front cover of Secessionist Rule
Secessionist Rule
Protracted Conflict and Configurations of Non-State Authority
Franziska Smolnik
Campus Verlag, 2016
In this timely investigation of secessionist entities in post-Soviet territories, Smolnik explores how political authority is organized, produced, and reproduced in conditions of violent conflict. Drawing on case studies of unrecognized or only partially recognized states in the South Caucasus, she shows that so-called low-level violent conflicts may significantly influence the form and functioning of political rule and thereby have a considerable impact on the empowerment and disempowerment of local actors. Offering fresh insight into the connections between violence and political power, Secessionist Rule not only contributes to the political sociology of violent conflict, but also adds to our knowledge of the largely understudied internal dynamics of de facto states.
[more]

front cover of Socialism in Georgian Colors
Socialism in Georgian Colors
The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883–1917
Stephen F. Jones
Harvard University Press, 2005

Georgian social democracy was the most successful social democratic movement in the Russian Empire. Despite its small size, it produced many of the leading revolutionary figures of 1917, including Irakli Tsereteli, Karlo Chkheidze, Noe Zhordania, and Joseph Stalin. In the first of two volumes, Stephen Jones writes the first history in English of this undeservedly neglected national movement, which represented one of the earliest examples of European social democracy at the turn of the twentieth century.

Georgian social democracy was part of the Russian social democracy from which Bolshevism and Menshevism emerged. But innovative theoretical programs and tactics led Georgian social democracy down an independent path. The powerful Georgian organization united all native classes behind it, and it set a remarkable precedent for many of the anti-colonial nationalist movements of the twentieth century. At the same time, Georgian social democracy was committed to a "European" path, a "third way" that attempted to combine grassroots democracy, private manufacturing, and private land ownership with socialist ideology.

One of the few Western historians fluent in Georgian, Jones fills major gaps in the history of revolutionary and national movements of the Russian Empire.

[more]

front cover of The Sovietization of Azerbaijan
The Sovietization of Azerbaijan
The South Caucasus in the Triangle of Russia, Turkey, and Iran, 1920–1922
Jamil Hasanli
University of Utah Press, 2017
Utah Series in Middle East Studies 

World War I and the fall of tsarist Russia brought brief independence to Azerbaijan, but by 1920 the Bolshevik revolution pushed south with the twofold purpose of accessing the oil-rich fields near Baku on the Caspian Sea and spreading communism into the Caucasus. Azerbaijan, the richest and earliest significant source of oil in the world, was the first republic in the South Caucasus occupied by the Red Army, which then advanced into neighboring Armenia and Georgia. Pulling from confidential, newly accessed archives, Hasanli describes Soviet Russia’s aggressive policy toward the three South Caucasian nations, which led to their absorption into the USSR by the end of 1922.

The book highlights the Caucasian peoples’ struggle to retain political independence against Soviet Russia and an international cast that included European powers wanting to retain petroleum concessions; Kemalist Turkey, which claimed special ties to the Turkic Azeris; and Iran, which controlled South Azerbaijan and was thus a possible route of expansion eastward for Bolshevik movement. The author also considers the impact on Azerbaijani-Armenian relations of the first two years of Sovietization and explains how Azerbaijan provided space for Bolshevik experiments. Throughout his book, Hasanli illuminates the tragedy of the complex, confused period of Sovietization of the South Caucasus. 
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter