Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Abkhazia
Proceedings of the Abkhaz State Museum, Issue VIII
Sukhum, 2023, pp. 95–108

Editor-in-Chief: A. I. Dzhopua
Editorial Board: G. D. Gumba, D. R. Tarkil, V. A. Nyushkov, I. T. Tsugba

Diana V. Akhba
Historian, ethnologist, archaeologist, and local historian; Senior Research Fellow at the Abkhaz State Museum.

Translated by AbkhazWorld

Among the agricultural branches of Abkhazia, viticulture has always occupied an important place. The country’s natural conditions, its humid subtropical climate, diverse relief, variation in altitude above sea level, and heterogeneity of soils, have all been conducive to this. The antiquity of the appearance of the grapevine in Abkhazia is attested by extensive archaeological, folkloric-linguistic, and ethnographic material, as well as written sources.

Zapiski kraeveda. Istoricheskiy zhurnal. Vypusk No. 1, pp. 110–115
Notes of a Local Historian: Historical Journal, Issue No. 1, pp. 110–115

By Denis K. Gopia
City of Sukhum, Republic of Abkhazia
Historian–Medievalist

Translated by AbkhazWorld

Abstract

This article examines the history of the city of Gagra from antiquity to the present day. It also discusses the structures built during the periods of the Russian Empire and Soviet rule, and offers an interpretation of the city’s toponymy.

Keywords: Gagra, history, toponymy, Lesser and Greater Abkhazia, Novorossiysk.

Z. V. Anchabadze
Essays on the History of the Peoples of the North Caucasus in the Middle Ages
Part I (6th–8th centuries)
Tbilisi, 1982
(pp. 325–336).

Zurab V. Anchabadze (Achba)
(22 April 1920, Gagra – 14 January 1984, Sukhum)
A distinguished historian and Caucasologist, honoured as a Merited Scholar of the Abkhaz ASSR (1961). He held a Doctorate in History (1960), became Professor in 1963, and was elected Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR in 1980.

Otar P. Dzidzaria (Dzari-ipa) is an Abkhaz linguist, lexicologist and lexicographer. After graduating in 1976, he taught Abkhaz language and literature and later continued his research at the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He served as Head of the Department of Abkhaz Language and Dean of the Faculty of Philology at Abkhaz State University.

He is the author of the monographs Maritime Vocabulary in the Abkhaz Language (1989) and The Sea and the Abkhazians (2002), pioneering the study of Abkhaz maritime terminology. He earned his Doctor of Philological Sciences degree in 2006.

Translated by AbkhazWorld

This chapter is translated from “Bolschewistische Ordnung in Georgien: Der Große Terror in einer kleinen kaukasischen Republik (Bolshevik order in Georgia: The Great Terror in a Small Caucasian Republic)” by Marc Junge and Bernd Bonwetsch, pp. 275–276 (“Abstammung statt Staatsbürgerschaft”).

Ethnic Origin in Place of Citizenship

The aim of the Great Terror in Georgia, unlike the deportations, was not the physical expulsion of entire ethnic groups, but rather the systematic violent disciplining and marginalisation of nations in order to punish them for their alleged lack of loyalty to the Soviet system. It should be noted that the already fragile balance that had for decades underpinned the coexistence of various peoples in Georgia had been seriously undermined by collectivisation, but it was only the Great Terror that became its ultimate gravedigger.

Thus, the national component of the mass repressions of 1937–1938 should be viewed as a radical element of the long-term policy of ethnic homogenisation pursued by the party and state elites of the Georgian Soviet state. From the perspective of Georgian realities, the thesis formulated by the German historian and political scientist Gerhard Simon with regard to the entire Soviet Union appears overly risky. According to Simon, beginning in 1933, Stalin slowed down the process of nation-building, which only gained a new dimension in the 1950s.[321]