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

3 A Lull

The turmoil of the 1905 Revolution did not end quickly or easily in the Russian Empire,

the Caucasus included. In April 1906, Leo and Giorgi Kereselidze and Nestor Maga-

lashvili (Magalov), the heads of the combat organization of Georgian Socialist Feder-

alists, staged a raid against a state bank oce in Dusheti, Georgia, capturing 315,000

rubles.¹The money was most likely used to publish political propaganda in Georgia.²

Pursued by the police, they ed to Switzerland, where they were tried but acquitted

on the grounds that they had acted for a justiable political cause against Russian

oppression.³The trial even helped publicize in Europe the plight of Georgians under

Russian rule.⁴The following year they sent a petition to a disarmament conference

in The Hague, Netherlands (Second Hague Conference for Peace), in which they ac-

cused Russia of occupying Georgia and appealed to the world powers (which included

Germany, Britain, France, the United States, and Japan, as well as Russia) to help rein-

state autonomy in Georgia.⁵By 1907, however, the Russian autocracy had succeeded in

restoring peace and order to much of the empire through a combination of concessions

(most notably, the creation of the national Duma and a form of quasi-constitutional

monarchy) and violent repression.

3.1 “Pacication”

In western Georgia, where weapons from theSiriushad reached, turmoil ended with

brutal suppression by the Tsarist forces. In 1905 the region consisted “not so much of

anarchy as of an independent state made up of self-governing communes which rec-

ognized no authority but that of the revolutionary committees.” The political situation

in the Kutaisi province, according to one account, was “so amazing when witnessed

against the general background of the political structure of the Empire that foreign-

ers are making special trips to the Caucasus with the aim of observing on the spot this

1 See GSCHA, f. 153, op. 1, d. 1835, ll. 169–223.

2 See GARF, f. 102, DPOO 1909, op. 239, d. 202, ll. 5, 59.

3 See Commissariat d’Annemasse, Surveillance générale des révolutionnaires russes. Au sujet des vols

commis à mains armée en Russie (reports of 14 and 15 September 1906 and of 14 February of 1907).

CHAN, Box F 7, 12521.

4 G. Kereselidze, “sakartvelos damoukideblobis komit’et’i (1914-1918)” [Committee for the indepen-

dence of Georgia],kartuli emigratsia[Georgian emigration] (Tbilisi: n.p., 2013), vol. I (4), 149.

5 Werner Zürrer,Kaukasien 1918–1921: Der Kampf der Großmächte um die Landbrücke zwischen

Schwarzem und Kaspischem Meer(Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1978), 8.

©2016 Hiroaki Kuromiya and Georges Mamoulia
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