Griboedov's Project of the Russian Transcaucasian Company and the Ideas of the European Enlightenment

God! How come it did not strike him before: Transcaucasia, you know, is a colony! ¹

— Yuri Tynianov

The project of the Russian Transcaucasian Company was written in 1828 in Tiflis by Alexander Griboedov, who at the time served as Russian minister plenipotentiary in Persia, and Petr Zaveleisky, the vice-governor of Tiflis. ² The text of the project is lost except for two surviving pieces: "A Note on the Founding of the Russian Transcaucasian Company" and "Introduction to the Project of the Charter" of the Russian Transcaucasian Company. ³ However, General Mikhail Zhukovsky's critique of the project on ethical and economic grounds, entitled "Comments on the Note about the Founding of the Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Trade Company," gives us a good idea of the project's main points. ⁴

The authors of the project were seeking governmental assistance in founding a chartered company in Transcaucasia that would have privileges similar to the ones the British East India Company enjoyed at the time of its beginning. In return they promised to promote economic and cultural development in the region and bring high revenues into the empire's treasury. Their critic, however, thought that the authors' plans to monopolize trade and production in Transcaucasia would benefit neither the empire nor the region, while undermining the principles of social justice.

So far scholars have either criticized the project as colonialist and oppressive or justified it as one that would have hastened the advance of capitalism in the Caucasus and thus would have contributed to historical progress. This article seeks to provide a more complex account of both Griboedov and of the project. In doing so, it will situate the project within the context of Russian discourse from that time about imperial expansionism in the Caucasus and also within the context of Enlightenment thinking about human equality, subjugated peoples, and the "Other."

Together, the project and Zhukovsky's criticism read as an ongoing polemic about the proper management of the colonies, where each side's argument continues along a thread of thought coming down from the thinkers of the eighteenth century. Zhukovsky criticizes the authors of the project from the viewpoint of a supporter of free trade and free enterprise, whose negative opinion on monopolies and chartered companies was modeled on the ideas of Adam Smith. Griboedov and Zaveleisky's position is close to that of the French Enlighteners, Raynal, Diderot, and other contributors to A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, whose "discussion of Russia's potential role in East-West trade constituted a brief for imperial expansion." ⁵

The latter, like Adam Smith, denounced many colonial practices, among them the founding of exclusive chartered companies, as economically ineffective and oppressive towards the inhabitants of the colonies. Yet at the same time Raynal and his collaborators "occasionally revealed enthusiasm" for colonial trade as a stimulator of industrial development worldwide and showed admiration for British successes in this type of endeavor. They encouraged their own country not to give up on its involvement with the colonies, but to seek new mutually beneficial ways of collaborating with them. In some passages, Raynal actually argues in favor of big trading companies, while Diderot goes further to specify certain circumstances when, in his opinion, successful trade requires the existence of a monopoly.

The authors of the project for the Russian Transcaucasian Company share the French thinkers' desire for their own country to successfully compete with the British. National pride, which was long recognized as one of the important features of Griboedov's personality, contributed to his ambition to become an entrepreneur who knew "the art of making all other nations tributary to his own." ⁶ At the same time, like the French Enlighteners, he believed in the possibility of mutually beneficial collaboration between the mother country and the colony. ⁷

No One's Land

And then there were suspicious sultanates and khanates, either Persian or Turkish, or no one's. ⁸

— Yuri Tynianov

In their project, Griboedov and Zaveleisky retroactively...