Administrative 'Exclusion': The Laz, by Marc Junge, Daniel Müller, Wolfgang Feurstein and Ivan Džucha

How a Muslim, non-Georgian-speaking minority became caught between Tbilisi's assimilation drive and Stalin's terror, told through the letters of the Laz activist Iskander Tsitashi.

Editor's Note

The following chapter is taken from Marc Junge and Bernd Bonwetsch (eds.), Bolschewistische Ordnung in Georgien: Der Große Terror in einer kleinen kaukasischen Republik (Berlin, Munich and Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), from the section 'Ethnos und Terror' (p. 157): the chapter 'Administrative Exklusion: Lazen', pp. 172–189, co-authored by Marc Junge, Daniel Müller, Wolfgang Feurstein and Ivan Džucha.

It is a remarkable piece of scholarship, built almost entirely around one man's paper trail: the letters of Iskander Tsitashi, a Laz activist who spent the 1930s pleading, first with the Comintern and then with Stalin himself, against what he called the 'Georgianisation' of his people - their language pushed out of schools, their land quietly withheld, their newspaper shut down. His warnings were accurate, his faith in Moscow was not, and in 1938 it cost him his life on a fabricated espionage charge. The chapter sets his fate against that of his quieter colleague Mukhammed Vanilishi, who chose flattery over confrontation and lived long enough to talk Beria into reversing part of the 1944 deportations, a contrast the authors draw out with real care. Perhaps the most sobering pages are the statistical ones: the Laz, though a tiny community, were sentenced to death during the Great Terror at a rate far higher than their Georgian neighbours, a pattern the authors link to their closeness with Nestor Lakoba's Abkhazia as much as to their standing as a border people.

We are grateful to the authors and to De Gruyter for this contribution to the history of the Caucasus. The translation into English is our own, prepared for AbkhazWorld readers.

4. Administrative 'Exclusion': The Laz

At first glance it is puzzling that a fourth ethnic group (alongside the Ajarians, Mingrelians and Svans) belonging to the category of Georgians with an ambivalent cultural identity was still recorded separately in the troika protocols. This group were the Laz. It was no accident that the Laz were the most problematic of all the South Caucasian, or Kartvelian, groups, since the dividing lines between them and the Georgians ran very deep. The Ajarians, for instance, were Muslims, but their language was Georgian. The Mingrelians and Svans did not speak Georgian, but they were Orthodox Christians, and were thus more receptive to the influence of the Georgian language (both as the language of worship and as the language of schooling). The Laz, by contrast, combined both dividing elements: they did not speak Georgian and were Muslims at the same time. To these two elements was added a further factor: the territory they inhabited. Under the Soviet-Turkish border agreements of 1922, the frontier between the USSR and Turkey ran in such a way that Lazistan, the country of the Laz, lay entirely within Turkish territory, with the exception of the eastern half of a single village, and at that time some 150,000 Laz lived there. Thus the Laz, apart from the village of Sarpi, through which the border ran, were a diaspora group within Georgia, which set them apart from the other Kartvelian groups.

The singling out of the Laz as a separate ethnic group in the troika protocols may also be explained by the vigorous struggle to defend Laz cultural distinctiveness waged by a small group of like-minded individuals. The chief spokesman for this group was the poet and publicist Iskander Teimurazovich Tsitashi, a member of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences and a former Komsomol member. A letter of protest that he wrote on the eve of the Great Terror allows us to form an impression of the arguments with which an intellectual closely bound up with the Laz sought to bolster his attempt to resist Georgian claims to hegemony. The letter likewise shows what kind of accusations Beria and the Georgian elite had to reckon with in defending their nationality policy, and what means the Georgian leadership had to resort to in order to obstruct the autonomist movement.

