User:Jzdollar/Russian conquest of the Caucasus

Annexation of Georgia
In 1762, Heraclius II of Georgia joined the two eastern parts of Georgia into the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti. Georgia was nominally a Persian vassal, and could exercise a degree of autonomy following the death of Nadir Shah. Owing to the circumstances, Heraclius II was de facto independent until 1795, when Shah Agha Muhammad deposed the Zand dynasty, and annihilated Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. (38)  By this time Russia had a fair number of troops north of the mountains at such places as Mozdok .During the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74), fought mostly in the west, Catherine launched a diversion in the east and, for the first time, Russian soldiers crossed the Caucasus.In 1769, Gottlieb Heinrich Totleben with 400 men and 4 guns, of the 20,000 Catherine originally promised to Heraclius, crossed the Darial Pass to Tiflis. Totleben was earlier sentenced to death by Catherine for treason but was pardoned on account of his Prussian origins. Of him Rayfield writes that despite this shock “...he remained treacherous, arrogant, and incompetent, treating the experienced Georgian kings as ignorant tribesmen.” After crossing the border, Heraclius and Totleben laid siege to Shorapani, an Ottoman occupied fortress. Four days into the siege, Totleben departed from the siege due to a lack of supply. He returned in March of 1770 with 800 men and 3 more siege guns. After his return to the field, he ignored Heraclius’s advice to aid him and instead advanced south, laying siege to Atsquri. Heraclius then went on to defeat an Ottoman force near Aspindza while Totleben failed to accomplish anything of note. Following this disappointment, Totleben then attempted to overthrow Heraclius by enticing his nobles to pledge allegiance to Russia. In the summer of that year, Solomon, an ally of Heraclius, captured Shorapani and Tsutskhvati from the Turks, with the negligible support of Totleben. Totleben was then involved in a siege to capture Kutaisi, but failed to destroy the Turkish garrison, which fled under cover of night August 6th, 1770. Afterwards, Totleben advanced to Poti, against the advice of Heraclius’s allies, planning to annex it to Russia as a city named after Catherine the Great. After failing to capture Poti, Totleben attempted to incite a rebellion in Mingrelia and Guria, whereupon his officers reported him for misconduct in the field. Totleben was quickly replaced by General Sukhotin, a more honest, but equally flawed, commander. He would go on to lose half his army to disease besieging Poti. This was to be the final Russian intervention of the war as Catherine ordered a withdrawal at the end of 1771. The failed campaign would go on to be an embarrassment for Catherine, and a national disaster for Georgia; large portions of its territory would be incorporated into the Ottoman Empire and forced to convert to Islam.

In desperation Heraclius would plea for Catherines aid a number of times without response. Eventually, Catherine claimed her agreement to the Kucuk-Kaynarca treaty prevented her from intervening. In 1776, Solomon and Heraclius finally stabilized the war situation and re-entered regional politics by playing Russia, The Ottomans, and Persia off eachother. However, Russia believed the Georgians were gaining too much strength and sponsored a pretender to Heraclius’s throne, Aleksandre Bakaris-dze, to disrupt order. Russia also backed Heraclius’s Azeri rival, Fat’h Ali. In 1781 Solomon, a now estranged ally of Heraclius, willed his territory to him after the death of his son and heir, but first had to seek permission from Colonel Burnashov. Solomon then departed on a doomed campaign to retake Georgian lands. He died April 23rd, 1784. In 1782, Catherines ministers, poised to exploit the chaos in the Transcaucasus, finally considered offering a substantial agreement to establish a protectorate in Georgia.

On the 24th of July, 1783, Pavel Potempkin and Heraclius II signed a Traktat officially subordinating Georgia to Russia. Importantly, the treaty forbade Georgia from engaging in foreign diplomacy, but also guaranteed that Russia would provide military support in the event of war. Despite a number of severe demands in the Traktat, Heraclius was sufficiently desperate enough to sign such a document. The Georgian public’s opinion of the Traktat was that Heraclius II was signing them into a bondage worse than that which they suffered under with the Persians. Although the Traktat was an immediate positive for Georgia, Ottoman sponsored Lezgin raids soon followed. After the death of Solomon, Heraclius II technically gained control over his kingdom. However, the agreement between Solomon and Heraclius II was that Solomon would relinquish his kingdom to Heraclius’s grandson, who was only a year old at the time of his ascension. By law, a regent from Solomon’s patrimony was required to manage in the stead of the monarch. A further complication of the affair was due to Heraclius’s signature of the Traktat. Because of it Georgia must, in perpetuity, only permit the ascension of Russian approved candidates. Colonel Burnashov, the local representative for Russia, permitted this. Thus, after his ascension to the throne in 1784, the turbulent reign of David Archilis-dze would begin. In the same year of David’s ascension, he would ask for Russian aid against Ottoman incursions, to which Russia merely lodged a stern warning (an albeit effective one) to the Ottomans. This only abated Ottoman designs. Three years later in August of 1787, the Ottomans would invade once again. David’s pleas for assistance fell on deaf ears and he would be forced to surrender significant territories to the Ottomans. In 1788, Heraclius II would also invade David’s territory and extract a pledge that Heraclius’s grandson, Solomon II, would succeed the throne when due time. David had once again pleaded for Russian aid to no avail and he was forced to surrender.

