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A new Georgian literature and culture were developingfast with the growth of a modern middle-classnational movement. This found varied political expression,notably in a social-democratic party of Menshevikcolouring which supplied a handful of the mostprominent leaders of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917 andof the struggling, nominally independent Georgia of1918-21. Beneath, the mass of the Georgian peasantryrose in jacqueries in the 1905 Revolution. Underground,a tiny group led by Stalin conspired and battledindomitably for the Bolshevik cause.The Armenians, divided between Russia and Turkeyand with important foreign colonies, much divided alsoamongst themselves, had a wider range of contacts thanthe Georgians, all of whom were included within Russia.While in the eyes of the Turks they figured as the toolsof Russian expansion in Asia Minor and paid a terribleprice in repeated massacres, the Russian Armenians werefar from united in accepting a tsarist Russia as the bestmeans of attaining a reunion of the Armenian people.Although many prospered in business and the professionsor Russian service, revolutionary movements were strongamong them, and their principal party, of a socialrevolutionarybrand, looked largely to the West.The Tatars of Azerbaidzhan were already beginning tobe dislocated by the effects of the Baku oil industry.Still mainly an illiterate reservoir of unskilled labour, by1914 they yet had produced a local press and their firstlocal millionaire. They were mostly Shiahs; hencepan-islamic propaganda from Constantinople had neverbeen dangerous. But pan-turanianism had a breedingground and in the twenty years before the Revolution of1917 their links with Turkey were being strengthened.The curse of Transcaucasia had been the centuries-oldfeuds between these three main peoples. The Russianconquest did little or nothing to allay them. On thecontrary, the darkest side of tsarism was to be seen inthe at times deliberate fostering of animosities by theauthorities during the forty years before 1917. TheRevolution of 1905 was marked by terrible excesses inTranscaucasia. Nowhere in the Russian empire was the296