Armenian and Georgian with alphabets dating from the fifth century.
The languages of Dagestan to the southeast are divided into a long list of small groups, including Aghul, Akhvakh, Andi, Archi, Avar, Bag-valal, Bezhta, Botlikh, Chamalal, Dargwa, Dido, Ghodoberi, Hinukh, Hunzib, Karata, Khvarshi, Lak, Lezgi, Rutul, Tabassaran, Tindi, and Tsakhur.
Georgia is also divided by the ethnic autonomies of Abkhazia, Ajra, and South Ossetia; and a number of Georgian and other ethnicities reside in the mountainous regions: the Svanetians to the west, speaking a Kartvelian language related to Georgian; the Khevsurs to the west, speaking a dialect of Georgian; Bats, a small group speaking a Vainakh tongue related to Chechen and Ingush; and the Khists, who are related to the Chechens and who occupy the Pankisi Gorge.
The ethnic and linguistic diversity described by Timosthenes and Pliny in antiquity, continues to be a fact of life in the Caucasus. It is a source of wonder, but also of conflict, as boundaries have continued slowly to shift back and forth over the millennia, but with a greater frequency in the past two centuries, as the Russian Empire appeared to
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claim this territory as its own. The spread of Russia southward was not always by military means, and in the case of the Caucasus, the military was preceded by the gradual migration of Cossacks, except along the Caspian coast, where Peter the Great led incursion early in the eighteenth century. Their collective societies lived at the edge of Russian territory and its legalities; in the eighteenth century they began to come into closer contact with the peoples of the Caucasus. Occasional violent conflict turned eventually into organized warfare.
The wars in the Caucasus throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seem to defy any logical reference to a benefit that the Russians may have gained from holding on to the land. The great authors of nineteenth-century Russia have left a vast collection of poetry, short stories, and novels that have the ambiguous heroics of war in the Caucasus as part of their plot. One of the most famous is Leo Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad, set in the central Caucasus. Its prologue, in which the narrator utterly destroys a beautiful yellow flower while attempting to pick it, should be required reading for any who study the Caucasus.
Some of the conflict between Russia and the natives of the Caucasus has traditionally been defined across confessional lines. The North Caucasian peoples were converted to Islam, although some, such as the Abkhaz, have been less intense in their assimilation of that faith. The wars in the nineteenth century came to have religious meaning for both sides, especially with the leadership of the Imam Shamil, from the Avar people of Daghestan, who led the Chechens and others until his capture in 1856. His defeat, and Russia’s eventual “pacification” of the region, was followed by a massive migration, not altogether voluntary, of North Caucasian peoples to the Ottoman Empire. Slavs, Georgians, and others often filled the “empty spaces” left behind, adding to the potential for ethnic conflict in later times.
The chaos of Revolution in 1917 was greatly felt in the Caucasus, with Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan all experiencing short periods of independence. The North Caucasus peoples attempted to form a Confederation of Mountain Peoples. All of these, pressed by foreign intervention, as well as White and Red Russian Armies, fell to the Bolsheviks. The shifting realities of ethnic jurisdictions in the Caucasus region is its own study of nationalities policy in the Soviet Union, with the most tragic chapter being written toward the end of World War II when entire groups were forced into exile, including Ingush and Chechens, and several smaller groups. Although allowed back in the 1950s, these deportations are part of the fuel that has fed the fire of revolt and conflict in the Caucasus during the post-Soviet period. See also: ABKHAZIANS; ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; AZERBAIJAN AND AZERIS; DAGESTAN; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baddeley, John. (1969). The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus. New York: Russell and Russell. Braund, David. (1994). Georgia in Antiquity: A History of Colchis and Transcaucasian Iberia, 550 BC-AD 562. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Ethnologue Web site: «www.ethnologue.com». Greppin, John A. C., ed. (1989). The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus. Delmar, NY: Caravan Books. Pipes, Richard. (1997). Formation of the Soviet Union, revised ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walsh, Warren B. (1968). Russia and the Soviet Union: A Modern History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
One of the oldest and most important East Slavic monasteries, the Kievan Caves Monastery is located in the southern part of Kiev along the Dnieper River. Its name derives from the tunnels and caves that served first as cells for monks and later as burial crypts. According to the Primary Chronicle, the monastery was founded by Saint Anthony of the Caves (died c. 1073) in 1051 after his return from Mount Athos in Greece, where he was tonsured. Anthony’s pious life attracted a number of followers, and soon he appointed Varlaam, the son of an influential boyar, as abbot and secluded himself in a nearby cave. In 1062 Varlaam left to lead the St. Demetrius monastery, and the brethren chose Theodosius to replace him. The monastery grew steadily under Theodosius’s guidance, and in an attempt to provide an orderly life for the monks, he introduced the Byzantine rule of Theodore of Stu-dion (759- 826). Despite the strong coenobitic nature of this rule, which required a common life under the strict guidance of the abbot, the way of life described in the Primary Chronicle at the time of Theodosius’s death in 1074 is more idiorrythmic,
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in that each monk was left to develop his own method of monastic practice. A hallmark of caves monasticism in the Kievan period was the claim, often repeated in the sources, that the Caves was a monastery founded not by princes or rulers, but through tears, fasting, prayer, and vigils. As a spiritual center, the monastery was a major source of bishops and missionaries in pre-Mongol Rus.
The Caves Monastery was also the center of cultural life in Kievan Rus. The Primary Chronicle has been traditionally ascribed to Nestor, a monk of the Caves Monastery writing at the end of the eleventh century, who also wrote the Life of Theodosius and the life of the slain princes Boris and Gleb. In addition, the monastery is the setting of the Kievan Caves Patericon, a thirteenth-century compilation of stories about caves monks, which was reworked and later reprinted until the nineteenth century.
Theodosius’s successors undertook a major building campaign that continued with some minor setbacks until the invasion of the Mongols, who sacked Kiev and destroyed the monastery under Batu Khan in 1240. The monastery began to flourish once again in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under Lithuanian rule. By the sixteenth century the Caves had become quite wealthy, although as a citadel of Orthodoxy it still faced some major challenges. After the Treaty of Lublin, which combined Poland and Lithuania, and the Treaty of Brest, which created the Eastern Rite Catholic Uni-ate Church (1596), there was pressure to subject the monastery to the Uniate metropolitan of Kiev. Only strong resistance by the Caves monks reversed this process. With the acquisition of Kiev by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, the monastery and the see of Kiev were placed under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Moscow. The Caves was the first (1598), and one of only four monasteries in Russia to be given the special designation lavra, which signified a particularly large and influential monastery. The monastery was an important center of Orthodox spirituality until 1926, when it was made a museum by the Soviet government. It was restored to the Orthodox Church in 1988. See also: KIEVEN CAVES PATERICON; KIEVEN RUS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fedotov, George P. (1965). The Russian Religious Mind. New York: Harper Torchbooks. The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. (1989). Translated and with an introduction by Muriel Heppell. Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. (1953). Ed. and tr. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America.
Of the twenty-six species of sturgeon found in the world, those most valued are the four that dwell in the
