A Fine Writer, a Formidable Historian, a Principled Politician, by Archimandrite Dorotheos (Dbar)

In memory of Stanislav Lakoba (1953–2025)

On 7 February 2023, I met Stanislav Lakoba at the D. Gulia Abkhaz Institute for Humanities Research, part of the Academy of Sciences of Abkhazia, where we worked together in the History Department. He gave me an inscribed copy of his book From Century to Century, published at the end of 2022. Leafing through it, I realised that I was already familiar with most of the works it contained. After his death, I suddenly felt the urge to read the book in its entirety, and did so. Sadly, as so often happens in life, we only begin to appreciate someone fully once they have departed this world for eternal life, never to return.

Stanislav Lakoba was held in great esteem in our society, as the many people who came to bid him farewell bore witness. He was a fine writer, a formidable historian and a principled politician.

Bibliography and Creative Legacy

The final section of the book contains a complete bibliography of Stanislav Lakoba’s works, apparently compiled by the author himself. I am very glad that he managed to do this during his lifetime. It speaks of his sense of responsibility, a rare quality among creative people today. The bibliography lists 11 monographs, books and pamphlets; 14 publications of source material and documentary collections compiled and published with his involvement; six textbooks and teaching aids; two contributions to encyclopaedias; ten individual addresses and lectures delivered at congresses, conferences, symposia and round tables; 20 polemical publications; and 109 articles, historical sketches, essays and shorter pieces. A total of 172 works.

In his later years, Stanislav Lakoba was also actively involved in publishing the almanac Nestor under the auspices of the N. Lakoba Historical Memorial Museum. It featured historical writing and commentary on Abkhaz subjects, chiefly concerning the 1920s and 1930s. He asked me to contribute an essay on Pyotr Alexandrovich Kulchitsky, a resident of the village of Ankhua.

Pyotr Alexandrovich taught at the Sukhum Art College, where I was among his students. He lectured to us on the history of art.

He was born in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. It was there, in the Soviet period, that he received an excellent education and moved in the city’s intellectual circles. His wife, Lyudmila Pavlovna, was an artist who painted porcelain. His son from his first marriage was killed during the Patriotic War of the People of Abkhazia of 1992–1993 and is buried in the Park of Glory in Gudauta.

I shall certainly fulfil Stanislav Lakoba’s request!

It is deeply regrettable that he did not have time to write his memoirs. I am certain they would have become an exceptionally important source for the study of Abkhazia’s contemporary history. He was not only a professional historian but also a direct participant in, and sometimes a principal architect of, crucial events, from the national liberation movement to the creation of an independent state. His personal recollections would therefore have been of extraordinary value. He did, however, manage to prepare and publish the memoirs of the Abkhaz statesman and public figure Kliment Dzhindzholia, a friend of many years. The book was formally launched after Lakoba’s death.

Collections and Public Addresses

I shall leave the assessment of Stanislav Lakoba’s literary work to those with the professional expertise to do so. Here, I would like to draw attention to a few other things.

During the Covid pandemic, after a very serious bout of the illness, he began placing the materials he had collected over decades in the care of others. He donated his archaeological material to the Abkhaz National Museum and entrusted his ecclesiastical collection to me. These materials are now held in the Ecclesiastical and Archaeological Cabinet of the Holy Metropolis of Abkhazia at the New Athos Monastery. He gave almost his entire book collection to Alexey Dbar, who, through his work on the Abkhaz online library Apsnyteka, scanned the books needed for the website before passing them on to me. All these books are also held in the Cabinet.

Looking through the books from Stanislav Lakoba’s collection, I was struck by their diversity and the care with which they had been chosen. I set aside several dozen volumes, including some magnificent editions of Japanese literature, for a future exhibition at the Holy Metropolis’s Ecclesiastical and Archaeological Museum at the New Athos Monastery.

Once one has seen his personal library, it is hardly surprising that his public addresses were invariably so thoughtful, carefully considered and engaging. Take, for example, the speech he delivered at the University of London in April 1993 as a member of the Parliament of the Republic of Abkhazia. He demonstrated not only an outstanding knowledge of our country’s history and the international political situation surrounding Abkhazia, but also an ability to draw on the insights of great thinkers. Speaking of the Georgian–Abkhaz war, he observed:

‘There will be no victors in this war. Jean-Paul Sartre once said: “When you learn the details of a victory, you will find it difficult to distinguish it from a defeat.”’

