The Policy of Ethnic Enclosure in the Caucasus
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Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………. iii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….. 1 Part I Ethnic Enclosure: Language, Myths and Ethnic Groups in the Soviet Union CHAPTER ONE: 1 Language, Ethnic Conflict and Ethnic Enclosure 11 1.1 Ethnic Group and Language …………………………………………….. 11 1.2 Language and Modernization ………………………………………… 15 1.3 Language in Ethnic Conflict ……………………………………………... 18 1.4 Ethnic Enclosure ……………………………………………………… 25 CHAPTER TWO: 2 Language Policy and the Soviet Ethno-Territorial Division 33 2.1 The Soviet Approaches to Nationality Policy…………………………… 33 2.2 Language Policy and Ethnic Identification in the Soviet Union………… 45 3 CHAPTER THREE: Language and the Construction of Ethnogenetic Myths in the Soviet Union 58 3.1 Historians and the Process of Myths Formation ………………………… 58 3.2 Cycles of Ethnogenetic Myths Formation in the USSR………………… 68 3.3 Myths and the Teaching of Local Histories in Schools of Soviet Autonomies………………………………………………………………… 71 Part II The Policy of Ethnic Enclosure in the Caucasus 4 CHAPTER FOUR: The Formation of Abkhazian and Georgian Ethnogenetic Myths 79 4.1 Previous Studies of the Georgian-Abkhazian Conflict …………………… 79 4.2 Languages in Abkhazia: A Linguistic Perspective……………………… 82 4.3 Russian Colonization of Abkhazia in the 19th Century and the Changes in Ethno-Demographic Composition of the Area ……………………… 87 4.4 Language and the Issue of Abkhazian Autonomy in the Democratic Republic of Georgia ……………………………………………………… 95 CHAPTER FIVE: 5 Language and Myths in Soviet Abkhazia (1921-1988) 101 5.1 The Early Soviet Years and the Status Struggle in Abkhazia…………… 101 5.2 The Early Abkhazian and Georgian Myths of Ethnogenesis…………….. 106 5.3 ‘Georgianization’ of Abkhazia and the Domination of Georgian Myths of Ethnogenesis (End of the 1930s – First Part of the 1950s)……………… 110 5.4 The Abkhazian ‘Revival’………………………………………………… 123 5.5 The Phenomenon of Abkhazian Letters ………………………………… 130 i CHAPTER SIX: 6 Georgian-Abkhazian War and the Persistence of Myths 137 6.1 The Break-Up…………………………………………………………… 137 6.2 The Clash of Georgian and Abkhazian Myths………….………………… 144 6.3 The War and Beyond: the Clash of Myths Continues…………………….. 152 6.4 The Policy of Ethnic Enclosure in South Ossetia………………………… 164 6.5 Ethnic Enclosure in Armenian and Azerbaijani Textbooks….…………… 165 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………… 171 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………… 180 APPENDICES 1 List of Textbooks……………………………………………… 188 2 Abkhazian Letters…………………………………………… 190 List of Illustrations FIGURES Figure 1.1 Nested Conflict…………………………………………………… 21 Figure 1.2 Basic Relationship of Two Languages…………………………… 22 Figure 1.3 Language Differentiation: Perception…………………………… 23 Figure 1.4 Language Identification: Perception……………………………… 24 Figure 1.5 Stages of Ethnic Enclosure……………………………………… 29 Figure 1.6 Clash of Language-Territory Complexes………………………… 32 Figure 2.1 Hierarchy of Autonomous Structures in the USSR……………… 53 Figure 3.1 Use of Language in the Process of Myths Construction ………… 68 Figure 4.1 South Caucasian and North Caucasian Families of Languages…. 84 Figure 5.1 Changes of Ethnic Composition in Abkhazia 1897-1926 ………… 105 Figure 6.1 Changes of Ethnic Composition in Abkhazia 1959-1989 ………… 138 TABLES Table 1.1 Dichotomies of Ethnicity…………………………………………… 12 Table 1.2 Ethnic Core………………………………………………………… 14 Table 2.1 Soviet Classification of Languages (1926)………………………… 50 Table 3.1 Stages of the Growth of Nationalist Commitment ………………… 60 Table 3.2 Stages of Ethnogenetic Myths Construction in the Soviet Union… 69 Table 4.1 Languages Spoken in Georgia in the End of the 1980s …………… 86 Table 4.2 Ethnic Composition of Abkhazia in 1897………………………… 89 Table 5.1 Ethnic Composition of Abkhazia in 1926 …………………………. 104 Table 5.2 Schools in Abkhazia in 1921-1926………………………………… 106 Table 5.3 Ethnic Origins of Students at the Sukhum State Pedagogical University in 1945………………………………………………… 117 Table 6.1 Ethnic Composition of Abkhazia 1959-1989……………………… 138 MAPS Map 1 Georgia and Abkhazia ………………………………………………… 194 Map 2 Languages of the Caucasus …………………………………………… 195 ii Acknowledgments This work is a result of the challenging period in the author’s professional timeline. What started with interesting but brief and rather superficial encounters with language issues in Russia and South America grew into the strong desire to comprehend deeper the phenomenon. This transition would never happen without the experienced guidance and encouragement of Professor Masatsugu Matsuo, my academic supervisor during six years spent in Japan as a Master’s, then a Doctoral student and, ultimately, as a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Peace Science. I am deeply grateful to him for enduring patiently the flow of my inquires and for numerous enriching discussions we had had during my years at Hiroshima University, and last but no least for a strong personal support. I am grateful to Professor Gen Kikkawa, Professor Osamu Yoshida, Professor