Who Should Be Settled in Abkhazia

A Georgian educationalist asked the question in a Tiflis newspaper in 1877 and answered it without embarrassment. The word he reached for was colonisers.

In 1896 the mountaineer Douglas Freshfield walked through a country that had lost its people. He found an Earthly Paradise gone to seed, its ancient inhabitants “exiled for a quarter of a century,” their dwellings and their tombs lost in vegetation that, as he put it, “feeds nothing but bears and mosquitoes and fevers.” He borrowed his epitaph from Gifford Palgrave, the British vice-consul at Sukhum, who in 1876 had been almost a witness to the Abkhazians’ last struggle. Palgrave wrote of a people who left behind “no records,” who “know that they are Abkhasians and nothing more,” now, in Freshfield’s words, “dispersed or destroyed.” That was the condition of Abkhazia at the close of the nineteenth century. A land famous for its fertility, largely empty of the people whose name it carried.

“What is to be the future of this Earthly Paradise? Its ancient and primaeval inhabitants are gone. They have been exiled for a quarter of a century; their dwellings and their tombs are alike lost in the glorious vegetation that feeds nothing but bears and mosquitoes and fevers. A people that had lived the same life in the same place since the beginning of history has been dispersed or destroyed…”

— The solitude of Abkhazia, by Douglas W. Freshfield (1896)

The emptying had two dates. The Russo-Caucasian War ended in 1864, and in its wake some twenty-five thousand Abkhazians, mostly from the mountain districts, were forced out to the Ottoman empire. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 finished the work. By the time it was over the country had been all but vacated. The figures trace the curve plainly. In 1886 the Abkhaz still made up 85.7 per cent of the population of Abkhazia. By 1897 they were down to 55.3 per cent. Within a single generation a people had fallen from the overwhelming majority in their homeland to a bare half, and the line kept dropping.

Even the Georgian press said as much. In October 1883 the Tiflis newspaper Droeba, no friend of Abkhaz claims, conceded the point in a single sentence: “Abkhazia, as the name of the place itself shews us, belonged and belongs to the Abkhazians.” The same correspondent called the country “a compassionate mother” to Caucasians and “an exceptionally evil step-mother” to everyone else, by which he meant that the newcomers who could survive its fevers were a particular few. The land was open. The only question was who would fill it.

A Georgian educationalist had already answered. In 1877, in the pages of Tiflisskiy Vestnik, Iakob Gogebashvili published an article under a title that needs no gloss: “Who should be settled in Abkhazia?” He wrote in the calm register of a man sorting crops by soil. The Abkhazians, he noted, had gone and would not return: “This resettlement, without any doubt, is not temporary, but irrevocable. Abkhazia will never see their sons again.” The climate was murderous to outsiders, so the task was to find a people whose constitution could bear it. He worked through the candidates like a list of seed varieties. Russians would die of the swamp fevers. So would eastern Georgians, Armenians, Svans, Rachans and Upper Imeretians. Only the Mingrelians, neighbours long used to the marshy air, “feel at home in Abkhazia.” They were industrious, able at trade, and, he was careful to add, politically reliable, “just as Russian as the Muscovites.” His conclusion was a single recommendation, offered as a matter of national interest. The Mingrelians, he wrote, should be “the primary replacements of the evicted Abkhazians,” and theirs would be “the successful colonisation of Abkhazia.”

He used the word without flinching. Colonisation. Colonisers. The argument was not whispered in a ministry. It ran across eight issues of a newspaper, reasoned and fluent and humane in manner, and that is exactly what makes it cold. Gogebashvili was not calling for anyone’s death. He was discussing, in good conscience, which tribe would best occupy ground that other men’s deaths had already cleared.

He was not alone, and not the most expansive of the advocates. The writer Georgii Tsereteli, in Droeba through the 1870s, turned the settlement of Abkhazia into something nearer a national summons. “Is not the Caucasus our region?” he asked in 1873. “The whole Caucasus is our land, our country.” In 1879 he put the edge on it: “It is time, high time that we move this way and that across our very own country; it’s time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus where air and soil that suits us is indeed to be found.” Move now, he urged, “before foreign tribes arrive and take up settlement in our vacant Caucasian lands.” The lowland coast suited Imeretians and Mingrelians; the mountain slopes would take Rachans, Lechkhumians and Svans. He even sketched the financing. Let “men with money” form “a large stock-company” to buy up the empty lands and settle there “our lower-order people,” so that within fifty years the country from New Athos to the mouth of the Kura would be remade, and “it will be the Georgian-Armenian language(s) that we hear,” the age of David the Builder and Tamar living again.

