Imperial Policies and Perspectives towards Georgia, 1760–1819

Imperial Policies and Perspectives towards Georgia, 1760–1819
Author: N. Gvosdev
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2000-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1403932786

This book examines how the Russian Empire expanded across the barrier of the Caucasus mountains to take control of the Georgian lands at the close of the eighteenth century. With no organized plan for conquest, Imperial policy fluctuated based both on personnel changes in the Imperial government and strategic re-evaluations of Imperial interests. Particular attention is paid to the role of two significant individuals - Princes Potemkin and Tsitsianov - in pushing the Empire toward total incorporation.

Imperial Policies and Perspectives Towards Georgia, 1760-1819

Imperial Policies and Perspectives Towards Georgia, 1760-1819
Author: NA NA
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2000-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780312229900

The image of an Empire relentlessly gobbling up the Eurasian steppe has dominated Western thinking about Russia for centuries, but is it accurate? Far from being motivated by a well-organized plan for territorial conquest, the Imperial government of the late eighteenth century had no consistent or coherent policy towards the Georgian lands which lie south of the Caucasus mountains. Seen both as co-religionist allies and as troublesome nuisances by different factions in St. Petersburg, Russian attitudes towards Georgia fluctuated as Emperors and Empresses, along with their favourites and enemies, rose and fell from supreme power. Thanks to the determined efforts of two princes, Grigorii Potemkin and Dimitri Tsitsianov, a vision of Georgia linked firmly to Russia was imposed upon a sceptical St. Petersburg. This led to its complete incorporation into the Russian Empire, forever changing the destinies of Russia, the Caucasus, and all Eurasia.

Representing Russia's Orient

Representing Russia's Orient
Author: Adalyat Issiyeva
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2020-11-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190051388

Throughout history, Russia's geo-political and cultural position between the East and West has shaped its national identity. Representing Russia's Orient tells the story of how Russia's imperial expansion and encounters with its Asian neighbors influenced the formation and development of Russian musical identity in the long nineteenth century. While Russia's ethnic minorities, or inorodtsy, were located at the geographical and cultural periphery, they loomed large in composers' perception and musical imagination and became central to the definition of Russianness itself. Drawing from a long-forgotten archive of Russian musical examples, visual art, and ethnographies, author Adalyat Issiyeva offers an in-depth study of Russian art music's engagement with oriental subjects. Within a complex matrix of politics, competing ideological currents, and social and cultural transformations, some Russian composers and writers developed multidimensional representations of oriental "others" and sometimes even embraced elements of Asian musical identity. In three detailed case studies--on the leader of the Mighty Five, Milii Balakirev, Decembrist sympathizer Alexander Aliab'ev, and the composers affiliated with the Music-Ethnography Committee--Issiyeva traces how and why these composers adopted "foreign" musical elements. In this way, she provides a fresh look at how Russians absorbed and transformed elements of Asian history and culture in forging a national identity for themselves.

Historical Dictionary of Georgia

Historical Dictionary of Georgia
Author: Alexander Mikaberidze
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 813
Release: 2015-02-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1442241462

Situated in the breathtaking Caucasus Mountains between the Black and the Caspian Seas, the country of Georgia sits at the crossroads between Europe and Asia; it has gone through more turbulence and change in the last twenty five years—the casting off of the Soviet regime, a civil war, two ethno-territorial conflicts, economic collapse, corruption, government inefficiency, and massive emigration—than most countries go through in 250 years. This small nation's strategic location at the crossroads of different civilizations has been a curse as well as a blessing. Once a battlefield between the ancient empires and the Christian and Islamic worlds, today it is caught between its NATO aspirations and its location in Russia’s backyard. Yet, despite all challenges and hardships, this resilient and ancient country, with thousands of years of winemaking, three-thousand years of statehood, and almost two millennia of Christianity, continues to survive and thrive. This book uses its chronology; glossary; introduction; appendixes; maps; bibliography; and over 900 hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on important persons, places, events and institutions, as well as significant political, economic, social, and cultural aspects to trace Georgia's history and predict its future. This historical dictionary is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Georgia.

The Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars
Author: Alexander Mikaberidze
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 977
Release: 2020-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199951071

Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the places most closely associated with the era of the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this period of nearly continuous conflict affect the world beyond Europe? The immensity of the fighting waged by France against England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and the immediate consequences of the tremors that spread throughout the world. In this ambitious and far-ranging work, Alexander Mikaberidze argues that the Napoleonic Wars can only be fully understood in an international perspective. France struggled for dominance not only on the plains of Europe but also in the Americas, West and South Africa, Ottoman Empire, Iran, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Taking specific regions in turn, Mikaberidze discusses major political-military events around the world and situates geopolitical decision-making within its long- and short-term contexts. From the British expeditions to Argentina and South Africa to the Franco-Russian maneuvering in the Ottoman Empire, the effects of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars would shape international affairs well into the next century. In Egypt, the wars led to the rise of Mehmed Ali and the emergence of a powerful state; in North America, the period transformed and enlarged the newly established United States; and in South America, the Spanish colonial empire witnessed the start of national-liberation movements that ultimately ended imperial control. Skillfully narrated and deeply researched, here at last is the global history of the period, one that expands our view of the Napoleonic Wars and their role in laying the foundations of the modern world.

