Abstract:
In the summer of 1902, a group of disgruntled Georgian peasants in the small county of Guria refused to pay Russian government taxes and demanded that their rents be reduced. Their boycott soon spread throughout the western reaches of the Transcaucasian Viceroyalty before and during the first Russian Revolution of 1905, attracting the attention of many foreign observers. This movement culminated in the declaration of a de facto independent socialist state in November 1905, before it met its demise at the hands of a brutal pacification campaign in January 1906. The Gurian Republic, as it came to be known, was a novel experiment in popular self-government, where the Marxist politics of urban radicals found a home in the impoverished Georgian countryside. A diverse set of sources reanimate the voices of the Gurian peasants and nobility, revealing how these people often looked to their shared past in times of great hardship despite their fascination with Social Democracy. The literature has explored the economic and political history of Guria, focusing on issues such as Russian agricultural policy and the role played by the Social Democratic agitators. However, such work leaves room for a subaltern analysis of peasant culture and of the Gurian lived experience. This thesis argues that the Gurians' receptivity to, and implementation of, their concept of socialism was born in a collective consciousness of rural traditions, including social banditry, literary culture, and traditional class paradigms. These traditions were the basis for realizing the romantic nationalist vision for Georgian society promoted by the famed poet Ilia Chavchavadze, and ultimately enabled the marshalling of international support for Georgian national sovereignty.
