Saint Petersburg §

Imperial capital of conquest and documentation

Saint Petersburg, Petrograd during the First World War and later Leningrad, was the imperial capital from which Russia's Caucasus policy was directed for much of the nineteenth century. The treaties, military appointments, church regulations and administrative surveys that transformed the South Caucasus were produced within the imperial state centred there.

The city matters to the atlas as an archive and command point. Russian imperial officers and administrators documented population, land, taxation and communal status in ways that later historians such as Bournoutian use to reconstruct the pre- and post-conquest demography of Erivan and Karabakh. Those documents are not neutral, but they are indispensable evidence. editorial

Saint Petersburg also symbolises the distance between local communities and the power that drew their administrative frames. Armenian and Azerbaijani political claims often cite imperial data created by a state whose priorities were conquest, order and revenue, not national self-determination.