This concerns a letter that Iskander Tsitashi sent no later than 25 July 1937 to Georgi Dimitrov, the general secretary of the Comintern's executive committee, in which he poured out complaints about manifestations of Georgian nationalism directed against the Laz. The author of the letter, by his own account, had since 1928 been one of the leaders of the Laz national-revolutionary movement, had taken part in creating a Laz literary language, and had written the first books in Laz. He had also helped train the first cadres of the Laz 'people's liberation front'.

Tsitashi described the current position of the Laz in Georgia in extremely negative terms. According to Tsitashi, 'the Georgian nationalist world has begun to obstruct our cause by every possible means'. Georgian 'nationalist scholars' — elsewhere in the letter Tsitashi calls their stance 'chauvinistic and bourgeois' — claimed that the Laz were a Georgian tribe and that the Laz language was a dialect of Zan, which in turn belonged to the Kartvelian, that is the Georgian, proto-language. Tsitashi explained his opposing position by characterising the description of Laz as a dialect of Zan as 'hypothetical', and calling the Kartvelian proto-language 'mythical'. To support his argument, Tsitashi enclosed a letter from a scholarly expert, evidently a certificate from the N. Ya. Marr Institute of Language and Thought of the USSR Academy of Sciences, based in Leningrad. This, unlike the hierarchical conception of the Georgian 'nationalist scholars', set out the view that the Laz language was of equal standing and originality, and did not use 'Georgian' as a synonym for the South Caucasian (Kartvelian) language family.

A further reproach that Tsitashi levelled at Georgian historians was that, contrary to historical fact, they tried to present Laz history as part of Georgian history. Tsitashi disputed this view by citing the certificate attached to his letter, in which the history of the Laz as a separate people was traced back as far as the fourth century AD.

The explosive element in Tsitashi's letter lay in the fact that he linked the levelling of Laz language and history to the general hunt then under way against internal party 'deviationists' of every kind. He even went so far as to launch an open attack on the current and past nationality policy of the leadership of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia and of the republic's state structures, which the author of the letter characterised as 'Georgianisation'. Georgian nationalist historians, and linguists in particular, Tsitashi wrote, exploited the fact 'that a nationalist odour still lingers within the party (in Georgia) [various national deviationists, secret Mensheviks, Trotskyists], [who] have launched a campaign against Laz writing and Laz schooling'. According to Tsitashi, an authorised Georgian commission, without any participation by the Laz and against the resistance of the Laz population, had decided to replace the Latin alphabet with the Georgian one, while schooling in the Laz language was conducted only as a temporary measure until pupils had mastered Georgian. This decision was subsequently amended by the Central Executive Committee of the Georgian SSR, but only to the extent that children were taught in Laz for the first two years of primary school rather than four, after which they continued their education in Georgian, Russian or Turkish.

Tsitashi describes the background to the Georgian leadership's nationality and demographic policy towards the Laz, though mostly indirectly, as a mixture of general incompetence and a deliberate strategy of procrastination, carried out by mid- and lower-level state organs, which covertly hindered the Sovietisation of the Laz and their integration into Soviet society. If one follows the author's account, the promising development of the revolutionary movement among the Laz was blocked precisely as a result of the policy pursued by the Georgian leadership. Tsitashi identifies demographic policy as the starting point. According to him, from 1928 onwards young Communist cadres were being trained in Abkhazia from among the Laz, whose activity in support of 'national and social liberation' extended, thanks to the 'leaky' border, as far as the areas of Laz settlement in Turkey. These fighters were helped by the fact that, from as early as 1926, the revolutionary-national movement had achieved its first successes throughout Lazistan, while Soviet Communist influence had grown.

At the end of 1929, publication began in Sukhumi (Abkhazia) of a Laz-language newspaper, Red Star (Mčita Murucxi). The paper was printed in the Latin script, so that it could also be read by Laz living in Turkey, where the Latin script had likewise been introduced, albeit with some difficulty owing to the new letters used in the paper. Its editor-in-chief was the 25-year-old Tsitashi. The paper, which ran to only four folio-format pages and had a minuscule print run of 100 copies, was published only until December 1929: after just two issues had appeared, its publication was halted, so Tsitashi claimed, in response to a protest by the Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, and Tsitashi himself was forced to leave Georgia.

