The Study of the History of Abkhazia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries During the 1930s to the Early 1950s, by Soslan Salakaya

Soslan Sh. Salakaya
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor in the Department of the History, Archaeology and Ethnology of Abkhazia, Abkhazian State University

Abkhazia from the 1930s to the Early 1990s. A Collection of Articles. Sukhum, 2025, 125 pp., at pp. 27-49.

The present collection addresses a broad range of questions connected with the history of Abkhazia in the Soviet period.

The Study of the History of Abkhazia in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries During the 1930s to the Early 1950s

At the turn of the 1930s in Abkhazia, as throughout the Soviet Union, the "Marxist-Leninist" theory of formational socio-economic development established itself in historical scholarship as the only correct one, and a Marxist school of historians began to take shape. Anatoly Vsevolodovich Fadeev is regarded as the first Marxist historian in Abkhazia; he began publishing actively from the early 1930s. The earliest of his published works is a small book of forty pages, On the Question of Feudalism in Abkhazia¹, which is considered the first Marxist work on the history of Abkhazia. For all its ideological colouring, it contains a good deal of interest. Seeking to prove that the history of Abkhazia had passed through every stage of socio-economic development, Fadeev attacked those who held that Abkhazia had known no sharp social contradictions, that feudal relations were foreign to it and had been brought in only with the consolidation of Russian tsarism.²

At the same time the author himself observes that survivals of clan and tribal relations remained strong in Abkhazia. Discussing the peculiarities of Abkhazian feudalism, he points to a whole series of distinctive features: the weak development of the productive forces, agrarian survivals of the clan order and so on. Feudal property did arise in Abkhazia, he argues, yet the exploitation of the peasantry never took extreme forms there. The peasants retained the right of ownership over their land and movable property, and every cultivator acquired land by clearing forest. The Abkhaz feudal lords, the author writes, drew their principal wealth through extra-economic coercion. Serfdom in its pure form did not exist in feudal Abkhazia, Fadeev maintains, first because it was economically unprofitable given the abundance of free land and the rudimentary state of agricultural technique, and second because elements of the clan order had embedded themselves firmly in the fabric of Abkhazian feudalism and restrained the lords' inclination to enserf the peasants. For this reason feudal Abkhazia (before the Russian period) presents peasants who were neither serfs nor free men, but personally dependent. That personal dependence was not uniform: some rendered the surplus product in the natural form of labour service (the ahuyu), others (the anhayu) in kind and in personal services.

There follow characterisations of the various groups of peasants: the anhayu, the ahuyu and the atwy (slaves). All of them, the author finds, were dependent on the feudal lords in one degree or another, but the dependence of the free or "pure" peasants (anhayu tsky) was masked beneath a shell of patriarchal clan relations. Among such survivals he counts the fostering of the lords' children, the peasant's freedom to pass from one master to another, his possession of a holding of his own and the like. At the same time he sets out the obligations that the pure peasants (anhayu) were bound to perform.³

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