Translated material
Actual anniversary
At the end of May 2008, independent states of the South Caucasus celebrated a significant anniversary in historical and political terms. In Tbilisi, Baku and Yerevan, 90 years were celebrated since the proclamation of the first independent states of the Transcaucasia - Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Let's make a reservation right away. We are not talking about the ancient states of the ancient era, the protested formations of the Middle Ages, the principalities, khanates or lemon balicisms in the era of "before nationalism." In May 1918, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, the February and October Revolutions in Transcaucasia, the first experience began to be realized to create nations-states focused on European patterns. Today, the study of the political experience of the “first republics” is extremely relevant not only for academic reasons. Numerous problems and contradictions (unresolved border disputes and ethnic conflicts, the relations of the nationalizing republics to the former metropolis) formed in their current form precisely in the period from 1918 to 1921.
On May 26, 2008, it turned 90 from the moment the last meeting of the Transcaucasian Sejm took place. At this meeting, it was officially announced the collapse of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federal Republic (a project that assumed the creation of a federation of three state -owned formations of the region). Then another meeting was opened, the National Council of Georgia, at which the “act of independence” of this republic was read out. The first article of the act read: "From now on, the Georgian people are a carrier of sovereign rights, and Georgia is a full, independent state." Two days later, on May 28, 1918, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (Adr) appeared, the first republican state of the Islamic East. On the same day, the Armenian National Council in Tiflis gave the authority of the government with unlimited powers. The Council announced the independence of Armenia, and on May 29, at a meeting of the Western and Eastern Bureau of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation “Dashnaktsutyun” (the most influential Armenian political party created in 1890), he appointed the first prime minister of the republic (they became the architect Ovanes Kachaznuni) and chose the capital of the new state. Thus, 90 years ago in the South Caucasus (Transcaucasia), the construction of the national statehood of three independent republics began.
However, the implementation of this project was not carried out long. The Azerbaijan Republic lasted only 23 months. On April 28, 1920, the creation of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (Azerbaijan SSR) was announced. The convocation of the first congress of the Soviets of the Azerbaijan SSR on March 6, 1921 ended the Sovietization of the Northern Azerbaijan. On May 19 of the same year, the first constitution of the Azerbaijan SSR was adopted. Then the turn of Armenia came. On November 29, 1920 , the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was proclaimed on its territory. On December 2, 1920, an agreement was signed between Armenia and the RSFSR. Independence lasted the longest in Georgia. Moreover, on February 21, 1921, the Constituent Assembly of Georgia approved the Constitution of this state - Georgia was the only independent Republic of Transcaucasia, which managed to adopt the Basic Law (Azerbaijan and Armenia of its constitutions during the period of "first independence). However, the adoption of the Georgian Constitution was already under the accompaniment of the Bolshevik guns and rifles.
The 11th Red Army in February 1921 entered Georgia (in March 1921, Soviet power was established in Abkhazia and in the future South Ossetia). On March 16, 1921, the RSFSR and Kemalist Türkiye agreed that Adjara, together with Batumi, would be considered part of Soviet Georgia. Two days after this, March 18, 1921, the government of the Georgian Democratic Republic left the country.
