The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

The Akashi Operations Ë 29

racy but a possible “centralist republic” that could hinder the “social, economic, and

national liberation of Georgia.”³⁷

Shortly after the conference, the Socialist Federalists issued an appeal to the Geor-

gian people in which it called on Georgian soldiers to boycott the war with Japan:

“[T]ake every measure not to participate in this useless blood-letting.... Our oppres-

sor and murderer is not there [in the Far East] but much closer.... We must ght not

to enslave others but for our own freedom.”³⁸Already from late 1904 onward, a limited

number of weapons (mainly revolvers) and revolutionary literature were being smug-

gled into Tiis, Baku, Batumi and elsewhere in the Caucasus with the nancial assis-

tance of Japan.³⁹In one case, the Georgians used the boatSidonof the Messageries

Maritimes Company to transport “illegal literature.” Russian police agents suspected

the boat of committing “more grave crimes.”⁴⁰

Despite the suspicions of the Russian police, Georgian revolutionaries were able

to receive revolutionary literature through these channels because they had their own

men in the customs authorities of the port of Batumi. As Tedo Sakhokia, a leader of the

Georgian Socialist Federalists later reminisced, with the help of his old friend I. Gvara-

madze he was able to deliver on shore, “almost freely,” his party’s organSakartvelo

and other illegal literature sent by boat from Paris.⁴¹

By the autumn of 1904, the Socialist Federalists had attained considerable po-

litical inuence in Georgia. Their antidraft campaign in Guria, for example, led the

majority of the population to refuse categorically to serve in the military, proclaiming

“Better to die in our Guria than in Manchuria.” This led to a bloody confrontation with

Cossacks, resulting in a large number of casualties on both sides. Some Gurians ed

to the woods where, in view of an acute shortage of weapons, they manually manu-

factured simple Berdan ries for partisan warfare. By contrast, the Social Democrats,

whose political base was generally much larger in Guria, called on the population not

to evade conscription but to join the military in order to conduct revolutionary propa-

ganda there. Their tactic did not, however, enjoy popularity in Guria. On 7 November

1904, people in Kutaisi demonstrated with red banners against the call-up and ended

up battling the Cossacks and the police, while in Khevsureti, in northeastern Georgia,

conscription was suspended owing to popular discontent.⁴²

37 GSCHA, f. 94, op. 1, d. 70, l. 2 ob.
38 “kartvel musha khalhs: mots’odeba no. 1” (kartvel sotsialist’-pederalist’ta sarevolutsio part’ia) To
Georgian Workers. Leaet no. 1 (Georgian Revolutionary Party of Socialist Federalists), Fonds
Georges Dekanozichvili, CHAN, boxe 345, AP/2.
39 GARF, f. 102, DP PP 1904-II, op. 316, d. 28, l. 12. According to Dekanozishvili, by May 1905 “a sig-
nicant number of weapons” had been delivered. See ibid., l. 49ob.
40 GARF, op. cit., ll. 22, 28.
41 See Tedo Sakhokia,tsimbirshi. mogonebani 1905 ts’lis revolutsiis droidan[My exile in Siberia. Mem-
oirs from the period of the 1905 revolution] (Tbilisi: literaturis muzeumi, 2011), 184.
42 sakartvelo, kartvel sotsialist’-pederalist’ta sarevolutsio part’iis organo(Paris) 1904, no. 7(19), 5-6.