Under the Russians, the Georgian kingdom, though subordinate, was more united than it had been for centuries. This factor, together with the provision of stability, the construction of communications, the offering of commercial opportunity and the inculcation of a European-style culture furnished the conditions in which it proved possible during the nineteenth century for Georgian nobles to find a sense of common identity with their own people, and to take the first steps towards nationhood in the modern sense.24 This is a paradox we shall see several times: the Russian empire providing the pre-conditions for the creation of a nation, which cannot flower fully within the empire and turns against it.
As for the Armenians, their hopes were roused by the Russian incursion into their territories, and especially by the victories over the Persians in 1828 and the Ottomans in 1829. For a time Russia held the strategically vital areas of Kars and Erzerum, but returned them to Turkey by the Treaty of Adrianople (1829). However, Armenians living there were allowed to emigrate to Russia, and did so in large numbers: this contingent included many peasants, who mostly settled in the hill country of Nagornyi Karabakh. Armenian traders, artisans and professional people became a significant element in all the Transcaucasian cities, in Tiflis and Baku as much as in Erivan. By a Statute of 1836 the Armenian Gregorian Church was recognized as self-governing.25
These population movements certainly provided new hope for thousands of Armenians. Yet they also had the effect of arousing the suspicion and enmity of the Muslims who were accustomed to political domination over the territories where they settled. The new Armenians were thus potentially insecure: basically, they remained, as before, a people divided among different empires, with no land they could securely call their own.
Paradoxically the Russians established themselves in Transcaucasia without having gained mastery of the Caucasus itself. The new Russian dominions depended on a tenuous line of communication, the Georgian Military Highway, running through the heart of the mountains. While the chieftains of the Ossetian people, who lived along it, were favourable to Russia, it was tolerably secure, nor did Russians need to fear permanent disruption so long as the diverse peoples of the mountains, the Chechens, Kabardinians, Circassians, Kumyks and so on, were held back from mutual cooperation by ethnic and princely feuds.
However, even before the end of the eighteenth century, there were signs that this disunity might not last for ever. In 1785, after an earthquake, a Sufi leader, Sheikh Mansur, called on his fellow Chechens to join with other tribes in resisting further encroachments by the infidel. The Sufi brotherhoods provided an ideal focus for the emergence of a new democratic Islamic resistance, often repudiating the chieftains and their compromises with imperial authority. In this case, therefore, by endeavouring as usual to co-opt local elites, Russia did not gain the docility of the mass of the population, but on the contrary provoked them to rebellion.
Sufism might seem an odd focus for such rebellion: originally it was a mystical movement of contemplation, self-denial and withdrawal from the world. But the intense relationship which existed between mentor (murshid or sheikh) and his disciples could, in circumstances of danger and instability, readily generate a collective commitment to militant action. By the early nineteenth century, the call for jihad, or ‘exertion in defence of the faith’ was becoming popular among ordinary people, overriding local feuds and cementing armed resistance under Sufi leadership. Egalitarianism, self-sacrifice and devotion to the prophet supplanted hierarchy and obedience to the tribal beg.26
In the 1820s Ghazi Muhammad taught that ‘He who is a Muslim must be a free man, and there must be equality among all Muslims’. To promote this freedom and equality it was the duty of all the faithful to cast out the infidel though qazawat or ‘holy war’. ‘He who holds to the Shariat must arm no matter what the cost, must abandon his family, his house, his land and not spare his very life.’27
Ghazi’s successor, the Imam Shamil’, led the resistance movement for quarter of a century (1834–59), exploiting all the advantages the terrain afforded him. Small bands of lightly armed men could descend at any moment on a Russian outpost or convoy, exploiting surprise and mobility to inflict the maximum damage and loss of life, before vanishing into the mountains and forests. This was a kind of warfare to which the Russians, with their long experience of the steppes, were not at all accustomed, and it was very difficult for them, despite their considerable superiority in numbers and technology, to overcome their nimble foe. Deploying more troops simply generated more casualties. The Russians’ attempts to divide their opponents and gain allies would call forth swift and ferocious retaliation from Shamil’.28
The Crimean War (1853–6) revealed what a threat this endless Caucasian fighting could be to the empire: two hundred thousand troops had to be stationed there throughout the war to keep an eye on both Shamil” and the Turks and were thus unable to intervene in the decisive theatre of war. In the end only a systematic campaign of forest-felling, crop-burning, road-building and destruction of villages enabled the Russians to gain a permanent grip on the Caucasus range.29
In a word, they were able to attain their ends only by genocide. Following the pacification, the Russian authorities resettled many mountaineers on the plains. Many more chose instead to leave, seeking a new home in the Ottoman Empire. At least 300,000 Circassians departed, nearly their entire population; so too did many Abkhaz, Chechens, Kabardinians and Nogai Tatars.30 This outcome, very different from what had bee experienced on the steppes and anticipating the massive deportations of the twentieth century, displayed dramatically the costs of empire: in this case a lasting legacy of hatred, bitterness and desire for vengeance which has made the Caucasian frontier a permanent source of weakness for Russia.
UKRAINE The flat, open region to the south and south-west of Muscovy was geographically part of the steppes, and presented Russia with the problems characteristic of steppe terrain. Here, however, there was a vital additional element: national identity was directly at stake, since the area had been for centuries part of the patrimony of the princes of Rus’, and its principal city, Kiev, had been the seat of the first East Slav state from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. At that time a thriving trading centre and agricultural region, it had suffered grievously from the Mongol invasion, and later from the collapse of Byzantium and the establishment of the Ottoman Empire. It became an insecure hinterland, defenceless before the Crimean Tatars’ slave raids, traversed by Cossacks, nomads and by the marauding robber bands which flourished where there was no fixed civil authority.31
During the fourteenth century Lithuania became the dominant power in the region, and it repulsed the Mongols a century before Muscovy was able to do so. Lithuania in turn fell under the influence of Poland, with which the Grand Prince of Lithuania concluded a dynastic union in 1385, later converted into a joint Commonwealth. The Catholic and Latinate culture of Poland took hold among the elites of the region, though profession of the Orthodox faith continued to be tolerated. The stage was set for a centuries-long national and religious struggle between Poland and Russia, Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the greater physical security afforded by the Polish-Lithuanian state, Ukraine became its grain belt. The landed nobility gained in both privilege and material wealth, while imposing