Abstract
To be sure, the wider historiographical scholarship on the Caucasus during the First World War and the onset of the Soviet rule, including that from within the respective national historiographies of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, have underscored the profound impact that these two world events had on the region. Yet little attention has been paid until now on to the triggering role that these events played in creating the political opening, even if only briefly so and never to be repeated, for a federative entity that called itself the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic.
Indeed, the TDFR represented a fleeting triumph of the idea of multi-layered interdependence and interactions among the nationalities of the Caucasus, an idea that had been on the minds of people both inside and outside of the region. This idea preceded the TDFR's emergence and lingered on after it collapsed - but did not seem to appeal to all of the contemporaries of the region or to have been viable for a longer duration given the specific challenges of the period.