A Federal Perspective on the Abkhaz-Georgian Conflict

A Federal Perspective on the Abkhaz-Georgian Conflict
Author: Neno Gabelia
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1527500616

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the problem of the development of regional security has become increasingly relevant in international politics. Of particular concern is the post-Soviet space, which remains in the most difficult process of transformation. The Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, which entered a sharp phase in 1992, was one of the first and most lengthy (1992–2008) international conflicts in the former Soviet Union. Complex factors, such as the deep roots of the confrontation, the great human sacrifices of the political parties during the hostilities, the high degree of defensive involvement of the entire population of Abkhazia, and the asymmetry in the approaches of the parties, all determine the need for an analysis of the nature and the origins and dynamics of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict. This book identifies the nature and the origins of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict and the causes of the inefficiency of the official negotiation process, and it evaluates the hypothesis of a possible federalist transformation of the institutions of both Georgia and Abkhazia. In the international panorama, federalism, in fact, is being increasingly considered as an instrument of conflict transformation in the case of conflicts based on cultural diversity and ethnicity.

Georgian and Soviet

Georgian and Soviet
Author: Claire P. Kaiser
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2023-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501766813

Georgian and Soviet investigates the constitutive capacity of Soviet nationhood and empire. The Soviet republic of Georgia, located in the mountainous Caucasus region, received the same nation-building template as other national republics of the USSR. Yet Stalin's Georgian heritage, intimate knowledge of Caucasian affairs, and personal involvement in local matters as he ascended to prominence left his homeland to confront a distinct set of challenges after his death in 1953. Utilizing Georgian archives and Georgian-language sources, Claire P. Kaiser argues that the postwar and post-Stalin era was decisive in the creation of a "Georgian" Georgia. This was due not only to the peculiar role played by the Stalin cult in the construction of modern Georgian nationhood but also to the subsequent changes that de-Stalinization wrought among Georgia's populace and in the unusual imperial relationship between Moscow and Tbilisi. Kaiser describes how the Soviet empire could be repressive yet also encourage opportunities for advancement—for individual careers as well as for certain nationalities. The creation of national hierarchies of entitlement could be as much about local and republic-level imperial imaginations as those of a Moscow center. Georgian and Soviet reveals that the entitled, republic-level national hierarchies that the Soviet Union created laid a foundation for the claims of nationalizing states that would emerge from the empire's wake in 1991. Today, Georgia still grapples with the legacies of its Soviet century, and the Stalin factor likewise lingers as new generations of Georgians reevaluate the symbiotic relationship between Soso Jughashvili and his native land.

Socialism in Georgian Colors

Socialism in Georgian Colors
Author: Stephen F. Jones
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2005-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674019027

Georgian social democracy was the most successful social democratic movement in Russia. Despite its size, it produced many of the leading revolutionaries of 1917. In the first of two volumes, Jones writes the history of this movement, which represented one of the earliest examples of European social democracy at the turn of the 20th century.

Sanctity, Gender and Authority in Medieval Caucasia

Sanctity, Gender and Authority in Medieval Caucasia
Author: Nikoloz Aleksidze
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1474498639

From the early fourth century, the veneration of saints and relics spread rapidly across Christendom from the British Isles to Iran. In late antique Caucasia, the cult of the saints was immediately integrated into Armenian and Georgian identity and political discourses. It was used to legitimise royal rule, sanctify domains and dynasties, define political realms and justify political decisions. This book is the first systematic study of this history. Discussing a wide variety of sources from Armenia, Georgia, Byzantium and Russia which have not been examined together before, it investigates the interaction of sanctity, holy relics, gender and politics in the medieval Caucasus, with a particular focus on Georgia. Nikoloz Aleksidze analyses three chronological eras: the first section focuses on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, when the cult of the relics was formed in Caucasian writing; the second explores the medieval era, when the Bagratids ruled in Georgia and the cults of figures such as St George, the Mother of God and Queen Tamar were shaped and politicised; and the third navigates a similar entanglement of sanctity, gender and political rhetoric in Russian Imperial and Georgian national discourse.

Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus

Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus
Author: Sophie Hohmann
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2014-06-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0857737341

After the final collapse of the Soviet Union, the so-called 'last empire', in 1991, the countries of Central Asia - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan - and of the Caucasus - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia - became independent nations. These countries, previously production centres under the socialist planning system of the Soviet Union, have made enormous economic adjustments in order to develop - or attempt to develop - along capitalist lines. As this study will show, however, inequality in Central Asia and the Caucasus is widening, as the Soviet systems of healthcare and state provisions disappear. Rejecting the Cold War-era East/West paradigm often used to analyse the development of these nations, this study analyses development along the North-South lines which characterise the migration patterns and poverty levels of much of the rest of the developed world. This opens up new avenues of research, and helps us understand why it is, for instance, that this region is better characterised as a 'new South' - as skilled workers flood out of the territories and into Russia and Western Europe. Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus draws together detailed analyses of the development of migration economics as the region's oil wealth further enhances its strategic and economic importance to Russia, the US, the Middle East and to the EU.