ABSTRACT
The case of the gortsy mountaineers of the North Caucasus, who came to view the Transcaucasian Federative Democratic Republic (TDFR) as a viable state structure for Transcaucasia and sought to join it, represents one of the clearest examples of support for the TDFR. And while the appeal for a federative arrangement had grassroot support, a key issue that came to the fore as the result of the First World War, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and the subsequent establishment of de facto federative structures such as the Transcaucasian Commissariat and the Seim , was whether the constituent elements in these structures could or should declare independence from their former metropole, the Russian state, which was undergoing an existential crisis and revolutionary transformation that many found frightening. In this context the range of actors who viewed the independence of the TDFR as viable was more limited.