The practical reports kept pace with the manifestos. Iveria in 1887 observed that the Rachans, Imeretians and Mingrelians had taken to Abkhazia where others could not. In the paper Shroma in 1882 the publicist I. Chichinadze, describing the relocation of Mingrelian families out of Zugdidi, called it one of the “most beautiful” things in the new life, and closed with a flourish: “Send here more Rachans, Lechkhumians, Upper Imeretians, and Megrelians from mountain sites, and you will see that these countries will be covered [with] more blooming villages, fruits of the land, and cattle than in the days of the Circassians and Abkhazians.” The replacement was the point, stated as a hope.

None of this was secret. It was a public idea, advanced by leading Georgian intellectuals, in the leading Georgian newspapers, over two decades.

When the Russian Empire fell, the idea acquired a state to carry it. The leader of the Georgian Mensheviks, Noe Zhordania, set out the aim without ornament: “The Russian tsarist government did not have the time to russify the Abkhazians, but we, as a related tribe, must georgianise the Abkhazians through our own culture.” In 1918 Menshevik forces entered Abkhazia by force. A Russian observer, N. Vorobyov, writing in 1919, watched a “free and young Georgia” that, “while preaching the rights of small nations to self-determination,” was making “every effort” to take in “the whole country” and “absorb in its entirety the Abkhazian nation, which is not at all related to the Georgian people,” all under “the highest, most esteemed slogans of justice and self-determination.”

The Soviet years gave the programme its scale. Abkhazia had begun the period with reason for hope. In 1921 it was constituted as a Soviet republic, and for a decade it kept a substantial autonomy under its first leader, Nestor Lakoba, who used the special standing of his small country to slow collectivisation and shield it from the worst. In 1931 that standing was cut down. Abkhazia was made an autonomous republic inside Georgia. The protection held a few more years, on Lakoba’s personal credit. Then, in December 1936, Lakoba went to Tbilisi.

“Abkhazia is just about the only republic whose political status was downgraded rather than upgraded by Stalin.”

―Vladislav Ardzinba

What happened there has never been formally established, and the honest account says so. The cause of his death was never settled, and his body was returned to Sukhum with its internal organs removed, which made the question harder to answer. What survives is oral testimony, most vividly from the writer Fazil Iskander. By his account Lakoba and Beria quarrelled at the Georgian Central Committee. Beria, the [late] historian Stanislav Lakoba notes, had put to Lakoba a plan to resettle peasants from Western Georgia in Abkhazia, and Lakoba had refused it. That evening Beria’s household coaxed him to dinner, and Beria handed him, in Iskander’s telling, “a glass of poisoned wine.” At the theatre afterwards Lakoba felt ill, went out to the street, and told his chauffeur in Abkhaz: “They’ve killed me.” He said it more than once. He reached his hotel, lay down and died. Within the hour Beria arrived at the hotel.

The aftermath is better documented and worse. Lakoba was buried with honours, then declared an enemy of the people. His widow was tortured to make her accuse him. She refused, lost her mind under it, and died in jail. His son was arrested, and later shot. What began as one man’s death on a Tbilisi street opened into a purge that fell hardest on ethnic Abkhaz. By 1952 more than four-fifths of the top party, government and managerial posts in Abkhazia were held by Georgians, with thirty-four Abkhaz left among the two hundred and twenty-eight.

With Lakoba gone, the resettlement Lakoba had refused went ahead. In 1937 a dedicated body was set up, Abkhazpereselenstroi, or Abkhazia Resettlement Construction, under the agriculture commissariat of the Georgian republic. It built compact Georgian settlements, on vacant ground where there was any and on land taken from Abkhaz villages where there was not. The state was proud of the work, and recorded its pride. A Gosplan report of 1940 opened in the approved style: “On the initiative of Comrade L. P. Beria, beloved son of the Georgian people, thousands of peasant farmers are being resettled from districts in Georgia where land is in short supply to Abkhazia, and are taking possession of vast expanses of land that has been abandoned for centuries.” Eleven new collective farms, sixteen hundred and fifty households, with a target of more than five thousand by the end of 1944. The chairman of Abkhazia’s Council of People’s Commissars, K. Chichinadze, told a jubilee session in March 1941 that the development since 1937 of “fertile lands in Abkhazia that had lain uncultivated for centuries” should be counted among the major achievements of Soviet power there.

The film-clip (from a 30-minute documentary on Abkhazia shot in 1941) talks of settlements having been created in the Gagra, Gudauta and Ochamchira districts and shows incomers travelling on carts, the building of their homes, and one family actually moving in.

