'…To Soothe Their Suffering as Sons of Our Entire Fatherland Russia': Violence and Charity in the Imperial Southern Caucasus

• In Event: Help at All Costs?: State, Community, and Individual Charity in the Late Nineteenth Century Romanov Empire

Abstract

In 1907, the Southern Caucasus was the empire’s ‘hotspot’. Revolutionary unrest, strike movements, ethnic tensions and extensive crop failures altogether challenged imperial authority to respond. While the regime notoriously clamped down on protests with military violence, it also had to find ways to ease the tensions and provide relief in the face of a pending humanitarian disaster. The paper addresses the famine relief efforts by state and civil actors in Nagornyi Karabakh and explains how the imperial government not only arranged the cooperation of Azeri and Armenian charity initiatives but facilitated a relief campaign as a means to enforce political control over the region. It argues that the imperial administration aided its subjects regardless of their background and that this aid, in turn, was expected by the people from this administration. Famine relief was a crucial means to sustain imperial rule.

Author

• Immo Rebitschek, U of Jena (Germany)