Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/19

 of the Russian language were everywhere degraded and excluded from all offices. Even in the factories of Georgia a worker who had not undergone an examination in Russian was liable to be refused employment.

The growth of Georgian resistance to the foreign yoke was assisted, for a time, by the practice of the Russian Government in banishing to Georgia, as well as to Siberia, its subversive subjects, such as Poles. This practice did not last long, as Georgia commenced to mutiny in the middle of the last century. It was then the turn of the Georgians themselves to be banished, and they shared this fate in the fullest measure, the struggle against Czardom had to be carried on with the aid of the ideas of the more highly developed West. Not only the officials, the military and the aristocrats, but also the revolutionaries of Russia drew their knowledge and methods of thinking from Western Europe.

This occurred at a time when the revolutionary movement of Russia received such an accession of strength that the Liberals had become Conservative, and only the Socialists represented revolutionary thought. Thus the Russian Revolutionaries became Socialists, in spite of the weakness of the proletariat and its class struggle in the Russian Empire. And just as the capitalists of Russia chose the more perfected forms of European technique for the industry which they founded, so the Socialists of Russia chose the most perfected form of Socialism, the Marxian.

This also applied to Georgia. There only for a short time the Opposition movement was led by the aristocracy, as in Poland, and possessed a purely nationalist, character. At the time when serfdom was abolished in Russia an echo was heard in Georgia in the form of peasant unrest, which was suppressed with bloodshed.

The Opposition movement first became strong and systematic when industrial capital was attracted to Georgia by the building of the railway from Tiflis to