+ Demographic change in Abkhazia 1886–1989

+ Ethno-demographic history of Abkhazia, 1886 - 1989, by Daniel Müller

+ The ethno-demographic aspect of the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, by Teymuraz A. Achugba

Read the phrase again. Abandoned for centuries. Uncultivated for centuries. The land in question had been emptied of its inhabitants within living memory, inside the lifetime of men then drawing pensions. The documents reach for centuries because decades would invite the obvious question. This is the small machinery of euphemism, worth naming once. A country cleared of its people in the 1870s, described in the 1940s as virgin ground, so that filling it could be called development rather than replacement.

The replacement was meticulous and expensive. By the start of 1940 seven resettlement kolkhozes had gone up along the coast, nine hundred and ninety houses for six hundred and nine families. The new settlements carried the names of the men who made them, a Beria kolkhoz at Kindgi, a Bakradze kolkhoz at Adzyubzha, an Ordzhonikidze kolkhoz at Bambora. Land was taken from working Abkhaz farms to stock them. In October 1941, with the German army deep in Soviet territory, Moscow approved the seizure of 4,544 hectares from twelve Abkhaz collective farms in the Ochamchira and Gudauta districts, to be handed to the resettlement farms “for permanent use.” One Abkhaz collective at Kindgi lost more than fifteen hundred hectares at a stroke. Between 1937 and 1953 the state lent 191 million roubles to build settler houses, and Abkhazpereselenstroi alone put up more than three thousand of them.

Whether the settlers came willingly is a question the documents answer against their own authors. The principle of voluntariness, the head of the Georgian resettlement administration admitted, was often disregarded, and the rules for choosing settlers grossly violated. That admission appeared in a Georgian journal, not an Abkhaz one. Many of the resettled did not stay. By March 1942 a hundred and fifty-two households had simply gone home, leaving behind a debt to the state of 97,920 roubles and forty-six tonnes of corn, counted to the rouble and the tonne in the ledger that recorded their flight. People had been moved onto land that was not theirs, and a good number wanted no part of it.

Alongside the settling ran an erasure. In 1939 the Abkhaz alphabet, Latin-based since 1926, was switched to a script adapted from Georgian. In 1945 and 1946 the Abkhaz-language schools were closed, and Abkhaz children were sent instead to schools that taught in Georgian, a language most of them did not speak. They were beaten for using their own. That detail left a particular mark on the generation that lived it. Publishing and broadcasting in Abkhaz stopped. Between 1947 and 1951 a long list of old Abkhaz place names was wiped from the map and replaced with Georgian ones. People recorded as Abkhaz were re-entered as Georgians in the registers, on paper if not in fact, the practice heaviest in the southern district of Gal. Even the history was rewritten. A Georgian writer, Pavle Ingorokva, argued that the Abkhaz were not the country’s natives at all but seventeenth-century arrivals who had taken another people’s name, and his thesis was printed in the Georgian literary press and praised by Georgian academicians as a valuable work of scholarship.

Some refused to be quiet about it. In February 1947 three Abkhaz scholars, Georgij Dzidzaria, Konstantin Shakryl and Bagrat Shinkuba, wrote to the Central Committee in Moscow to set down what was being done in Abkhazia: the closed schools, the resettlement, the renaming. They wrote knowing the letter would most likely pass through Stalin’s hands to Beria’s, and that they would pay for it. They did. They were charged with misinforming the Party and defaming the Abkhazian organisation, and they carried the labels “bourgeois nationalists” and “fascist elements” until 1953. They sent it anyway, because they could see no other way to get the truth out.

The settling of Abkhazia was not done only at Abkhaz expense, and it is worth saying so. In June 1949 the Greek and Turkish populations were deported wholesale to Kazakhstan and Central Asia, more than thirty thousand Greeks among them, and Georgians were moved into the emptied villages. Russians and Ukrainians were pushed out too. Whole settlements such as Pologi and Chernigovskoye ceased to exist. Where deportation cleared the ground, resettlement followed. There is evidence that the planners weighed deporting the Abkhaz as well, between 1949 and 1951, and it is not clear why they did not. One reading, which the documented record supports, is that officials grown confident in assimilation judged deportation unnecessary. Among Abkhaz who lived through it the memory is more concrete. Oleg Damenia, who as a schoolboy played in empty boxcars left standing on sidings near Ochamchira, recalls being told the wagons were waiting to load the Abkhaz, and that they stood there until Stalin died. That recollection cannot be set on the footing of a state order, and it should not be. It is offered for what it is, the testimony of a man who was there.

Whose policy was it? The honest answer holds two things at once. The drive to assimilate national minorities came from the centre, from Moscow, and Georgianisation in Abkhazia was one local application of a Union-wide design that pressed in turn on Ukrainians, Tajiks, Karakalpaks and others. Primary responsibility lay there. And yet the Georgian leadership were not reluctant instruments. They went past their orders. Moscow’s directives ended teaching in minority languages but did not forbid teaching those languages as subjects. The Georgian authorities suppressed the teaching of Abkhaz as a subject too, closing a door the Kremlin had left open. Both halves are true, and keeping them together is what makes the charge hard to answer. This was not a Georgian conspiracy against a single people. It was a Soviet policy that the Georgian leadership carried out with more appetite than it required.

