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Georgia The Spirit of Revolution
In 1905 a large-scale peasant revolt in western Georgia and
general strikes in industrial centers throughout the Caucasus
caused Russia to declare martial law. As elsewhere in the Russian
Empire, the political reforms of 1905 temporarily eased tensions
between the Georgian population and the Russian government. For
the next decade, the Georgian revolutionaries of the Moscow-based
Social Democratic Party were split between the gradualist
Menshevik and the radical Bolshevik factions, and the incidence
of strikes and mass demonstrations declined sharply between 1906
and 1917. Mensheviks, however, occupied all the Georgian seats in
the first two seatings of the Duma, the Russian parliamentary
institution established in 1905. In this period, Joseph V. Stalin
(a Georgian who changed his name from Ioseb Jugashvili around
1910) became a leader of Bolshevik conspiracies against the
Russian government in Georgia and the chief foe of Menshevik
leader Noe Zhordania.
Data as of March 1994
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