From that time to the restructuring of Transcaucasia, it has become an integral part of the Soviet political space (since 1922 - the USSR union). It was the Soviet government who carried out the “general land survey” in this region, determined the inter -republican borders, which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, created the predicates of statehood, prepared through the system of party and economic nomenclature, as well as educational projects of its own “national forms, but socialist in content”. However, in 1989-1991, the form and content of many nominees of the Communist Party and the Soviet state were significantly modified. Many of them turned to a glorious past, not to the “commissars in dusty helmets” from the 11th Red Army and not to the legacy of Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani Bolsheviks, but to the experience of the first statehood of 1918-1921. Since the late 1980s. The first statehood of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan ceased to be a manifestation of the “counter -revolutionary activity” of the Mensheviks, Dashnakov and Musavatists supported by “world imperialism”. She became a pattern for the restoration of statehood, and her leaders (Noe Zhordia, Mammad Emin Rasulzade, Ovanes Kachaznuni) and military leaders (Movses Silikov, Garein Nzhda, Georgy Smazniev (Mesniashvili), Georgy Quinitadze) were included in the lists of new national heroes. Their works and performances began to quote as often as before the restructuring of the composition of the classics of Marxism-Leninism. But the actualization of the experience of the first republics was not limited to the ideological sphere. The “restoration of statehood” was elected Azerbaijan and Georgia as a strategy for state construction during the struggle for independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Armenia has chosen a different way of building a national state from scratch through legal demarcation with the Soviet Union. Such a step can be explained by the fact that the Armenian elite, unlike the Georgian and Azerbaijani elites, does not consider the “first republic” as a “golden age”, with which it is required to restore continuity. At the sunset of the USSR on April 9, 1991, Georgia adopted the "Act on the restoration of state independence of Georgia." Azerbaijan “restored” his statehood on August 30, 1991, after the failure of the State Emergency Committee. However, even Armenia, proclaiming its second independence by the Declaration of the Supreme Council of the Republic of August 23, 1990, stated that this choice was made in order to develop "democratic traditions of an independent Republic of Armenia, formed on May 28, 1918, aimed at creating a democratic, legal society."
Meanwhile, the “restoration of statehood”, as the theory and practice of gaining independence, was accompanied by the restoration of all those conflicts and contradictions that existed during the “first republics”, and which, along with the determination and consistency of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, led these formations to collapse. The implementation of the “Renaissance” strategy at the initial stage contributed to the strengthening of the illigimality of the “restored state”, since they resurrected in the mass consciousness the memory of the period of 1918-1921, when the war of everyone was against all in the South Caucasus.
According to the fair remark of the political scientist and journalist Mamed Arakelov, “by the time Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia came without clear and mutually recognized state borders. There have not been independent state formations in the Transcaucasia since time immemorial: from the 7th to the 15th century, the territory was in invasions of Arabs, Byzantines, Seljukov Turks, Mongol-Tatars. From the XVI to the XVIII century, Transcaucasia was the subject of discord between Turkey and Persia, from time to time various small principalities and khanates arose in large numbers, and in the 19th century the entire territory of the modern Transcaucasia was included in the Russian Empire. As a result of endless wars, residents of Azerbaijani, Armenian and Georgian cities and villages had to wander from place to place, which ultimately formed the national vessel and diametrically opposite understanding of the autochthonousness of a particular people in specific regions. In such a situation, at the time of the proclamation of independence between the newly formed republics, disagreements in the issue of determining the boundaries could not have arisen, which, in turn, multiplied by the centuries -old local interethnic conflicts and religious differences, led to serious armed clashes, which are largely provoked from the outside. ”
Until May 1918, all the leading nationalist forces of Transcaucasia (Dashnaki, Musavatists, Georgian Social Democrats) believed that coexistence was possible within the framework of a single federal state. On November 15 (28), 1917 - March 26, 1918, a single Transcaucasian government acted - the Transcaucasian Commissariat, headed by Evgeny Gegechkori (he was a member of the Third State Duma from the Kutaisian province). On February 10 (23), 1918 , the Transcaucasian Sejm was convened (Nikolai Chkheidze became the chairman with the rights of the President of the Republic). It included deputies from Transcaucasia, elected to the All -Russian Constituent Assembly, as well as representatives of the leading political parties of the region. The Sejm in March 1918 authorized the Transcaucasia Department from Soviet Russia , and on April 9 (22), 1918 , he proclaimed the creation of an independent Transcaucasian Democratic Federal Republic (ZALL). Alas, the ZDFR project lasted a little more than one month. The idea of the Transcaucasian "integrism" could not stand the test of practice. All three Transcaucasian republics proclaimed their independence in Tiflis (the capital of the Caucasian governorship of the Russian Empire). Moreover, the independence of Georgia was declared in the palace of the imperial governor On Golovinsky Prospekt (now Rustaveli Avenue), and the capital of independent adr originally (in June-September 1918) was based in Ganja while in Baku (the future capital of Azerbaijan) until September 1918 the political positions of the leading Armenian party Dashnaktsutyun were strong.