Let me quote another passage from his London address:

‘At the instigation of the Georgian media, the West repeats the myth that the Abkhaz are supposedly “Islamic fundamentalists” who threaten the entire world… Yet scholars of the Caucasus are well aware of the religious tolerance of our people, who officially adopted Christianity as early as the sixth century, during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I… As for Islam, it began to make its way here in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but never became widespread. In the nineteenth century, for example, there were only a few wooden mosques in Abkhazia, and today there is not a single one. Meanwhile, stone mosques stand in Moscow, St Petersburg and the centre of Tbilisi. For some reason, no one recalls that Georgia has been connected with the Islamic world and its culture since the eighth century; that from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, an Arab emir of the Emirate of Tbilisi ruled from what is now Georgia’s capital; that the Georgian king David the Builder minted coins bearing Arabic inscriptions; or that Muslim Georgians outnumber the entire Abkhaz people…’

I also remember his vivid address at an evening honouring Fazil Iskander at the Abkhaz State Drama Theatre on 18 June 2002, which I attended. Entitled ‘Iskander’s Spiritual Empire’ — what a metaphor! — it was also included in From Century to Century.

‘In the second half of the twentieth century,’ Stanislav Lakoba said that evening, ‘Abkhazia gave the world two outstanding figures: the poet and prose writer Fazil Iskander, and the poet amid the prose of politics, Vladislav Ardzinba.’

During the difficult years of Soviet dissent, when Fazil Iskander found himself in desperate circumstances, Lakoba arranged a secluded retreat for him in the mountains of Abkhazia.

Historical Scholarship and Academic Standing

Stanislav Lakoba is undoubtedly one of the foremost Abkhaz historians. The authors of his entry in the Abkhaz Biographical Dictionary (Moscow–Sukhum, 2015) aptly described him as ‘a historian of the Caucasus of the “new wave”’. One can only agree.

His principal historical work is undoubtedly An Outline of the Political History of Abkhazia (Sukhum, 1990), which received the D. Gulia State Prize. At the award ceremony in June 1992, Bagrat Shinkuba singled out another work in his speech: the textbook History of Abkhazia, of which Stanislav Lakoba was editor-in-chief. Republished in Gudauta in 1993, in wartime conditions, this textbook played an immense role in the contemporary history of our people.

At the celebration of Lakoba’s seventieth birthday in 2023, I said that preparing a history textbook can sometimes be far more difficult than writing a doctoral dissertation for a small circle of specialists. The greatest challenge lies in the responsibility to society that a textbook entails. A dissertation is scrutinised by specialists, and its errors affect the development of scholarship. Errors or misplaced emphases in a textbook shape the historical consciousness of an entire generation.

Naturally, specialists have questions and criticisms concerning this textbook and those that Lakoba subsequently co-authored with Oleg Bgazhba. It would be surprising if they did not. Yet this in no way diminishes the importance of the textbooks on Abkhaz history that he edited or co-authored. They have rightfully earned their place in Abkhaz historiography.

Nor can I pass over the ‘scandal’ and legal proceedings prompted by the latest edition of History of Abkhazia from Ancient Times to the Present Day, by Oleg Bgazhba and Stanislav Lakoba. In my view, the most difficult period for a historian to write about is the recent past. One might expect events whose participants are still alive to be easy to assess, but this is not the case. A proper analysis of events and individuals requires historical distance.

The evolution of Lakoba’s assessment of Vladislav Ardzinba provides a clear example. It should be stressed that, unlike many of Ardzinba’s associates, Lakoba openly criticised Abkhazia’s first president while he was still in office. He offered his final assessment of Ardzinba in an extensive interview with Abaza TV in 2025, marking the eightieth anniversary of the first president’s birth.

In the summer of 1996, I met Stanislav Lakoba on Aiaaira Avenue in Sukhum. By then, he had stepped back from formal political life. During our conversation, he confided his concern that he might have to leave Abkhazia. We also discussed a letter I had sent him in connection with the publication of my first work on the history of the Abkhaz Church.

Let us turn to From Century to Century, published in 2022 under the auspices of the D. Gulia Abkhaz Institute for Humanities Research of the Academy of Sciences of Abkhazia. The book was nominated for the G. Dzidzaria State Prize for Science but did not secure the necessary votes.

