159 AfterwordApproximately 25 per cent of them died within just four years.^32
Orthodox Georgia benefited from the incident, and the exiled moun-
taineers were all Muslims, sent to their fate by a Russified Georgian
who had attended the Tiflis Orthodox Seminary as a young man. The
maverick Bolshevik rulers from Moscow contributed to the tradi-
tional ambiguities of empire on Russia’s southern frontier.