The Downgraded Republic: The Stalin-Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1921-1953
Two Georgians, one policy: Joseph Stalin (Jughashvili) and Lavrenti Beria.
Abkhazians entered the Stalin years already downgraded, demoted in 1931 from a Soviet republic to an autonomous one inside Georgia. What followed, between Nestor Lakoba's death in 1936 and Stalin's in 1953, was a sustained campaign against them as a people, conducted through purges, school closures, demographic colonisation, and the falsification of their history. The documentary record is now substantial: security-police files, resettlement decrees, scholarly petitions, and oral testimony. What it does not settle is where the responsibility lay, between Moscow and Tbilisi.
Among the national territories of the Soviet Union, Abkhazia occupies an unusual place. Vladislav Ardzinba, later the first president of the post-Soviet republic, told the First Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR in 1989 that Abkhazia was "just about the only republic whose political status was downgraded rather than upgraded" by Stalin. Almost everywhere else the trajectory ran the other way, from autonomous region to autonomous republic, from autonomous republic towards union status, as Moscow rewarded loyalty and managed nationhood by promotion. Abkhazia moved in the opposite direction. Declared a Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921, demoted to a treaty republic bound to Georgia in 1925, and reduced in 1931 to an autonomous republic inside the Georgian SSR, it entered the years of the Great Terror already diminished in standing and already exposed.
What followed between the death of Nestor Lakoba in December 1936 and the death of Stalin in March 1953 was a sustained assault on the Abkhaz as a people: the decapitation of their political and cultural elite, the suppression of their language and schools, the renaming of their villages and rivers, the resettlement of tens of thousands of Georgian peasants on their land, and the preparation, never carried out, of their deportation. The documentary record is now substantial. Files preserved in the Sukhum archive of the security police, collections of resettlement decrees, the protocols of the NKVD troikas, the petitions written by Abkhaz scholars to the central authorities, and oral testimony gathered by historians together allow a fairly detailed reconstruction.
They do not, however, resolve the question that runs through all of it. Was this the work of the central Soviet leadership, applied to Abkhazia as one instance of an all-Union policy of assimilation, or was it the project of the Georgian republican leadership, which exceeded Moscow's directives and pursued aims of its own? The two readings are not mutually exclusive, and the weight of evidence does not fall cleanly on either side. This article sets out the record across the period, treats documented fact, archival evidence, and oral testimony as distinct, and returns at the end to the problem of attribution without pretending it can be settled by assertion.
From republic to autonomy: the 1931 downgrade and the Duripsh Gathering
Soviet power was established in Abkhazia at the end of March 1921, and the territory was proclaimed an independent Soviet Socialist Republic. From the outset its position was contradictory. The Caucasian Bureau of the Russian Communist Party had already, in a decree of 16 November 1921, judged an independent Abkhazia economically and politically inexpedient and pressed for its entry into a federation with Georgia. A treaty union with Georgia followed in December 1921. The constitution of 1925 fixed Abkhazia as a treaty republic, a Soviet Socialist Republic joined to Georgia by special agreement, an arrangement unique in the Union and, as later Soviet and Georgian historiography preferred to forget, a genuine downgrade from the position of 1921. Junge and Bonwetsch note that Soviet historiography refused on principle to acknowledge the 1931 reduction in status, since the official narrative admitted only elevations, and that Georgian historiography had its own reasons for minimising a history that supplied the Abkhaz with arguments for separateness.
The decisive step came on 19 February 1931, when the Sixth All-Georgian Congress of Soviets resolved to convert the treaty republic into an autonomous republic within the Georgian SSR. The form given to the act was telling. Eight days earlier, on 11 February, the Sixth Congress of Soviets of Abkhazia had been induced to request its own incorporation, so that the demotion could be presented as the will of the Abkhaz themselves. The historian Aslan Avidzba observes that the issue was not even on the agenda of the Abkhaz congress, and that the request was formulated under dictation from Tbilisi.
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Further reading
+ The Stalin-Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1936-1953, by Stephen D. Shenfield
+ Documents from the KGB archive in Sukhum. Abkhazia in the Stalin years, by Rachel Clogg
+ Appendix to Documents from the KGB archive in Sukhum. Abkhazia in the Stalin years, Translation by B. G. Hewitt
+ The Distortion of Abkhaz Surnames
+ Contrary to the will of the people: how the S[oviet] S[ocialist] R[republic] of Abkhazia became an autonomy within Georgia
+ The 1988 'Abkhaz Letter': A Turning Point in the Quest for Independence