Partner or Province: Abkhazia, 1917–1921

How, between 1917 and 1921, Abkhazians kept choosing a pan-Caucasian path of their own, and twice had a different answer imposed by force.

In the autumn of 1917 the Abkhaz had something most small peoples never get. A choice.

The Russian Empire had collapsed, and across the Caucasus every old certainty went with it. A tiny nation on the Black Sea coast could suddenly look around and pick its friends: Russia, Turkey, the new Georgian republic forming to the south, or the league of mountain peoples gathering to the north. For four short years the Abkhaz chose, again and again. And almost every time, they turned the same way. North.

That is the thread that runs through the whole story. In these years Abkhazia kept choosing a pan-Caucasian, northern-facing path of its own. The two great turning points, the Georgian military entry of 1918 and the Soviet settlement of 1921, were really one long argument about a single question. Would Abkhazia be a partner, or be swallowed as a province?

A parliament in Sukhum

It began with a vote. On 8 November 1917 the Congress of the Abkhaz People met in Sukhum, adopted a Declaration and a Constitution, and elected a parliament, the Abkhaz People's Council, with Simon Basaria in the chair.

The Declaration read the revolution as a licence for nations to decide their own fate, pointing to Ukraine and Finland as places already doing it. Abkhazia, it said, was a country with a thousand-year history. This was not a district asking for favours. It was a people announcing itself.

And the small print mattered. The founding charter gave the Council a standing duty: to keep Abkhazia tied to the Union of Caucasian Highlanders, the mountain league of the north. Not to Tiflis. Even in Samurzakan/Myrzakan (modern Gal), the district hard against the Georgian frontier and the one Tiflis most often claimed, the local peasants' council resolved to join the Highlanders, and to join with Georgia only if Georgia joined the mountain union too.

None of this meant hostility to the Georgians. When an Abkhaz representative addressed the opening of the Georgian National Council in Tiflis that November, he brought warm greetings and the hope that the two peoples would soon meet inside one Caucasian family. He just said it as a member of the mountain alliance. Friendship with Georgia, yes. From a northern home.

A deal between equals

In early 1918 the two sides put it in writing. On 9 February, in Tiflis, the Abkhaz and Georgian national councils signed an agreement, with Alexander Shervashidze (Chachba) speaking for Abkhazia.

Read the terms and you see two equals at a table. They agreed to restore a single, indivisible Abkhazia from the river Ingur to the Mzymta. They left its future political shape to be settled by an Abkhaz assembly, not decided in advance. Each promised to consult the other before making deals with anyone else. Months earlier the Georgian politician Akaki Chkhenkeli had even written that Abkhazia's place in the Highlanders' League was no trouble for Georgia.

Then the northern idea reached its high point. On 11 May 1918, at Batum, the Mountain Republic declared independence, a state stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian, with Abkhazia drawn inside its borders. The Abkhaz delegates were blunt about where they stood. They did not want to be lumped in with the Transcaucasian peoples, they said; they belonged with the north. Writing to the republic's foreign minister, Haydar Bammat, they called the union sacred and indissoluble.

This is the point too often lost. The northern path wasn't a Soviet-era myth invented later. It was a consistent choice, made out loud, by the same people, year after year.

Two armies, not one

Here is where memory plays tricks. People speak of "the Georgian intervention of 1918" as a single event. It was two, and the difference is everything.

In the spring, the Bolsheviks seized Sukhum, proclaimed Soviet power, and arrested the leaders of both camps, the nationalist Basaria and the pro-Georgian Menshevik Isidore Ramishvili alike. The still-shared Transcaucasian government, in which Georgians, Abkhaz, Armenians and Azerbaijanis still sat together, sent troops under the Red Guard commander Valiko Dzhugeli. They retook Sukhum in May. That operation was genuinely anti-Bolshevik, and it was not an occupation of Abkhazia by Georgia, because Georgia did not yet exist as a state.

Then everything changed. At the end of May the Transcaucasian federation broke apart and Georgia declared independence. The soldiers already in Abkhazia did not go home. As the Russian historian Vadim Mukhanov puts it, the detachment "automatically turned into a Georgian one." A force sent against Bolshevism had become the tool of a new state with its eye on the coast.

The Abkhaz Council saw it coming. On 2 June it declared that it now held all power in Abkhazia and that Georgian independence had cut the old legal tie clean through.

It made no difference. In June the Georgian general Giorgi Mazniashvili, backed by German troops, took the country. On 23 June he issued his Order No. 1: Abkhazia was now the Sukhum General-Governorship, he was its governor-general with full military and civil power, and the people would obey Georgian law. The elected Council had agreed to none of it.

What they did to the parliament

The looting came first. Mazniashvili's men loaded cattle, oxen and horses onto ships and carried them out of the country. Basaria's letters to Bammat that summer are the sound of a man watching his homeland stripped bare, telling him the population was helpless and no help was coming.

