The discriminatory policy of the tsarist authorities in relationship to the Abkhazians led to the Abkhazians starting to place greater trust in the neighbouring Mingrelians and Georgians than in the Russians. However, at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries when it became clear what practical steps were being taken by the Georgians for the demographic annexation of Abkhazia’s emptied lands, for the georgianisation of the Abkhazians, and, finally, with the revelation of the political goals of the Georgian people’s spiritual fathers to incorporate Abkhazia within the frontiers of a future Georgian state, all of these factors gave rise to the Georgian-Abkhazian ethno-political conflict, which has already gone on for more than a century. From this period the ethnic history of the Abkhazians has to be seen within the direct context of a stand-off between Georgians and Abkhazians.

With the lifting from the Abkhazians of the label of a ‘guilty’ population (1907) thanks to their non-participation in the revolutionary movement of 1905-1907, tsarism gave the Abkhazians themselves the opportunity to withstand the ethno-cultural offensive from the side of Georgia. If previously the Abkhazians saw in the face of the Georgians sympathisers and to a certain level protectors, then, by the start of the century, the striving for, and the concrete steps taken to effect, the georgianisation of the Abkhazians shattered the trust the Abkhazians had in the Georgians. Henceforth, Abkhazian society, in order to find safety from the impending new ethnic catastrophe of assimilation, began to show concern for the mass-expansion of Abkhazian literacy, for the conservation and development of Abkhazian culture, and the restoration of Abkhazia’s statehood.

Tsarism’s attempts to support the national rebirth of the Abkhazians were, in the main, directed not by any yearning to preserve the ethnic identity of the Abkhazians but by a desire to provide some kind of barrier to the process of the georgianisation of the core population of Abkhazia and to restore trust between the Abkhazian and Russian authorities. At the same time, these measures took on a half-hearted character, and in many settlements in Abkhazia, especially its south-eastern region of Samurzaq’an, the Abkhaz language continued to be under pressure from the Mingrelian language (and, for official or religious purposes, Georgian). Moreover, despite all efforts, the Abkhazian population of this region, forming about half of the ethnic Abkhazians left after the Maxadzhirstvo (’Exile’), was subjected to intensive assimilatory activity under the leadership of the Georgian intelligentsia and Church, and later by both the Menshevik and Bolshevik Georgian authorities.

Following upon the forced suppression of the Abkhazian national self-awareness among the majority of the Samurzaq’anians, the authorities of Soviet Georgia in the 30s-50s of the XXth century, with the support of Moscow, began to effect a policy of georgianising the entire Abkhazian ethnos. To this effect, the following fundamental measures were put into practice:

— lowering the state status of Abkhazia and its inclusion as an autonomy within the composition of the Georgian SSR (1931);
— repression of the political leadership of Abkhazia and of the Abkhazian scholarly and artistic intelligentsia, along with their replacement by Georgian cadres;
— declaring that the Abkhaz language and culture was related to the Georgian language and culture and that the Abkhazian people were an ethnographic sub-group of the Georgians; deliberate distortion of the history of the Abkhazian people;
— transference of the Abkhazian alphabet from Roman to Georgian graphics;
— closure of Abkhazian schools and the shift to the Georgian language for the tuition of children (1945-1953);
— transference of the language of administration to Georgian;
— curtailment of the publication of periodicals and books and of radio-broadcasting in Abkhaz;
— renaming of Abkhazian toponyms and hydronyms according to Georgian patterns;
— total settlement of Abkhazia by Georgians transplanted from different regions of Georgia; disruption to the compact nature of areas settled by the Abkhazians, etc...

With the ending of Stalin’s regime, the Abkhazians succeeded in avoiding total assimilation. However, even in the post-Stalin period there continued both the settling of Georgians in Abkhazia and attacks in different forms on the national culture of the core ethnos.

In sum, under the conditions of the former Soviet Union, the Abkhazians, in addition to the ending of Stalin’s regime and the unmasking and condemnation at USSR level of the assimilatory policy of Georgia towards the Abkhazian people, were helped with regard to preserving their national identity and Abkhazian self-awareness by the following factors:

— the struggle of the people to resurrect Abkhazia’s state-sovereignty, to preserve and develop the national identity of the Abkhazians, who made their feelings known in actions quite unprecedented for the Soviet regime: letters and appeals, protests, mass-meetings, demonstrations in 1931, 1947, 1952, 1957, 1965, 1967, 1977-79, 1989;
— the restoration of the Abkhazian alphabet on the basis of Cyrillic;
— the change in school-policy — the revival of Abkhazian primary schools, incomplete and complete secondary Abkhaz-Russian schools, and special educational institutions;
— the restoration of periodical publishing, radio-broadcasting, book-publishing, professional and people’s artistic collectives in the Abkhaz language;
— the development of Abkhazian literature and professional art;
— the development of abkhazological scholarship in: history, archaeology, ethnography, folklore, literary studies, linguistics, and other fields;
— the outflow of part of the transplanted Georgian population from Abkhazian villages, and the preservation overall of the compactness and monoethnicity of Abkhazian settlements in two regions of Abkhazia: Abzhywa and Bzyp;
— the functionality of monoethnic families;
— the vitality of national customs and traditions, and, overall, the maintenance of the norms of the traditional way of life = Apswara;
— the intensive contacts between the mountain- and the village-residents of the core people of Abkhazia, etc...

This article belongs to http://abkhazworld.com