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Following the abolition of the Bagratid monarchy of
Kartlo-Kakheti in Eastern Georgia, the liquidation of the branch of the
dynasty ruling in Western Georgia was only a
matter of time. King Solomon II of Imereti defended his independence as long
as he was able. Taken under Russian suzerainty in 1804, Solomon later
revolted and was deposed and captured by armed force in 1810. The smaller
independent principalities of Western Georgia
were gradually absorbed into the administrative framework of the Caucasian
Viceroyalty. Guria was taken over in 1829, Mingrelia in 1857, Svaneti in 1858
and Abkhazia in 1864.
Subjugation of Western
Georgia
Prince Tsitsianov, who … succeeded Knorring as
commander-in-chief, … rapidly extended Russia's
grasp on Transcaucasia. He saw the urgency
of securing as rapidly as possible the entire area between the Black Sea and the Caspian. From his headquarters in Tbilisi, he turned his
attention westwards to Imereti. Western Georgia
was at this time torn by a feud between King Solomon II of Imereti and his
nominal vassal, the semi-independent prince-regent or Dadian Grigol of
Mingrelia. One of Grigol Dadian's predecessors had sworn fealty to the Tsar
of Russia as long ago as 1638. Now, in 1803, his country was taken under
direct Russian suzerainty. In contrast to the situation in Eastern
Georgia, the local administration was left to the princely
house, which retained control under nominal Russian supervision until the
dignity of Dadian was finally abolished in 1867. With his principal vassal
and foe now under Russian protection, King Solomon of Imereti felt it wise to
feign submission. His dominions also were in 1804 placed beneath the imperial
aegis, under guarantees similar to those given to the Dadian. However,
Solomon remained at heart bitterly opposed to his foreign overlords, and his
court at Kutaisi
was a hot-bed of anti-Russian intrigue. ..
Under Tsitsianov's successors, the war against Persia and Turkey continued with varying
success and great ferocity. On the Persian front, Derbent and Baku were at last annexed in 1806, though a second
attack on Erivan in 1808 ended in another
costly failure. In Western Georgia, the Russians kept up their pressure on
the Turks, from whom they took the Black Sea port
of Poti in 1809, Sukhum-Kaleh on the
coast of Abkhazia in 1810, and the strategic town of Akhalkalaki
('New Town') in south-western Georgia
in 1811.
Click on the map for better resolution
King Solomon II and Napoleon Bonaparte
The remaining independent princes of Western
Georgia hastened to accept Russian suzerainty. In 1809, Safar
Bey Sharvashidze, the Lord of Abkhazia, was received under Russian protection
and confirmed in his principality. Prince Mamia Gurieli, ruler of Guria, was
taken under the Russian aegis in 1811, receiving insignia of investiture from
the Tsar. Only King Solomon II of Imereti held out to the bitter end.
Encircled by Russian troops, the king strenuously resisted
an demands for submission, in spite of the fact that he had earlier, under
pressure, sworn fealty to the Tsar. In 1810, the Russians despatched an
ultimatum to Solomon, demanding that he hand over the heir to his throne and
other Imeretian notables as hostages, and reside permanently under Russian
surveillance in his capital at Kutaisi.
Solomon refused, and was declared to have forfeited his throne. Hounded by
Russian troops and by Georgian princes hostile to him, he sought refuge in
the hills, but was soon captured and escorted to Tbilisi. A few weeks later, Solomon staged
a dramatic escape from Russian custody, and took refuge with the Turkish
pasha at the frontier city of Akhaltsikhe.
Inspired by this daring feat, the people of Imereti rose against the Russian
invaders. Ten fierce engagements were fought between the Russian forces and
the guerillas of Imereti. Famine and plague broke out, and some 30,000 people
perished, while hundreds of peasant families sought refuge in Eastern Georgia. Eventually the patriots were crushed
by armed force. A Russian administration was set up in Kutaisi, the country placed under martial
law.
