Preface xion this unfortunate era of the country's history are presented in a
few works, which still leave room for further discussion. Jamil
Qozanlu has written two short narratives of the First and Second
Russo-Iranian Wars.^3 There is also a more complex study of Iranian
relations with Britain by Mahmud-e Mahmud, who makes extensive
use of British publications, especially those of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centures; however, he does not share those
authors' views.^4 The last book in English on Russian expansion in
the Caucasus was John Baddeley's The Russian Conquest of the
Caucasus, which was published in 1908. The author was primarily
interested in affairs of the high Caucasus and treated the struggle for
the Iranian and Ottoman borderlands in a few opening chapters. In
any event, he shared many of the biases of the Russian empire
builders. More recently there has been important work done on related
issues such as developments in Georgia and Armenia about the time
of the Russian takeover and Russian expansion (considered in a
somewhat broader framework).
5
Yet there has not been a study of
some critical issues of the formative period of Russo-Iranian relations:
the motives for and methods of Russian expansion in the eastern
Caucasus and the responses of the Iranian government and the inhabi-
tants of the disputed territories.
In referring to the disputed border zone, I have used the term
eastern Caucasus rather than the Russian name Transcaucasia or the
Iranian names Azerbaijan and Daghestan. Eastern Caucasus is a politi-
cally neutral term describing the location of the kingdom of K'art'lo-
Kakheti, known as Georgia, and the Muslim-ruled khanates that had
been part of Iran and became part of Russia. In contrast, Transcau-
casia reflects a Russian perspective, while the Iranian names, apart
from presuming that country's hegemony over the region at a time
when that was hotly contested, are subject to confusingly different
interpretations. In Safavi times, Azerbaijan was applied to all the
Muslim-ruled khanates of the eastern Caucasus as well as to the area
south of the Aras River as far as the Qezel Uzan River, the latter
region being approximately the same as the modern Iranian ostdns of
East and West Azerbaijan. It seemed clearer to me to use Azerbaijan
only for the southern part of the province that has remained under
Iranian control. The term Daghestan was used occasionally by the
Iranians and frequently by the Russians to refer to the territories on
the northeastern slopes of the Caucasus, including Derbent and
Qobbeh. (The Russians also applied it to Baku, Shirvan, and Shakki
on the southeastern side of the high Caucasus.) The problem with
this term is that it does not distinguish the khanates — which, despite