Tiflis During The Russian Revolution of 1905: The Momentum of The “Georgian” Menshevism
Abstract
With a population of up to 200,000 inhabitants, Tiflis[1], the largest city in the South Caucasus, was a crucial site of the first Russian revolution in 1905. The revolutionary process and widespread discontent were participated by various social groups, each with its own distinctive political identity and objectives. The 1905 revolution in Tiflis was significantly impacted by ethnic, religious, and class identities, as well as the persistent conflicts among these identity groups. The ethnic confrontation between Armenians and Tatars[2] represents one of the most noteworthy occurrences in Tiflis during this period. This article concentrates on the political organizations that were operational in Tiflis throughout the Russian Revolution of 1905. It discusses the typology of these groups and their primary drivers for action, along with analyzing the interaction among them, which predominantly determined the fate of the revolution in both the South Caucasus and Tiflis.
[1] During the period of Russian imperial administration, the city of Tbilisi was officially known as Tiflis (Russian: Тифлис). This designation was used in administrative, cartographic, and literary Russian-language sources from the incorporation of the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti into the Russian Empire in 1801 until the collapse of imperial rule in 1917. The name “Tiflis” remained in widespread international and Russian usage into the early Soviet period, although the Georgian name “Tbilisi” was officially restored in 1936.
[2] In late imperial Russian usage, “Caucasus Tatars” referred primarily to the Turkic-speaking Muslim population of the South Caucasus, especially in present-day Azerbaijan and parts of eastern Georgia. This was not an ethnic self-designation but an administrative and ethnographic label used in the 19th–early 20th centuries. By the late imperial period and especially after the 1918–1920 national movements, this population increasingly adopted the ethnonym “Azerbaijani” (Azerbaijani Turks), which became the standard national identity in the Soviet period. The term “Caucasus Tatars” was officially abandoned in the 1920s as Soviet nationality policy formalized “Azerbaijanis” as a distinct titular nation.
The research was conducted with the support of the Shota Rustaveli Georgian National Science Foundation [No. FR-24-17422].
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