56 Ë A Lull
tionaries.¹⁰From 1905 to 1911, more than ve thousand state o cials were killed by ter-
rorists in Russia as a whole, Stolypin himself being murdered in 1911. Georgia’s Exarch,
Archbishop Nikon, a vehement opponent of the autocephalous Georgian Church, was
assassinated on 22 May 1908, probably by former members of the Socialist Federalist
combat organization.¹¹The Russian autocracy in turn executed nearly three thousand
people for political crimes between 1905 and 1909.¹²
Despite the setbacks, Dekanozishvili continued shipping arms to Georgia, which
apparently the Russian authorities failed to intercept.¹³He also succeeded in deliver-
ing printing presses to Georgia after the 1905 revolution.¹⁴A small group of Georgian
Bolsheviks also revived political terrorism, the most famous event of which was the
1907 raid on the Tbilisi State Bank. Nevertheless, the revolutionary and national move-
ments in the Caucasus were generally contained by the Tsarist government. The politi-
cal parties tended to be fragmented under Stolypin’s repression. Some Socialist Feder-
alists chose legal methods of work, while others adhered to illegal ones. Those right-
ists who, abandoning socialist ideas, focused on the nationalist cause joined other
forces in 1917 to form the National Democratic Party of Georgia.¹⁵
In the meantime, Japan and Russia began mending relations following the Russo-
Japanese War, and during World War I they stood on the same side, that of the Triple
Entente. Little trace of a Japanese-Caucasian link can be found in these years. But the
interwar period was just a lull, soon to be interrupted by the world war, the Russian
Revolutions, and the independence of four Caucasian states.
3.2 The Impact of Japan’s Victory
The 1905 victory of Japan, an Asian constitutional monarchy, over Russia, a European
autocracy, had an immediate impact on other nations in the world that had to contend
with the European colonial powers, Russia included. As a German naval o cer noted
10 Ronald Grigor Suny,The Making of the Georgian Nation(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1988), 174.
11 See GSCHA, f. 153, op. 1, d. 1835, l. 4.
12 See Anna Geifman,Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917(Princeton, NJ,
1993), 21, 228.
13 See letters from Sh. Iosava to Dekanozishvili (25 January and 2, 5, and 6 February 1906), Fonds
Georges Dekanozichvili. Centre historique des archives nationales (CHAN), Paris, box 345 AP/1, and
GSCHA, f. 13, op. 29, d. 64, ll. 11–14.
14 See V. Nozadze, “gardasrul zhamta ambavni da sakmeni” [Events and deeds of the past],kavkas-
sioni(Caucasus) (Paris), 1964, no. 9, pp. 123–28, and GARF, f. 102. DPOO 1904, op. 316, d. 28, ll. 133, 162
and f. 102, DPOO 1909, op. 239, d. 202, ll. 15–16, 23.
15 D. Shvelidze,polit’ikuri part’iebis ts’armoshoba sakartveloshi. pederalist’ebi[The origins of the po-
litical parties in Georgia. Federalists] (Tbilisi: “Arsi,” 1993), 256.