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Araxes, or Aras, which was fixed as the border between the Russian and Persian empires in 1828. The Araxes runs for 660 miles from eastern Turkey between Armenia and Azerbaijan on one side and Iran on the other, until it meets the other main river of the region, the Kura, and flows into the Caspian Sea. Modern Azerbaijan extends south of the Araxes at its eastern stretch, encompassing the mountainous region where the Talysh people
convivial
Armenia is most famous for its cognac. Brands such as Nairi
Most Ossetians are nominally Christian, but many still
take part in overtly pagan ceremonies.
The Armenian king Trdat III was supposedly converted by Saint Gregory the Illuminator in either 301 or 314.
Georgia became Christian in 327–32, when King Mirian III was converted by Saint Nino.
late fourth century, enabling them to write religious texts i...
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The Armenian and Georgian churches traded anathemas, and the Armenian catholicos forbade Armenians to communicate with, eat with, pray with, or marry Georgians.9 This split drew the Georgians closer to the Greek world and aligned the Armenians more with the older Christian churches of the Middle East.
Two of the grandest Georgian churches, the cathedral of Svetitskhoveli in the old capital of Mtskheta, outside Tbilisi,
the monastery of Gelati in western Georgia, date back to the eleventh century.
Azerbaijan was different, and Islam gradually became universal there.
that context, the Sunni-Shiite schism began to lose any meaning.
The cultural residue of this is surprisingly faint but is there if one looks for
“a Persian work now done into Georgian.”
Iranian political dominance of the Caucasus began to fade with the end of the Safavids in 1722. A succession of military defeats on all fronts led to a slow retreat from the Caucasus that culminated in full capitulation to the Russians in 1828. This
(“The Knight in the Panther Skin”),
Pavel Tsitsianov,
only became fully integrated into the Russian Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Ganja was made into a district of Georgia and renamed Elizavetpol, its central mosque converted into a church.
the fourteen-centuries-long autonomy of the Georgian Orthodox Church was abolished, and it was absorbed into the Russian Orthodox Church, recovering its independent status only in 1917.
Treaty of Turkmenchai of 1828,
centuries. At the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, the Turks followed the Persians in formally ceding their claims on the Transcaucasus, and it became an undisputed part of the Russian Empire.
His major reform, the abolition of serfdom, caused as many problems as it solved in the Transcaucasus.
“Armeno-Tatar War.”
The Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan was the most remarkable of the three in being the world’s first parliamentary democracy in a Muslim nation. Women had the vote there before they did in the United Kingdom. But the Musavat Party and the national leader, Mammed
In 1920 the Menshevik People’s Guard killed thousands of Ossetians in a ferocious response to what they said was a pro-Bolshevik uprising
The British left the Transcaucasus in the summer of 1920, just as the Bolsheviks completed their conquest of Azerbaijan.
is determined not only by the fact that it is a source of raw materials, fuel, and food supplies but by its position between Europe and Asia and in particular between Russia and Turkey and the presence [there] of the most important economic and strategic roads.”45 The immediate priority was to get
It is tempting but misleading to see the seventy-year Soviet experiment as just a second Russian imperial project.
Standards of health care and literacy were undoubtedly higher in Soviet Azerbaijan, and women had far greater opportunities, but they also lacked basic political and cultural freedoms.
On the personal level, the clash was the first phase in the so-called “Georgian Affair,” in which the dying Lenin, worried about what the quarrel told him about Stalin’s character, tried to block his approval as his successor, but failed.
an armed rebellion did break out in Georgia in 1924. The Armenians and Azerbaijanis were generally supportive
still broken by numerous inter-ethnic conflicts, may have caused the Bolsheviks to invent the ethnofederal system under duress.
Lenin, who disapproved of Russian nationalism, might have been content to see Georgia detached from Russia, so long as it remained Bolshevik.
Closer examination of Stalin’s biography suggests a different picture, in which he became who he was to a large degree by rejecting Caucasian tradition.
“rather than a melting pot, the Soviet Union became an incubator of new nations.”
The sinister side of the change was that some nationalities were deemed to be unworthy of membership in the new Soviet family.
Meskhetian Turks, who were Muslims, probably of mixed Turkish-Georgian origin from the Meskhia (or Samtskhe) borderland of southern Georgia. In November 1944, all of them—around one hundred thousand people—were deported to Central Asia; about a fifth died en route.
The Georgian Orthodox Church was given back its autonomy in 1943.
one hundred thousand men from the Transcaucasus may have fought on the Nazi side.
When Stalin died in March 1953, the Soviet Union faced an existential crisis.
executed at the end of 1953, after an aborted bid to take power. With these two dead, mass fear was no longer a unifying factor, and arguably the Soviet Union carried on for the next four decades as a state without an idea, propelled by inertia and a few common myths.
The post-Stalin state was not a fully totalitarian system.
In 1956, there were mass protests in Tbilisi at Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin.
Vasily Mzhavanadze and Eduard Shevardnadze.
Less than one-tenth of Transcaucasia’s trade was conducted within the region itself. This situation led to a dramatic economic collapse once borders and railways started closing after 1989.
Russian project as a multinational hybrid state with a strong Russian flavor. Besides,
Kozyrev as Russian foreign minister all had connections with Tbilisi: Yevgeny Primakov grew up in the city, Igor Ivanov had a Georgian mother, and Sergei Lavrov’s father was a Tbilisi Armenian.
Although the Soviet authorities won back physical control of Baku, they basically lost Azerbaijan in the process.
