UC Santa Barbara

For centuries the institutions of slavery and social dependency constituted an integral element of the strikingly diverse social landscape of the Caucasus region. Known as kul in Dagestan, kusag in Ossetia, or akhashala in Abkhazia, enslaved people could be found in virtually all regions of the Caucasus mountains. Personal status of the enslaved people was determined by eclectic oral traditions of indigenous customary law, which generally recognized them as chattel. The prevalence of slavery in the region, in turn, encouraged a flourishing transnational slave trade whose extensive networks straddled much of Eurasia. The status of the Caucasus as the single most important supplier of enslaved people in the Black Sea basin was solidified in 1783 when Russian Empire abrogated the Crimean Khanate and formally annexed the Crimean Peninsula.

Russia’s annexation of the Georgian kingdom Kartli-Kakheti in 1801 marked a pivotal milestone in the gradual expansion of Russian imperial interest into the Caucasus, which portended great changes in the lives of the indigenous communities living in the region. However, rather than upending the social conventions and political institutions of the native population, the tsarist government, spurred by the tenuous nature of its rule in the region, practiced the politics of imperial co-optation. Thus, the imperial authorities often recognized the right of the indigenous ruling elites to continue managing the internal affairs within their traditional territorial domains and promised to protect the political status quo in return for loyalty to the Russian Tsar. The vacillating pendulum of hegemonic pretensions of the imperial state and the broad autonomy of its vassals translated into a policy of tacit toleration of the indigenous institutions of slavery and social dependency in the Caucasus.

After decades of ambivalent policies and reluctant efforts to contain slavery and the slave trade in the Caucasus, in the 1860s the government undertook what was arguably the most transformative series of reforms aimed at delivering a decisive answer to the kholopskiĭ vopros (the slave question). However, abolition in the Caucasus arrived on the heels of the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto, which abolished the institution of serfdom in the heartland of the empire and, in turn, gave the government the green light to contemplate the legislative contours of emancipation in the Caucasus Viceroyalty. Although the abolition marked a major rupture in the history of the Caucasus, where slavery and the slave trade have had verifiable existence since the emergence of the first written records, freeing of the enslaved people in the region was eclipsed by the emancipation of Russian serfs and consequently received scant attention in the historiography of imperial Russia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East.

This dissertation examines the history of abolition in the Caucasus region under Russian imperial rule from 1801 to 1914. Two main arguments undergird the research and writing of this dissertation. First, using primary sources collected in the archives of Armenia, Georgia, and the Russian Federation, this project demonstrates that aside from rhetorical condemnation of slavery, abolitionism has never become a guiding principle or clearly articulated policy that accompanied Russian imperial expansion in the Caucasus. On the contrary, until the late 1860s, the imperial administration was reluctant to emancipate the enslaved people and largely turned a blind eye to the practices of slave labor in the region. Second, contrary to intuitive expectations, Russian blueprints for abolition of slavery in the Caucasus did not entail a unilateral, unconditional, and immediate emancipation. Fearful of losing the support of the slaveholding class, the imperial government invited the slaveholders to play an active role in drafting the abolitionist legislation that established the rules for emancipation in each region of the Caucasus mountains. The terms of abolition required the enslaved people to pay a redemption sum to obtain freedom. Until a redemption sum was paid in full, the formerly enslaved people entered what the imperial government termed as the temporary-obligated relations (vremenno-obiazannye otnosheniia) with their former owners and continued performing the same labor duties for a period that could last up to seven years. Various forms of anachronistic social dependency and custom-based labor obligations continued to survive in different parts of the region until the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917. In short, at every stage of the emancipation reforms in the Caucasus, the Russian imperial government prioritized the financial wellbeing of the landed nobility and slaveholders at the expense of the freedom and life chances of the enslaved and socially dependent people.

Furthermore, Russian abolitionist reforms meant much more than simple liberation of the enslaved communities. The imperial government aimed to usher in the advent of modernity in the region. The chief hallmarks of this modernization effort included the introduction of rudimentary forms of capitalist production, commercial proprietorship, and promotion of a cash economy. Abolition was accompanied by a comprehensive land reform, which prioritized private landownership for the select social elites and installed communal land-tenure regime over agricultural land in the indigenous peasant communes. The reforms upended the traditional economies of subsistence, encouraged production of surplus value, and gradually linked local economies to the forces of supply and demand in the markets of the Russian Empire and the Middle East. Finally, abolition of slavery in the Caucasus also served as an important but frequently overlooked catalyst for the Muhajir (emigrant) movement, which witnessed a mass transimperial migration of Chechen, Dagestani, Ossetian, Circassian, Abkhaz, and other indigenous groups from the Caucasus into the Ottoman domains. Among the muhajirs were hundreds of slaveowners who decided to leave their native homeland because of the refusal to lose their enslaved and enserfed people. As a consequence, thousands of the enslaved and enserfed families and individuals were forced to follow their masters on a difficult journey to the foreign lands of the Ottoman Empire. These enslaved communities played an integral role in the founding of new villages and cities in Anatolia and the Levant.