Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/92

 Denikin against the Bolshevists. These overtures too were definitely rejected by the Georgian, Government, which continued to maintain the strictest neutrality. That was not easy, as the conflicting classes in Russia adopted the attitude of who is not for us is against us.

The democratic country, which had expropriated the ground landlords, was a thorn, in. the side of the Generals of the counter revolution. The Republic seemed to be not less inconvenient to the men of the Soviet Republic it for other reasons. They hated Georgian Menshevism right heartily.

Both the dictators who. aimed at restoring Czardom, and the People's Commissaries could not bear to think that within their orbit was a free and independent community, which would not obey the dictates of Moscow. A great part of the fighting between the Bolshevists and the white troops took place on the northern borders of Georgia. Sometimes the one and sometimes the other side, whichever happened to be victorious, attempted to subdue the free mountain peoples of the Caucasus, and occasionally invaded Georgia, in order either to set up the re-action, or to provoke a Communist rebellion which would lead to submission to the Moscow régime.

At first it was the Bolshevists who, without any declaration of war, invaded the coastline of Georgia, in the autumn of 1918 and captured Sukhum. The Georgian forces pressed them back. The Bolshevists were soon followed by Denikin's forces, who seized the territory which had been wrested from Georgia by the former. Georgia endeavoured to negotiate, but Denikin was not disposed to do so. He advanced, but was at length thrown, back, like the Bolshevists. The intervention of the English succeeded in restoring peace.

In the following year the white troops tried to subdue the mountain peoples in the northern Caucasus, who had won their independence. Georgia remained neutral, but its sympathies lay with those who had been attacked