Abkhazia was an exception to even the exceptions in Soviet history: a strong base of Bolshevik support amid a popular form of Georgian Menshevism; a sub-tropical climate conducive not only to cultivating strategically significant crops (tobacco, citrus), but as the preferred vacation destination for senior Bolshevik leaders; a titular nationality that was a significant minority in “its” republic; and a novel territorial status for the first decade of Soviet power, the “treaty republic” (dogovornaia respublika). Timothy K. Blauvelt examines these peculiarities—and the opportunities and risks they afforded to local actors—in his archivally-rich examination of early Soviet Abkhazia through the lens of its charismatic and vibrant leader, Nestor Lakoba. For all of early Soviet Abkhazia's novelty, Blauvelt shows convincingly how it can be a “prism through which to view the intersection of clientelism and nationality, the tensions between federalism and local sovereignty implicit in the ‘post-imperial’ Soviet federative structure, and the role of personalized power in the early Soviet periphery.” (5)
Like several of his contemporaries from the Caucasus, Lakoba was a larger-than-life figure who was and continues to be mythologized in competing and contradictory ways. Born into a peasant family in post-mukhadzhirstvo Abkhazia, Lakoba was an early convert to the Bolshevik cause, having allegedly been exposed to revolutionary literature at the infamous Tiflis Seminary. After a short-lived Bolshevik “Sukhum Commune” in 1918, Lakoba returned to Abkhazia in 1921 and took up the position of chair of the Abkhazian Sovnarkom (rather than Party), which he would command for the next fifteen years, until his suspicious death in Tbilisi in 1936. Lakoba's power base was the Abkhaz peasantry, from whom he came, though his appeal proved broader over time: first, among wide swaths of Abkhaz society, including elites and intelligentsia; and second, certain non-Abkhaz populations in the republic, as well as well-placed Georgian Bolshevik patrons. The former made Lakoba and his network seemingly irreplaceable, given the small population of ethnic Abkhaz from whom to draw for korenizatsiia (indigenization) nomenklatura efforts.
This perception of irreplaceability emboldened Lakoba and his clients and allowed them to successfully resist several political challenges over this 15-year period, from Tbilisi- and Moscow-commissioned investigations to show trials to more local power struggles within Abkhazia. These challenges form the chapter framework for Blauvelt's book, including the inter-Abkhaz “Rif revolt” (Ch. 4), a violent controversy with ethnic and economic dimensions in the tobacco center of Tsebelda (Ch. 5), and a series of commissions and investigations from without between 1928–31 (Ch. 6–7). In each instance, Blauvelt shows the importance of Lakoba's Abkhaz power base and platform, as well as the decisive intervention of Lakoba's patrons, including Sergo Orjonikidze, Lavrenti Beria, and Iosif Stalin. Lakoba's fortunes shifted, however, as Beria rose to power in Georgia in the 1930s (displacing, in the process, much of Orjonikidze's network). The deepening struggle between Lakoba and Beria in this period has often been simplified as an ethnic conflict rather than, as Blauvelt aptly demonstrates, one between political factions.
Writing histories of Soviet Abkhazia, including—or perhaps especially—during the Lakoba period, poses significant methodological challenges due to the fact that Georgian paramilitaries destroyed Abkhazian Party and state archives during the 1992–93 Georgian-Abkhaz war. Blauvelt tackles this limitation creatively through extensive engagement with underused Tbilisi-based sources, including from both Georgian and Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republics (SFSR) collections, as well as by revisiting, with new conclusions, the personal files of Lakoba that found their way to the Hoover Institution following his death and posthumous purge as his supporter-turned-rival Beria fully took the reins in Soviet Georgia. This combination of sources mirrors the structural arrangement of layered federalism—the simultaneous subordination of Abkhazia to the TSFSR and GSSR during Lakoba's life—which created both tensions and opportunities, including the strategy of leveraging relationships in multiple “metropoles” (Tbilisi, Moscow, or even the Kremlin decamped to a Black Sea dacha) from the peripheral Abkhazian vantage point.
Blauvelt's longstanding and consistent access to archives in Tbilisi has paid off in this book, revealing seemingly obscure episodes in early Soviet history that are linked in surprising ways to the broader arc of early Soviet history, from korenizatsiia and the NEP, to collectivization and the Terror. Lakoba's rise and fall, as detailed compellingly by Blauvelt's book, has much to teach us about how the burgeoning Bolshevik state viewed the challenging terrain of the Caucasus—as well as how Caucasian actors understood and attempted to deploy the larger Bolshevik project toward their own, local, and at times deeply personal ends.
