4 Ë Introduction
Fig. 1.2.The Geography of the Caucasus.
arrival of Russian rulers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the Caucasus
had a lingua franca.
This diversity was replicated in major cities in the Caucasus with a twist. For ex-
ample, in Ti is (Tbilisi from 1936 onward), capital of Georgia and the administrative
capital of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus, there were more Armenian and Rus-
sian speakers than Georgian in 1897, when the rst comprehensive population cen-
sus was taken.⁷It was only in the 1920s under the Soviet regime that Ti is became
more Georgian than Armenian. Until then Russians and Armenians had been predom-
inant in commerce and administration in the Caucasus. In cities in the north, such as
Vladikavkaz and Grozny, Russian speakers were the vast majority in 1897. In the same
year in the city of Baku, Azerbaijan, Russian and Armenian speakers accounted for
more than half the population. Not until the 1960s did Azeris become a majority in
their own capital city.
7 The census data are now available online: http://demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/census.php?cy=0 (ac-
cessed 17 March 2013).