Introduction Ë 7
By the time the Caucasian War ended, however, Russia itself had begun to change
rapidly. Its defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56) against Britain, France, and the Ot-
toman Empire was an impetus for what came to be known as the Great Reform. Initially
with much hesitation, Russia ultimately embarked on rapid modernization if only to
survive in an increasingly competitive world. It emancipated the serfs (one of the last
states to do so in Europe) in 1861 and enacted other reforms (judicial, military, and
administrative) in the following years. Russia did so, however, without reforming the
political system, that is, without renouncing its autocracy. More generally, the Russian
autocracy failed to see, let alone solve, fundamental contradictions in its body politic:
while it wished to become a mighty state with modern military forces on a par with the
most advanced European countries, it refused to acknowledge that its modernization
program inevitably eroded the fabric of the old regime. In plain language, while Eu-
rope made its way into the modern era by way of bourgeois revolution, the Russian
autocracy remained stuck in the absolutist mold.
This marked a sharp contrast with Japan, another latecomer, which, setting out
on the path of modernization about the same time, assumed a constitutional monar-
chy following the Meiji restoration in 1868.¹²By the time Japan nally promulgated
its constitution in 1889, Russia had reversed some of its earlier reforms in the wake of
the assassination in 1881 of the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II by revolutionary terrorists
(a process called “counter reform”). Nevertheless, the Russian autocracy even inten-
si ed its modernization and industrialization programs in the belief that they would
strengthen, rather than undermine, the old, tradition-bound autocratic monarchy.
Modernization came to the Caucasus as well. Railways, the symbol of modern, in-
dustrial power of the time, reached Poti, on the western Black Sea coast of Georgia, in
1865 and Ti is and Vladikavkaz in 1872 and 1875, respectively. In 1883 the railway net-
work extended to Baku on the Caspian Sea of Azerbaijan, completing the Baku-Poti
route. This allowed Caspian oil to be shipped from Baku to the Black Sea and then to
other parts of the world. Yet the Caucasus remained Russia’s colony, however enlight-
ened some of Russia’s viceroys may have become. The Great Reforms failed to reform
Caucasian society very much. For instance, the zemstvo system, an elected body of lo-
cal representatives with all estates (sosloviia) participating, was introduced in 1864 in
European Russia. But although it contributed greatly to improving the provincial in-
frastructure, including administration, education, medicine, welfare, transport, and
the like, it did not extend to the Russian periphery, including the Caucasus, where
the Russian gentry was non existent or else weakly represented. Russian hegemony
was thus impossible to secure.¹³The judicial reform enacted in the same year also
improved the legal system of the empire greatly. Yet for this reform, too, the elective
12 See the classic work, Cyril E. Black et al., eds,The Modernization of Japan and Russia: A Comparative
Study(New York: Free Press, 1975).
13 For the Great Reforms in general, see Ben Eklof, John Bushnell, and Larissa Zakharova, eds,Rus-
sia’s Great Reforms, 1855-1881(Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).