The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Reprint Edition by Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine

Author:Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel [Nathalie Babel, Peter Constantine Isaac Babel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1200-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

IX

Reports from Georgia1922-1924

In 1921, Joseph Stalin and Grigory Ordzhonikidze, the Georgian Bolshevik leaders in Moscow, outmaneuvered Lenin and sent the Red Army to occupy Georgia. They quickly established a Soviet regime, brutally crushing the local Communist factions and the Mensheviks, the non~Leninist wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, which had played a leading role in the administration of the region since the Russian February Revolution of 1917. Early in 1922, Babel traveled through Tiblisi, Sokhumi, and the towns and villages along the Georgian, Abkhazian, and Ajarian seacoasts, to report on the progress of the Sovietification of the region.

In these reports Babel traces much of what is wrong in the Georgia of 1922 back to Czarist Imperial Russia, which had gained control of the region through a series of annexations in the nineteenth century. Babel condemns the Russian nobility, which had set out in the early 1900s to turn Georgia’s Black Sea coast into a Russian Riviera that would eclipse France’s Cote d’Azur. He is even more unforgiving about the four years of Menshevik influence that followed the Russian Revolution. But, as always, he does not refrain from criticizing the misguided methods of the new Soviet regime.

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