Table of Contents

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

Adrian Brisku and Timothy K. Blauvelt

1. Between empire and independence: Armenia and the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic

Mikayel Zolyan

2. Azerbaijan and the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic: historical reality and possibility

Georges Mamoulia

3. The Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) as a "Georgian" responsibility

Adrian Brisku

4. Pragmatism and expediency: Ottoman calculations and the establishment of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic

Stefano Taglia

5. The German perspective on the Transcaucasian Federation and the influence of the Committee for Georgia’s Independence

Lasha Bakradze

6. Feeble projects and aspirations: the Caucasian and Transcaucasian federation/confederation in the geopolitics of 1918–1920

Beka Kobakhidze

7. Ideology meets practice in the struggle for the Transcaucasus: Stepan Shaumyan and the evolution of Bolshevik nationality policy

Timothy K. Blauvelt

8. Ukraine and the Transcaucasus in 1917–1918: parallels, interactions, influences

Timothy K. Blauvelt and Stanislav Tumis

9. Turning towards unity: a North Caucasian perspective on the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic

Sarah Slye

Afterword

Adrian Brisku

About the Author

Adrian Brisku is intellectual historian working at Charles University (Prague), University of Vienna, and Ilia State University (Tbilisi). He is the author of Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe, 1878–2008 (Berghahn Books, 2013), Political Reform in the Ottoman and Russian Empires: A Comparative Approach (Bloomsbury, 2017) and National Economy-Building in Albania, Czechoslovakia and Georgia in the 1920s (Routledge, forthcoming 2023).

Timothy K. Blauvelt is Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Ilia State University (Tbilisi), and is also Regional Director for the South Caucasus for American Councils for International Education. He has published more than two dozen peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His book Georgia after Stalin: Nationalism and Soviet Power (edited with Jeremy Smith) was published by Routledge in 2015, and his next book, Clientalism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba, is forthcoming from Routledge.