Talk:Caucasus Viceroyalty (1801–1917)

Colony

@Rutdam Contrary to your claim, all four of the sources on the word "colony" clearly describe the Caucasus as a colony of the Russian Empire, with the last explicitly mentioning the viceroyalty:

From these aspects, this paper will attempt to analyze the Russian Empire’s rules over its Caucasian colony led by Michael Semenovich Vorontsov (1782-1856), who was a Caucasian governor-general (viceroy2) and a commander-in-chief of the Caucasian Independent Forces (1845-1854), and demonstrate that his idea and methods of rules contributed to establish an original colonial administration and to subjugate anti-colonial wars for politico-economic integration of the Caucasus with the Russian Empire.

The claim that it was an "integral part" of Russia is meaningless, both on the basis that there are four separate sources by separate people that describe it as a colony, and the basis that this is a vague, loaded term. French Algeria was also an "integral" part of France, and this does not mean that it is not described as a colony in reliable sources.

Edit 1298348621, claiming "unsourced info", is also wrong, as the body provides a source for info in the lead. Per MOS:LEADCITE, "Because the lead usually repeats information that is in the body, editors should balance the desire to avoid redundant citations in the lead with the desire to aid readers in locating sources for challengeable material." As such, I have reverted your three most recent edits until there's some explanation based in sourcing to not describe the Caucasus as a colony, given that there are several RS which do so.

