Georgian policy towards Abkhazia in the period 1918-1921, by Vadim Mukhanov

  • History
General Giorgi Mazniev (Mazniashvili) with his son Ivan.

This article has been written in Russian and is translated into English.

Vadim M. Mukhanov
Head of Caucasus Department of The Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IMEMO). Russia.

In 1917, i.e. in the first revolutionary year, when everyone was just beginning to live according to the new rules, the principle of territorial demarcation in Transcaucasia was recognised to be based on ethnicity (which was associated with the economic needs of the people and topographical conditions). This is what was accepted and supported by the main political forces in the region (in particular, the representatives of the Georgian Social Democratic and Social Federalist parties took a similar position). Striking confirmation of this is one of the programme-statements of the Social Democratic Party, which emphasised that “the boundaries of territorial self-government are established on the principle of the real settlement of one or another nationality, while economic and living conditions are taken into account. When shifting national borders, a referendum of those areas that are disputed in determining borders is to be applied”. This principle did not cause heated debates and discussions at numerous meetings and commissions either during that fateful year or until the declaration of independence in the late spring of 1918 (that is, the period of the Provisional Government and the united Transcaucasian Republic).

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Who should be settled in Abkhazia? By Jakob Gogebashvili (1877)

  • History

This article by the famous Georgian publicist Jakob Gogebashvili was published in the newspaper "Tiflis Vestnik [Тифлисский вестник]" No. 209, 210, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248, 249) September-November 1877. The article is written in Russian.

The article determined the ideological basic principles of the whole programme of "development" of Abkhazia by Georgian settlers, as a result of which tens and hundreds of thousands of Mingrelians, Svans, Georgians rushed to the fertile Black Sea lands.

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

  • History

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)

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Abkhazia and The Caucasian War: 1810-1864, by George Anchabadze

  • History

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.

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