Allow me a brief digression.

I consider it unjust that Stanislav Lakoba was not a member of the Academy of Sciences of Abkhazia. Although the formal explanation was that he did not hold a higher doctorate, his work had long since earned him the right to an honorary doctorate — honoris causa — from the Academy.

I raised this question several times in the Institute’s History Department. Lakoba himself firmly refused to entertain the idea of his candidacy. At departmental meetings, I insisted that this was something the Abkhaz scholarly community needed, rather than something he needed for himself. A scholar of his calibre could have ensured that the Academy was represented with distinction in a range of forums, including international ones. The membership of figures such as Lakoba would have greatly enhanced the standing of Abkhaz scholarship.

A Closer Look at From Century to Century

Let us return to the book itself. It brings together the author’s most significant historical and cultural essays, written at different times and selected by him personally — a fact that gives the collection particular value. Some of its contents have already been mentioned above. Here, I shall consider several others.

The book opens with a substantial study of the poet and archaeologist Viktor Strazhev. In this essay, as in his other historical works, Lakoba brings together his two principal talents: those of the writer and the historian. It is worth recalling that, from a very young age, he also took a scholarly interest in archaeology and palaeontology, although in later years he regarded palaeontological evidence with a certain scepticism.

In this and the essays that follow, he draws extensively on materials from the Central State Archive of Abkhazia, destroyed by Georgian troops in October 1992. Citing archival documents, he relates how, in 1925, a resident of New Gagra approached the Abkhaz Scientific Society with an offer to sell ‘a valuable marble bas-relief of ancient Greek workmanship depicting Aphrodite and Hermes, which he had found near the village of Kaldakhvara during the construction of the railway’.

Lakoba continues:

‘The marble slab, bearing artistic representations and inscriptions and discovered in the immediate vicinity of the ancient city of Pityus, attracted the interest of researchers. On 23 May 1925, G. Barach, chairman of the Abkhaz Scientific Society, informed A. Chochua, chairman of the Commission for the Protection of Monuments of Art, Antiquity and Nature, of the discovery. A month later, this unique ancient bas-relief was brought to the attention of N. A. Lakoba, Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the SSR of Abkhazia.’

Sadly, the subsequent fate of this unique discovery remains unknown!

From Century to Century also includes two studies of Aslanbey, the eldest son of Abkhazia’s legendary ruler Keleshbey, who was accused of murdering his father. These are among Lakoba’s most compelling historical essays. He proposes a new interpretation of Keleshbey’s murder and the circumstances in which Abkhazia became part of the Russian Empire: Keleshbey was killed in the Sukhum fortress on 2 May 1808 as a result of a conspiracy organised by his second son, Seferbey, who was born of a marriage to a woman of lower social rank. Seferbey enjoyed the support of Nino Dadiani and the Russian military administration, while the blame fell on Aslanbey, the legitimate heir.

Seferbey’s ‘Articles of Petition’ of 12 August 1808, addressed to the Russian Emperor Alexander I and requesting that Abkhazia be accepted under Russian sovereignty, were drawn up in Georgian at the dictation of Nino Dadiani and her confessor, Archpriest Ioann Ioseliani. This is precisely why the events of 1808–1810 cannot be regarded as Abkhazia’s voluntary accession to Russia.

Lakoba’s reasoning and arguments appear convincing, although the available sources are insufficient…

The collection also reproduces the full text of ‘Who Should Settle in Abkhazia?’, an article written in 1877 by the prominent Georgian commentator and public figure Iakob Gogebashvili. Lakoba repeatedly refers to it in his work, above all in his disputes with Georgian scholars over the indigenous status of the Abkhaz.

Finally, among his historical and cultural essays, I would like to mention those written at the Slavic Research Centre of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. Lakoba undertook research there as a visiting professor in 2000 and 2004.

In 2001, he came to the New Athos Monastery to arrange his son’s baptism with me and gave me a copy of his newly published book from Japan, Abkhazia — De Facto or Georgia — De Jure? Russia’s Policy towards Abkhazia in the Post-Soviet Period, 1991–2000. His courage in assessing the actions of Russia’s political and military leadership under Yeltsin, both in this study and in the subsequent Abkhazia after Two Empires: The Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries (Sapporo–Moscow, 2004), commands enormous respect. In the present climate, few would be likely to venture back into these subjects.