Kenji Iwata, and Professor Kazuhito Nakazono for spending their valuable time to review the manuscript with constructive criticism, and for their useful suggestions which have also contributed greatly in the improvement of this publication. I also wish to express my sincere appreciation to Dr Victor Shnirelman, who was willing to share his first-hand knowledge of the Caucasus during our encounters in Cambridge and who continued to provide me with helpful comments and suggestions ever since. The books by Victor Shnirelman on the issues discussed in this publication had been truly inspiring for me. I would like to acknowledge the support of Dr Robert Maier and the library’s staff of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbooks Research as well as of the Russian State Library and thank them for cooperation, understanding and thoughtfulness in facilitating the access to the material I needed to proceed with my research. I owe many debts of thanks to Mr Valeriy Vorobiev, Mr John Lotherington, Mr Neal Ascherson, Professor George Hewitt, Professor Vasiliy Avidzba, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Maxim Gvindzshia, Dr Gunda Kvitsinia and to all colleagues and friends in London and Sukhum for helping me to conduct a field research in Abkhazia. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for their generous financial support of my work which allowed me to concentrate entirely on my research. I wish to thank my good friends Mr Maxym Alexandrov and Mrs Sharapiya Kakimova, now with Hiroshima Office of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, for their valuable help which made my life in Japan much easier. My thanks go to the administration of Hiroshima University, and, first of all, to the staff of the Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation, for their kind assistance in many matters. I am deeply thankful to my mother Dr Svetlana Vorobieva, a prominent linguist and educator, who brought me up in love, tenderness and exceptionally cordial atmosphere. It is to her credit, that my deep interest in science has been continually growing forth since the early schooldays. I wish to believe that I have come up to my mother's expectations. I devote my work to my wife Olga Vasilieva. Without her constant support and companionship in all things, the completion of this research would not be possible. iii This publication, with all its faults and remaining deficiencies, is solely my own responsibility. Cali, Colombia Vladimir Rouvinski July 2007 iv INTRODUCTION The fight was over. All was still. The bodies made a grisly hill. Blood trickled from them, steaming, smoking... “Just tell me, my kunak, What do they call this little river?” “They call it Valerik”, he said, “Which means The River of the Dead. Those who named it are in Heaven...” Then someone else's voice I heard, “This day is for the war decisive”. I caught the mountaineer’s glance derisive. He grinned but did not say a word. And there I was; my heart so pained with pity. I thought: “Poor man, what are you after? The sky’s so blue. The world so endless. And still you’re fighting: Why, what for?!” M. Lermontov, Valerik The lines from the poem Valerik that open this publication were written by the Russian poet Michael Lermontov in the year 1840, half of which he spent in the Caucasus before being shot to death in a duel just a year later. Sent to serve in the Russian imperial army fighting Caucasian highlanders, the poet had to participate in several harsh combats. Shocked by the cruelty of the war, he was also stunned by a long history of confrontation and bloodshed experienced by the peoples of the Caucasus. Sadly, today, more than a hundred and sixty years after Lermontov wrote Valerik, the Caucasus is again far from tranquility, and many scholars and practitioners are trying to answer the question asked in the last line of the Lermontov’s poem. However, the aim of the present publication is not to provide an all-encompassing account for all the violent conflicts that are taking place in contemporary Caucasus. We will limit the scope of our examination to a particular aspect of the conflicts fought along ethnic fault-lines, namely, to the role of language in these conflicts. Already many centuries ago, Arab geographers referred to the Caucasus as Jebel-ul-al-Sun – “the Mountain of Languages” (Gatagova 2000, 17). Contemporary linguists found more than forty distinct languages spoken here (Gluck 1993, iv., see also - 1 - Map 2). Hence, it must come as no surprise that in the Caucasian ethnic conflicts language is often one of the central issues to the opposition between ethnic groups, and it is natural to assume that the examination of language in relation to an ethnic conflict could lead us to a better understanding of the causes of the conflict and the reasons of endurance of ethnic hostilities. However, we need to clarify what exactly the subject of this research is. This study is about language. And it is not about language. It is not a study about language to the extent that we are not focusing on the purely linguistic aspects of the issues discussed in this work.