Transcaucasian Model of Diversity Governing: a Talk by Etienne Peyrat

On February 15, 2019 the Center for Historical Research at the HSE in St Petersburg hosted an ERA.Net research seminar. Etienne Peyrat (Sciences Po Lille) presented his talk  "Imperial transition and regional integration in the South Caucasus (1900s-1930s)" 

The talk dealt with emergence, existence, dissolution, and legacy of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic as a non-national political entity within the Soviet Union. The lecturer overviewed a wide spectrum of issues starting from the challenges of diversity-management in the South Caucasus to the various efforts to foster non-national identity of the T.S.F.S.R. and fit it into the nationality-based structure of the Soviet Union. The discussion that followed came across several topics such as inner political struggles in the national groups inside the latter Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijan Republics, complexity and the hybrid nature of political imaginations that were produced by some of the political activists and the persistence of those imaginations of non-national forms of diversity at least until the 1960th – the time when a new USSR Constitution was discussed.