communications with Georgia made a corridor to the sea necessary.
There was an overland route linking Tbilisi and the Caucasian Line,
but it was narrow and steep even after Paul Potemkin made improve-
ments since it crossed the high Caucasus. Even the key pass, the Dar-
ial, was almost 8,000 feet high. The road was blocked by snow half
the year and vulnerable to rock slides and floods. It was also liable
to be cut by hostile mountain tribes, as the Russians discovered
when their garrison in Tbilisi was cut off from the line between 1785
and 1787 by the Chechens, who were then at war with Russia. The
Tbilisi garrison received no pay or material from Russia as long as the
road was cut. The hard-pressed commandant warned St. Petersburg
of the need for a link to the Caspian.
29
Finally, the 1795 attack per-
suaded the expansionists of the need to shield Georgia with a buffer
zone comprised of the neighboring khanates. In fact, Catherine deter-
mined that Russia needed to have suzerainty over all the territory up
to the Aras River, which she believed would provide a clearly defined
and strategically defensible border.^30 Moreover, she believed that this
goal was nearly fulfilled by the 1796 expedition since Zubov obtained
the submission of most of the khans in that region. In the minds of
the expansionists, this gave Russia a legal claim to those khanates, no
matter how unwilling or temporary the submission had been.
Despite the scarcity of information about the border provinces,
the expansionists were convinced by recurring contacts with those
areas over a sixteen-year period that they knew how to deal with
"Persians," a term they used indiscriminately to describe speakers of
Persian, Kurdish, or Azeri Turkish; Qajar shahs and their subjects or
autonomous marchwardens. "Persians" were exceedingly venal—that
had been proven to Russian satisfaction by consul Tumanovskii's ac-
cusations against Aqa Mohammad when the latter conquered Gilan in
- Thus, General Gudovich quite blithely assumed in 1795 that
he could make Aqa Mohammad leave Tbilisi by offering him a bribe.
The offer was not accepted, but there is no indication that St. Peters-
burg disagreed with the approach, which fitted in with Catherine's
belief that Iranian rulers in general cared only for personal enrich-
ment at public expense. In addition to being corrupt, "Persians"
were militarily inferior to Russians. The plausibility of this convic-
tion stemmed to a considerable degree from the fact that there had
been no battles between Russian and Qajar armies. (The capture of
the Voinovich mission to Astarabad had been accomplished without
fighting.) Russians consistently underestimated the effectiveness of
Iranian (and Caucasian) methods of warfare, which seemed so unor-
ganized to people reared in the Western military tradition. Thus,
44 Russian Expansion under Catherine the Great