Armenian-Georgian Relations, 1918 to 1920

This blog post was written by Ani G. Ohanian, a Doctoral Candidate at Clark University, in the Department of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She is currently conducting research for her dissertation, which focuses on Bolshevik and Kemalist relations in the South Caucasus, after the First World War, and their use of violence in the South Caucasus. Ohanian primarily focuses on Armenia as her case study for her dissertation project and connects violence to genocidal acts and intent. Her scholarly interests include political history and genocide theory, with regional interests in the late Ottoman Empire/early Turkish Republic, Russia, and Armenia.

The Southern Caucasus, comprised of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, is a mountainous region uniquely positioned between large-to-medium power countries: Russia, Turkey, and Iran. During World War I, the Caucasus was not a region of independent nation-states and found itself predominantly under Russian imperial rule. When the Bolshevik revolution succeeded in 1917, nationalist groups in the South Caucasus advocated self-determination and established independence in May 1918. The governing bodies included the Dashnaks in Armenia, the Musavatists in Azerbaijan, and the Mensheviks in Georgia. While the major imperial forces, notably the Russians and the Ottomans, no longer played a critical role in the region after war, the revolutionary forces, which gained further power and arose from the collapse of these major empires, did. While the Bolsheviks aimed to spread Marxist internationalism globally, the Turkish Kemalists hoped to mitigate the European partition of the remaining Ottoman lands by carrying out a nationalist campaign that would lead to the eventual establishment of the Republic of Turkey, in 1923.[i]

With the support of a short-term research grant from The New York Public Library, I gained access to Special Collections that pertain to my doctoral research on the relations between the Bolsheviks and Kemalists in the South Caucasus. I discovered the Jacques Kayaloff collection, which contains original documents and reports focusing on Armenia and its bordering nations. This collection provides insights into the historical circumstances during the tumultuous period of 1917 to 1921 and further elucidates the relations between Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan vis-à-vis the larger Bolshevik, Kemalist, British, French, and German forces in the region. Additionally, I was able to read unique first-person sources, including memoirs of soldiers and missionaries in the region, such as Zareh Melik-Shahnazarov’s Sketches of a Karabakh Soldier, Memoirs of a participant in the events of 1918-1920 in Nagorno Karabakh, and L. Dartigue’s La Mission sanitaire chirurgicale française du Caucase (premier juillet 1917 – 13 juillet 1918).

In light of the current territorial disputes that Armenia and Georgia face, I was keen to understand the historic relations between their populations. Between 1920 to 1921, the Red Army managed to subjugate the entire Caucasus, realizing the Bolshevik (and Kemalist) objective to oust European powers from the region, and consequently closing the lid on simmering geopolitical disputes. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the darker chapters of the Caucasus’s history have resurfaced and conflicts such as Karabagh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia evoke memories associated with past ethno-territorial violence. Given these ongoing regional conflicts, coupled with the international community’s inaction, one question that historians might pose is why the Georgians and Armenians did not become allies, as the Azerbaijani Musavatists and Ottoman Turks did. The latter also found an ally in the Bolsheviks.

The documents in the Kayaloff collection suggest that cooperation was implausible, primarily because of nationalist ideologies and geopolitical foresight. Within the collection, a copy of Mikaël Varandian’s 1919 publication, Le Conflit arméno-géorgien et la guerre du Caucase, provides a primary historical account of what occurred in the first year of the Armenian Republic’s independence. Varandian, an Armenian historian and fervent Dashnak, who was born in Karabagh and relocated to France after the Bolshevik conquest, details the issues between the Armenian and Georgian Republics including feelings of abandonment amid land controversies.[ii] The latter refers primarily to competing claims for the Lori and Akhalkalak provinces where Georgian troops exercised authority over the local Armenian population, resulting in several peasant revolts. Georgians and Armenians shared a sense of abandonment. While Georgian Prime Minister Tsereteli claimed that Georgia was left to face external threats alone, Varandian writes about mismanaged expectations, as Armenia faced “the bloodiest repression that a tyranny had ever organized against a people,”[iii] referring to the genocide of 1915. From the Armenian perspective, Georgian complicity with German affairs led to real abandonment, as the Armenians fought for survival against the Turks in May 1918. Rather than help stave off Turkish attacks, the Georgians remained complicit because Turkish aggression against Armenians benefitted plans for “Greater Georgia,” notably by driving the Armenian population out of provinces.

