Timothy Blauvelt - Clientelism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba

Nestor Lakoba (1893-1936) has remained in obscurity (outside his homeland of Abkhazia) for far too long. The shrouds of a distant past, and the distance from a place that to Western Europeans and Americans is a remote land, were compounded by Soviet censorship, state collapse, civil war, and the fragility of memory. By the time the intrepid haunter of archives and historian of the South Caucasus Timothy Blauvelt turned to the topic, only a few dedicated specialists remembered (or, more likely, misremembered) the story of the diminutive leader of Soviet Abkhazia and his tragic fate at the hands of more brutal Stalinists. Mysteriously, a trove of documents and photographs found its way to the Hoover Institution Archives, but deep local knowledge and a persistent search for historical context was required to piece together the fragments of what could be found into a legible mosaic. Blauvelt has successfully restored, one might say, resurrected, Lakoba from undeserved murkiness and added new understanding to the complexities of South Caucasus politics in the early Soviet decades. The achievement in this extraordinary book is the telling of an important story that has been obscured or avoided in earlier historical accounts. Blauvelt has recovered a lost history and written a new narrative against existing narratives, particularly nationalistic ones, that integrates the Abkhaz story into the broader Georgian, Caucasian, and Soviet stories. What looks like a micro-history of a small republic becomes here a deep dive into Soviet nationality policy and the fate of non-Russian peoples in the USSR that gives us greater immediacy and intimacy than we have had before. The Abkhazia case demonstrates how ethnicity was used to consolidate local control and build a patronage network so that a small people might survive in the fierce competition with stronger neighbors.

Nestor Lakoba could be as ruthless as required of a Bolshevik in the revolutionary underground and the years of revolution and civil war, but ultimately his success and his personalized power [lichnyi rezhim] depended on patrons, most importantly Joseph Stalin and Sergo Orjonikidze. Once he lost that support, he fell victim to Lavrenty Beria, the chosen satrap of the Kremlin autocrat. Following the rise and fall of Lakoba, Blauvelt opens a window into the vagaries and dangers of both the rule of Vladimir Lenin and the frightening demands that the Stalinist system imposed on the Soviet ruling elite. Blauvelt uses the tools of both historians and political scientists to open up and render more transparent the necessary networking that was required for success in the power struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. Policies and personalities were involved in the intra-party disputes [