Heraclius II fared no better; the Russians rarely aided their Georgian protectorates. In 1785, Heraclius II was forced to pay a ransom of 5,000 rubles to Lezgin raiders to prevent a potentially devastating raid. At the same time, Heraclius was also obliged to pay 30,000 rubles to maintain the local Russian garrison, which was rarely of any use. In the same year, the local Russian authority, Colonel Burnashov would write that the state in which Heraclius’s kingdom found itself in was pathetic and hardly tenable. In 1787, the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war would see Burnashov, and the aforementioned garrison, moved to Chechnya to suppress Sheik Mansur’s rebellion. This was a clear violation of the Traktat which was only signed 4 years earlier. Afterwards, Heraclius II would spend a number of years parlaying with each neighboring power to find the best possible overlord for Georgia, to no avail. In 1789, a peasant rebellion broke out, threatening Heraclius’s reign. Once again, Russian aid was paltry to non-existent. In 1791, Catherine the Great offered to surrender suzerainty over Georgia to the Ottomans in exchange for recognition of Russia as the guardian of all Christians. In the same year, the Ottomans recognized Persian claims to Georgia and the Caucasus. In 1792, General Gudovich warned Heraclius that future Russian assistance would be exclusively symbolic. In June of 1795 Agha Mohammed Khan, the leader of Iran, invaded Armenia then, in September of the same year, invaded Kartli-Kakheti. Despite a heroic defense, the Persians crushed the Georgian army and laid waste to Tbilisi.

The negligence of Catherine regarding a vassal, has led to a suspicion that Catherine deliberately allowed Georgia to be wiped out to weaken it for personal gain. Only afterwards did Russian assistance come in the form of two battalions, who would be quickly withdrawn following the ascension of Tsar Paul. The thorough and consistent raids decreased an already small population of only Georgians 500,000 down to 200,000, significantly weakening Georgia, a fact Russia would soon take advantage of. Following a power struggle in Georgia caused by the death of Heraclius II, Paul deployed, for the first time, significant forces to Georgia. Though Russian forces were maintaining order in Georgia, the upper echelons of what remained of Georgian nobility struggled for control over the country.

On December 28th, 1800, the nominal king of Kartli-Kakheti, Giorgi Dadiani, Heraclius’s heir, died. On his deathbed, Giorgi left his entire country to Russia, asking in return that his son be crowned King. Tsar Paul, however, drafted a manifesto announcing the abolishment of Georgia and proclaiming its annexation to Russia. Panic followed when a certain Major General Ivan Lazarev, summoned the nobles to Sioni Cathedral to announce the late King’s will. Lazarev bluntly stated that Georgia was no more. This came as a shock to Solomon Leonidze, who then claimed this was a mistranslation, and then discovered it was not when Lazarev ordered his arrest. Solomon escaped but the annexation continued on. On the 18th Of January 1801, Kartli-Kakheti was officially annexed. The Tsar appointed General Knorring as governor-general of the gubernia March 11th of the same year. Knorring, quickly deported all the Bagratids to Russia, a convoy that numbered more than 80 members of the house and had Giorgi’s crown and scepter symbolically seized and locked up in the Kremlin. In April of 1802 the Georgian nobility swore allegiance to the Tsar at Sioni Cathedral, surrounded by a troop of heavily armed Russian soldiers.

Immediate Aftermath
Russia, finally able to exert more than a marginal control of Georgia, straightaway underwent a restructuring of the devastated country. Lazarev arrested dissident princes and planned to embark on military campaigns to capture black sea ports, convert the mountaineers to Christianity, and repopulate Georgia with Russians. This, however, would be complicated by the abolition of Georgian as an administrative language, only Russian was to be spoken. This unfolded into disaster as barely 5% of the country spoke Russian. The reigning authorities would go on to epically mismanage Georgia. In the case of Kovalensky, he demolished a prince’s home to construct a wool factory, built by state resources, of which the profits he would collect privately in their entirety. In 1802, Tsar Alexander fired Kovalensky and Knorring, replacing them with a Georgian administration. A new appointee of Alexander, Tsitsianov, would come to be equally authoritarian, but effective. In March of 1803, General Lazarev would see to it that his plan of deporting the last of the Bagrations be fulfilled. In pursuit of this goal, he personally went to oversee Queen Mariam’s deportation. Entering her bedchamber unannounced he stated the obvious, that she was to be deported, and was promptly stabbed to death by her. Though some Bagrations met relatively grim fates, the majority were to live as elites in Russia. Under Tsitsianov’s administration, the infamous raids into Georgia by mountainfolk largely ended, on account of the conquest of Ganja and Azerbaijan. Following this victory, an unexpected peasant rebellion broke out in the spring of 1804. Citing various abuses by cossacks, 4,000 rebels were gathered altogether. They would be quickly wiped out by August.

Solomon II, the neighboring king of Imeretia, was also targeted for a summary annexation. Tsitsianov sent an army under false pretenses and on April 25th, threatened Solomon II, exclaiming that he should sublimate himself to Russia and the Traktat. Though Solomon was able to resist because of the poor state of the army sent to blackmail him. He was surrounded by Russian vassals and his state was in danger.