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Russian Rule and Caucasian Society in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: The Georgian Nobility and the Armenian Bourgeoisie, 1801–1856

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Ronald Grigor Suny
Ronald Grigor Suny*
Affiliation:
Oberlin College
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Extract

In the half century from the Russian annexation of eastern Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti) to the outbreak of the Crimean War, Transcaucasian society underwent a deep and irreversible transformation which, in its effects, was as fundamental a metamorphosis for Armenians and Georgians as were the contemporary political and industrial revolutions for “western Europeans. Whether the move into the Russian orbit was “progressive,” as Soviet historians insist, or a fatal perversion of these nations’ natural development, as some nationalists argue, is not really a historical judgement capable of empirical demonstration. What can be shown, however, is that with the Russian occupation a historical process began which rent the fabric of traditional Georgian and Armenian society and produced both new opportunities and loyalties for some and a persistent, if ultimately futile, resistance to centralized bureaucratic rule by others. Responding to that resistance, the tsarist administration enticed the nobility of Georgia into participation in the new order, and at the end of the first fifty years of Russian rule, the once rebellious, semiindependent dynasts of Georgia had been transformed into a service gentry loyal to their new monarch. At the same time, the Armenian merchants and craftsmen of Caucasia's towns benefited from the new security provided by Russian arms and, while competing with privileged Russian traders, oriented themselves away from the Middle East toward Russian and European commerce. In the process they laid the foundation for their own fortunes and future as the leading economic and political element in Russian Georgia. The peasantry of Transcaucasia was forced in the meantime to submit to new exactions as their status became increasingly more similar to that of Russian peasants. And the respective churches of Georgia and Armenia made fundamental and irreversible accommodations to the new political order.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Spring 1979 , pp. 53 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by the Association for the Study of the Nationalities (USSR and East Europe) Inc. 

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References

Notes

1. For English-language accounts of the end of the Georgian kingdoms and the early years of Russian administration, see David Marshall Lang, The Last Years of the Georgian Monarchy, 1658–1832 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957); and two unpublished dissertations: Laurens Hamilton Rhinelander, Jr., “The Incorporation of the Caucasus into the Russian Empire: The Case of Georgia” (Columbia University, 1972); and Henry John Armani, “The Russian Annexation of the Kingdom of Imeretia, 1800–1815: In the Light of Russo-Ottoman Relations” (Georgetown University, 1970).Google Scholar

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32. Rhinelander, “Incorporation,” p. 244. Those who failed to prove their nobility became state peasants.Google Scholar

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34. Avaliani, Krestianskii vopros, p. 125.Google Scholar

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45. Ibid., pp. 170-72. A royal decree was required to raise an ordinary merchant or craftsman to this exalted rank of mokalake .Google Scholar

46. Ibid., pp. 177-78.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., p. 187.Google Scholar

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50. Chkhetiia, Sh., Tbilisi v XIX stoletii (1856–1869) (Tiflis, 1942), p. 145. Georgians made up a little over one-fifth of the population.Google Scholar

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56. Meskhiia, Goroda i gorodskoi stroi, p. 239.Google Scholar

57. The nobles also opposed the merchants having the right to buy peasant serfs by household or village and wished to limit their serf ownership to one or two domestic servants. Ibid., p. 240.Google Scholar

58. Polnoe sobranie zakonov, XV, no. 13369; Chkhetiia, Tbilisi, pp. 259, 313–317.Google Scholar

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63. Akhverdov's brief was later published as: Tiflisskie amkary (Tiflis, 1883).Google Scholar

64. Chkhetiia, Tbilisi, p. 270. The decline in the number of amkarebi was due, in part, to the abolition of merchant guilds and, in part, to the merging of many craft guilds.Google Scholar

65. Ibid., pp. 293–438.Google Scholar

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67. Rozhkova, Ekonomicheskaia politika, p. 51.Google Scholar

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74. Rozhkova, Ekonomicheskaia politika, p. 94.Google Scholar

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77. Chkhetiia, Tbilisi, p. 224n.Google Scholar

78. Ibid., p. 225. As part of his colonial policy, Kankrin planned sending Russian peasants to settle in Georgia, and Ermolov was forced to inform him that there was no free land in Georgia belonging to the Treasury for such settlers. Khachapuridze, K istorii Gruzii, p. 140.Google Scholar

79. Rozhkova, Ekonomicheskaia politika, pp. 96–100.Google Scholar

80. Ibid., p. 101.Google Scholar

81. Ibid., p. 151.Google Scholar

82. Ibid., p. 274.Google Scholar

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84. Ibid., p. 103.Google Scholar

85. Akty, vol. 10, no. 10, p. 9.Google Scholar

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87. Rhinelander, “Incorporation,” p. 341.Google Scholar

88. Ibid., p. 321; Akty, X, p. 355. The numbers of students doubled by 1852: 3000 boys, almost 300 girls. (Akty, X, p. 897) Princess Vorontsova organized the Saint Nina Philanthropic Society to open schools for poor girls, five of which were operating by 1852. Nine schools were established for the Muslims, and the Armenian Patriarch Nerses, who in 1825 had opened a private Armenian school, the Nersesian Jemaran, again found financial support among the Armenian merchants and organized a commercial gymnaziia in 1851. The schools, though not of high quality, managed to teach their pupils Russian as well as two local languages. In Tiflis, Georgian and Azeri were studied, and in Kutaisi, Georgian and Turkish. Armenian may also have been available; it had been added to the cirriculum of the Tiflis Nobles’ Gymnaziia in 1831. Rhinelander, “Incorporation,” pp. 312, 322. (For a treatment of education in Tiflis in mid-century, see Chkhetiia, pp. 353-93).Google Scholar

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