Mupper-san (talk) 08:13, 9 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

None of the sources describe Caucasus Viceroyalty as a colony itself. This article is not about Caucasus within Russian Empire or Russian Caucasus, but about Caucasus Viceroyalty administration, therefore, specific sources are required, and until they are present, the other sources can not be used to support the information, and specific terms need to be used for specific administrations. Moreover, colonies have their own specific laws and legal system, they are separate entities, I am not sure any sources demonstrated this entity itself was such rather than being governed as ordinary Russian territory. Not all empires are colonial empires. According to definition of colony, "A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule,[1] which rules the territory and its indigenous peoples separated from the foreign rulers, the colonizer, and their metropole (or "mother country").[2] This separated rule was often organized into colonial empires, with their metropoles at their centers, making colonies neither annexed or even integrated territories, nor client states. Particularly new imperialism and its colonialism advanced this separated rule and its lasting coloniality." Caucasus fits more into an "annexed territory". As for example of Algeria, according to the French Algeria article:
"French Algeria (French: Alger until 1839, then Algérie afterwards;[1] unofficially Algérie française;[2][3] Arabic: الجزائر المستعمرة), also known as Colonial Algeria, was the period of Algerian history when the country was a colony and later an integral part of France. French rule lasted until the end of the Algerian War which resulted in Algeria's gaining independence on 5 July 1962.
The French conquest of Algeria began in 1830 with the invasion of Algiers which toppled the Regency of Algiers, though Algeria was not fully conquered and pacified until 1903. It is estimated that by 1875, approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians were killed.[4] Various scholars describe the French conquest as genocide.[5][6][4] Algeria was ruled as a colony from 1830 to 1848, and then as multiple departments, an integral part of France, with the implementing of the Constitution of French Second Republic on 4 November 1848, until Algerian independence in 1962. After a trip to Algiers in 1860, the then-French emperor Napoleon III became keen on establishing a client kingdom which he would in rule in a personal union, expanding freedoms for the indigenous population and limiting colonisation (a stance which he hoped would strengthen France's footing in the Muslim world, but which was unpopular with the local European settlers)."
Appereantly, the colonial period and the period of being integral part of metropole are separated here, marking the case of colony being by definition separate from the metropole. Although I would argue that this is still different, because Algerians did not have French citizenship unlike residents of Caucasus. Rutdam (talk) 08:34, 9 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the quick response! I would strongly disagree with the notion that 'this is not about Caucasus within Russian Empire'. Just as British India redirects to a description of several different pages on British rule in India over several centuries, but is used to refer to the British Raj within the context of the period after 1857 (at least judging by quite a few of the sources only describing 'British India' rather than the Raj), I would say that 'Russian Caucasus' or any other such term for the Caucasus under the Russian Empire is a less-formal term for the Viceroyalty, on the basis of the fact that there existed no separate 'Caucasus' under Imperial rule other than in the sense of the Caucasus Mountains (I would not mind a separate title, such as 'Caucasus under the Russian Empire', since the current one seems more sparsely-used in academia and especially Anglophone academia by comparison save for very niche matters of administrative history, but that is a separate debate).
Additionally, there are quite a few sources on the legal separation of the Viceroyalty from metropolitan Russia (such as Matveyev 2004, p. 24, which notes that much of the Caucasus was under military rule or regarded as 'foreigner territories' and that the viceroy was subordinate only to the Tsar; and Dameshek & Dameshek 2018, pp. 59–60, which details contemporary internal debates over whether the Caucasus constituted an 'integral' part of Russia or a 'borderland' in the same sense as Finland and Poland and eventual broad independence and efforts at integration). This would place the Caucasus under the Viceroyalty as being within the category of neither fully integrated nor client state; however, I would defer to academic sources on what is defined as a colony, rather than Wikipedia or broad definitions of colonies, as the first is, of course, always imperfect, and there is no such thing as a 'normal' colony (to use the example of Britain, one may simply compare India, Hong Kong, Malaya, Nigeria and the Caribbean to see that each were ).
Further, I will note that other parts of the French Algeria page refer to it as a colony after it became integrated (such as the § Post-colonial relations, § French atrocities against the Algerian indigenous population and § Under the Third Republic (1870–1940) sections and a few sources, such as Bouchène and Morgan).
Finally, on your last point (on citizenship), that's not necessarily true, given the category of inorodtsy was frequently and broadly applied to Caucasians and the institution of zemstvo was not permitted to exist there. Continuing the Algeria comparison (one which I do not think is unjust given it's used in the book edited by Companjen, Marácz and Versteegh as well as this BBC article from more than twenty years back), this contrasts with Cossacks and other Slavic settlers in the Caucasus, who, like the pieds-noirs, were full citizens.
Mupper-san (talk) 10:33, 9 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
First of all, I think it is important to note that this page has serious mistakes like the dates of existence of viceroyalty, because it was actually established in 1844, as is confirmed by other wikis. Even in the text, there is no source for viceroyalty existing in 1801, and the only meaningful discussion of viceroyalty beings after 1845, with the vague term "Russian authority in the Caucasus" being used before that. The actual dates of the viceroyalty are 1844–1882, 1904–1917. Therefore, this article can not encompass entire period of Russian rule in Caucasus.
