Thomas de Waal: The Ghosts of Abkhazia
[Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.]
I slept badly in the Hotel Ritsa in Abkhazia. I had an unsettling dream in which I walked through an old house with an elderly Stalin, muttering malevolently to himself. In the morning, wondering who had disturbed my sleep, I had a long list of suspects from the other world.
Many of Abkhazia’s numerous ghosts must live within the walls of this whitewashed hotel. A convalescent Trotsky lived here in 1924 and gave a valedictory speech for Lenin from the first-floor balcony on the day of his old comrade’s funeral. Or I could have slept in the room of another of Stalin’s victims, the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1993 the hotel produced more ghosts when it was burned to the ground in Abkhaz-Georgian fighting. It has only recently been rebuilt.
Pretty much everything about the past, present and future of Abkhazia is disputed. That includes the name of its capital city which the Georgians and most of the world still calls by the Georgian name Sukhumi and the Abkhaz call Sukhum. This is a city of absences. In the mid-nineteenth century, Abkhaz were deported to the Ottoman Empire for rebelling against the Imperial Russian Army. From 1877 to 1907 those who remained were banned from living in the city or along the Black Sea coast. Georgians, Greeks and Russians settled in their stead, shifting the demographic balance against the indigenous Abkhaz. In 1949 the Greeks were expelled en masse to Kazakhstan in one of the crazy Stalinist deportations. In 1992 most of the Abkhaz fled the city when the Georgian armed forces captured it, and the following year almost all the Georgians fled when the Abkhaz recaptured it. Seventeen years on, despite an influx of Russian money and a new crop of cafes and shops and reopening hotels, the streets of Sukhum(i) are still disfigured with ruins.
So anyone who talks about the history of Abkhazia should tread carefully...
Read entire article at National Interest
I slept badly in the Hotel Ritsa in Abkhazia. I had an unsettling dream in which I walked through an old house with an elderly Stalin, muttering malevolently to himself. In the morning, wondering who had disturbed my sleep, I had a long list of suspects from the other world.
Many of Abkhazia’s numerous ghosts must live within the walls of this whitewashed hotel. A convalescent Trotsky lived here in 1924 and gave a valedictory speech for Lenin from the first-floor balcony on the day of his old comrade’s funeral. Or I could have slept in the room of another of Stalin’s victims, the poet Osip Mandelstam. In 1993 the hotel produced more ghosts when it was burned to the ground in Abkhaz-Georgian fighting. It has only recently been rebuilt.
Pretty much everything about the past, present and future of Abkhazia is disputed. That includes the name of its capital city which the Georgians and most of the world still calls by the Georgian name Sukhumi and the Abkhaz call Sukhum. This is a city of absences. In the mid-nineteenth century, Abkhaz were deported to the Ottoman Empire for rebelling against the Imperial Russian Army. From 1877 to 1907 those who remained were banned from living in the city or along the Black Sea coast. Georgians, Greeks and Russians settled in their stead, shifting the demographic balance against the indigenous Abkhaz. In 1949 the Greeks were expelled en masse to Kazakhstan in one of the crazy Stalinist deportations. In 1992 most of the Abkhaz fled the city when the Georgian armed forces captured it, and the following year almost all the Georgians fled when the Abkhaz recaptured it. Seventeen years on, despite an influx of Russian money and a new crop of cafes and shops and reopening hotels, the streets of Sukhum(i) are still disfigured with ruins.
So anyone who talks about the history of Abkhazia should tread carefully...