Last year I was accused of being a kazennyi optimist for having reflected the view of the administrations of various academic institutes in the Soviet Union. Today, I am happy to start with the words of my Viennese grandmother, “Ich sehe schwarz.” But as I am sitting next to the Institute's professional doomsayer, Professor Motyl, I will still look somewhat optimistic, I am sure.

The emergence of a strong Cossack movement has great implications for the future of Russia and the post-Soviet space. It is at once the glorification of a mythical past and a powerful alternate vision of the future. Old questions of Cossack identity are once again being debated and a Cossack presence is strongly felt in the cities of southern Russia. In the volatile North Caucasus region the Cossack revival has increasingly assumed many of the features of national movements in other areas of the former Soviet Union.

Since Gorbachev's accession to power in March 1985, his rule has been marked by a very visible concern for economic reforms and developments in international relations. Nationality and minority affairs within the USSR, which played such a prominent part previously with the mass emigration movements and open dissent of the 1970s, have not been at the forefront of his interests, in either his speeches or his travels. However, the local Party congresses and the 27th Congress of the CPSU as a whole provide an opportunity for a review of current thinking on this enduring and contentious issue. The All-Union Congress in particular witnessed the appearance of the final draft of the Party's new Program for the future, with its relatively recently adopted longer-term perspective on the question of the advent of full communism and the withering away of conflicting and antagonistic national minority allegiances. The limited prospects for this long awaited moving together of nations are likely to have been significant features in the readjustment of the time scale of Communist development and the emergence of a more realistic assessment of the possibility of producing a fully “Soviet” man divested of his narrower ethnic loyalties.

In the half century from the Russian annexation of eastern Georgia (Kartli-Kakheti) to the outbreak of the Crimean War, Transcaucasian society underwent a deep and irreversible transformation which, in its effects, was as fundamental a metamorphosis for Armenians and Georgians as were the contemporary political and industrial revolutions for “western Europeans. Whether the move into the Russian orbit was “progressive,” as Soviet historians insist, or a fatal perversion of these nations’ natural development, as some nationalists argue, is not really a historical judgement capable of empirical demonstration. What can be shown, however, is that with the Russian occupation a historical process began which rent the fabric of traditional Georgian and Armenian society and produced both new opportunities and loyalties for some and a persistent, if ultimately futile, resistance to centralized bureaucratic rule by others. Responding to that resistance, the tsarist administration enticed the nobility of Georgia into participation in the new order, and at the end of the first fifty years of Russian rule, the once rebellious, semiindependent dynasts of Georgia had been transformed into a service gentry loyal to their new monarch. At the same time, the Armenian merchants and craftsmen of Caucasia's towns benefited from the new security provided by Russian arms and, while competing with privileged Russian traders, oriented themselves away from the Middle East toward Russian and European commerce. In the process they laid the foundation for their own fortunes and future as the leading economic and political element in Russian Georgia. The peasantry of Transcaucasia was forced in the meantime to submit to new exactions as their status became increasingly more similar to that of Russian peasants. And the respective churches of Georgia and Armenia made fundamental and irreversible accommodations to the new political order.