As for the first source, it does not really defines entire Caucasus as being under military rule and regarded as foreign territory, but only in some years and some parts of the Caucasus being under "military-popular rule", while others being under "governorate rule". Moreover, in the end of the first page and in the beginning of the second page, the source directly mentions that the Caucasus was officially recognized as the part of the Russian state, citing the fact that the Russian Interior Ministry retained and exercised its functions in relation to Caucasus just as it was doing with the central Russian provinces, while it cites the contrary example of France, which had the Ministry of Colonies which appointed officials for the dependent territories and in essence they were treated as separate from the central provinces.
In addition, List of viceroyalties of the Russian Empire shows that the viceroyalty itself, while being a special administrative unit, was not a separate statelet, and that it was established in many core Russian territories too, while also symbolizing a greater central imperial control over the territory, not the opposite, as the territory was directly governed by a personal representative of emperor in it.
As for Poland and Finland, I don't think they are widely regarded as colonies within the Wikipedia pages and moreover, if the source does not defines Caucasus as colony in a decisive manner, I don't think it can be used for a conclusive citation.
I am not sure what is the difference between academic and Wikipedia definitions of colony? In general, colonial empires are treated differently from land-based empires, which had tendency of more directly integrating and annexing territories (does not means they did not grant autonomy, but the territory was regarded as part of the state rather than being a separate and dependent statelet). Russian Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Empire can be regarded as examples of such land-based empires, while British Empire, French Empire and etc. were colonial empires. However, I would like to see if there is a major disagreement to this points in the sources, or the texts of the authors who distinguish between these concepts and maybe argue that there is no actual meaningful distinction.
Inorodtsy page does not demonstrates that inorodtsy were not citizens, moreover, it does not gives a conclusive explanation on whether entire Caucasus population was regarded as inorodtsy, and as it does not touchs the topic of citizenship, it would be important to see whether the population of Caucasus was given citizenship, since it defines whether they were subject of emperor and Russia state or were seen as a different entity and a "state within a state". Rutdam (talk) 01:47, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You're right that this article is not good. Most articles relating to the Caucasus are not. Speaking honestly, I again maintain that all articles on the Empire's top-level administrative divisions in the Caucasus should probably be merged into a single article, at least for the time being, as there's far more academia lumping this entire period of Caucasian history together than there is about picking apart each individual government organ over the Caucasus.
I don't think there is any argument that the Caucasus under the Empire was a "statelet" or not part of Russia. Most colonies, to the extent of my knowledge were not regarded as independent states, even protectorates in Africa or Asia. In mentioning the system of the Viceroyalty as directly-ruled, I was meaning to draw comparisons to the Raj in India, for example, which was similarly governed.
In regards to the dichotomy of "land-based" versus "colonial" empires, I wouldn't say this is true at all in Western academia, as I can name several historians (Alexander Etkind, Orlando Figes, Alexander Morrison and Michael Khodarkovsky, just off the top of my head; this article also briefly mentions the descriptions of the Caucasus, Siberia and present-day Alaska as colonies, though it primarily discusses settler-colonialism and contemporary debates on the nature of colonialism) who readily describe the Empire as possessing colonies or being a colonial empire. There are, however, certain historians which describe Russia as simultaneously both subaltern and a colonial empire in nature (see here). Russian academia is also not entirely opposed to describing the Imperial era as "colonial" regarding some aspects (as demonstrable here), despite state opposition (as noted by Morrison here).
Sunderland's "The Ministry of Asiatic Russia" defines colonialism as 'a form of European rule "imposed to exploit and, within limits, transform distant areas and peoples"' (per Geraci 2010). HOWEVER, that aside, I think that choosing to define Russia as colonial or non-colonial based on this definition or that would be original research; claims of colonialism based on any such definition could be reasonably applied to most states, so it is important, especially in such a politically-charged case as this where there is frequent accusations of negative historical revisionism directed by both sides towards each other, that we use what reliable sources say, rather than what we say. This ties into the matter of Finland and Poland; so long as academic sources generally do not describe them as 'colonial', they should not be described as colonial (though it's worth noting that Ukraine under the Empire, for example, was frequently described as a semi-colony of Russia in Soviet historiography, a term also used by Western historians not infrequently), while Turkestan and the Priamur, which are very frequently described as colonial, should be, given the wealth of sources that do so. This presents an issue for the Caucasus, in which it is generally described as a colony of Russia, without distinction as to which administrative divisions were colonial in nature; whether or not it can be determined that references to the Caucasus between its establishment and 1917 can be interpreted as referring to the Viceroyalty, and .
The inorodtsy were not subjects on the same level as Russian commoners, I should say (per this piece), rather than citizens, given that the Russian Empire did not possess modern concepts of citizenship and nationality. However, this piece describes Caucasians as a separate population from inorodtsy, classifying them as 'aborigines' upon whom a certain system of governance was imposed. However, regarding how this plays into the definition of the Caucasus as a colony, I refer to the previous paragraph.
Mupper-san (talk) 07:26, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
allikas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Caucasus_Viceroyalty_(1801%E2%80%931917)