International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

The national liberation movement in Georgia began like that of many other countries, with an initially liberal and literary “national awakening” that was most often headed by poets and essayists. Ironically, as Georgia became more assimilated into the Russian empire in the mid-1800s, its liberation movement grew more radical due to the fact that its Russian-educated intelligentsia was exposed to “dangerous ideas” within the Russian university system. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Georgian revolutionary movement was fully radicalized with the Russian populist brand of socialism as its prime ideological current. Prince Varlaam Cherkezishvili (1846–1925), whose name is often Russified as Tcherkesoff or Cherkezov, was one of Georgia's first professional revolutionaries and was at the heart of the Georgian anarchist movement since its inception. Cherkezishvili was among the first militant socialist revolutionaries agitating during the late 1860s in Russia. By the mid-1870s, however, he was fully committed to the cause of anarchism and worked with both the Armenians and Turks in an attempt to create a national liberation solidarity movement within the Balkans. Although anarchism was only a marginal voice within the larger revolutionary nationalist movement (which was dominated by the Georgian Mensheviks or social democrats), after the 1905 Revolution in Russia ... log in or subscribe to read full text