In the village of Aatsy, in the Gudauta District, a former police bailiff from Poti taught the assembled peasants a lesson in republican government. His name was Lieutenant Kupunia. He had the whole village-gathering lie face down on the ground, then ordered machine guns trained on the prone backs of men who had done nothing but live where they had their living. He walked across them, beating them with the flat of his sabre. Then he had them bunched into a mass and rode his horse at a gallop straight into the crowd, lashing about him with a whip. When two members of the former Abkhazian People's Council, Abukhba and Dzukua, came to protest at this, he had them arrested and locked in a barn.
This is not the rhetoric of a partisan-pamphlet. It is the substance of a formal appeal drawn up by fourteen deputies of the People's Council and carried to Tiflis, addressed to the head of the Georgian government, Noë Zhordania, on 29 September 1919. The men who wrote it were not Bolsheviks, not Turkish agents, not enemies of the Georgian republic in any ordinary sense. Many of them had welcomed that republic and its democratic promises. They were trying, in the only language a parliament understands, to tell the government in Tiflis what its soldiers were doing in their name. The barn at Aatsy is where the gap between the promise and the practice can be measured most exactly, because in that barn sat two elected representatives of a people, locked up by an officer who answered to a state that described itself, without irony, as free and democratic.
The chairman of the Council, Prince Varlam Shervashidze, protested on 4 July that the only source of power and emergency authority in Abkhazia was the People's Council, and that the laws of the Georgian National Council, the death penalty among them, could not be extended to Abkhazia until the Council had spoken on the matter. The protest changed nothing. Mazniashvili had already begun treating the surrendered weapons of a defeated Turkish landing party as his personal war-booty, and had introduced the death penalty on his own authority.
The cruelty that followed was not incidental to the occupation. It was the occupation. The fullest catalogue comes from Abkhazian sources, but its most damning confirmation comes from the Russian archive that Mukhanov works through, and the two corroborate each other almost line for line. Mazniashvili and his chief of staff, Colonel Tukhareli, organised an expeditionary detachment for punitive operations. According to the deputies' statement, this detachment broke into peaceful Abkhazian villages in the Kodor district, carrying off everything of even the slightest value and committing violence against the women. Another part of the same detachment, under Tukhareli's direct supervision, busied itself with bombing the houses of people who had been denounced by informers. And then there was Aatsy, and Kupunia, and the barn.
The numbers survive because clerks recorded them. In the village of Atara a flying detachment carried off eleven horses and robbed the population of 62,500 roubles, by the district commissariat's own reckoning. The peasants of Lechkop reckoned their losses at thirty-two thousand. Gumista and Eshera together at 196 thousand. Kavakluk at more than two hundred thousand. On the return journey one detachment robbed the Armenian village between Dzhgerda and Atara for good measure. An investigative commission, set up after Georgian soldiers broke open the cash desk of the Lykhny Credit Association on 22 June 1918 and reduced the fireproof safe to a state of complete disrepair, went on to compile a register of what had been taken from the population. Money, yes, but also horses, saddles, bridles, whips, gold rings and bracelets, watches, daggers, carpets, household utensils, wine and vodka by the bucket, flour, sugar. The soldiers, the record notes, were not above stealing handkerchiefs.
How did the men who suffered this describe the man responsible? They reached for the only comparison available to them, the worst figure in living Caucasian memory. The chairman of the Mountain Republic, Tapo Chermoev, in a declaration to the Georgian government on 29 September 1919, compared the punitive actions of Mazniashvili and Tukhareli in their cruelty and inhumanity to those of the Tsarist General Maksud Alikhanov-Avarsky, the man who had drowned Georgia itself in blood in 1906. The Abkhazian historian Ruslan Khodzhaa, working through the People's Council's own archive, puts it more bluntly still: not a single Tsarist general, he writes, showed such merciless fury in subduing the Caucasian peoples as Mazniev did in Abkhazia. A people compared the soldiers of a democratic republic to the Tsar's secret police and found the republic the harsher master.
The slow theft of a parliament
Brutality leaves marks on bodies and account books. The deeper injury was administrative, and it was inflicted not by sabres but by procedure. This is the thread Mukhanov traces with the patience of a man following a paper trail, and it is the more devastating for being told in the flat voice of the archive.
