Short and deaf, with refined features and a cropped mustache, Lakoba carried himself with elegance. He did not pound a fist on the table or shout profanities, like his hotheaded friend Orjonikidze. Whereas Bolshevik rule in ethnic Georgian regions had, for a time, been dicey—a mass uprising had broken out in the 1920s—in Abkhazia it looked firm. Lakoba won wide popularity through the customary patronage (apartments, dachas, scarce goods), but also by attentiveness to ordinary people. He cultivated social harmony, downplaying the peasantry’s supposed social stratification, and managed to delay collectivization of the citrus groves and tobacco fields and even avoid dekulakization, otherwise unheard of. Almost uniquely among local bosses, his power base was not in the party. The Abkhaz Communist party was merely a provincial organization of the Georgian party, but the Soviet state was federal, and Lakoba served as chairman of the Abkhaz government (Council of People’s Commissars) in the 1920s, and after 1930 as chairman of the Abkhaz soviet’s central executive committee.44 Often, he skipped meetings of the party organization.45
Wits dubbed Abkhazia “Lakobistan.” A traveling commission had complained that such “a personalized regime is always a bad thing, always kills social life and weakens organizations, demoralizes cadres and encourages a slavish passivity among them.”46 But Orjonikidze sent Lakoba regular telegrams about taking care of high-level Moscow visitors at the spas.47 Trotsky (who had recuperated often in Sukhum) admired Lakoba, though he noted that, “despite the special sound amplifier he carried in his pocket, conversing with him was not easy.”48 (The regime soon acquired a new, bulky Phonophor hearing device for him from Siemens.) Stalin called him the Deaf One, and loved that Lakoba could whip top Soviet military men at billiards and shoot like a sniper. “When Lakoba came to Moscow, you would always see him at Stalin’s place, either at the apartment or at the dacha,” Khrushchev would recall, adding, “Stalin trusted him completely.”49 Artyom recalled that visits by Lakoba brightened up the house, noting: Stalin “loved Lakoba very much.”50 The dictator was said to joke, “I am Koba, and you are Lakoba.”
The two men shared a great deal. Lakoba (b. 1893) did not remember his father, who had died of a bullet wound. Two stepfathers had died as well. His mother, after many tries, got him into a religious school and then the Tiflis seminary—where Stalin had studied more than a decade earlier—and whence Lakoba, too, was expelled. Lakoba had helped lead the Red Army’s civil war reconquest and Bolshevization of Abkhazia, while Stalin had egged on Orjonikidze to do the same in Georgia.51 The Abkhaz had become a minority in Georgia-controlled Abkhazia, but Lakoba and other Abkhaz Bolsheviks were determined to redress this by remaining independent.52 Stalin had ended up caught between the Abkhaz, who proclaimed their own republic, and the Georgians, who tried to force the territory back into Georgia.53 He had approved a fudge recognizing Abkhazia as a “treaty republic.” Such decisions among competing claims had to be made across the Union, given the more than one hundred languages and the threescore recognized “nations.”54
The USSR consisted of three levels: (1) Union republics, initially reserved for Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the South Caucasus Federation (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), then Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; (2) autonomous republics inside Union republics for concentrated populations such as the Tatars, Bashkirs, and Yakuts in the RSFSR; the Moldavians in Ukraine; and (3) autonomous provinces, many of them in the RSFSR and the South Caucasus Federation.55 In former tsarist Turkestan, the inhabitants, who were often multilingual, had been compelled to choose one national identity, then fought over territory. The prize cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, despite populations categorized as predominantly Tajik (Persian), had gone to Uzbekistan (Turkic), thanks to Uzbek leaders’ dynamism and Tajik leaders’ fumbling.56 But then Stalin had acceded to Tajik demands for equal status, upgrading their autonomous republic in Uzbekistan to a self-standing Union republic.57 Uzbeks seized the opportunity to become a national elite and aligned their future with the central regime, coercing their cereal-growing republic toward intensive cotton production. Mosques were forcibly shuttered.58 Power was centralized in Moscow, but there were internal ethnoterritorial borders, local state institutions, vernacular official languages, and growing ranks of indigenous Communists.59 The regime fostered not nationalism per se but Soviet nations, with Communist institutions and ways of thinking.