Sultan Sosnaliyev: First Commander of the Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, by Musa Shanibov
Sultan Sosnaliyev (23 April 1942 – 22 November 2008)
Editor's Introduction
Sultan Sosnaliyev: The First Military Commander of the Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus first appeared in Russian as part of AbkhazWorld's Reflections on Abkhazia: 1992–2012 project, published under the title Султан Сусналиев — первый полководец горских народов Кавказа (Sukhum and Nalchik, 2011–2012). This English text has been translated by AbkhazWorld.
Written by Musa (Yuri) Shanibov, president of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus throughout the Georgian-Abkhaz war, the memoir is at once a tribute and a reckoning. Its ostensible subject is Sultan Sosnaliyev, the Kabardian airman who built the Abkhaz army and led it to victory, but Shanibov uses the portrait to range far more widely: over the founding of the Confederation, the halting of Georgia's war in South Ossetia, his own arrest at the hands of Yeltsin's prosecutors, and the bitter cooling of his friendship with Vladislav Ardzinba. Readers should approach it as a participant's testimony rather than a detached history. Shanibov writes with the candour of a man settling accounts with his own memory, and several of his judgements, that the new Russian leadership armed and abetted the assault on Abkhazia, that Ardzinba's refusal to prepare for war was "not a crime but a mistake," and that this mistake hastened Ardzinba's own decline, are advanced as personal conviction. They are valuable precisely as the views of someone who stood at the centre of these events, and they invite comparison with other accounts of the period.
The closing chapters, drawn from Sosnaliyev's own sparing recollections and the fuller account of his wife, Lyuba, reconstruct the decisive moment of the war: the secret plan to retake Sukhum, and the long, charged conversation in which Sosnaliyev talked a doubting Ardzinba into authorising the offensive that ended the occupation.
About the author. Musa (Yuri) Shanibov (1936–2020) was the founding president of the Confederation of Peoples of the Caucasus and, in civilian life, founder and scientific director of the Centre for Sociological Research at Kabardino-Balkaria State University. A lawyer, former prosecutor, sociologist and philosopher by training, he was the leading organiser of North Caucasian solidarity with Abkhazia during the war, in the course of which he was arrested by the Russian authorities, wounded, and lost his only son.
About Sultan Sosnaliyev. Sultan Aslambekovich Sosnaliyev (23 April 1942 – 22 November 2008) was a Soviet Army officer of Kabardian (Circassian) origin who commanded Abkhaz and North Caucasian forces during the 1992–93 Georgian-Abkhaz war and served as defence minister of the Republic of Abkhazia in 1993–1996 and again in 2005–2007. Born in Baksan, in Kabardino-Balkaria, he graduated from the Syzran Higher Military Aviation School and the Zhukov Air and Space Defence Academy, and served for twenty-nine years in the Soviet anti-aircraft forces, retiring in 1990 with the rank of colonel. He was working in Kabardino-Balkaria's construction industry when, in 1992, he took up the post that would make him the first military commander of the mountain peoples of the Caucasus.
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