Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The four-month pause between the Soviet offensives in Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhchivan, in June–July 1920, and that against Yerevan in November of that same year, can be explained by the outbreak of general Soviet–Polish hostilities in April–May of that year, as well as by the White threat reemerging from Crimea in June–July 1920. Also pertinent here, though, were Soviet concerns not to discomfit their partners in the ongoing, and very delicate, negotiations that would lead to the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement (in March 1921) by acting too precipitously in an area in which London—especially that bit of Westminster closed off by a door marked “Curzon”—had a special interest.172

These factors also, for a while, reprieved the Democratic Republic of Georgia. The Menshevik regime in that country, which had been established in May 1918, endured, despite a number of Soviet probings (in April–May 1920), through the Darial Gorge, into South Ossetia (Tskhinvali) and along the Black Sea littoral toward the chiefly Muslim region of Abkhazia (both of which regions had ambitions to secede from Georgia and both of which alleged cruel treatment in the civil-war years at the hands of the Georgian republic’s security police, the People’s Guard). It also survived a planned Bolshevik coup in Tiflis that was forestalled by Georgian forces. But local Bolsheviks were soon ordered by Moscow to refrain from such activities, as Sovnarkom went so far as to sign a full treaty, the Treaty of Moscow (7 May 1920), with their erstwhile Menshevik rivals. Under the terms of this agreement, Georgian independence was recognized by the RSFSR. However, as the Moscow treaty also demanded that Georgia sever all links with undefined “counterrevolutionary forces,” expel foreign missions, and legalize the Bolshevik Party on its territory, as well as declaring the strategic mountain passes through the Caucasus (which had to that point been garrisoned by the Georgians) to be neutral and demilitarized, the signing of this treaty was the equivalent of the Georgian Mensheviks sawing through the already creaking branch on which they were sitting. With the Poles and Wrangel dealt with, and with assurances from Soviet representatives in London that the projected Anglo–Soviet trade agreement would be signed no matter what verbal protests the British government might feel constrained to make against further Soviet advances in Transcaucasia, a workers’ uprising broke out—exactly on cue, having been prearranged by Moscow’s plenipotentiary to the region, Sergo Ordzhonikidze173—in the Borchalinsk and Akhalkaksk districts of Georgia on 11 February 1921. Within two weeks, the Georgian capital was under the control of local Bolsheviks and units of the 11th Red Army.

However, partly as a consequence of its international support;174 partly because of the long-lingering, internecine social-democratic bitterness that soured relations between Moscow and Tiflis; partly because of the Georgian clans’ warrior traditions; and partly because its mountainous terrain made the country almost uniquely difficult to conquer, the civil war in Georgia was a long way from being won by the Reds in February 1921. Extensive guerrilla resistance to Soviet rule, eventually coordinated by agents of the Paris-based Committee for the Liberation of Georgia, ebbed and flowed continuously and very violently across the region—notably in the Svanetian uprising (September 1921) and the Kakhet–Kevsureti rebellion (of 1921–1922)—culminating in the extensive August Uprising of 1924. Subsequently, between 7,000 and 10,000 Georgian prisoners were executed by the Cheka and perhaps as many as a further 20,000 were deported.175 Meanwhile, a softening of Moscow’s economic policies (the New Economic Policy) served to undermine resistance in Georgia and Transcaucasia in general, as well as peasant resistance across what in December 1922 was declared the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.