The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

Introduction Ë 3

the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus is sometimes divided into the Southern Caucasus (Tran-

scaucasia, roughly encompassing Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia) and the North-

ern Caucasus. In terms of geographical size, the Caucasus is very roughly the size of

France or Spain, and larger than Germany or the state of California in the United States.

In 1897 the population of the Russian Caucasus was approximately nine million, in-

creasing to some fourteen million by 1939. (Here the “Caucasus” is dened in rough

terms without considering the various and complex administrative changes that have

aected the region.) The Caucasus was an area long contested for inuence by the

Russian, Persian, and Ottoman Empires. It was an area where Islam and Christian-

ity coexisted: Georgia (an autocephalous Orthodox church) and Armenia (an Orien-

tal Orthodox Monophysite church), both among the oldest Christian communities in

the world, and smaller Christian communities (in Ossetia, Abkhazia, and elsewhere)

lived alongside the Muslims of Azerbaijan and the Northern Caucasus (such as Chech-

nia, Ingushetia, and Dagestan). Within each of these lands, Christians and Muslims

created a complex web of relations. The Muslims in turn were divided among Shias

(predominant, for example, in Azerbaijan) and Sunnis (predominant in Chechnia, In-

gushetia, and Dagestan).

Most of all, the Caucasus is known as the embodiment of complexity, a mosaic of

geographic, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Since the days of Greek civiliza-

tion, the Caucasus has dismayed visitors with its “tribal” and linguistic variations. It is

estimated that more than fty ethnic groups and corresponding numbers of languages

exist there. As one anthropologist has noted:

Again and again in the two and a half millennia since Herodotus’s day, writers have commented

on the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Caucasus. Strabo, writing about four and a half cen-

turies later, having discounted more exaggerated estimates, arms that 70 tribes, all speaking

dierent languages, would come down to trade in Dioscurias (the modern Sukhumi), and a few

decades after Strabo, Pliny claimed that the Romans carried on business in the same city by

means of 130 interpreters. Arab travelers in the middle ages bore continuing witness to Caucasian

polyglossia, and it was one of them, the tenth century geographer al-Mas’udi, who named the

Caucasusˇȷabal al-alsun, “mountain of tongues.”⁵

This diversity, especially prominent in the northern, mountainous regions of the Cau-

casus, may have something to do with the region’s terrain (which isolated villages and

settlements from one another) as well as with the practice of endogamy, intended to

provide “a high level of guarantee that outsiders will not be able to lay claim to [arable]

land,” which was particularly scarce in the mountainous regions.⁶It was only after the

5 See J.C. Catford, “Mountain of Tongues: The Languages of the Caucasus.”Annual Review of Anthro-
pology6 (1997), 283.
6 Bernard Comrie, “Linguistic Diversity in the Caucasus.”Annual Review of Anthropology37 (2008),
139.