Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus

by Krista A. Goff | Cornell University Press
Krista Goff is a historian of Soviet and post-Soviet history, with a particular interest in the North and South Caucasus.

Chapter 2: Territory, War, and Nation-Building in the South Caucasus (pp.61-105)

What’s Yours Is Mine: Nation-Building and Extraterritorial Nationhood Inside the South Caucasus  (pp.81-93)

On 26 July 1866, a popular gathering in the village of Lykhny grew into an uprising known as the Lykhny Uprising.

Abkhazian historian Soslan Salakaya told us about the preconditions of the popular uprising and its consequences.

Droeba (Georgian: დროება, "the Times") was an influential Georgian political and cultural newspaper published in Tiflis from 1866 to 1885.

George Anchabadze (Achba) 
Professor of history at the Ilia State University, Georgia.

The Caucasian War is the longest-running military conflict in Russian history. One of its features is the absence of generally accepted chronological boundaries. Moreover, if almost all historians recognize 1864 as the final date of this conflict, then there is a wide range of opinions regarding the initial date - 1722, 1763, 1785, 1801, 1817, 1830 and other years. Each of these dates has its own more or less justifiable motives, but the most reasonable is the opinion of historians who attribute the beginning of the great confrontation in the North Caucasus to the era of the Russian Empress Catherine II (1762-1796), when the active advance of the Russian troops and administration began here.

Translation

21 January 1919

Temir-Khan-Shura

I am happy on this great historic day for us the mountaineers of the Caucasus. I am a member of the government of your related-by-blood, fraternal Abkhazian people, and offer greetings on behalf of the entire Abkhazian people to the members of the Union Council, as the supreme body uniting the ravaged and oppressed mountain-peoples of the North Caucasus.