Introduction Ë 9
ing milieu, which was largely Muslim) and in part because both groups produced
larger numbers of educated people than did others in the Caucasus, and these went
on to articulate and spread national ideologies.²¹Giorgi Dekanozishvili (Dekanozi)
(1868–1910), an engineer who appears prominently in chapter 2, is merely one such
educated Georgian. In Azerbaijan, the modern nation of “Azerbaijani” came much
later, well after the 1905 Revolution, created from the o cial and disparate notion
of “Tatars,” or “Turks” and other generic designations, implying nonnational pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism.²²Other regions in the Caucasus also produced educated
people who brought forth new ideas and new movements. Haidar Bammat (Bamma-
tov) (1889–1965), a Kumyk from Dagestan and one of the protagonists of the present
book, belonged to the younger generation of educated Northern Caucasians, studying
rst at a classical gymnasium in Stavropol’ and then law at St. Petersburg University.²³
The small and disparate ethnic groups in the Northern Caucasus, on the other hand,
had a far harder time articulating a sense of nation than did the Armenians or Geor-
gians. Consequently, when the Russian Empire collapsed, they tended, if only for the
sake of survival against the forces of Russia, to band together as “mountaineers” and
orient themselves politically toward a federation.
In a country where any organized political activity was illegal, all critical politi-
cal expressions had to go underground. In the 1890s in particular, when Russia’s in-
dustrialization was progressing particularly rapidly under its nance minister Sergei
Witte (1849–1915, born in Ti is to a Baltic German family), Russia’s economic and so-
cial fabric was rent ever more widely. Social and political contradictions mounted
and unrest became increasingly evident in town and country alike. In this last decade
of the nineteenth century, numerous political parties emerged in the Caucasus as in
Russia proper. In the Caucasus, as in most other borderlands in the Russian Empire,
modern nationalism emerged together with socialism. One of the most famous Cau-
casians, Ioseb Jughashvili (Iosif Dzhugashvili), better known among English speakers
as Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), started his political career rst as a Georgian nation-
alist in the mid-1890s and then, within a few years, as a Marxist internationalist.²⁴
Where national oppression and class oppression often coincided, this was inevitable.
The Georgian liberal nationalists, central players in the present book on the Russian-21 For Georgia and Armenia, see Suny,The Making of the Modern Georgian Nationand also hisLooking
toward Ararat.
22 See Mostashari,On the Religious Frontier; Audrey Altstadt,The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Iden-
tity under Russian Rule(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1992); and Tadeusz Swietochowski,Rus-
sian Azerbaijan, 1905–1920: The Shaping of National Identity in a Muslim Community(Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985).
23 Georges Mamoulia, K-M. Donogo, and M. Vatchagaev,Gaidar Bammat i zhurnal “Kavkaz”
(Makhachkala–Paris: Akhul’go, 2010), 9.
24 See Donald Ray eld,Stalin and His Hangmen: Au Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who
Served Him(London: Viking, 2004), ch. 1 and Simon Sebag Monte ore,Young Stalin(London: Wei-
denfeld & Nicolson, 2007), part one.