The Georgian party organisation came in for particular criticism from Tsitashi over the conciliatory position it had adopted in 1928 towards the mass emigration of Laz to Turkey. According to Tsitashi's figures, by 1937 some six to seven thousand Laz had left Georgia. He believed that the Georgian party leadership ought to have responded in an organised fashion to pressure from Turkey and prevented the emigration.

Tsitashi believed that it was not only policy towards the Laz living outside Georgia that had ended in failure, but also the concentrated Sovietisation policy directed at the Laz within Georgia itself, begun in 1931. Here again language policy was Tsitashi's starting point for criticism. Although in 1932 the first Laz-language school textbook (a primer) had been published in Georgia, or more precisely in Abkhazia, and teaching in Laz schools had 'spontaneously' shifted from Turkish to Laz, this trend, despite official support from the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia, was subsequently blocked by the People's Commissariat of Education of the Georgian SSR. New textbooks were approved only after endless delays, and their printing was held up, ostensibly for lack of funds. When a further textbook, again written in the Latin script, was prepared in 1936, it was not admitted into the schools, because the People's Commissariat of Education suddenly demanded Laz textbooks in Georgian. Moreover, the Central Committee's cultural-propaganda department forbade even raising the question for discussion. Tsitashi held that, however small the Laz people might be, it was the task of the Georgian SSR leadership to create 'every condition for the flourishing of their culture, language, literature and economic prosperity', and not to assist Kemal Pasha, that is Turkey, in eliminating the Laz as a distinct people. Tsitashi characterised Georgia's policy towards the Laz overall as 'disgraceful'. The Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia had at the time left four of his complaints unanswered. Nor, Tsitashi said, had his letter to Stalin done any good, since the commission eventually appointed by the Central Committee was dominated by a Menshevik, already exposed as an 'enemy of the people', who had subsequently repainted himself as a Trotskyist.

To lend variety to his account of these general processes, Tsitashi paints a picture of mass persecution directed at him personally by the organs of the Georgian NKVD, who among other things interrogated him about his social and national origin. Tsitashi complained that, as a result, he had been 'morally destroyed', to such an extent that he was forced to abandon everything and leave Georgia.

As a way out of this situation, Tsitashi proposed a two-pronged strategy: first, to use the Comintern to return to a policy directed at the Laz on both sides of the Georgian-Turkish border, drawing on contacts with the Communist Party of Turkey; and second, to bring pressure to bear, through the central Moscow structures and above all through the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), on the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia, so that the Georgian authorities would settle the 'Laz question'.

Tsitashi's letter is characterised by a complete loss of illusions. As a last resort, he tried to use the Comintern, the international organisation uniting the communist parties of various countries, to influence the Moscow leadership so that it would pay attention to the problem of the Laz in Georgia and Turkey. In this spirit, Tsitashi deliberately sought to absolve Moscow of any criticism. He thus concentrated all his reproaches and accusations on Georgia, portraying Moscow's role as that of a partner who was constantly being deceived and misled. Such an approach was entirely justified, since local party organs and state institutions frequently hindered, and even worked against, the policies of the centre. This applied to Georgia too. The party and Soviet leadership of Georgia did what it could to give the outward appearance that the republic was implementing the official line of nationality policy aimed at protecting and supporting the national diasporas. There is no doubt that the Georgian authorities were able to demonstrate to Moscow that the problems of the Laz were constantly on the agenda of party and state organisations and of various commissions. It must therefore have been especially irksome to them that some local activist not only would not let them alone for years on end, but again and again drew Moscow's attention to the fact that, in his view, what was really at issue in Georgia's nationality policy was the informal nationalist policy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia and of other Georgian state organs, aimed at the 'Georgianisation' of the republic.