King Solomon
of Imereti
King Solomon now applied for help to the Shah of Persia,
to the Sultan of Turkey, and to Napoleon Bonaparte himself. To the Emperor of
the French, Solomon wrote in 1811 that the Muscovite Tsar had unjustly and
illegally stripped him of his royal estate, and that it behoved Napoleon, as
supreme head of Christendom, to 'take cognizance of the act of pitiless
brigandage' which the Russians had committed against him. 'May Your Majesty
add to your glorious titles that of Emperor of Asia! But may you deign to
liberate me, together with a million Christian souls, from the yoke of the
pitiless emperor of Moscow, either by your lofty mediation, or else by the
might of your all-powerful arm, and set me beneath the protective shadow of
your guardianship!" 26 Napoleon
himself was, of course, quite a connoisseur of 'pitiless brigandage'.
However, this eloquent plea, which reached him shortly before he set out on
his ill-fated campaign to Moscow, provided him with encouraging evidence of
the unsettled condition of Russia's Transcaucasian provinces. But as things
turned out, Napoleon could not save even his own Grand Army from virtual
annihilation, let alone a princeling down in the distant Caucasus.
Without regaining power, Solomon died in exile in 1815, and was buried in the
cathedral of Saint Gregory of Nyssa in Trebizond.
The elimination of King Solomon did not bring civil strife
in Georgia
to an end. No sooner was Western Georgia
outwardly pacified than fresh troubles broke out in Kartli and Kakheti. Ten
years of Russian occupation had greatly changed the attitude of a people who,
a decade before, had welcomed the Russians as deliverers from the infidel
Persians and Turks. Called upon to furnish transport, fodder and supplies to
the Russian Army at artificially low rates, and regarded by their new masters
as mere serfs, the Georgian peasantry looked back wistfully to the bad old
days. Under the Georgian kings, though invaded and ravaged by Lezghis,
Persians and Turks, their country had at least been their own. Now it was
simply an insignificant province, engulfed in a vast, alien empire, whose
rulers seemed lacking in sympathy for this cultivated, Christian nation which
had voluntarily placed itself under the protection of its northern neighbour.
………………………
The integration of Western
Georgia
It was at this period that Mingrelia, the Colchis of the ancients, finally lost its autonomy. It
will be recalled that the Dadian or ruling prince of Mingrelia had been
placed under a Russian protectorate in 1803, but had retained a large measure
of authority as a vassal of the cause, and organized a militia to help drive
out the intruders. This invasion imposed a severe strain on the Mingrelian
economy, and particularly on the peasants. When the Turks withdrew, the
landowners attempted to reimpose their authority on their serfs, but were met
with defiance. A peasant revolt broke out, led by a blacksmith named Utu
Mikava. Most of Mingrelia was reduced to a state of turmoil. In the end, both
parties welcomed Russian intervention--the landowners to safeguard their
lives and property, the serfs in the hope of being guaranteed a status
approximating to that enjoyed by crown peasants in Russia. Fate thus played into the
hands of the Russian authorities, who sent in 1857 a commission to Mingrelia,
and removed the Regent Catherine from office. A Russian-dominated Council of
Regency was set up, nominally in the interests of the youthful heir, Nicholas
Dadiani. In 1867, when Nicholas attained his majority, he was compelled to
cede all his sovereign rights to the Tsar in exchange for 1,000,000 rubles, a
grant of estates in Russia,
and the title of Prince Dadian-Mingrelsky. The principality of Mingrelia thus
became an integral part of the Russian empire.
A like fate soon overtook the free mountaineers of Upper
Svaneti, high up in the Caucasus range
looking down over Imereti and Mingrelia. The Russians had long been irked by
the rebellious attitude of the Svanian princes, who spent their ample leisure
in prosecuting blood feuds against one another, and in intrigues with Omar
Pasha's invading Turks. In 1857, Prince Baryatinsky ordered Svaneti to be
subdued by armed force, despite the existence of the treaties of 1833 and
1840, which established a protectorate over the principality of Western Upper
Svaneti and the self-governing tribal area of Free (Eastern Upper) Svaneti.
