abstract
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This chapter clarifies the forging of the Russo-Armenian political partnership in the fires of the First Russo-Persian War, during which the shah's Armenians systematically assisted the tsar's military and political agents. It examines Russo-Georgian and Armeno-Georgian tensions and Russia's rivalries with its Western and Eastern counterparts. The chapter also explores how, and why, Armenians emerged as imperial Russia's primary partners in the early nineteenth century. Although the political symbiosis between Russia and Armenia blossomed in that era, they were already familiar to each other well before the onset of tsarist imperialism in the Caucasus. It investigates the Russo-Armenian encounter that happened centuries before the Romanov incorporation of Eastern Armenia in 1828.