Another work completed at Hokkaido University deserves particular mention: A Response to Historians from Tbilisi: Documents and Facts. It is a carefully argued reply to Studies in the History of Abkhazia/Georgia, published by Georgian authors in 1999. Reading it, one cannot fail to notice Lakoba’s command of the smallest details of events in Abkhazia between 1917 and 1921, which made his Georgian opponents’ task all the more difficult. Equally striking is the care with which he recorded the public statements of contemporary Georgian political, military and public figures.

For example, in discussing the notorious Georgian historian Mariko Lordkipanidze, Lakoba quotes a statement by Levan Berdzenishvili, director of the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia. Speaking about the state of the Georgian intelligentsia and the study of Georgian history, Berdzenishvili said:

‘We have no history; we have M. Lordkipanidze. She is a good person, but that is not history. Lordkipanidze’s opinion is the opinion of Georgia’s past.’

After returning to Abkhazia from Japan, Lakoba maintained close ties with academics at Hokkaido University, several of whom visited the republic on numerous occasions. In 2006 and 2017, he asked us, as those responsible for the New Athos Monastery, to receive Professor Kimitaka Matsuzato. The professor subsequently published several articles on relations between Orthodox Churches concerning Transnistria and Abkhazia.

At my last meeting with Professor Matsuzato, by then a professor at the University of Tokyo, I gave him all the Holy Metropolis of Abkhazia’s printed publications for the university library, including my doctoral dissertation in Greek. All of this became possible thanks to Stanislav Lakoba!

One further point deserves mention: his love of Japanese culture began through his friendship with the artist Varvara Bubnova, who had lived in Japan for more than 35 years and spent the final quarter of her life in Abkhazia.

Political Life

Turning to Stanislav Lakoba’s political life, I must say that it was even more eventful than the literary and scholarly career discussed above. He was undoubtedly a key figure in the creation of the modern independent Abkhaz state. His political colleagues — members of the so-called ‘golden convocation’ of Abkhazia’s Parliament — are better placed than I am to tell that story. I shall therefore dwell on a few other aspects.

Above all, Stanislav Lakoba was a politician of principle. This important quality frequently drew him into political turbulence. He was also a selfless politician, which brought him no shortage of difficulties. When I went to his flat to conduct the funeral service, I was struck by the modest circumstances in which he had lived. I am certain that his was one of those exceedingly rare examples in our state’s recent history of a man who used neither power, status nor public office to enrich himself.

People who knew him well during his political career would often say that he was unduly wary of the various intelligence services and greatly exaggerated their influence. I witnessed this caution myself. In 2012, when he was Secretary of the Security Council, he turned up the volume of the television in his office during a conversation with me. Throughout our meeting he listened in silence, then wrote his reply on a sheet of paper. At the time, it all seemed excessive. Yet, as life has shown, matters were not so simple…

Having worked extensively with Soviet archival material, Lakoba was well acquainted with the methods of the intelligence services. In 1996, he published an article entitled ‘The Secret of the “Green Folder”’. It concerned secret documents from the Stalin–Beria period that became available to him only after the liberation of Abkhazia’s capital in September 1993. These documents reveal how undercover agents of the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) of the Abkhaz ASSR, operating under aliases such as ‘Light’, ‘Machine Gun’, ‘Motherland’ and ‘Ivan’, kept even Abkhaz schoolchildren under surveillance and gathered compromising material on the Abkhaz elite.

Another particularly interesting work in this connection is Abkhazia’s Last Ruler in Political Exile and the Agreement of 1844. In it, Lakoba recounts the final years of the ruling prince Mikhail Chachba, who was exiled to Voronezh.

The irony was that Mikhail Chachba, who had used the military power of Russian tsarism against his Abkhaz political rivals, himself became a victim of tsarism. Lakoba draws the reader into the story of Prince Tade Anchabadze, who spent fifteen years in the Tobolsk prison fortress, to which the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was also brought during that period.

Personal Recollections

We first met on 7 June 1995, when Lakoba, then First Deputy Speaker of the Parliament of the Republic of Abkhazia, accompanied Speaker Sokrat Dzhindzholia to a festive church service in Kaman. Ten years later, in 2005, although both men were by then holding other public offices, they again came together to the New Athos Theological School, where I was rector, to attend the graduation ceremony.

