Religion, Nation and Empire in the Caucasus

Session Submission Type: Panel

Affiliate Organization: American Research Institute of the South Caucasus

Brief Description

What was the relationship between the imperial Russian state and its varied religious communities in the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How did imperial state structures impact the lives of ordinary believers? This panel examines varied religious communities of the Caucasus region (Georgian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Muslim) in order to articulate a stronger understanding of the intersection of imperial and religious structures in the periphery of empire. Paul Werth explores interactions between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the autocratic regime beginning with Emperor Nicholas I’s visit to Echmiadzin in 1837, assessing the role of personal contact and correspondence in the fate of the Apostolic Church across the long nineteenth century. Alika Zangieva examines the impact of pan-Islamist propaganda on the Muslim population of the North Caucasus during the 1877–78 Russo–Ottoman War, probing the extent to which religious affinities dictated combat experience and military strategy on the frontlines. Rebecca Mitchell examines the relationship between the Orthodox church hierarchy, state bureaucracy, and the ethnically Georgian clergy of the Exarchate. She reconstructs the complex and entangled loyalties of ordinary Georgian clergy in order to understand how, why and when devout Orthodox priests became "radical" revolutionary activists. Armen Manuk-Khaloyan explores how dioceses of the Armenian Apostolic Church in both the Ottoman and the Russian empires mobilized to aid their communities amid state-sanctioned violence and persecution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Vera Shevzov, Smith College

Papers

• The Armenian Church Face-to-Face with Tsarist Autocracy - Paul William Werth, U of Nevada, Las Vegas

• A Credible Threat?: Pan Islamist Propaganda in the North Caucasus 1877–78 - Alika Alanovna Zangieva, Princeton U

• Brothers in Faith?: A Family History of Religious and National (Dis)loyalties in the Georgian Exarchate (1880-1917) - Rebecca Anne Mitchell, Middlebury College

• Two Empires, One Nation?: Violence, Humanitarianism, and the Making of Russo-Ottoman Armenian Church Relations at the Turn of the Twentieth Century - Armen Manuk-Khaloyan, Georgetown U

Discussant

• Vera Shevzov, Smith College