All independent states of Transcaucasia had territorial claims to each other in 1918-1920. Armenia and Azerbaijan were arguing for the belonging of Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhichevani (later Karabakh and Nakhichevan will be transferred to Azerbaijan, and Zangezur - Armenia). At the end of 1918, a Georgian-Armenian conflict arose because of the Lorian district. In the Georgian-Azerbaijani conflict, Tiflis claimed the Zagatica district of Azerbaijan, inhabited by Georgians, and Baku-to the Marneul and Gardabansky districts of Georgia, which were a register of compact residence of Azerbaijanis. Add here internal conflicts (Georgian-Abkhaz and Georgian-Ossetian, Armenian-Tatar confrontations in Armenia and Azerbaijan). All these conflicts took place during the intervention of Turkey and the "central powers", and then the countries of the Entente. We add to this the military-political confrontations of the first republics with the Russian Bolsheviks and the White Guards. The latter were perceived in Georgia and in Azerbaijan as defenders of the Russian imperial project.
Today, Armenia and Türkiye do not have diplomatic relations, and the land border between the two states is closed. Meanwhile, the sources of this problem do not lie in the “centuries-old enmity of the two peoples” (peoples cannot be at war because they do not have political subjectivity, it has states and international structures) and not even in the 1915 tragedy in the Ottoman Empire. The current borderline problem is the result of the conflict of two nationalist discourses of the early twentieth century. For Armenia, the results of the Sevres Peace Treaty (signed on August 10, 1920) were the triumph of the Armenian National Affairs, and for Turkey - by national shame and humiliation. And therefore, after the Sevres Agreement, an Armenian-Turkish war occurred, accelerating the Sovietization of Armenia (the choice in those conditions was small: either the RSFSR or a complete defeat from Turkey), the Alexander Polish agreement appeared (December 2-3, 1920), according to which Armenia lost a significant part of the territories “laid down” under the Sevres Treaty of territories. For many years, the December tragedy of 1920 determined latent anti -communist sentiments within Armenia (Soviet Russia openly supported Kemalist Turkey), actualized in 1988 with the start of the struggle for Nagorno -Karabakh. This regard is characterized by the sketch of the writer Mikhail Haifets (in 1974 he was sentenced to six years of camps and references for the preface to the “samizdat” collection of Joseph Brodsky) about his dialogue with the leader of the dissident nationalists Paruir Airikyan: “Once we talked with Airikyan about the independent Armenian Republic, which was in appearance to territories of the former Persian (and then Russian) Armenia after 1917. At the institute, we were taught that the Turkish army, led by Ataturk, almost destroyed then, at the end of the twentieth year, the young state and almost finished off the remnants of the Armenian people, but the Red Army stopped Kemal-Pasha and saved the Russian Armenians. Paruyr boiled when I retold all this: “We defeated the Turkish army when they created our republic, and they would be defeated again if the eleventh Army of the Reds had not been attacked from the north. We were taken into ticks: the Turks walked from the south, from the north - the Bolsheviks. The Russians did not save us, but helped Kemal to eliminate our state and received part of our lands for this, and gave the rest to the Turks. ”
The appeal to the “first republics” has also created many political and legal conflicts that have not yet had their permission. In the Constitution of Georgia in 1921 (restored by the Military Council after the overthrow of Zviad Gamsakhurdia and approved by the first composition of the Georgian Parliament 1992-1995), the provision on the limited autonomy of Abkhazia was not about the status of South Ossetia. The same constitutional dispute has largely the basis of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict. While Georgia appealed to the Basic Law of February 1921, Abkhazia sought to “restore” the Constitution on April 1, 1925 (which did not go through a sieve of the Transcaucasian regional committee). Legal conflicts related to the “restoration” played a role in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict due to the Nagorno-Karabakh. It was Stepanakert who claimed (and continues to argue) that the decision of Azerbaijan to restore legal continuity from the ADR 1918-1920. The entire political and legal basis for the location of Karabakh was crossed out as part of Azerbaijan (since the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and then the NKAO was created as part of Soviet Azerbaijan, which denied the very existence of the Bourgeois Adr). The leadership of the Nagorno -Karabakh (in the future - the unrecognized Republic of the NKR) sought to substantiate its claims to independence not by the right of the "first republics", but by the legislation of the USSR on the right to withdraw allied and autonomous entities from the composition of the Soviet state. The legislation of the perestroika period involved a referendum on the territory of autonomy if the Union Republic intends to leave the SSR. Thus, some were ready to almost completely exclude the Soviet period, having made a jump into the “bright past”, while others sought to take into account the realities of the Union State (which, however, was rather a situational choice than a conscious strategy).
