Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan: Neoclassicism and Imperial Signification in the Caucasus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contrary to urban histories of the Caucasus that have tended to take an individual capital city and chart urban development from the Persian imprint and the Russian imperial legacy to the Soviet reconstruction, this article takes a comparative look at three national capitals, Baku, Yerevan, and Tbilisi, in order to argue for their similarities as well as their distinctness. It puts forth that the markers of the “national monumentality” and “capitality” of these three cities were set in place in the period of Russian imperial rule and that the central cores of Yerevan, Baku, and Tbilisi remained relatively unchanged into the Soviet era. This argument stresses that the impact of both the historiography of the Soviet urban revolution and the nationalizing historiography that continues to idolize genius figures like Armenian–Soviet architect Alexandr Tamanyan has led to an under-appreciation of the many imperial traces remaining in the Soviet-era cities. The article proceeds by using the architectural evidence, alongside travel accounts authored by those very familiar with imperial urban settings that describe Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan in some detail in these periods, to shed light on the changing dynamics of these locations (or lack thereof) into the Soviet era. Imperial travelers are supplemented by literary sources, as well as a spotlight on the example of Tamanyan and his centrality to movements like the World of Art group of neoclassicist architects in St. Petersburg. It is argued that it was neoclassicism that united the urban approaches in Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan under the Russian and Soviet periods of rule and that this violent rupture from the Persianate past continues to dominate these cities today.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".