Thus, as early as a letter to Stalin written at the beginning of 1935, Tsitashi described the treatment of the Laz in Georgia as a permanent catastrophe. The allocation of land to the Laz, who with the onset of collectivisation had lost the possibility of leasing plots for growing tobacco, was effectively torpedoed by the republican government, even though the Abkhazian regional committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia and the Abkhazian Central Executive Committee had already, in 1930, spoken in favour of allocating the appropriate land. In the end the Georgian authorities allocated the Laz too small and marshy a strip of coastline, providing them with practically no machinery or funds for draining the marshes, nor medicines for treating malaria. Moreover, without regard for the cultural particularities of the Laz, members of other nationalities were settled in their villages, creating mixed fishing brigades. The integration of Laz craftsmen into producer cooperatives likewise proceeded in an entirely unsatisfactory manner, without any regard for their national specificity.

There is, however, one inconsistency in Tsitashi's argument. In the context of his accusations against the party-Soviet leadership of Georgia, he characterises the closure of the Laz newspaper in his letter to Dimitrov not as the work of the Georgian authorities but as the result of Turkish intervention, although everything speaks against this version. The paper, after all, was published in Sukhumi in Abkhazia, not in Batumi in Adjara, which lies close to Lazistan. Evidently the Abkhazian authorities, as in the case of the allocation of land to the Laz, supported the publication of the paper against the wishes of Tbilisi, seeking in this way to find allies in the struggle to preserve their own autonomy. And indeed, the troika protocols contain indications that Laz and Turkish activists cooperated with the Abkhazian leadership headed by Nestor Lakoba. In turn, the OGPU organs of Georgia began to persecute Tsitashi, who after the closure of the paper was forced to flee Abkhazia, and hence Georgia, for Moscow. A possible explanation for Tsitashi's overestimation of Turkish influence lies in his determination to protect Moscow from criticism at all costs. Evidently Tsitashi did not have enough information to rule out with any certainty that foreign-policy, that is to say still 'Moscow', interests were among the causes of the newspaper's closure.

Tsitashi's determination to portray Moscow in the role of a deceived 'victim' is entirely understandable from his point of view, since he was in urgent need of the centre's support; but this stance was short-sighted and unpromising, in that Moscow's policy was undoubtedly one of the causes of the mass voluntary emigration of the Laz to Turkey. Thus Tsitashi's letters contain no criticism whatsoever of the campaign against Islam, which sharply intensified in 1927 as a result of the 'Hujum' ('Offensive') campaign directed at ending the wearing of the veil. It is worth mentioning here that the father of Mukhammed Vanilishi, Tsitashi's 'right-hand man', was the hoja of the Turkish-Georgian border settlement of Maradidi (Maradit).

Turkey, which in Tsitashi's account consistently appears as the hostile party profiting from Georgia's failed nationality policy, was nonetheless evidently more attractive to the Muslim Laz than the USSR, despite the secularising policy pursued by Mustafa Kemal. In just the same way, throughout the 'long' nineteenth century, up to 1914–1918, muhajirs, Muslim refugees seeking to escape the grip of the Russian Empire in the Caucasus, migrated to Turkey, as did Balkan Slav Christians and Greeks. Nor does Tsitashi write anything about the Soviet Union's unilateral policy of sealing the border, which considerably complicated contact between the Laz, since the traditional border crossings they had practised were now classed as a crime. It is only in veiled form that Tsitashi mentions, in his 1935 letter to Stalin, that the Laz had learned from bitter experience the consequences of the forced collectivisation carried out by Moscow. With the liquidation of private farming and the creation of collective farms, they lost the possibility of leasing land. Thereafter the Laz's need for land was met partially or not at all in the course of land-use planning, and they themselves were admitted only reluctantly into collective farms and state enterprises.

