out of fear for the advancing Turks. Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, became one of the capitals in the Caucasus from where a Russified Georgian elite ruled the Caucasus in cooperation with the Russians. Finally, the Caucasian War created a gigantic diaspora of predominantly Islamic Caucasians, who fled to the Ottoman Empire from the murderous, Christian Russians. Joseph Stalin A is by far Georgia’s most famous inhabitant. He was acquainted with the Caucasus’ different nationalities like no other at the top of the Bolshevik party apparatus. After the Communists seized power, Stalin as party commissar (1917-1924) was charged with the minority issue. In a speech to the Supreme Soviet he declared that the Caucasian mountain peoples had suffered enough under the tsars and should be helped instead of suppressed. But no regime would have more radical consequences for the Caucasus than that of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Under Lenin’s command, the North Caucasus and the Black Sea coast were designated as holiday destinations for the proletariat. With great difficulty the inhospitable coast and mountains were paved and filled with hotels and sanatoria. The mass tourism went hand in hand with the mass immigration of Russians. Stalin altered the population composition even more drastically by transporting whole ethnic groups to Central Asia. In addition to the Cherkessians, Chechens, Balkarians and Ingushetians, Abkhazia’s Greek, Bulgarian and Armenian minorities were deported. Russian and Georgian colonisers took their place in the Caucasus. They had often also been forced to move. This is the background of the widespread hatred of Georgians in Abkhazia and the North Caucasus.
A
Just as Chechnya, for example, was an autonomous republic (ASSR) within the Russian Federation, so Abkhazia was within the Georgian Republic. It had not always been. For a few years - between 1921 and 1931 - Abkhazia had had the status of republic, in a federation with Georgia, within the Soviet Union. During the Soviet era there were regular uprisings against the central regime in the Caucasus, in particular in Georgia and Chechnya. On 18 March 1989 - perhaps they foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union - thousands of Abkhazians in Sukhumi demanded the independence of their
Colliding histories
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