That same year, on learning that we were related, Lakoba asked me: ‘How is Kotik Lakoba related to you?’ I explained that Konstantin, or Kotik, Lakoba, who had lived in Gulrypsh since before the war, was married to Raya Dbar, my father’s first cousin.

Later, I discovered that this was not our only family connection. Lakoba’s grandfather’s sister had married a member of the Kutarba family in the village of Blabyrkhua. Her daughter Katitsa married Vladimir, or Ludia, Khutaba, the brother of my maternal grandfather. Vladimir was killed in action during the Second World War.

In May 2011, Stanislav Lakoba took an active part in the Church–People’s Assembly at the New Athos Monastery, where his brief speech carried considerable weight. It was at this Assembly that the Holy Metropolis of Abkhazia was established. At the participants’ initiative, Lakoba was elected to its first Council. His subsequent return to public service obliged him to leave the Council in 2012, but he continued actively supporting the Metropolis throughout the years that followed.

On 31 May 2011, we were together at a wreath-laying ceremony at the monument to the muhajirs — the Abkhaz exiles — in Sukhum. Tali Dzhapua, a Hero of Abkhazia, came over to us. Suddenly, Lakoba turned to her and said: ‘Tali, let us nominate Father Dorotheos as a candidate for President of Abkhazia.’ He returned repeatedly to this idea, first voiced in 2011, in conversations with me and with other political and public figures in Abkhazia. In effect, it was he who persuaded me of the need to take such a step ahead of the 2019 presidential election. At the time, anonymous social media users called me ‘Stanislav Lakoba’s monk’. However, a misunderstanding arose between us, which contributed to my decision to abandon the idea. I described the episode in detail in my statement ‘I Have No Intention of Playing Political Games, and I Say “Ochi” [No]’, published on social media on 20 March 2019. Certain traits of character that we shared may also have played a part in this outcome.

Years later, and in light of the political outcomes of Abkhazia’s presidential elections in 2019 and 2020, I acknowledge that Lakoba’s calculations about putting me forward for the presidency of the Republic of Abkhazia were sound in theory. Whether the geopolitical circumstances surrounding Abkhazia at the time would have allowed his idea to be put into practice remains an open question.

In March 2018, Lakoba and I took part in a round table in Sukhum entitled ‘Abkhazia: The Difficult Road to Revival — Marking the 125th Anniversaries of the Births of N. Lakoba and E. Eshba’. My paper concerned Nestor Lakoba. His addressed two leaders of Soviet-era Abkhazia, Nestor Lakoba and Efrem Eshba, whose relationship had been far from straightforward. He drew our attention to an important detail in their competing claims to leadership: Eshba had been close to Lenin, and Nestor to Stalin, while both held Trotsky in high regard. Eshba was closer to the party’s ‘theorists’ — Lenin, Bukharin and Kamenev — whereas Lakoba was closer to its ‘men of action’ — Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Rykov and Ordzhonikidze. Stalin’s relationship with Eshba was the opposite of his relationship with Nestor.

‘Had Efrem Eshba remained in power in Abkhazia after 1922,’ Lakoba said, ‘it is not difficult to imagine what the consequences for Abkhazia might have been…’

Conclusion

Now, as I leaf through From Century to Century and look at the books from his library laid out in my study, I understand ever more clearly that Stanislav Lakoba has departed, yet remains part of our lives. He lives on in every work he wrote, every document he collected, every book and every other item he entrusted to us. He lives on in the historical interpretations he dared to propose and in the principles he never betrayed. We shall never hear his memoirs, and that is a loss we all share. Yet we have what matters most: hundreds of works, dozens of public addresses, textbooks from which generations will continue to learn, and his undying love for Abkhazia.

I shall certainly fulfil his request and write the essay on Pyotr Kulchitsky. That, too, will continue our conversation, which death interrupted but did not bring to an end. For those who knew him, read him and heard him speak, remembering Stanislav Lakoba will always mean more than paying tribute. His memory will remain a living inspiration to serve our people, as he did, through our words, our deeds and our conscience.

May his memory be eternal! Анарцә абзиара иҟоу уалхымзааит!