Chakva Station, mentioned in the text here at the start of the book, is part of the Transcaucasus Railway an imperial-era railroad that spanned the South Caucasus, connecting the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. The railroad’s completion opened-up trade between what would become the southern republics of the U.S.S.R. (i.e., Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) and the rest of the Russian Empire. Unsurprisingly, its concentration in Georgia became a centralizing point of ethnic pride for Georgians: its role in connecting the hamlets and sovkhozy of a very mountainous republic should be emphasized. It was the railway’s creation of economic interdependence among parts of Georgia that promoted its self-consciousness as a single state in the late nineteenth century.