French diplomatic reports from December 1918, plainly titled, “histoire du conflict arméno-géorgien,” provide further details on the affairs that plagued the South Caucasus. They demonstrate that Georgia sought a protectorate from Germany, and hint at a connection between the Georgians and the Turks. The Germano-Turk imperial project in the South Caucasus, for practical purposes, was to employ Baku as a military operational base, from where they could challenge the British. Additionally, there was a Turkish-Georgian accord prior to the war, as well as the existence of a Georgian corps in the Turkish army. The “Turanian masses,” including Dagestanis, Chechens, Circassians, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz, assisted the Turkish project to takeover Baku, which fell on September 17, 1918. Varandian writes about Enver Pasha’s troops driving out 80,000 Armenians from Akhalkalak, amongst whom 30,000 perished because of lodging, epidemic, and a lack of necessities. The Germano-Turk cooperation in the region was also met with Azerbaijani support.

Between these actors, the common objective was to drive Russian troops out of the Caucasus. Under this pretext, Georgians and Azerbaijanis cooperated to combat Bolshevik penetration, leaving the Armenians a solitary force against Turkish military operations in the region. The Dmitry and Eugenie Lehovich Collection contains several Russian-language letters and reports from members of the White Army who cooperated with the Entente as informers. One report highlights the importance of these documents: a letter from a soldier to General Denikin, post-defeat. “They did not obey the conspirators and did not fulfill their duty but contributed to the disclosure of the truth. And let our children know the villains.”[iv] The letter offers an alternative to one-dimensional nationalist narratives while shedding light on sentiments from the defeated participants. The failure of the White Army to protect the South Caucasus from the Bolshevik conquest has not received adequate attention.

Today, Georgia and Armenia find themselves in parallel situations. Persistent violence in the region and the failure to cooperate between Armenia and Georgia, demonstrate strong continuities between past and present. Since 1988, Armenia and Azerbaijan have violently fought over Nagorno-Karabagh, with total casualties estimated at nearly 20,000. During that same period, the Abkhaz and Georgians fought similar ethno-territorial battles, resulting in 10,000 casualties and a 1994 ceasefire, like the Karabagh conflict. In 2008, Georgian-Russian relations deteriorated, as Moscow aimed to annex South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Georgians view the Abkhaz and Ossetians as fifth columns for Russia after the latter acknowledged the Abkhaz state in 2014. The manifestation of a neocolonial relationship with Russia becomes apparent, as Russian troops are currently stationed in Northern Georgia, as well as in the Lachin Corridor of Nagorno-Karabagh.

My doctoral project has benefited from the materials in the Kayaloff and Lehovich Special Collections, as well as the secondary source publications at The New York Public Library, and the Picture Collection with its visual history of the peoples in the region. The images are not only of the indigenous population but images of the land that is the main object of the ethno-territorial, nationalist-promoted violence. While sifting through the picture files in the Armenian, Georgian, Russian, and Turkish folders, I found images that more concretely demonstrated the social fabric of these peoples, as well as those that portrayed the bleak, disheartening reality about how war negatively impacts civilians. My residency at The New York Public Library gave me the opportunity to advance my research about Bolshevik-Kemalist reconfigurations of the Caucasus, analyzing how their plans had a penchant for violence, as well as making connections with the present day.

[i] Since 1850, the Ottoman Empire dwindled to the extent that the Great Powers attributed to them the label, “sick man of Europe.” Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, aimed to save the Empire and joined Germany.

[ii] Mikaël Varandian, Le Conflit arméno-géorgien et la guerre du Caucase, Paris, France: Imprimerie Flinikowski, 1919, p. 8-9

[iii] Ibid., p. 68, « La plus sanglante répression qu’une tyrannie n’ait jamais organisée contre un peuple aspirant à la liberté »

[iv] «кто погибов за то что не подчинился заговорщикам и не изменил долгу, а способствовал раскрытию истины. И пусть наши дети знают злодеев»