What the Georgian Press Argued About Abkhazia, 1869 to 1897

For three decades the leading newspapers of Tiflis debated who should occupy a country whose people had been deported. Their writers used the word colonisation. In 1869 the imperial authorities had tried to stop it.

They write to us from Sukhum

In the summer of 1884 a correspondent sent Droeba an account of the year's work on the state lands of Abkhazia. Germans, Greeks and Mingrelians had been settled there. Many of the Germans died of the Sukhum fever and many of the survivors went home, but those who stayed cut the forest back so hard that in a single season they had ploughland where nothing had stood but trees. In the clearing something came out of the ground. 'Ancient churches and burial places have come to light, thickly covered with inscriptions', the letter says, and it asks that somebody take an interest in them, because the new settlers 'are pulling them down and levelling them without mercy'.

Whose graves they were, the correspondent does not say. In 1884, near Sukhum, he did not have to.

How the country came to be empty

Two wars did it, thirteen years apart.

The Russo-Caucasian War ended in 1864, and with its end went the Sadz, the Akhchipsy, the Aibga and the Pskhu, some 25,000 people from the mountain districts, forced out to the Ottoman empire. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878 finished the work. Adgur Agrba puts the whole of the deportation, across both wars and the risings between them, at roughly 135,000 people, which was most of the nation.

Sergei Meskhi, who edited Droeba from 1869 to 1881, printed contemporaneous figures. Writing in 1878 he recorded that more than 200,000 Circassians had gone to Turkey in 1864 to 1866, and that 50,000 Abkhazians had left that year, 'according to official figures'.

Droeba had explained two years before the second war how the first one ended. A lecture on the Caucasus printed across two April issues in 1876 described a people of no more than a million holding off armies many times their size for thirty-five years, and losing because they would not combine. The Abkhazians and Circassians 'would ordinarily fight the Russian army village by village', and, having fought that way, 'surrendered village by village as well'. The sequel came in one flat sentence: the Russians 'soon became convinced that their Russification was impossible'. Withdrawal followed, and the settling of people from Russia's interior provinces in their place.

Petre Charaia, writing an ethnographic description for Iveria in 1888, reckoned that fewer than half of those who went to the Ottoman empire had returned, and that the nation no longer amounted 'to even a quarter of what it once was'. Konstantin Machavariani put the whole Abkhaz population at 52,000 in 1895, with Gumista almost entirely deserted. Iveria had been blunter in 1881, in a line that reaches us at second hand through Nazim Bagapsh: four years earlier, the paper observed, Abkhazians had lived in Abkhazia.

Returned to the chiefs of their own uezds

On 30 May 1869, Count Levashov, military governor of Kutaisi, wrote to the chiefs of the Zugdidi, Senaki and Lechkhumi uezds. Droeba printed the letter that year in its 'Internal News' column, in number 29. Mingrelians had been moving into the Ochamchira district holding certificates for resettlement in Abkhazia. There were, Levashov wrote, 'few unoccupied places left in Abkhazia', and those which remained 'will be needed by the local landless inhabitants'. He had instructed the district chiefs 'to return such settlers and hand them back to the chiefs of their own uezds'. The Sukhum military administrator asked, in addition, that permission to resettle in Abkhazia not be granted to Mingrelians at all.

The date is the whole value of the document. 1869 falls five years after the first emptying and eight before the second. The men writing are Russian officials; the people turned back are Mingrelian peasants with papers. The reason given is not political. It is that the land is spoken for, by inhabitants of Abkhazia who have none of it. Nothing in the letter suggests a movement that was old, or customary, or a matter of families going back to ground they had always worked.

There is an awkwardness here for anyone who wants a simple story, and it is better stated than managed. The empire that emptied Abkhazia also, at moments, obstructed the settlement of Georgians in it. The persecutor was for a time the shield.

Sorting people by soil

The argument for filling the country ran in public for close to thirty years, and its most careful statement appeared while the deportations were under way.

Between September and November 1877, across eight issues of the Russian-language Tiflis paper Tiflisskiy Vestnik, the educationalist Iakob Gogebashvili published a series titled 'Who should be settled in Abkhazia?'. He began by removing any possibility that the question might not arise. The war had emptied one of the finest corners of the empire, and the departure was 'not temporary, but irrevocable'. 'Abkhazia will never see their sons again.'

What follows is a sorting exercise in the manner of a man matching crops to ground. Russia proper could not supply suitable colonisers, nor could most of Transcaucasia. Eastern Georgians from beyond the Suram Pass 'very quickly become victims of swamp poison'; Armenians could bear the coast even less; the Rachans, Svans and Upper Imeretians had been tried and had died of malignant fevers. One people was left. 'But the Mingrelians feel at home in Abkhazia.'

His reasons came in order: a constitution adapted to marsh air, a shortage of land at home severe enough to have produced agrarian unrest, a talent for productive labour, an aptitude for trade unusual among the Georgian tribes, and political reliability. On the last he was emphatic. In political terms the Mingrelians are 'just as Russian as the Muscovites'. Settled along the coast they would also 'present an insurmountable barrier to enemy invasion'. His conclusion was that the Mingrelians 'should be the primary replacements of the evicted Abkhazians'.

He called the operation colonisation and the settlers colonisers, in a newspaper, in Russian, in the months when the people to be replaced were being put on ships.

Georgii Tsereteli had got there before him and stayed with it longer. In Droeba in 1873, in the column headed shik'rik'i, he observed that the soil on the Black Sea fringes yielded ten times what Upper Imereti and Racha yielded, and that his own people were doing nothing about it. Would it not be better to prepare at once, he asked, 'before others seize the coastal territories and while land is still plentiful'? To a man who said he could not leave his own region he gave the answer that has been quoted ever since: 'The entire Caucasus is our territory, our country.'

Six years later he set out the distribution. The lowland coast, from the port of Sochi through Abkhazia's coastal zone to Batum and Kobuleti, suited Imeretians and Mingrelians, used to the sea, to trade and to fever-bearing air. The mountain slopes would take Rachans, Lechkhumians and Svans. The landless of Lechkhumi, Racha, Ossetia and Svaneti, he noted, came down to the valley towns every year 'with a knapsack slung over their backs'. Then the summons: 'it's time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus where air and soil that suits us is indeed to be found', and 'Let's spread out while we still have time, before foreign tribes arrive and take up settlement in our vacant Caucasian lands.'

Later that year, in number 47, he explained how it would be paid for. Men with money should form 'a large stock-company', buy up the empty lands, and settle on them 'our lower-order people'. He gave the scheme fifty years. At the end of them the country from Anakopia, now New Athos, to the mouth of the Kura would have come back to life, speaking Georgian and Armenian, with the days of David the Builder and Tamar the Glorious living again.

Meskhi worked the same ground from the practical end. In July 1876 he reviewed Russian settlement on the coast and found it a failure: newcomers went home within a year or two, and much of the land had gone to 'men of merit', to generals who 'never even set eyes on their plots'. Then the detail that gives his article its edge. Mikhail Katkov, who preached in his own newspaper that Russians must put down deep roots in the Caucasus, was at that moment selling the estate the government had granted him near Pitsunda. The coast, he concluded, should be settled by the peoples of the Caucasus, because 'nature itself resists' a people from another land.

Two years later, in number 24 of 1878, he narrowed it. Wheat does not grow on that coast, only maize, and men from flat treeless plains cannot manage a mountainous, forested, humid country. He endorsed articles published shortly before in Tiflisis Moambe which had named the Mingrelians, and added the Imeretians, on grounds he listed without embarrassment. Both can live without wheat, both are used to the climate, both need land, and 'both are entirely reliable politically'.

By 1882 the thing had acquired a tone of celebration. I. Chichinadze, writing in Shroma, called the operation to move Mingrelian families out of the Zugdidi district one of the most beautiful features of the new life. Send more, he wrote in closing: Rachans, Lechkhumians, Upper Imeretians and Mingrelians from the mountain districts, 'and you will see that these countries will be covered more blooming villages, fruits of the land, and cattle than in the days of the Circassians and Abkhazians'.

The comparison is with the people who had been there before, and it is offered in favour of the proposal.

In 1894 Iveria put the case in the government's own terms: if the coast must be settled, why not by inhabitants of Georgia, people in whose 'abilities and loyalty' the state could have no doubt? A plot in Imereti or Racha could reach 300 tumans.

What the same newspapers also printed

The case against was made in the same papers, sometimes by the same men, and not quietly.

In 1878 Meskhi published 'Abkhazians and Abkhazia' in Droeba. The editor who that year endorsed settling Mingrelians and Imeretians on the coast also printed an account of how the coast had been cleared. Most of the Abkhazians put aboard the ships wept and stretched their hands towards the shore, and sent word back that they were being taken by force and should be reckoned 'as prisoners of the enemy, but not as traitors'. Meskhi accepted it. A few had been set on freeing Abkhazia; the great majority had no other means of defending their families. From this he drew a conclusion no Georgian paper was obliged to draw: every Abkhazian who wished to return should be allowed back, as justice and practical interest demanded as much as humanity, since such peoples are better held as friends than as enemies.

Five years later Droeba printed a concession from Abkhazia itself. Its correspondent, writing from the country on 10 October 1883, opened with the sentence that has been quoted against Georgian claims ever since: 'Abkhazia, as the name of the place itself shews us, belonged and belongs to the Abkhazians.'

He then described what had come in. Simon the Canaanite had been put to death here, he wrote, and Russian monks had lately been given leave to rebuild the ruined church on the spot, with a holding of over 4,000 desiatins and 150 monks now in residence; their missionary effort came to nothing. Every man who heard that land was being given away had come, so that within five or six years Greeks, Russians, Bulgarians, Germans, Mingrelians, Imeretians and Armenians had flooded in, and 'the authorities refused none'. Most then fell to the fevers and either fled or died within two or three years. Hence his summary of the country: 'Abkhazia for Caucasians is a compassionate mother, but for others it is a step-mother and an exceptionally evil step-mother too'. Hence also his recommendation, which was to admit nobody in future except Imeretians, Mingrelians and Greeks.

The sentence about whom Abkhazia belongs to and the advice about whom to let into it sit in the same letter, a few paragraphs apart.

Charaia's ethnography of 1888 was written by a man watching a way of life go. Emigration had scattered the people, the clergy were at work among those who remained, and what he called 'so-called civilisation' was finishing the business, so that in Abkhazia little would be seen tomorrow of what had been seen before. His Abkhazian is lean and dark, quick-tempered, jealous of his honour, with a look in the eye he calls a little wild and mournful. No country in the world is better than Apsny in an Abkhazian's understanding, he recorded, and 'God preserve Apsny' was on their lips in joy and sorrow alike. Then he took the name apart. Apsua means Abkhazian and an means mother, and the two contracted give the mother, or the homeland, of the Abkhazian.

The fullest of these counter-statements came in 1895, in Moambe, and it is not an editorial but a conversation. Konstantin Machavariani, writing as Abu-kino, met a friend of his youth at Ochamchira on the bank of the Galidzga and asked what had happened. What Murzakan Kodor-ipa told him fills four pages.

Samurzakano, Kodor-ipa said, is held by some to belong to Mingrelia because its people speak Mingrelian, and they are mistaken, and the surnames settle it: Emukhvari, Shervashidze, Marganiya, Chkhotua, Anchabadze, Kvablukho, Gedlach and the rest. The Abkhazians then numbered 52,000. Gumista was empty.

Then the military account. On 18 April the twenty-two Cossacks at Gudauta, the only harbour between the Bzyb and Sukhum, were recalled, leaving the district without a single soldier. Sukhum held two battalions, a Cossack regiment, militia and mountain artillery, no fewer than 4,000 men. Kravchenko withdrew them eight or nine versts to the Machara, then another thirty-five to Tsebelda, before an enemy had appeared. On 28 April two armoured vessels came up to Gudauta, and the whole of Upper Abkhazia gathered there without leaders and without weapons, having been disarmed years earlier.

'What were they expected to do?' Kodor-ipa asked. 'How were they supposed to fight an enemy? With their bare hands? With their teeth?'

Before the war, he added, Reshid Gech, a prince of the Jikhs from beyond the Bzyb, had come to Sukhum to tell Kravchenko that the Sultan was preparing for war, that the first blows would fall on the coast, and that the Abkhazians must have either their weapons back or troops to defend them. Kravchenko sent him away.

Afterwards the country was divided into the guilty and the innocent. Those between the Bzyb and the Galidzga were the guilty: they kept the use of their plots for life and lost the right to inherit, sublet or sell them. Those between the Galidzga and the Ingur were the innocent and kept their hereditary rights. And people were arriving all the time, Kodor-ipa said, who worked to mislead the natives into leaving for good, so that the newcomers or the officials could take their places.

One more concession belongs here, and it is Gogebashvili's. In 1907 the man who had proposed the settlement in 1877 wrote in protest at the distorting and altering of Abkhaz surnames.

Seven or eight villages

What actually arrived can be established, because the correspondents counted it.

Writing from Abkhazia on 13 November 1883, the Droeba correspondent reported the ruling that governed everything else. After the war, Abkhazians were not to settle between the Kodor and the Psyrtskha, and everyone else was granted the right to do so. By that November there were seven or eight Mingrelian villages and three or four Greek villages around Sukhum. At Merkheuli, fourteen versts out along the main highway, a church was being consecrated; at Abzhakva, close to the town, the Mingrelians were building one of stone and lime at their own expense. Other settlers, he had heard, were given up to fifteen chervonets to start their farms.

Fourteen years later Petre Charaia set out the land settlement in Kvali. His account of the prohibition differs from Droeba's in one particular: he gives the closed zone as the country between the Kodor and the Aabsta, and states its purpose plainly: to settle near Sukhum people the state thought more reliable. The Abkhaz consequently no longer lived as one body. The Abzhui were in the Kodor section, the Bzyb people in the Gudauta section, nearly two days apart on foot. Between them lay Gumista, the central and most favourable part of the old country, with not one Abkhaz community in it. On its state land sat colonies of Russians, Germans, Mingrelians, Greeks, Estonians and Armenians, among whom the Mingrelians stood first or second in number. The private estates had gone to men who had distinguished themselves in military or civil service.

In the following issue Charaia added a line about Dal, once thickly settled by Abkhazians and known since ancient times for the bravery of its people, and now so thoroughly depopulated that nobody lived there at all.

The clearest number of the lot was printed in Iveria in 1897 by Iliko Vermitsanashvili, who counted his township. In Gudauta there lived fifty Georgians, one an Imeretian, two Gurians and the rest Mingrelians; thirteen Greeks; eleven Russians; two Armenians; and five Abkhazians. The surrounding district, ninety versts long, held twelve Abkhazian communities, three Russian and one Armenian.

Ten years earlier the same paper had noted which settlers were doing best. Those from Racha, Imereti and Mingrelia had taken hold and the others could not endure the air, for the reason Gogebashvili gave in 1877 and Meskhi in 1878: the conditions of Abkhazia resemble those of Imereti and Mingrelia.

The idea acquires a state

None of what the correspondents were counting was a state programme. Much of the movement of the 1880s and 1890s was people looking for land, and the families who built the church at Abzhakva were agents of nothing. That distinction carries the weight of everything that follows.

It was collapsed by Gogebashvili's own editors. When the 1877 articles were gathered into volume one of his collected works, published in Tbilisi in 1952, the editors noted, as George Hewitt records, that Gogebashvili's ideas on settling Abkhazia's empty territory with Georgians 'achieved their actual realisation under the conditions of Soviet power'. They also felt obliged to gloss one of his words. Their footnote explains that Gogebashvili used 'coloniser' not in its modern sense but to mean the persons settled there.

The realisation they had in mind can be dated. In 1918 the leader of the Georgian Mensheviks, Noe Zhordania, stated the object without ornament: the tsarist government had not had time to Russify the Abkhazians, and Georgians, as a related tribe, must Georgianise them through their own culture. Menshevik forces entered Abkhazia that year. In 1919 Nikolai Vorobyov published a pamphlet at Rostov-on-Don charging that a Georgia preaching self-determination for small nations was making every effort to absorb the Abkhazian nation entire.

+ Three Extracts from the Georgian Newspapers Droeba and Iveria

+ Revelations of forgotten voices

+ Georgii Tsereteli (1879): It’s time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus

+ Part 1: The Nineteenth-Century Georgian Press on Abkhazia

+ Part 2: The Nineteenth-Century Georgian Press on Abkhazia and the Abkhazians

+ Part 3: The Nineteenth-Century Georgian Press on Abkhazia and the Abkhazians

The programme proper began in 1937, the year after Nestor Lakoba's death in Tbilisi, under a trust called Abkhazpereselenstroi. Between the end of 1937 and 1 January 1940 it built 990 houses along the coast for 609 peasant families brought in from districts of Georgia. The new farms carried the names of the men who made them: a Beria farm at Kindgi, a Bakradze farm at Adzyubzha, an Ordzhonikidze farm at Bambora. When the vacant land ran out, more was taken from Abkhaz villages. By order number 9821 of 10 October 1941 the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR authorised the seizure of 4,544.69 hectares from twelve collective farms in the Ochamchira and Gudauta districts. Krasny Kindgi gave up 1,566.8 hectares of it.

The same paperwork records the failure. By 1 March 1942, 152 settler households had gone home, leaving a debt of 97,920 roubles and 46 tonnes of corn. Narsiya, who ran resettlement for the Georgian agriculture ministry, reported that the rules for selecting settlers were grossly violated and voluntariness often disregarded. Between 1937 and 1953 the state lent 191 million roubles for settler housing, and Abkhazpereselenstroi alone built 3,378 houses.

Two documents from the middle of it describe the ground being taken. A Gosplan report of 1940 has peasants from land-poor districts of Georgia taking possession of expanses 'abandoned for centuries'. Konstantin Chichinadze, chairman of Abkhazia's Council of People's Commissars, told a jubilee session on 3 March 1941 that fertile lands 'had lain uncultivated for centuries'. That ground had been cleared sixty-three years earlier, and there were men in Abkhazia in 1941 who had been children when it was.

Alongside the settlement ran the removal of what was being settled over. The Abkhaz alphabet was shifted to a Georgian base at the end of the 1930s. The Abkhaz-language schools closed in 1945 and 1946 and their pupils were sent to schools teaching in Georgian. Publishing and broadcasting in Abkhaz stopped, and Abkhaz place names came off the map. Pavle Ingorokva then supplied a history to match, arguing that the modern Abkhazians had come down from the north Caucasus in the seventeenth century and taken a Georgian tribe's name.

In 1955 a new edition of Gogebashvili's collected works appeared. The 1877 articles were not in it.

