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Title: Anarchism in Georgia Author: Ryan Robert Mitchell Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: Georgia, history Source: Retrieved on 22nd November 2021 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp1659 Notes: Published in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.
The national liberation movement in Georgia began like that of many
other countries, with an initially liberal and literary “national
awakening” that was most often headed by poets and essayists.
Ironically, as Georgia became more assimilated into the Russian empire
in the mid-1800s, its liberation movement grew more radical due to the
fact that its Russian-educated intelligentsia was exposed to “dangerous
ideas” within the Russian university system. By the last two decades of
the nineteenth century, the Georgian revolutionary movement was fully
radicalized with the Russian populist brand of socialism as its prime
ideological current.
Prince Varlaam Cherkezishvili (1846– 1925), whose name is often
Russified as Tcherkesoff or Cherkezov, was one of Georgia’s first
professional revolutionaries and was at the heart of the Georgian
anarchist movement since its inception. Cherkezishvili was among the
first militant socialist revolutionaries agitating during the late 1860s
in Russia. By the mid-1870s, however, he was fully committed to the
cause of anarchism and worked with both the Armenians and Turks in an
attempt to create a national liberation solidarity movement within the
Balkans.
Although anarchism was only a marginal voice within the larger
revolutionary nationalist movement (which was dominated by the Georgian
Mensheviks or social democrats), after the 1905 Revolution in Russia
there was a brief and intense flare-up of anarchist activity in Georgia,
lasting a little under two years between 1905 and 1907. During this
time, Georgi Gogeliia (a.k.a. K. Orgeiana, K. Illiashvili, d. 1921), a
member of Peter Kropotkin’s Khleb i Volya (Bread and Liberty) circle in
Geneva along with his partner Lidia, was active in Tbilisi, championing
anarchosyndicalism (Nettlau 1996: 258).
Thus, in 1906, Tbilisi supported two daily anarchist newspapers, Musha
(The Worker) and Khma (The Voice), and the highly influential “legal”
weekly, Nobati (The Call), which included contributions from both
Cherkezishvili and Kropotkin. This relative wealth of anarchist
publications can be viewed as part of an attempt by the Georgian
anarchists to win control of the revolutionary nationalist movement. The
content of these periodicals generally comprised critiques of Marxism
and the ideological basis of the social democrats who dominated the
revolutionary movement.
The Georgian anarchists were opposed to the social democratic idea of
using the state as a revolutionary tool and furthermore opposed the
concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat as yet another form of
domination. A young Joseph Stalin engaged in polemics with the
anarchists and wrote a response called Anarchism or Socialism? that was
serialized in 1906 in the Georgian Bolshevik journal Akhali Tskhovreb
(New Life). Perversely, some of the best information in the English
language about Georgian anarchism of this period comes from Stalin’s
opposition piece.
After this brief resurgence, the effect of anarchist activity on
Georgian political or social life seems to have been somewhat negligible
– national support for the social democrats was near universal within
the Russian empire. After the October Revolution in Russia, the Georgian
social democrats were able to repel Bolsheviks and establish the
Democratic Republic of Georgia in May 1918. Cherkezishvili, having
realized his ambitions for an independent Georgia, obtained a seat in
the Constituent Assembly. The republic would not last long, and in 1921,
after a short uprising and rebellion, the Soviet-supported Red Army took
control of Georgia, effectively ending opposition to state socialism.
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REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Lang, D. M. (1962) A Modern History of Georgia. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
Nettlau, M. (1996) A Short History of Anarchism. Trans. Ida Pilat Isca.
London: Freedom Press.
Stalin, J. V. (1907) [2002] Anarchism or Socialism? Amsterdam: Fredonia
Books.
Suny, R. G. (1996) The Emergence of Political Society in Georgia. In R.
G. Suny (Ed.), Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in
the History of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Tevzadze, D. (1994) Nation vs. Humankind: The Problem of National
Identity in Georgian Thought. History of European Ideas 19, 3: 431–6.