In the first years after the First World War, social democrats in Europe celebrated the beleaguered socialist government in the briefly independent Republic of Georgia (1918–21). The senior statesman of the Second International, Karl Kautsky, travelled to the South Caucasus and wrote a laudatory book – Georgien, Eine Sozialdemokratische Bauernrepublik (translated into English as Georgia: A Social Democratic Peasant Republic – Impressions and Observations) (1921) – that contrasted what the Georgian social democrats (formerly the Georgian Mensheviks) were doing while maintaining a democratic government in contrast to the one-party dictatorship then operating in Soviet Russia.1 Almost simultaneously with the appearance of the small book, the communists invaded Georgia, and the social democrats were forced to flee to western Europe. Their flight ended an extraordinary three decades in which Marxist socialists dominated the national liberation movement in a largely peasant country, repeatedly won elections to the Russian imperial Duma (1906–12), successfully forged a cross-class alliance in Georgia that brought democratic socialists to power when the tsarist regime was overthrown in February/March 1917, and even provided major leaders (Nikoloz Chkheidze and Irakli Tsereteli) to the Petrograd Soviet through 1917.