Who wanted the TDFR? The making and the breaking of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic

Abstract

During the brief period between 22 April and 26 May 1918, the leading Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian political forces of the early twentieth century, having established the shared federative structures of the Transcaucasian Commissariat and the Seim in the preceding months, declared an independent Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) (see Figure 1). Emerging as it did from the ruins of an imploding tsarist empire and the still glowing embers of the First World War, and facing the imminent threat of invasion from the Ottoman army and the power ambitions of incipient Soviet Russia, the TDFR seemed both to the actors at the time and to later scholars of the region to be unique, contingent, and certainly unrepeatable. For Noe Zhordania, for example, who as leader of the Georgian Social Democratic Party played a key role in the creation of the TDFR and the founding of the Georgian Democratic Republic, declaring independence was entirely contingent upon the political developments in Russia and the designs of the Ottoman Empire towards those territories that it had lost in the 1878 Russo-Ottoman War. This sense of contingency could be felt in his speech to the Transcaucasian Seim shortly before the declaration of independence, entitled “On the Independence of Transcaucasia,” in which he stated that such a political union could achieve independence only if a democratic Russia abandoned it, even though Transcaucasia would have to face the Ottomans on its own (1919, 76). The hopes of Zhordania and many others for the emergence of a democratic Russia failed to materialize, while an Ottoman invasion did, forcing the main Transcaucasian political forces, primarily the Georgian Social Democrats and the National Democrats, the Armenian Dashnaktsutyun (or Dashnaks), and the Azerbaijani Musavatists, to agree to declare the independence of the Transcaucasus/Transcaucasia. While the TDFR appeared to these historical actors, as well as to later historians and scholars of the region (more on this below), as a unique political phenomenon that resulted from happenstance, how the TDFR emerged, what the political discourses were that sustained or contested it, and what the positions of the main political actors and interested parties/states towards it were have not been studied systematically. This set of questions and others were addressed in the contributions of historians and specialists on the region and its surrounding areas at an international conference on the centennial of the TDFR that was organized at Charles University in Prague on 24 May 2018. Building on the contributions from the only international academic event to mark this centennial, this special issue offers to readers interested in the region a comprehensive and multi-perspective historical account of the TDFR. It does so via a few guiding questions, namely: