Abkhazia and the Selective Memory of Sovereignty
In May 1945, the security police in Abkhazia were told to recruit informers among teachers and monitor the reactions of schoolchildren. Georgian was about to replace Abkhaz as the language of primary education. The authorities expected objections and had already decided how to deal with them.
A later report listed absent pupils by name and counted the lessons they had missed. Some children had no suitable clothes or shoes. Others refused to study in Georgian and wanted to move to Russian schools. Their absence from the classroom had become a matter for state security. [1]
Those children belong in the history of the Abkhaz conflict. They help explain why a promise of autonomy, reassuring enough on a diplomat’s desk, may inspire rather less confidence among people whose families remember what happened under it.
They also bring us to a question that arguments about Abkhazia too often leave unanswered. If its place within Soviet Georgia is to carry such weight in deciding its future, how much weight should be given to what happened to the Abkhaz within that arrangement?
The administrative status and the experience of living under it cannot honestly be separated. Yet that separation allows an imposed hierarchy to appear natural, while resistance to it requires endless explanation.
Abkhazia’s constitutional history is more complicated than either side’s slogans suggest. Proclaimed a Soviet Socialist Republic in 1921, it entered a special treaty relationship with Soviet Georgia that December. Its position during the following decade was unusual. Descriptions differ, and it would be misleading to equate it without qualification with a union republic as that category existed at the end of the Soviet period. What is clear is that in 1931 Abkhazia was formally reduced to an autonomous republic within the Georgian SSR. [2][3]
The earlier arrangement had practical consequences. It gave the Abkhaz leadership greater scope to approach Moscow and pursue a course that differed from Tbilisi’s. Treating Abkhazia as an ordinary autonomous republic from 1921 obscures that history. Its subordinate position took shape through identifiable political decisions. [2]
Decades later, the Soviet hierarchy acquired a significance its subjects could hardly have anticipated. As the USSR dissolved, the distinction between union republics and the autonomous territories within them became decisive for international recognition. Administrative rank helped determine whose departure would be accepted as independence and whose would be treated as separatism. [4]
That history does not settle the dispute by itself. It does, however, weaken the claim that the inherited arrangement needs no further justification. Time cannot supply the democratic consent that was missing when a decision was made.
For the Abkhaz, the costs of subordination reached into the classroom, the workplace and the language heard on the radio.
On 25 November 1947, three Abkhaz scholars sent a detailed complaint to the central party authorities. Before the schools were reorganised, they explained, children had been taught in Abkhaz until the fifth class and in Russian thereafter. Teachers were now being brought mainly from Georgia, while many Abkhaz teachers had lost their posts. Abkhaz schools in towns had closed, including a longstanding school in Sukhum. [5]
The letter followed the consequences beyond the classroom. Textbooks were lacking. Teacher training was being dismantled. Abkhaz had disappeared from local radio broadcasts, and Abkhaz lettering had been removed from public signs. Institutions that should have sustained the language were steadily losing the means to do so. [5]
The details matter. Some teaching of Abkhaz as a subject survived, although the petition described inadequate provision and its disappearance in particular settings. To say that every form of Abkhaz teaching vanished everywhere would overstate the record. What the documents establish is already devastating: children lost access to education through their own language while the institutions needed to sustain it were weakened around them. [1][5]
The scholars began their complaint by praising Soviet power. They had to appeal to the system’s promises to challenge what its officials were doing. Even within those constraints, they left a contemporary record of the damage.
Read beside the security directives, their letter makes the sequence plain. Officials prepared to suppress opposition to a policy; people living under it recorded what it had cost them. These grievances were on paper long before the geopolitical confrontations through which Abkhazia is now commonly explained.
The violence of the preceding decade had reached much further than the educated elite.
Records of the operation conducted under NKVD Order No. 00447, usually called the kulak operation, identify 554 ethnic Abkhaz victims in the Georgian SSR during 1937 and 1938. Relative to the respective populations, the repression rate was approximately 1 per cent for Abkhaz and 0.63 per cent for Georgians. Death sentences amounted to 0.57 per cent of the Abkhaz population, against 0.30 per cent of the Georgian population. [2]
These figures cover one operation. They are neither a total death toll for Abkhazia nor percentages of prisoners executed. Their value is that they show, within a defined body of records, how disproportionately the operation affected the Abkhaz.
Much of the attack on the upper leadership had already taken place before the mass operation began. The later campaign fell heavily on ordinary people, including peasants. A history concerned only with prominent victims misses how deeply repression entered Abkhaz society. [2]
Responsibility for this cannot be assigned simply by choosing between Moscow and Tbilisi. Soviet central policy encouraged the absorption of smaller peoples into larger national groupings. Republican officials had their own ambitions and room to act, including through punitive powers delegated by Moscow. Historians differ over the balance of responsibility, but the evidence supports both central involvement and active participation by the Georgian authorities. [2][6][7]
Moscow’s role does not excuse officials in Tbilisi. Nor does their role make the Georgian people collectively guilty. Georgians also suffered under Stalinism. Acknowledging their suffering leaves every reason to examine the particular policies directed against the Abkhaz.
The demographic record is especially uncomfortable because the consequences of state policy can outlive the memory of how they were produced.
A security directive dated 30 May 1945 anticipated the settlement of up to 1,500 households from western Georgia during 1945 and 1946. Officers were instructed to watch for opposition. Two years later, the scholars’ petition complained that new settlements were being inserted among areas of compact Abkhaz habitation. These were organised measures, supported by the administration and watched over by the security services. [1][5]
They followed an earlier catastrophe. Under the Russian Empire, expulsions and emigration to Ottoman territory had depleted the Abkhaz population. People from several other communities subsequently settled in the country. Russia’s part in that history must remain visible, however inconvenient it may be to an account built around Russian protection. [2]
A census records the population at a particular moment. It cannot, on its own, explain the expulsions, settlement programmes or pressures to assimilate that helped produce the figures. When those circumstances disappear from the argument, the consequences of coercion can become evidence against the people who endured it.
There is no justice in answering that injustice by denying the rights of later generations. Georgian civilians acquired homes and attachments of their own. Their rights cannot be erased by tracing the policies under which their families arrived. Any serious Abkhaz position must address the suffering of displaced Georgians, alongside the difficult questions of return, property and security. Historical explanation carries no licence for collective punishment.
Nor should the decades after Stalin be compressed into an unchanging story of persecution. Conditions improved. Particularly after the protests of 1978, Abkhaz television developed, the Abkhaz State University was established and Abkhaz representation in official posts increased. Those changes also provoked resentment among local Georgians. The record contains concessions and competing grievances as well as continuing disputes over authority. [8]
For the Abkhaz, however, improvements left a question of trust. A language restored to public life by one leadership might be restricted by another. Cultural provision was valuable, but how secure was it if the power to withdraw it remained elsewhere?
A family that remembered the schools of 1945 had reason to ask that question. Remembering helps explain the fear. It does not make the later war inevitable or excuse everything done in the name of national survival.
The same care is needed when discussing Russia. Recognition in 2008 followed years in which Abkhazia had developed institutions outside Tbilisi’s control. Contemporary arguments for recognition pointed to that earlier history and challenged the assumption that Abkhaz interests were simply Russian interests. [9]
Dependence on a powerful neighbour can constrain a society’s choices without explaining the origin of every choice it makes. Russia can pursue its own interests through support for Abkhazia while Abkhazians pursue aims rooted in their own experience. The security files and petitions are evidence of concerns that existed long before recognition became a question of Russian foreign policy.
This leaves anyone proposing renewed Georgian authority with a substantial task. A promise of autonomy must explain how education, language and public institutions would be protected, who could alter those protections and what remedy would exist if they were broken. Above all, it must take seriously the possibility that the people being asked for their consent may refuse.
Abkhazia’s own authorities face obligations that follow from the same argument. A political claim grounded in protection from arbitrary power must make government answerable to the people who live under it. That means room for criticism, equal treatment and safeguards for every community. The memory of having been denied those protections makes providing them more necessary.
The children whose names appeared in the security report of 1945 had no say in the constitutional arrangement governing their lives. They nevertheless left their mark on its history, in the record of their missed lessons and their objections to the imposed language of instruction.
Their experience belongs beside the administrative documents whenever Abkhazia’s future is discussed. Those who ask Abkhazians to trust renewed Georgian authority must explain how that trust would be earned. Pointing to a Soviet boundary does not answer them. A status imposed in the past cannot stand in for consent in the present.
Sources and further reading
[1] Rachel Clogg, “Documents from the KGB archive in Sukhum. Abkhazia in the Stalin years”, Central Asian Survey, volume 14, number 1, 1995, pages 155 to 189. Especially the security directives and school reports, pages 160 to 166.
[2] Marc Junge and Bernd Bonwetsch, editors, Bolshevik Order in Georgia, volume 1, 2015. “Social Status and Repressions: Abkhazians, Adjarians, Ossetians”, pages 245 to 267.
[3] The Downgraded Republic: The Stalin and Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1921 to 1953. Consulted in the supplied PDF. A synthesis drawing on several of the sources listed here, rather than independent corroboration of them.
[4] George Hewitt, Some Thoughts on “Abkhazia is not Kosovo”.
[5] B. G. Hewitt, translator, “Appendix to Documents from the KGB archive in Sukhum. Abkhazia in the Stalin years”, Central Asian Survey, volume 15, number 2, 1996, pages 259 to 297. Especially the petition of 25 November 1947, pages 260 to 266.
[6] Stephen D. Shenfield, The Stalin and Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1936 to 1953.
[7] Nuri Bagapsh, Stalin’s National Question and Ethnocultural Policy in Abkhazia.
[8] Stephen D. Shenfield, Origins and Evolutions of the Georgian and Abkhaz Conflict.