The Caucasus on the Eve of World War I Ë 69
to be drastically curtailed in 1910, the Georgian Socialist Federalists protested against
the Russian government in support of the Finns.⁶⁹
The thrust of Stolypin’s policy in the Caucasus as elsewhere in the Empire was
not merely Russi cation, but the advancement of Russian hegemony in non-Russian
provinces. It was to be carried out by ethnic Russians. Russian peasants, in particular,
were encouraged to “colonize” the Caucasus by buying land from impoverished land-
lords. Thus under Stolypin tens of thousands of Russian peasants settled in Georgia
alone. The Black Sea coastal areas and the southern part of Azerbaijan (the Mugan
steppe) were also settled by Russians. Altogether, by 1910 one hundred thousand had
settled in the Caucasus.⁷⁰Naturally their settlement, supported by the Russian govern-
ment, deeply disturbed local sentiments. Indeed, the Georgian Socialist Federalists,
without excluding terrorism as a weapon against Russian colonization, set up a secret
national land fund to keep Georgian lands from being bought by Russian peasants.⁷¹
The insistence on national autonomy by the Georgian Socialist Federalists made
their position particularly dangerous in the eyes of Russian authorities. They were in
fact more dangerous than the Social Democrats (who dominated Georgian politics) in
one particular respect: whereas the latter, as Marxist internationalists, considered na-
tionalism as particularistic and separatist and sought to “solve” national issues within
the framework of “Russia” itself, the former regarded Russia as an occupier and col-
onizer. As repression continued, some Socialist Federalists became even more radi-
calized, advocating outright independence from Russia. By 1910, they were targeted
for destruction, and in April of that year, most of the central gures of the party were
arrested.⁷²In a further blow to the party, in November, the most prominent member
abroad, Dekanozishvili, died in Cannes, France.
Nonetheless, the Socialist Federalists persisted politically. In 1912, for example,
Prince Varlaam Gelovani (1878–1915), a Georgian lawyer who had studied at St. Pe-
tersburg University and a member of the Socialist-Federalist Party, was elected in Ku-
taisi to the Fourth State Duma of the Russian Empire. In a speech at the Duma, he
demanded Georgia’s autonomy within the empire.⁷³Moreover, the Romanov tercente-
nary in 1913 led the government to grant amnesty to many of those arrested and exiled.
In 1911, Peter Surguladze, a Socialist Federalist who had ed Russia in December
1910, had already founded the Foreign Committee of the Party of Georgian Separatists
in Geneva.⁷⁴The committee included Leo Kereselidze and his brother Giorgi, Nestor
69 GSCHA, f. 94, op. 1, d. 369, ll. 1–2.
70 See Mostashari,On the Religious Frontier, 107.
71 GSCHA, f. 153, op. 1, d. 1835, l. 11ob and 18ob, and GARF, f. 102 DPOO 1909, op. 239, d. 202, ll. 174–75,
f. 102 DPOO 1910, op. 240, d. 2479, ll. 13, 16–17, 30–31, 33, 47–48, 58, 64.
72 GARF, f. 102 DPOO 1910, op. 240, d. 2479, ll. 45–45ob.
73 Laskhishvili,memuarebi (1885–1915), 279.
74 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), 151.