90 Ë War, Independence, and Reconquest, 1914–21
Fig. 4.5.The Constituent Assembly of Georgia, Tiflis, 1920.
Now with British instead of German forces stationed in the capital, the new republic
held elections for the Constituent Assembly in February 1919. Mensheviks took 109
seats out of 130, with the National Democrats and the Socialist Federalists accounting
for eight seats each. Noe Zhordania headed the newly formed government. By 1920
Ti is, its capital, had been signi cantly “Georgianized,”⁷³although it never lost its
multinational character. In the end, however, Georgia and all of the Caucasus would
be conquered by the Bolsheviks.
The rst to fall was the Mountaineer Republic, even though in late 1918 it had been
“recognized” by British Major General William M. Thomson, who was acting as the Al-
lies’ representative.⁷⁴Thomson was the commander of the British expeditionary forces
that had arrived in Baku, in agreement with the Azerbaijan government, in November
1918, in the wake of the departure of the Ottoman forces. The British forces, however,
also supported Denikin’s Volunteer Army, operating in the Don, Kuban, and North-
ern Caucasus, in the ght against the Bolsheviks. But Britain’s double game was not
viable because Denikin’s goal was not merely the overthrow of the Bolshevik govern-
ment but also the maintenance of “one and indivisible Russia.” This latter objective
meant rejecting independent states such as the Mountaineer Republic. By mid-1919
73 Loris-Melicof,La Révolution Russe et les nouvelles républiques transcaucasiennes, 163–164. In the
autumn of 1918, however, Germany entertained the possibility of a coup against the Menshevik gov-
ernment as it had the previous spring against the socialist government of Ukraine (the Skoropads’kyi
coup). See Mamoulia,Les combats indépendandistes des Caucasiens, 17.
74 Bammate, “The Caucasus and the Russian Revolution,” 17.