8 Ë Introduction
justice of the peace was not introduced in the Caucasus. In any case, the reform it-
self did not extend to the vast majority of the population in Russia either, namely the
peasantry.¹⁴Nor did the emancipation of serfs in 1861 satisfy any group in the Cauca-
sus: not only did it take a few years to reach the area, but its eects were also much
more limited there than in Russia proper. (In Dagestan, slavery persisted, abolished
only later in the 1860s.)¹⁵In Georgia, the serfs were emancipated but received no land,
while the landlords lost both the labor and income they had had from serfdom, leaving
all important groups within Georgia dissatis ed.¹⁶Elsewhere in the Caucasus, espe-
cially in Azerbaijan, emancipation did not extend to most peasants because they were
not living on private lands but instead on those belonging to the crown and treasury.
Even those emancipated “had in eect been expropriated and forced to rent the land
under [their] use from the landowners.”¹⁷
Russian authorities wished to use the Great Reforms in the Caucasus to integrate
unruly areas more closely into the Empire. Yet Russia remained a colonizer and its poli-
cies, including the Great Reforms, were meant in the last analysis to serve its colonial
purposes. The reforms were palliatives, failing to adapt the old order to the demands of
the modern era. In the Northern Caucasus, the presence of the Terek Cossacks, a priv-
ileged, landed warrior class of Orthodox Slavs who served the Empire, greatly com-
plicated the ethnic, religious, and economic relations with the indigenous peoples.¹⁸
In Armenia, the government decided to turn over the estates of the Armenian Church
to the Ministry of Agriculture and the Department of State Properties, meaning that
the clergy were to become “paid employees of the state.” This blatant assault on Ar-
menian national sentiment provoked violent protests, which were brutally crushed by
military forces.¹⁹Combined with an intense cultural and linguistic Russi cation cam-
paign in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Russia’s modernization, without
any substantive political or economic reforms, created a base for modern nationalism
and modern forms of national resistance in the Caucasus.²⁰
Georgian and Armenian nationalism appeared rst in the Caucasus in the 1890s.
This was in part because of their historic sense of distinctness (aided by the surround-
14 See Richard S. Wortman,The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness(Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1976).
15 See Elena Inozemtseva, “On the History of Slave-Trade in Dagestan,”Iran and the Caucasus, 10, no.
2 (2006), 181–89.
16 Ronald Grigor Suny,The Making of the Georgian Nation(Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 112.
17 Mostashari,On the Religious Frontier, 69.
18 See Thomas M. Barrett,At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier,
1700-1860(Boulder: Westview Press, 1999).
19 Ronald Grigor Suny,Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington-
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 92.
20 For the most explicit work linking modernization and nationalism, see Ernest Gellner,Nations and
Nationalism(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).