The harshest testimony came, strangely, from Georgia's own side. Trotsky later published a report written by Abkhaz Mensheviks to their own government, comparing Mazniev's detachments to the notorious Tsarist general Alikhanov. It described villages plundered, women assaulted, and a Lieutenant Kupuni who forced the village council of Azy to lie on the ground under machine-gun fire while he rode his horse over them. When even your supporters write that about you, the words carry weight.

But the violence is not the heart of the case. The parliament is.

Watch what was done to it. The Council was dispersed by force in August 1918. It was dissolved again in October, after its members lost confidence in their pro-Georgian chairman, and several deputies were marched off to the Metekhi prison in Tiflis. It was re-run in March 1919 under tight Georgian control, the rolls padded with non-Abkhaz voters until the Abkhaz lost their majority, and opened by a Georgian Menshevik. That obedient new body promptly declared Abkhazia "an autonomous unit" of Georgia. Three drafts of an actual constitution went to Tiflis over the next two years. None was ever passed. As the historian Stanislav Lakoba notes, the autonomy stayed on paper.

The Georgian case, and why it doesn't hold

A fair account has to give the other side its best form. So here it is. The Bolshevik danger was real; Soviet power really had been proclaimed in Sukhum. The February agreement really existed. And the coast really mattered to a young Georgian republic squeezed by Denikin's White armies to the north.

All true. None of it explains the parliament.

You don't answer a Bolshevik rising by jailing the elected nationalist deputies who fought the Bolsheviks too. You don't restore order by dissolving the same assembly three times until it hands you the words you want. The aim was never order. It was possession. The clearest proof came from Georgia's own envoy, Ilya Odishelidze, who told the Paris Peace Conference that Sochi was "a purely Georgian town" by right of the eleventh century. Even a confidential British report of 1919 admitted the Georgians held the coast with no legal or historical right to it. When you reach back eight hundred years to justify what you took last summer, you have given the game away.

Partner promised, province delivered

Then the Reds came for everyone. Tbilisi fell to the Bolsheviks in February 1921, and the Menshevik leader Noe Zhordania left on the last train out.

For one strange moment the northern dream seemed almost vindicated. In the spring a Soviet Socialist Republic of Abkhazia was proclaimed in its own right, and on 21 May the Georgian Revolutionary Committee formally recognised it and welcomed it as a sister republic.

You can guess what happened next. In December 1921 a "union treaty" bound Abkhazia to Soviet Georgia. On paper a treaty between equals. In practice the first turn of a screw. By 1931 Stalin had quietly demoted Abkhazia again, from a republic to an autonomous region inside Georgia. As Vladislav Ardzinba would later put it, Abkhazia was about the only republic Stalin moved down rather than up.

So return to where we started, to 1917 and that rare luxury of choice. The Abkhaz did choose. They chose clearly, in their parliament, at Batum, in their letters to the mountain north, and they chose partnership in a Caucasus of equals over absorption into anyone's province. The tragedy of these four years is not that they chose badly. It is that they chose at all, again and again, and were overruled each time by men with more soldiers. The choice was real. The honouring of it was not. And a hundred years on, that is still the argument.

Further reading

Almost everything in this article can be read in the original. The key documents and studies are gathered on AbkhazWorld.com and on the Historical Memory of the North Caucasus project at historycaucasus.com.

The documents

• The Declaration of the Abkhaz People's Congress, 8 November 1917, and the accompanying Constitution of the Abkhaz People's Council.
• The treaty between the Abkhazian and Georgian national councils, 9 February 1918.
• The correspondence between Simon Basaria and Haydar Bammat from the Ottoman archives, the appeals quoted here.
• The memorandum of the Union of Circassian Peoples and Daghestan to the Paris Peace Conference, 9 May 1919.
• The declaration of the Georgian Revolutionary Committee recognising Soviet Abkhazia, 21 May 1921, and the union treaty of 16 December 1921.

Studies and accounts

• Stanislav Lakoba, "Abkhazia, Georgia and the Caucasus Confederation", on the northern, confederal idea.
• "General Mazniashvili and the 1918 Occupation of Abkhazia", on the events of that summer.
• Vadim Mukhanov, "Georgian Policy towards Abkhazia, 1918–1921", the Russian historian's account of the dispersals and the imposed autonomy, drawn on throughout.
• Cem Kumuk, Düvel-i Muazzama'nın Kıskacında Kafkasya Dağlıları (Istanbul, 2022), and his essay "Abkhazia and Georgia on the Verge of Independence, 1917–1921".
• Leon Trotsky, Between Red and White (1922), and C. E. Bechhofer, In Denikin's Russia and the Caucasus, 1919–1920, for two very different outside witnesses.

What came after

• A Century of Sovietisation, or How Abkhazia Became a Republic, and How the SSR Abkhazia Became an Autonomy within Georgia.
• Stephen Shenfield, Stalin-Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1936–53, and the 1989 speech of Vladislav Ardzinba, quoted at the close.
• Metin Kodzoko, The Downgraded Republic: The Stalin-Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1921-1953
• The Republic of the Union of Mountain Peoples, Abkhazia, and Soviet Policies: A Historical Analysis