On the other hand, one cannot help but see the objective nature of the emergence of independent statehood in Transcaucasia (both in 1918 and at the sunset of perestroika). In one and in the other case, the independence of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia became the result of the development and rooting of nationalist discourse. Both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, conducting the modernization of its “Caucasian outskirts”, objectively became the creators of future “national personnel”. Urbanization, the development of a market economy, attempts to integrate the “outskirts” into the general imperial society became the environment in which the Armenian, Georgian, Tatar (subsequently Azerbaijani) intellectuals discussed the problems of their own identity, designed the images of the national future. Both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union brought personnel for future independent national entities. About Heydar Aliyev, Eduard Shevardnadze, Karen Demirchyan (as well as the dissidents of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Abulfaz Elchibea, also prepared by the Soviet system), is known. The imperial contribution to the formation of the management corps of the first republics of Transcaucasia is much less known. Meanwhile, the National Parliament of Adr was headed by Alimardan-Bek Topchibashev, a graduate of the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, author of labor “Diplomatic conversations in Istanbul”, and the first prime minister of the Republic of Fatal Khan-Khsky was a deputy of the State Duma of the second convocation. Noe Jordan, the head of the Georgian government, was elected to the first Duma, and in 1907-1912 he was a member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (i.e. participated in the all-Russian social democratic movement). The chairman of the Constituent Assembly of Georgia, Nikolai Chkheidze, before the proclamation of independence, was the vowel of the Batuma City Duma, a deputy of the third and fourth State Duma, and after the February Revolution of 1917 - the chairman of the Petrograd Council. The famous Armenian military leader Movses Silikov (Silikyan), the hero of the Sardaratarapat Bita on May 21-28, 1918 (in which the Armenian forces prevailed over the Turks), made a good career in the Russian army, having traveled to the title of Major General. Assistant to the military minister of Adr, one of the highest representatives of the Muslim nobility of the Caucasus, the general in “Tsarist times”, Ali-Aga Shikhlinsky also had an excellent track record. In the memoirs of the Protopresbyter of the army and fleet of imperial Russia, father George Shavelsky gives a story about how Shikhlinsky and his wife (daughter of the Caucasian Mufti) in Smolensk visited the Orthodox Council. The general informed the future author of memoirs about his tradition to visit the Orthodox churches in places where soldiers and officers serve under his leadership (see Schavelsky G.I. Memories of the last protopresvitor of the Russian army and navy.-New York: ed. Chekhov, 1954). The Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Democratic Republic of Georgia in 1920-1921. General Georgy Quinitadze recalled that before the independence gained by Georgia, during his service in the Russian Imperial Army, "did not know his native language and barely captured the general meaning of speech."
The ethnic self -determination of Georgia made the officer loyal to Russia to become a defender of the Georgian business. However, the process of creating its “nationalized state” forced this choice of other bright politicians, diplomats, scientists, and military, who were perfectly integrated into the general imperial legal, social and cultural space until 1918. However, with the beginning of the process of national construction, they began "flight from the empire." At the same time, the process of "nationalization" of states was accompanied by significant excesses. The famous American historian, professor of universities of Michigan and Chicago Ronald Grigor Suni rightly notes: “Instead of obvious support for interethnic clashes of the Social Democrats (the ruling party in independent Georgia 1918-1921) sublimated national tension into a class-political conflict, in which the Armenians were transformed into Bourgeoisia, and the Armenians were transformed, and Russians in bureaucracy. " In the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Latent sublimation of ethno -national contradictions was not limited. Large -scale ethnic purges have passed here, which gave rise to then and today to talk about genocide. In March 1918, cases of “Tatar pogroms” were noted, and in the fall of 1918 - the Armenian pogroms in Baku, the Armenian population was supplanted from the territory of the former Baku and Elizabethpol provinces (the current Ganja was then called Elizabethpollee), and the “Tatar population” was expelled in the territory of the former Erivan province.
