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Abstract

This paper explores the interrelation between Empire and Nation from the late Tsarist to the early Bolshevik periods in the imperial borderland of the Caucasus. It does so through the case of the Museum of the Caucasus, which was repurposed as the Museum of Georgia under the Mensheviks and later as the Georgian State Museum following the Bolshevik seizure of power.

The first part examines the Museum of the Caucasus and the imperial agents involved in making and claiming the region through practices of collecting and exhibiting. In this way, I set the context for the museum’s transformation under Soviet rule.

I begin by introducing Gustav Radde (1831–1903), a German naturalist from Danzig who was dispatched to Tiflis by the Imperial Academy of Sciences. Embedded in imperial structures, Radde ventured into the wild to gather plants, animal specimens, and ethnographic objects. However, it was also his practice as a naturalist that shaped the way he imagined and divided the region, which was subsequently put on display. By incorporating tropical plants and exotic animals into natural history exhibits, the Tsarist empire defined itself through its borderland - figured here as a miniature model of imperial diversity, albeit framed in universalist terms. I further argue that the museum was part of a broader global context.

The analysis of these displays engages with the Tsarist logic of conquest, which portrayed highlanders as static and frozen in time, while communities such as the Kurds were depicted as primitive yet receptive to modernization. Georgian-speaking subgroups also appeared in ethnographic dioramas, but their presentation intersected with the archaeological section of the exhibition, establishing a temporal link between an ancient, glorious past and the present. This sense of historical continuity was denied to highlanders and Muslim communities. Christian Georgian-speaking populations thus came to occupy a central place in Russia’s Orient - in this case the Caucasus imagined as a unique blend of 'Orient' and Occident.

Drawing on archival sources, travelogues, visual materials and museum ethnography, the paper then demonstrates that the museum in the early Soviet period, curated by Georgian scholars, actively engaged with the imperial framework of diversity and modernization. In particular, it transformed 'Russia’s Orient' into its 'own Orient', sunstituting the frame of the Caucasus as a distinctive civilizational blend with that of Georgian civilization.