38 Ë The Russo-Japanese War
taken place earlier in February 1905, and Shusha was in Nagorno-Karabakh, a land
disputed by Armenians and Azeris.) Nevertheless, Akashi supported, nancially and
otherwise, the completion of the operation. In August he received information that
“a plan had been completed” to transport eighty- ve hundred Swiss ri es and 1.3
million bullets to the Caucasus and the Black Sea provinces.⁶⁷For this purpose the
Sirius, a tramp steamer of 2,500 tons, much larger than theJohn Grafton, was acquired
for 2,900 pounds sterling. (Initially funds provided by an “industrial tycoon” in the
Caucasus were used to purchase the steamship. Yet they soon proved inadequate to
carry out the operation, and the Georgian revolutionaries used the money provided
by the Japanese Embassy in Paris instead.)⁶⁸This was on 6 September 1905, one day
after the signing of the Portsmouth Treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War. Christiaan
Cornelissen, a Dutch anarchist and nephew of Cherkezishvili’s wife, was appointed
to supervise the operation. The boat was manned by Dutch anarchists and French
sailors (the latter of whom, unlike the former, did not know the aim of the journey).⁶⁹
Money from the Japanese government, however, posed a moral challenge to the
crew, who nonetheless in the end accepted and justi ed it. Cornelissen himself noted:
“This concerned Finnish and Georgian nationalists who considered the government
in St. Petersburg a more immediate threat and a more direct enemy to their homeland
than the government in Tokyo which played one government against another. As an
internationalist opposing the oppression of one people by another, of a weak people
by a bigger and stronger, I could have understood their position.”⁷⁰
The original plan was to discharge the freight in Turkish waters, out of the reach of
Russian authorities. The weapons and ammunition were then to be smuggled inland
into the Russian Caucasus in small quantities. In June 1905, to obtain the Sublime
Porte’s agreement, Prince Mamed Abashidze, a Muslim leader with roots in both Ad-
jara in Georgia and Ottoman Turkey, went to Istanbul, where he had contacts among
the ruling elite. The Ottoman government was inclined to grant permission, although
there is no record that it ever did o cially.⁷¹The following month Dekanozishvili se-
cretly dispatched from Paris to Georgia a group of conspirators (representatives of So-
cialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, and Socialist Federalists) to organize propaganda.
One of them was Mikheil Kiknadze, a compositor of the newspaperSakartvelo, who
carried to the Ti is committee of Socialist Federalists a missive on armed uprisings de-
67 Akashi,Rakka ryusui ̄ , 53.
68 “Personal Memoirs by Christiaan Cornelissen,” 330.
69 Markoz Tugushi, “giorgi dekanozishvili (tskhovreba da mokmedeba). sakartvelos sotsialist’-
pederalist’uri sarevolutsio part’ia (1901-1906 ts’.ts’.)” [Giorgi Dekanozishvili. Life and Activity. Geor-
gian Socialist-Federalist Revolutionary Party (1901-1906)],kavkassioni[Caucasus] (Paris) 1964, no. 10,
137-138.
70 “Personal Memoirs by Christiaan Cornelissen,” 331.
71 See Sakhokia to Dekanozishvili (19 and 28 June, 15 and 21 September). Fonds Georges
Dekanozichvili, CHAN, boxe 345 AP/1.