Introduction: Who wanted the TDFR? The making and the breaking of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic
2021
Abstract
During the brief period between 22 April and 26 May 1918, the leading Armenian, Azerbaijani and Georgian political forces of the early twentieth century, having established the shared federative structures of the Transcaucasian Commissariat and the Seim in the pre- ceding months, declared an independent Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR). Emerging as it did from the ruins of an imploding tsarist empire and the still glowing embers of the First World War, and facing the imminent threat of invasion from the Ottoman army and the power ambitions of incipient Soviet Russia, the TDFR seemed both to the actors at the time and to later scholars of the region to be unique, contingent, and certainly unrepeatable.