The rapid “nationalization” with an ethnic bias led to the fact that the “first republics” could not gain legitimacy (neither external nor internal). Following the principle of “your land” (understood as collective ethnic property) ultimately laid a mine under the foundation of the new Caucasus states. Moreover, by legitimacy, in our opinion, one should understand not only the perception of power as legal, but also as a power expressing the interests of citizens. “One nation (ethnically understood) is one state” is not the best approach to ensuring the legitimacy of power in countries with the multi -ethnic and polyconfessional composition of the population and with numerous images of “their lands”. None of the first independent states of the Transcaucasia was fully recognized, which ensured its territorial integrity and legitimacy of power. In 1920, the independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (Adr) was recognized as the de facto as the Supreme Council of the Union Powers at the Paris Peace Conference. However, Adr did not get to the League of Nations. The memorandum of the League Secretary General indicated why this is impossible to do: “The territory of Azerbaijan was part of the Russian Empire, in the view of which the question arises whether the announcements in May 1918 on independence and recognition by allied powers in May 1920 in order to consider Azerbaijan de jure a completely self-governing state.” In 1920, this was not enough. The adoption of Armenia in the member of the League of Nations was rejected on December 16, 1920 by 21 votes against 8 under 13 abstained. The main reason for this solution is the lack of clearly defined boundaries of the republic. Georgia was also denied admission to the League of Nations, despite the fiery support of its independence from Fridtjof Nansen. But out of 24 states that participated in the vote on the issue of Georgia membership in the league, only 10, against the adoption, was about 14. For the election, it was necessary to get 16 votes.
However, we must not forget that many of the three independent republics introduced many concepts and elements of Western democracy (parliamentarism, the need for elections and legitimization of power through elections, freedom of speech and civil rights, which, however, often coincided with ethnic boundaries). In the same Azerbaijan, in just 23 months of the existence of independence, 155 parliamentary meetings took place (230 laws adopted, 270 were considered). The leaders of the first republics of Transcaucasia very highly set the role of education (considering it a guarantee of freedom and independence). It is no accident that at a meeting of the Adr Parliament on September 1, 1919, a law was adopted on the establishment of Baku State University. Thus, the political experience of the “first republics” is not reduced to border disputes and ethnic purges, although these practices crossed out the entire democratic impulse that the deputies of the Transcaucasian Sejm showed, discussing the future of the peaceful and democratic Caucasus.
In 1920-1921, the Soviet government allowed for the duration of territorial disputes in the South Caucasus, gathers all three republics - Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan - within the framework of a single “communist project”. It was in the Soviet period that the “territorial integrity” of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia was ensured (Zangezur would also be the subject of the dispute without the help of Soviet power) and those boundaries that were recognized as the boundaries between the new subjects of international law after the collapse of the USSR. Having parted with the USSR, the new independent states of the South Caucasus are clearly not wanting to abandon such a heritage of the Kremlin Empire as the territorial survey carried out by it (for Armenia - with the exception of Karabakh). From the whole heritage of the “first republics” of democracy, they clearly prefer patriotism in its extreme forms.
The political evolution of the first republics of Transcaucasia was interrupted by the Sovietization (not only external, as it is often talked about today in Baku, Yerevan and especially in Tbilisi, but also internal). The development of nations-states in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan was not stopped, but translated into a different format-the format of the policy of nationalist ethnicity (creation of national republics, establishing national-state symbols, universities, academies of sciences and writing unions). According to the university professor Berkeley Yuri Slovkin, the Soviet Union itself contributed to the rooting of ethnic nationalism in republics of different levels. But the whole focus is that the post -Soviet states of the South Caucasus have not yet developed other (except imperial and Soviet) mechanisms for ensuring the national world and tranquility in the region. Today, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are not ready to recognize Georgian sovereignty, and Karabakh is a sovereignty of Azerbaijan. It is obvious that to recreate the Central Committee of the CPSU, the KGB or the Institute of the Caucasian Viceroy to solve these problems today. But at the same time, the appeal to ethnic nationalism in order to “return” the lost one works with the exact opposite result. Thus, the experience of 1918-1921. It turns out to be extremely relevant, since the lessons from it are still not taken into account.