The thing to understand is that Abkhazia kept on electing a parliament, and Tiflis kept finding ways to make it disappear. The People's Council was dissolved, reconstituted, and dissolved again. The second dissolution, in October 1918, is recorded in detail because two of its members left memoirs. On 9 October the opposition group in the Council moved a vote of no confidence in the chairman, Varlam Shervashidze, and won. Rather than yield the chair, Shervashidze called a recess and quietly summoned a regiment. When the meeting resumed, soldiers began to filter into the chamber, singly and in pairs, until ranks of them lined the walls. The Council closed without drastic measures that night. But on the same night, or the next, soldiers and policemen went to the apartments of the most active opposition deputies and arrested them. Semjon Ashkhatsava, Ivan Margania, Dmitrij Margania and Georgij Adzhamov were sent to Tiflis and locked in the Metekhi Fortress. After that, as Ashkhatsava himself recorded, the Council was effectively dissolved and never again convened with that membership. It was done, in his words, cunningly and behind the scenes, without any official act, by the most surreptitious method of arresting some deputies and not summoning the rest.
Read that again, because it is the whole policy in miniature. There was no decree abolishing Abkhazian self-government. There was simply the steady removal of any Abkhazian self-government that proved inconvenient, dressed up as the maintenance of order. The Mensheviks, Ashkhatsava observed, having suffered a complete collapse on their favourite parliamentary front, decided to resort to military force, especially since they had it to hand.
Illustration: October 1918: soldiers file silently into the chamber of the Abkhazian People's Council as its deputies sit in session.What replaced the dissolved Council reveals the design. In March 1919 fresh elections were held, kept under total control by the Georgian administration and run on a new proportional formula across the whole district. The arithmetic was the point. A district-wide proportional vote diluted the Abkhazian majority and let in representatives of the Georgian parties and the protégés of the Georgian administration. The Abkhazians would lose their majority in their own assembly. The new session was opened by Isidore Ramishvili, an old Menshevik who happened also to be the official representative of Georgia in the Council, and at its very first meeting this reshaped body adopted the document Tiflis had been waiting for: the Act on the Autonomy of Abkhazia, on 20 March 1919. Its operative clause read that Abkhazia is part of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, as an autonomous unit thereof. A second paragraph, which Mukhanov calls a kind of straw to soften the blow, promised that work would begin on a constitution for Abkhazia.
That constitution was never permitted to exist. This is the quiet centre of the whole story, and it deserves to be stated without ornament. Between 1919 and 1920 three separate delegations travelled from Sukhum to Tiflis, each carrying a different draft of an Abkhazian constitution. Not one was considered on its merits. Not one was adopted. As Mukhanov puts it, no Abkhazian constitution was ever considered or supported by Tiflis, and the members of the People's Council were deprived of the right independently to adopt one. The reason was not bureaucratic sloth. To approve an Abkhazian constitution, agreed between equals, would have created a format of equality between the Abkhazian and Georgian sides, and that was precisely what Tiflis feared and did not want. Lakoba's judgement, which Mukhanov quotes approvingly, is that the Act on Autonomy in essence remained on paper while the three drafts went unapproved through disagreement between the Abkhazian Council on one side and the Georgian government and Constituent Assembly on the other.
The Abkhazian delegation that came to Zhordania in November 1920 grasped exactly what had been done to it. Relations between Georgia and Abkhazia, its note stated, had still not been formalised and were therefore not legally binding on either side. All the government's assurances about the inviolability of autonomy had in practice been far from reality. Since 1918, the note went on, the government of Georgia had steadily expanded the scope of its intervention in every sphere of life in Abkhazia, often violating even those rights about which there had been no dispute. A people had been promised a constitution, sent its lawyers to the capital three times to collect it, and been sent home empty-handed three times, while the government drafted its own constitution in which Abkhazia, now demoted in the text to the Sukhum region, was allotted a very modest place. The autonomous status was finally fixed in law only in February 1921, on the eve of Sovietisation, in the last days of a republic already rolling towards collapse, after a Constituent Assembly whose elections the majority of Abkhazians had boycotted. The gift arrived only when there was nothing left to give.
What non-locals saw
A sympathetic case can always be accused of special pleading. The strongest part of the Abkhazian argument is therefore the part that comes from people who had no stake in it, and in some cases every reason to think otherwise.
Take first the Englishman Carl Bechhofer, who travelled through the Caucasus in 1919 and 1920 and had no particular brief for any small nation. His verdict on the Georgian state has the durability of a good epitaph. The Free and Independent Social-Democratic State of Georgia, he wrote, would always remain in his memory as a classic example of an imperialist small nation, its chauvinism beyond all bounds both in snatching territory abroad and in bureaucratic tyranny at home. The phrase imperialist small nation is the thesis of this article, and it was coined not by an Abkhazian but by a passing English observer armed with a notebook.
