William P. Cresson, Persia: The Awakening East" (1908)

William P. Cresson (1864-1932) was an American architect, who was born in Claymont, DE, and attended the University of Pennsylvania. He started his career as a draftsman for Cope & Stewardson company. After spending several years studying architecture in Europe, he pursued a rather diverse career as a diplomat (served in Lima, London, Quito, Panama, Portugal and finally as a secretary in the American embassy in St. Petersburg), soldier, professor of history and politics at the Princeton University (1919), and a well respected architect. Before and during the World War I, he had traveled extensively in the Russian Empire and the Middle East and later published several books about his experiences, including "Persia: The Awakening East" (1908) in which he recounted he briefly recounted his visit to Georgia at the turn of the 19th century.

Fostered by the generous colonial policy of M. de Witte [Sergei Witte,  minister, and prime minister in Imperial Russia] - a policy that dotted the far Russian border with modern cities like Dalny and Krasnovodsk, built in a night to give substance to the dream of Russian Imperialism, while it left the moujik [common men] of Central Russia to starve on his barren fields - we found the ancient towns of the Caucasus fast losing their Oriental traits and taking on the outward aspect, at least, of European cities. The Golovinsky Prospect, that strange street of Tiflis, which has its beginning among the theatres, clubs and palaces of the European quarter, and ends in the Asiatic filth and squalor of the Tatar town, was crowded with handsome equipages and gay with Russian uniforms and the bright dresses worn by the women-folk of Georgian and Armenian merchants. In the cafes of the Place de l'Europe we met moon-faced Tatar merchants and Georgian chieftains in their picturesque national costumes, who talked intelligently about the price of Standard Oil and the American Tariff question; while at the Officers' Club we saw Circassian princes (every one in the Caucasus who lives in a brick house lays claim to that title), dancing graceful Polish dances with the wives and daughters of Russian bureaucrats.

Among the motley throng of domineering officials and subservient Asiatics who filled the broad avenues of Tiflis, the native Caucasians, with their handsome physique and regular features, presented a marked contrast to the stolid Tartar-faced troopers of the conquering race. The Georgian national dress is one of the most graceful and warlike costumes in the world; clad in the flowing "tcherkeska," an arsenal of shining weapons belted about his narrow waist and wearing a tall cap of shaggy sheepskin, the native of Tiflis is a fierce and imposing figure. In private life he may be nothing more warlike than a bazar merchant or a prosperous tailor of the Golovinsky, but as he swaggers about the streets of his native town, toying with the silver hilt of his long Caucasian dagger, one realizes that the Georgian national spirit, after withstanding for centuries the onslaught of all the great conquerors of Asia, from Tamerlane to Aga Mohammed, has not yet succumbed to the despotism of a hundred years of Russian rule.

While the newspapers of St. Petersburg were talking complacently of Russia's "Manifest Destiny in Asia," and comparing the prosperous condition of the Caucasus with the famine-stricken provinces of India, the first mutterings of the approaching storm were beginning to be heard. During our visit the police were already preparing for the sudden outburst of barbarism long repressed that a few months later filled the Caucasus with familiar scenes of rapine and bloodshed.

As the Trans-Caspian Express, which was to carry us to Baku, moved out from the new railway station in Tiflis, we observed that the broad platforms between the triple line of military sidings were crowded with soldiers wearing the uniform of every branch of the Russian service: Cossacks in gray and silver; dragoons in sombre green; infantry of the line in dingy white caps and blouses; smart guardsmen from St. Petersburg and workmanlike riflemen from the Trans-Caspian, [all] waiting transportation to one point or another of the chain of patrols and garrisons established along the whole length of the railroad, and in every town and hamlet of the Caucasus. This display of armed force was the only visible sign of the fierce internal struggle against Russification that was going on all over the Caucasus, the real key-note of Russia's policy along her Turkish and Persian frontiers; the foundation for the unconvincing prosperity which astonishes the traveller towards the Shah's dominions, as he pauses on the threshold of the Eternal East to take a farewell glimpse of the blessings of European civilization.