
89. Quoted
in Bern, On
the history of the Bolshevik organizations in Transcaucada,
pp. 166-67.
90. Zhordania, Reminiscences, pp. 78-79.
91. A.
Baramidze, Sh. Radiant and V. Zhghenti, Istoriya gruzinskoy literatury (History
of Georgian Literature), Moscow
1952, p. 234.
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