Move on to the British military mentality, which is rarely sentimental. A secret document sent from Constantinople to the War Office in 1919, assessing the Georgian hold on the Sochi district, recorded a striking admission. On occupying Transcaucasia, the writer noted, the British had found the Georgians in possession of the Sochi district, to which he considered they had no legal or historical right, though turning them out would cause complications in Georgia proper. Here is the occupying power's own assessment, made for no audience but itself, that a Georgian claim was being maintained in defiance of right because dislodging it was inconvenient.
Then there is the question of who actually belonged to the land, and on this the British intelligence reports are remarkable. The population of Abkhazia, one report conceded, was wonderfully mixed, Abkhazians and Russians and Mingrelians and Armenians and Turks and
Greeks and
Estonians all jumbled together. And yet, the report went on, despite that mixture there was one nation that might and must be considered the owners of the land, and that nation was the Abkhazian. However far back one peered into history, the report concluded, one always met the Abkhazians as the autochthons of the territory; the other nations came later, after intervals of centuries, and were without doubt newcomers. "The owners of the land". The words are not Abkhazian propaganda. They come from British intelligence.
The most uncomfortable testimony of all comes from inside the Georgian camp. Zurab Avalishvili, the international lawyer also known in the Russian records as Zurab Avalov, was a distinguished figure of the Georgian republic and a member of its delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, a true and consistent politician by the reckoning of those who consulted him. When the British, unconvinced by the Mensheviks, sought his view, he gave it. He acknowledged that in the second half of the nineteenth century most of the indigenous population of Abkhazia had been deported to Asia Minor and cleansed through the
genocidal practices of the Russians, and that the very existence of an ethnic Georgian majority was purely derived from the
demographic disaster the Russians had caused. A leading Georgian patriot, asked under oath as it were, conceded that his nation's numerical presence in Abkhazia was the product of an emptied land. The forced exile of 1864, the
makhadzhirstvo, the great expulsion that ended the Caucasian war with a parade of
Russian and Georgian troops on the meadow of Krasnaya Polyana in historical Abkhazia, had not merely depopulated a country. It had manufactured the demographic fact on which every later Georgian claim would rest, and the most honest Georgian voice in the room said precisely this.
Illustration: The forced exile of 1864: Abkhazian and other Caucasian highlanders driven from their homeland to the boats of the Ottoman coast.The White Russian generals, no friends to small-nation separatism, said the same. Lukomsky wrote that Georgia, taking advantage of German support, had occupied Abkhazia and the Sochi district against the wishes of the population. He understood the strategy precisely: the Sochi district mattered to Georgia as a zone separating the freedom-loving Abkhazian people from the Volunteer Army, because Tiflis feared that any opening might encourage the secession of Abkhazia from Georgia. Denikin received a formal appeal from representatives of the Abkhazian people in February 1919. He wrote to the British generals Forestier-Walker and Milne that the hatred of the Abkhazians towards the Georgians was so great that no cohabitation of the two peoples was possible, and asked for the immediate withdrawal of Georgian troops to save the Abkhazian people from violence. And Colonel Rjasnjanskij, head of the Volunteer Army's intelligence, summarised the mood on 22 October 1918 in a single sentence that no amount of partisanship could improve upon: all Abkhazians, he reported, were extremely hostile towards the Georgians and the Georgian government.
The reasons he gave were the reasons that recur in every source. Tiflis had refused to let returning Abkhazian exiles come home, turning away a delegation of two hundred who had come to ask permission for their kinsmen to resettle. And it had requisitioned, in a year of good harvest, almost all the food supplies of the population for Georgia, taking not only grain but cattle, horses, saddles, everything Georgia needed, until the Abkhazians were brought to the end of their tether and in places rose in armed revolt. That last detail is the whole tragedy compressed. A people had been emptied from its land by one empire, and when the survivors asked a self-styled democracy for leave to bring their relatives home, the democracy said no, and took their grain as well.