Stalin died in March 1953 and Beria was arrested in July. The reversal began at once. Abkhaz schools were reopened, the alphabet was shifted again, this time to a Cyrillic base, and the renamings started to be questioned. At the end of 1953 Andrej Chochua, the chairman of the republic’s supreme council, wrote to his Georgian counterpart that the mass renaming of settlements between 1948 and 1951 had been carried out without proper study of local conditions, and had produced “gross distortions” and justified resentment among the population. The wagons on the sidings disappeared.

The result can be read in the figures the planners themselves left behind. The Abkhaz, a clear majority of their homeland within living memory, were a quarter of its population by the census of 1926 and something nearer a sixth by the end of the Stalin years. By the close of the Soviet period they were a minority in the country that carried their name, outnumbered by the people whose settlement Gogebashvili had proposed in 1877 and Beria had organised sixty years later. The bitterness laid down in those years did not stay buried. It surfaced again in the late 1980s, and in the war that followed.

Freshfield, walking the empty paradise in 1896, wondered what its future would be. He could not have guessed the shape of it. The land did not stay empty. It was filled, deliberately and on the record, by men who wrote down what they were doing and why, and who reached, when they needed a word for it, for the word colonisers.

Douglas W. Freshfield, “The Solitude of Abkhazia”, in The Exploration of the Caucasus, Vol. II (London, 1896), pp. 191-220, quoting W. Gifford Palgrave, Eastern Studies (Palgrave then vice-consul at Sukhum Kale, 1876).

Jakob (Iakob) Gogebashvili, “Who should be settled in Abkhazia?”, Tiflisskiy Vestnik [Тифлисский вестник], Nos. 209, 210, 243 to 246, 248, 249, September to November 1877.

Georgii Tsereteli, Droeba [დროება] (Tiflis), No. 399, 1873; No. 27, 1879; and No. 47, 1879, pp. 1-2.

Droeba (Tiflis), No. 216, 29 October 1883.

Iveria [ივერია] (Tiflis), No. 114, 9 June 1887.

I. Chichinadze, Shroma [შრომა] (Tiflis), No. 15, 1882.

Noe Zhordania, statement of 1918, quoted in “Revelations of forgotten voices”, AbkhazWorld.

N. Vorobyov, On the Groundless Claim of the Georgians to the Sukhum District (Abkhazia), Rostov-on-Don, 1919.

Абхазия: документы свидетельствуют. 1937-1953 [Abkhazia: Documents Testify 1937-1953], Sukhum: Alashara, 1992: the Gosplan (Abkhazia) report of 1940 and K. G. Chichinadze, “20 Years of the Abkhaz ASSR”, report to the Abkhaz ASSR Supreme Soviet, 3 March 1941.

Stephen D. Shenfield, “The Stalin-Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1936-1953”, AbkhazWorld, drawing on O. Kh. Bgazhba and S. Z. Lakoba, Istoriia Abkhazii s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei (Moscow, 2007); the Fazil Iskander interview, Russkii Bazar, No. 35(645), 2008; and G. P. Lezhava, Mezhdu Gruziei i Rossiei (Moscow: TsIMO IEA RAN, 1997), pp. 116-61.

Adgur E. Agrba, “On the Demographic Expansion of Abkhazia (1937 to Mid-1950s): Towards Framing the Issue”, Аҧсуаҭҵаара / Abkhaz Studies, No. 11 (2018), pp. 90-96, Abkhaz Institute of Humanitarian Research named after D. I. Gulia, citing Abkhazia: Documents Testify 1937-1953 (Sukhum, 1992) and A. Menteshashvili and A. Surguladze, “Only Facts and Documents”, Literary Georgia, 1989, No. 11.

Badrak Avidzba, “Letter of despair”, Sputnik Abkhazia, 25 February 2017, drawing on O. Bgazhba and S. Lakoba, The History of Abkhazia from Ancient Times to Our Day: the 1947 letter of G. Dzidzaria, K. Shakryl and B. Shinkuba, and Andrej Chochua’s 1953 letter on the renamings.

Arkhip Labakhua and Ivan Tarba, letter to the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, 19 April 1957 (Archive of ABIYALI, f. 5, op. 1, d. 72, ll. 45-51), on Pavle Ingorokva’s Giorgi Merchule (Tbilisi, 1954).

Oleg Damenia, “’The Issue Was Georgianisation’”, interview by Indira Bartsits, ApsnyPress, English translation by AbkhazWorld.