Conclusion

Abstract

The various phases of Tsereteli’s political career show a remarkably similar pattern: a rapid rise, a short period of generally recognized leadership and a rather more gradual slide into political isolation. In his student days, in the Second Duma, during the revolution, in Georgia and in emigrant circles he repeatedly began by assuming a major role almost without question. Leadership came to him not from ambition, vanity or lust for power, but was as it were pushed upon him. He did not seek power and only accepted responsibility if he knew he had the support of a mandate or if he considered it absolutely necessary for political reasons. What inspired him was of a quite different order: he wanted to deliver humanity from an existence which suddenly struck him in his youth as being in human. His aversion to wrong, in the broadest sense of the word, his moral rigorism, was the most important political motive for his actions, and we have seen prime instances of this in the incident in his young days with his uncle, the conflict with Meshcherskii, his disgust of both the immorality of tsarism and Bolshevism, his rows with the Georgian nationalists and Dan, and his last letter to Vointinskii quoted above. It gave him great strength of purpose, but at the same time it displayed his limitations, because he refused to allow his moral principles to be compromised when it would have been sensible to do so for political reason.