A measure of things
There is an economic ledger here too, and it points in the same direction. Abkhazia lived on tobacco, and tobacco lived on the Russian market. When Tiflis announced a state-monopoly on the export of tobacco-leaf, in violation of agreements that had left internal administration to the Council, the effect was swift and brutal. By July 1918 tobacco prices had already fallen by almost forty per cent, and the previously flourishing industry was brought down. The closure of the Russian and Ukrainian markets cut off the flour and foodstuffs on which the country had depended. By the autumn of 1919 the People's Council's own delegation could report that the financial and economic crisis of Abkhazia had reached catastrophic proportions, that local democratic institutions were on the verge of extinction, and that no creative work or development was conceivable unless urgent action were taken. New taxes piled on, a one-time emergency land-tax in the autumn of 1919, a sanitary tax that the merchants of Gudauta called an invention of the mayor and that pushed prices for all goods up while the poor, in the words of a local newspaper, were doomed to starvation. When the Council asked Tiflis for the right to export fifty thousand poods of its own tobacco, it was eventually allowed twenty-five, on terms that handed sixty per cent of the proceeds to the central government. A country was permitted to sell half its own crop and keep less than half the money. This is what bureaucratic tyranny at home looks like in a ledger.
+ The Republic of the Union of Mountain Peoples, Abkhazia, and Soviet Policies: A Historical Analysis
+ What exactly happened in Batumi on May 11, 1918?
+ Abkhazia: Documents and Materials (1917–1921)
+ Quotes from the 'Between Red and White' by Leon Trotsky
+ Legitimacy of Abkhazia's Sovereignty and Independence in The Light of Historical Evidence
It would be possible to multiply the threads further. There is the betrayed ideal of a Caucasus Confederation, towards which the Mountaineers reached again and again from the Vladikavkaz congresses of 1917 onward. There is the telling detail that even von Lossow, Georgia's own German patron, attached a reservation to his secret letter of 28 May 1918. Should a confederation of Caucasian peoples form, he allowed, the population of the Sukhum district should be free to determine its place among them, whether with Georgia, with the Union of Mountain Peoples, or as a separate state-canton of its own. Even the German general arranging Georgia's borders did not treat Abkhazia as simply Georgian. There is the linguistic question. Tiflis issued a three-month ultimatum that all government, postal and telegraph business be conducted in Georgian, on pain of dismissal for those who could not comply. The Council rejected it in August 1918 as impossible in such a multi-tribal country, resolving to keep Russian as the common tongue and forbidding the dismissal of officials on a national basis. But the spine of the case is already standing without the need of them, and a case that lands hard is better than one that sprawls.
What the documents establish, taken together, is not a series of regrettable excesses by a young state finding its feet. It is a pattern, and patterns have authors. A self-governing parliament was packed and dissolved whenever it asserted itself, and a constitution was withheld for three years because granting it would have implied equality. Villages were robbed and their elected representatives locked in barns. An industry was strangled and a population taxed towards starvation. Exiles were refused the right to return to a land their own expulsion had emptied. And all of this was done by a government that the most clear-eyed foreigners who saw it, Englishmen and White Russians and even its own most honest lawyers, described as an empire masquerading as a small democracy.
Abkhazia was not part of the Caucasus Mountain Peoples' Republic by accident or by Turkish intrigue. It joined that union by the decision of its own elected deputies, and it stood outside Georgia's borders on the day Georgia declared its independence. What happened next was not the natural unfolding of a shared national life. It was a conquest, conducted by a state too small to admit it had become what it had once suffered under. The barn at Aatsy was unlocked long ago. The record of who built it never has been.
References
Ruslan Khodzhaa, The Abkhazian People's Soviet 1917–1920 (Sukhum, 2007), and Documents and Materials of the Abkhazian People's Soviet 1918–1919 (Sukhum, 1999).
Primary documents and testimony cited within the above:
Appeal of fourteen deputies of the Abkhazian People's Council to Noë Zhordania, 29 September 1919.
Declaration of Tapo Chermoev, chairman of the Mountain Republic, to the Georgian government, 29 September 1919.
Protest of Prince Varlam Shervashidze, chairman of the Abkhazian People's Council, 4 July 1918.
Memoirs of Semjon Ashkhatsava and Mikhail Tarnava, deputies of the Abkhazian People's Council.
Report of Colonel S. N. Rjasnjanskij, Intelligence Department of the Volunteer Army, 22 October 1918.
Appeal of representatives of the Abkhazian people to General Denikin, 1 February 1919, and Denikin's appeal to Generals Forestier-Walker and Milne.
General A. S. Lukomsky, statements on the Georgian occupation of Abkhazia and the Sochi district.
Anita Burdett (ed.), Caucasian Boundaries 1802–1946 (London, 1996): secret British War Office assessment of the Sochi district, 1919, and British intelligence report on the population of Abkhazia.
Zurab Avalov (Avalishvili), The Independence of Georgia in International Politics, 1918–1921 (Paris, 1924; New York, 1982), and his statements to the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference.
Note from the Abkhazian People's Council delegation to Noë Zhordania, November 1920.