The ruling prince of Western Upper Svaneti was exiled to Erivan in Armenia.
On his way to banishment, this Svanian prince, Constantine Dadeshkeliani by
name, came to Kutaisi for a farewell audience
with the Governor-General of Western Georgia, Prince Alexander Gagarin, a
jovial man and a good administrator, who had built a boulevard and two
bridges over the Rioni at Kutaisi
and embellished the town with a public garden. At this interview, Constantine
Dadeshkeliani suddenly drew his dagger and stabbed to death the Russian
general and three of his staff.
When captured, he was summarily tried by court martial and
shot. In 1858, the whole of Upper Svaneti was annexed to the Russian
viceroyalty of the Caucasus. Thus ended the
independent existence of this renowned nation of fighters and hunters, mentioned
with respect by Strabo and the ancients, but sunk in more recent times into
squalor and ignorance from which contact with European ways has only lately
begun to redeem them.
The Russians were now able to subjugate Abkhazia, the
autonomous principality situated immediately north-west of Mingrelia along
the Black Sea coastline. It will be recalled
that the Lord of Abkhazia, Safar Bey or Giorgi Sharvashidze, had been
received under Russian protection as long ago as 1809, and confirmed in
perpetual possession of his domains. In the intervening period, Abkhazia had
been frequently involved in the Russian campaigns against the Circassians,
with whom the Abkhaz, many of them Muslims, had cultural, ethnic and
linguistic connexions. During the Crimean War, the Turks stirred up the
Abkhaz against Russia
at the time of null Omar Pasha's invasion of Mingrelia. Turkish envoys who
arrived at the Abkhazian capital, Sukhumi,
found the ruling dynasty of the Sharvashidzes divided: the Christian princes
adhered to the Russian interest, but Iskander (Alexander), a Muslim, was
prepared to help the Turks in return for permission to annex the neighbouring
Mingrelian district of Samurzaqano. Omar Pasha had subsequently landed at Sukhumi, from which he
advanced south-eastwards into Mingrelia. After the Crimean War was over, the
Russians looked for a chance of extending their direct rule to Abkhazia. In
1864, they deposed the ruling prince, Michael Sharvashidze, and annexed his
country by force of arms. Two years later, the Abkhaz staged a general revolt
against their new masters, and recaptured their capital, Sukhumi. The Russians had to send 8,000
troops to quell this rising, which was suppressed with heavy loss of life.
The subjugation of Abkhazia coincided with Russia's
annihilation of the national existence of the Circassians, that valiant North
Caucasian people who had for a century been a thorn in the side of Tsarist
colonialism. Cut off since the Crimean War from contact with Turkey and the Western European powers, the
Circassians were no match for Russia's
military might, especially after the surrender of Shamil and the Murids of
Daghestan. In Chechnya
and Daghestan, the Russians were satisfied with the submission of the local
population to Russian law. But on the Black Sea
coast, their plans involved the seizure of the wide and fertile Cherkess
lands to provide for a part of the wave of Russian peasant migration which
resulted from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The Russian government
conceived the drastic project of enforcing the mass migration of the
Circassians to other regions of the empire or, if they preferred, to Ottoman
Turkey. The last shots in the long series of Russo-Circassian conflicts were
fired in 1864. Rather than remain under infidel rule, some 600,000 Circassian
Muslims emigrated to various regions of the Ottoman
Empire, where their descendants may be found to this day. Many
of the Russian, German, Greek and Bulgarian colonists who were endowed with
the tribal lands of the Circassians near the Black Sea
coast proved unable to endure the sub-tropical climate, and the wilderness
invaded the orchards and gardens once cultivated by prosperous and highly
civilized Circassian communities.
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26. French
diplomatic archives, Quai d'Orsay, Paris,
as quoted in M. Lang, The Last Years of the Georgian Monarchy, pp.
263-65.
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