Documents on the History of Abkhazia: 1917 to 1931 | Chapter 1. Political Questions
Edited by Georgy Anchabadze, Marina Pagava, Ia Tutashvili and Georgy Maisuradze
Tbilisi, 2021
Chapter 1. Political Questions
The Abkhaz People's Council
Pages 9 to 75
This chapter has been translated from Russian by AbkhazWorld. It forms part of the second volume of a three-volume documentary series, Documents on the History of Abkhazia: the first volume covers the nineteenth century to the early twentieth (Tbilisi, 2018); the second, presented here, covers the years 1917 to 1931 (Tbilisi, 2021); and the third covers 1924 to 1989 (Tbilisi, 2025). The second volume was edited by Georgy Anchabadze, Marina Pagava, Ia Tutashvili and Georgy Maisuradze. Georgy Anchabadze (Achba), the lead editor, is a historian of Abkhaz descent long associated with Tbilisi State University and with the Georgian-Abkhaz scholarly dialogue on the shared history of the two peoples. The series was published with the support of COBERM, a joint initiative of the European Union and the United Nations Development Programme.
The chapter gathers primary documents on the Abkhaz People's Council between November 1917 and December 1920: the Declaration and Constitution adopted at the Congress of the Abkhaz People in Sukhum on 8 November 1917; the agreements of February and June 1918 between the National Council of Georgia and the Abkhaz People's Council; the regulations, explanatory memorandum and dissenting opinion produced for the 1918 to 1919 Council elections; the proceedings of the elected Council from its opening in March 1919, including the Act on Autonomous Abkhazia of 20 March 1919; the Council's economic petitions and memoranda to the Government of the Democratic Republic of Georgia; and the 1920 draft Constitution of Autonomous Abkhazia, together with the delegation's closing statement of 5 December 1920, at which point agreement on the procedure for adopting that constitution had still not been reached. The Council itself was renamed the People's Council of Abkhazia in May 1919; both names appear in the documents according to the date of each item.
The translation aims to present the documents in full and without abridgement, preserving the institutional voice, the political disagreements and the archival apparatus, including footnotes, seals, signatures and marginal resolutions, of the 2021 edition. Where the printed Russian text itself contains apparent errors, inconsistencies or damaged passages, these have been flagged rather than silently corrected, and are recorded in the accompanying translator's notes.
The full chapter in PDF can be downloaded by clicking here (775 KB)