Yet the real reason for Tsitashi's loyalty to Moscow, in all probability, lay not only in his unwillingness to criticise his potential allies in the confrontation with the Georgian authorities, but also in his own role as 'guardian angel' of the Laz. It is likely that Tsitashi assumed this role by arrangement with, and with the support of, if not on the direct instructions of, Moscow. The suspicion that Tsitashi had from the outset been given a special assignment to concern himself with the problem of a national minority such as the Laz, who lived almost entirely in Turkey in the immediate vicinity of the Soviet border, and whose situation in turn made it possible to pursue certain Soviet foreign-policy interests, arises as soon as one becomes acquainted with his 'murky' biography. Thus it can be excluded with a fair degree of confidence that Tsitashi was ethnically Laz by origin. The surviving troika protocol does not state Tsitashi's nationality, giving only his place of birth, the town of 'Vitse' as rendered in the Laz manner, that is the town of Findikli in the far east of what is today the Turkish province (il) of Rize. Doubts about Tsitashi's Laz origin were entertained not only by the Georgian state security organs, who interrogated him in the 1930s in order to establish his nationality, but by 1938 did not record it in the troika protocol at all. Almost all of his contemporaries agreed that Tsitashi had no particular command of the Laz language and spoke almost no Turkish, which was unusual for a member of the Laz intelligentsia. Other Laz repeatedly took Tsitashi for a Russian, a Jew or even a German, until eventually Mukhammed Vanilishi, the 'second man' in the Laz autonomist movement, along with several other individuals, declared that Iskander Tsitashi's real name was Alexander Tsvetkov. The theory of a Russian origin for Tsitashi is supported by the fact that, already a writer, he had translated Gogol, which does not seem a typical occupation for a Laz intellectual of the time. One should also add the direct contacts that Tsitashi, at such a young age, already had with senior scholarly institutions, which opened doors for him at the USSR Academy of Sciences, at the universities of Moscow and Tiflis, at the A. S. Enukidze Leningrad Institute of Oriental Studies, where courses for national minorities of the Soviet East were run, and at the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences in Baku. Against a Laz origin for Tsitashi speaks the indirect denunciation of a number of Laz contained in Tsitashi's 1935 letter to Stalin, which could have had unpleasant consequences for these Laz families. Thus certain Laz are named and characterised as agents of Turkey 'dressed in Soviet clothing'. Denunciations of this unflattering kind, addressed to Beria, the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia and ultimately to Stalin, would, had they become known within the Laz community, have made life considerably harder for Tsitashi, up to and including acts of revenge. During his lengthy absences in Leningrad, Moscow, Tiflis or Baku, Tsitashi himself needed trusted contacts among the Laz who could supply him with information. Tsitashi's early entry into the Komsomol at the age of 19 in 1923, in which he remained until 1934, together with his successful career in the scholarly fields of ethnography and linguistics, likewise testifies to the fact that Tsitashi's biography was shaped by his close relations with the Communist authorities. He collaborated with the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, travelled frequently to Moscow, and worked at Tiflis University in the department of Caucasian languages. In Baku he headed, evidently from the autumn of 1937, a section of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences, with which he had presumably maintained relations even earlier. Behind such an impressive scholarly career there undoubtedly lay political approval from Moscow, as well as the support of Nikolai Marr, the leading figure in Soviet linguistics, who backed Tsitashi right up until his own death in 1934.

The full chapter in PDF can be downloaded by clicking here (427 KB)

Turkish version | Türkçe: İdari “Dışlama”: Lazlar

See also:

+ Laz Intellectuals Explain Their View of Laz Ethnicity

+ Bolshevik order in Georgia: Social Status and Repressions: Abkhazians, Adjarians, Ossetians, by Marc Junge & Bernd Bonwetsch

+ Bolshevik order in Georgia: Ethnic Origin in Place of Citizenship

+ What’s Yours Is Mine: Nation-Building and Extraterritorial Nationhood Inside the South Caucasus, by Krista A. Goff

+ The Downgraded Republic: The Stalin-Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1921-1953