Akaki Vissarionovich Kabakhidze

Akaki Kabakhidze was a Georgian Old Bolshevik who joined the party in 1904 and belonged to the Society of Old Bolsheviks. Repression records give his birth in 1889 in Ambrolauri, Georgia, nationality Georgian (грузин), with residence in Tbilisi (then Tiflis). In 1922, as a member of the Georgian Communist Party Central Committee, he sided with those opposing Transcaucasian amalgamation, and that year he clashed with Ordzhonikidze and was struck in the face with a fist. Arrest on 22 December 1936 was followed by a death sentence on 24 June 1937, execution the next day, and rehabilitation on 2 April 1957. Identifying the 1922 figure with the executed man is a source-based inference; a namesake cannot be excluded.

Georgian Affair (1922)

The Georgian Affair was a political conflict inside the Soviet leadership over how social and political transformation was to be carried out in the Georgian SSR. On one side stood the local Georgian Bolshevik leaders headed by Makharadze and Mdivani; on the other, their de facto superiors Stalin and Ordzhonikidze. At issue above all was Moscow's decision to amalgamate Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan into the Transcaucasian SFSR, which the Georgian leaders strongly opposed. The Georgian side accused the Caucasus Bureau, and Ordzhonikidze personally, of Great Russian chauvinism and of imposing unification from above without prior consultation with local cadres. The dispute peaked at the end of 1922 and ended with the victory of the Stalin-Ordzhonikidze line.

At the height of the dispute Ordzhonikidze resorted to physical violence. After he berated Georgian Communists as social-nationalists and chauvinist rot, Kobakhidze called him "Stalin's donkey", whereupon Ordzhonikidze struck him in the face with his fist. Sources divide on when this happened. Megabook and Diletant date it to 20 October 1922, and Rogovin's account also places the remark and the blow immediately after the October CC plenum and immediately before a reference to 19 October, although Rogovin leaves the victim unnamed, writing only of "one of Ordzhonikidze's opponents". The English-language account, by contrast, holds that the conflict peaked in November 1922 and says only that a member of the Mdivani group was struck, without naming him, while Sakharov states that the exact time is not established from the archives and can be fixed only approximately, in the third week of November 1922. Neither date should be presented as settled. Lenin was ill in October 1922 and could not intervene, but in December he intervened in the conflict, accused Stalin of Great Russian chauvinism, and proposed that Ordzhonikidze be excluded from the party for the blows; his recommendations were not carried out.

Reaction from the centre followed at once: the Georgian CC secretary Mikhail Okudzhava was removed from his post, and in response the entire Georgian CC decided to resign, citing the impossibility of working under the "Derzhimorda regime" Ordzhonikidze had created. Rogovin records that Solts told Fotieva that Kabakhidze's statement to the Central Control Commission had disappeared. Rykov's "objective account", given by a man who was present, stressed that Ordzhonikidze was right to treat Kabakhidze's reproaches as a gross personal insult. Sakharov, for his part, ties the slap Ordzhonikidze gave to "old (pre-revolutionary) party member Akaky Kabakhidze" directly to the contemporaneous struggle over the formation of the USSR, and argues that the traditional reading, which characterizes the violence as an act of political reprisal, over-politicizes the episode; this dissenting reading should stand alongside the traditional one rather than replace it. Rykov's note of 7 February 1923 records that the incident occurred in Ordzhonikidze's Tiflis apartment and ended after his intervention, while Rtvladze's account describes the slap as a private matter unconnected with factionalism and states that Kabakhidze filed no written statement with the Control Commission.

The affair held back the careers of the Georgian Old Bolsheviks. Mdivani and his associates were removed to minor posts but were not actively attacked until the late 1920s, and most of them were later executed during the Great Purge of the 1930s.

Repression and rehabilitation

The record in this section states that a man of the name Kobakhidze was arrested on 22 December 1936 and held in a state security isolation unit. No documentary chain linking this record to the figure of the 1922 incident has been established, however, so the account below rests on the premise that the two are the same person, and that identification is itself a source-based inference. On 24 June 1937 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death on charges of belonging to the centre of a right-wing terrorist, diversionary and wrecking organization (articles 58-7, 58-8, 58-11), and the sentence was carried out on 25 June 1937. The same record gives birth year 1889, nationality Georgian (грузин), birthplace Ambrolauri, Georgia, peasant social origin, and residence at ul. Lenina No. 54, Tbilisi, Georgian SSR: the documentary basis for the card's birth, origin and citizenship data. A VKP(b) member from 1904 and a member of the Society of Old Bolsheviks, he was expelled from the party in connection with his arrest; at the time of the arrest his employment is listed as former manager, a post he had already left, of the Shveisbyt "Mkeravi-Gasakhebi" of the People's Commissariat of Local Industry of Georgia. By a ruling of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court of 2 April 1957 (No. 4н-02540), case 5/56 was closed for absence of corpus delicti: the conviction was quashed and he was rehabilitated.