Sources

1. 'Internal News', Droeba [დროება] (Tiflis), no. 29, 1869, containing the letter of Count Levashov, military governor of Kutaisi, of 30 May 1869. 
2. Georgii Tsereteli, shik'rik'i (Courier), Droeba (Tiflis), no. 399, 1873, p. 3. 
3. 'A Lecture on the Caucasus', Droeba (Tiflis), nos 36 and 37, 14 and 16 April 1876. 
4. Sergei Meskhi, 'The Settlement of the Black Sea Shores', Droeba (Tiflis), no. 74, 18 July 1876. 
5. Iakob (Jakob) Gogebashvili, 'Who should be settled in Abkhazia?' [vin unda iknes dasaxlebuli apxazetshi?], Tiflisskiy Vestnik [Тифлисский вестник], nos 209, 210, 243 to 246, 248 and 249, September to November 1877; collected in Works, vol. 1 (Tbilisi, 1952). 
6. Sergei Meskhi, 'On the Settlement of Abkhazia', Droeba (Tiflis), no. 24, 1878, p. 1. 
7. Sergei Meskhi, 'Abkhazians and Abkhazia', Droeba (Tiflis), no. 158, 1878. 
8. Georgii Tsereteli, 'Resettlement', Droeba (Tiflis), no. 27, 1879, p. 1 (dated 4 February 1879 in AbkhazWorld's 'Demographic change in Abkhazia'). 
9. Georgii Tsereteli, Droeba (Tiflis), no. 47, 1879, pp. 1 to 2. 
10. I. Chichinadze, Shroma [შრომა] (Tiflis), no. 15, 1882. 
11. Antimoz Jugheli (Gadagmeli), correspondence 'Abkhazia, 10 October', Droeba (Tiflis), no. 216, 29 October 1883.
12. Antimoz Jugheli (Gadagmeli), correspondence 'Abkhazia, 13 November', Droeba (Tiflis), no. 240, 29 November 1883. 
13. Correspondence from Sukhum, 'This year they have settled people in Abkhazia', Droeba (Tiflis), no. 219, 1884. 
14. Iveria [ივერია] (Tiflis), no. 114, 9 June 1887, p. 2. 
15. Petre Charaia, 'Abkhazians and Abkhazia (an ethnographic description)', Iveria (Tiflis), nos 165 and 167, 1888. 
16. Iveria (Tiflis), no. 120, 1894, pp. 1 to 2. 
17. Konstantin Machavariani (Abu-kino), 'From My Diary', Moambe, no. 9, 1895, pp. 61 to 64. 
18. Petre Charaia, 'Landownership in Abkhazia', Kvali, no. 12, 1897, p. 252, and no. 13, 1897, p. 268.
19. Iliko Vermitsanashvili, 'The Township of Gudauta (Abkhazia)', Iveria (Tiflis), no. 188, 1897. 
20. Iveria (Tiflis), no. 11, 1881, p. 95, cited in Nazim V. Bagapsh, Ethno-demographic Development of Abkhazia: Territorial Aspect (Moscow, 2010), p. 55, quoted in Agrba below.
21. Noe Zhordania, statement of 1918, and Nikolai Vorobyov, On the Groundless Claim of the Georgians to the Sukhum District (Abkhazia) (Rostov-on-Don, 1919), both quoted in 'Revelations of forgotten voices'. 
22. Gosplan (Abkhazia) report to the government, 1940, and Konstantin Chichinadze, '20 Years of the Abkhaz ASSR', report to the Abkhaz ASSR Supreme Soviet, 3 March 1941, in Абхазия: документы свидетельствуют. 1937-1953 (Sukhum: Alashara, 1992). 
23. 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 to 96. 
24. George Hewitt, 'Abkhazia, Georgia, and the Crisis of August 2008: Roots and Lessons', Global Dialogue, vol. 11, 2009, for the remark of the 1952 editors, their gloss on 'coloniser', and the omission of the 1877 articles from the 1955 edition. 
25. 'The Samurzakanians: An Abkhaz Borderland Between the Ghalidzga and the Ingur', AbkhazWorld, for Gogebashvili's 1907 protest at the alteration of Abkhaz surnames.