xPrefaceCongress, and Georgian according to the simplified, rather than
“scientific,” system. Georgian does not have capital letters, but gener-
ally in the text I follow English convention and render Georgian
names and places with the first letter capitalized. The endnote refer-
ences to Georgian materials, however, do not include capital letters.
The endnotes are also abbreviated, but readers can refer to the bibliog-
raphy for full citations. The city of Tbilisi (Tiflis in Russian) is gener-
ally referred to by its Georgian name, except in those cases where the
name is used in an imperial designation, such as “Tiflis Theatre” or
“Tiflis province.” Dates for events before 31 January 1918 generally
correspond to the Julian calendar in use in imperial Russia, rather than
the Gregorian calendar of the West. For the rendering of ethnonyms
from the region in English, I follow the usage adopted by Ronald Wix-
man in Language Aspects of Ethnic Patterns and Processes in the North
Caucasus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
For the support of five different research trips over a period of nine
years, I am grateful to the Education Abroad Program of the Univer-
sity of California, the Department of History at the University of
California, Davis, and the American Councils on International Educa-
tion. Eric Johnson and the Tbilisi office of the American Councils on
International Education supported and facilitated my study of the
Georgian language and my work in Georgian archives and libraries in
both 1999 and 2000. I am especially grateful to my language teachers,
Ramaz Kurdadze, Tamuna Koshoridze, and Tamara Chakhtauri, for
their excellent instruction in Georgian, and also to Rezo Khutsishvili
and his dedicated staff at the Georgian National Historical Archive in
Tbilisi, Larisa Isinovna Tsvizhba of the State Military Archive in
Moscow, Serafima Varekhova of the Russian State Historical Archive
in StPetersburg, Neli Melkadze of the Tbilisi Public Library, and
Aleko, Maia, and Nutsa Khutishvili of Tbilisi. In the United States sev-
eral stimulating and productive summers were made possible by the
Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in 199 7 and the
Hoover Institute of Stanford University in 1995. The Social Science
Research Council (New York) supported my dissertation work for an
entire year in 1992–93. The Office of Research and Graduate Studies
and the College of Arts and Letters at Old Dominion University gener-
ously supported the project in its later stages.
For critical responses to portions of my work, as well as for their or-
ganizational initiative, my thanks go to Tom Barrett, James Brooks,
Michael David-Fox, Wayne Dowler, David Hoffman, Harsha Ram,
Ron Suny, Yuri Slezkine, Ted Weeks, and Dov Yaroshevskii. Marc
Raeff, Anthony Rhinelander, Richard Wortman, and my anonymous
readers at McGill-Queen’s University Press read the entire manuscript21737_mm.book Page x Monday, January 21, 2002 9:38 AM