August Uprising - Outbreak and Reaction

Outbreak and Reaction

On 18 August 1924, the Damkom laid plans for a general insurrection for 2.00 am 29 August. The plan of the simultaneous uprising miscarried, however, and, through some misunderstanding, the mining town of Chiatura, western Georgia, rose in rebellion a day earlier, on 28 August. This enabled the Soviet government to timely put all available forces in the region on alert. Yet, at first the insurgents achieved considerable success and formed an Interim Government of Georgia chaired by Prince Giorgi Tsereteli. The uprising quickly spread to neighboring areas and a large portion of western Georgia and several districts in eastern Georgia wrested out of the Soviet control.

The success of the uprising was short-lived, however. Although the insurrection went further than the Cheka had anticipated, the reaction of the Soviet authorities was prompt. Stalin dissipated any doubt in Moscow of the significance of the disorders in Georgia by the one word: "Kronstadt", referring to the Kronstadt rebellion, a large scale though unsuccessful mutiny by Soviet sailors in 1921. Additional Red Army troops under the overall command of Semyon Pugachev were promptly sent in and Georgia’s coastline was blockaded to prevent a landing of Georgian émigré groups. Detachments of the Red Army and Cheka attacked the first insurgent towns in western Georgia—Chiatura, Senaki and Abasha—as early as 29 August and managed to force the rebels into forests and mountains by 30 August. The Red Army forces employed artillery and aviation to fight the guerrillas who still continued to offer resistance, especially in the province of Guria, a home region to many Georgian Menshevik leaders and thus overwhelmingly disloyal to the Bolshevik rule. Tiflis, Batumi and some larger towns, where the Bolsheviks enjoyed more authority, remained quiet as did Abkhazia and most of the territories compactly settled by ethnic minorities.

Following the setback suffered by the insurgents in the west, the epicenter of the revolt now shifted into eastern Georgia, where, on 29 August, a large rebel force under Colonel Cholokashvili assaulted the Red Army barracks in Manglisi, on southwestern approaches of Tiflis, but was driven back by the Soviet troops which had heavily fortified all strategic positions in and around the capital. Reinforcements failed and Cholokashvili’s forces were left isolated, forcing them to retreat eastward into the Kakheti province. On 3 September Cholokashvili made the last desperate attempt to turn a tide of the rebellion and took the town of Dusheti in a surprise attack. However, he could not hold off a Red Army counter-offensive and withdrew into mountains. The suppression of the rebellion was accompanied by a full scale outbreak of the Red Terror, "unprecedented even in the most tragic moments of the revolution" as the French author Boris Souvarine puts it. The scattered guerrilla resistance continued for several weeks, but by mid-September most of the main rebel groups had been destroyed.

On 4 September the Cheka discovered the rebels’ chief headquarters at the Shio-Mgvime Monastery near the town of Mtskheta, and arrested Prince Andronikashvili, the Damkom chairman, and his associates Javakhishvili, Ishkhneli, Jinoria, and Bochorishvili. On the same day, Beria met with the arrested oppositionists in Tiflis, and proposed to issue a declaration urging the partisans to put down their arms. The committee members, tied up and facing death themselves, accepted the proposal on the condition that an order to stop mass executions be given immediately. Beria agreed and the rebels signed the declaration in order to put an end to the bloodshed.

The persecutions did not end, however. In violation of the promise made by Beria to the arrested opposition leaders, mass arrests and executions continued. The political guidance of the anti-revolt operations was effected by the GPU chief in Georgia, Solomon Mogilevsky, and the repressions were largely supported by the Transcaucasian Central Committee. Stalin himself is quoted to have vowed that "all of Georgia must be plowed under".

In a series of raids, the Red Army and Cheka detachments killed thousands of civilians, exterminating entire families including women and children. Mass executions took place in prisons, where people were killed without trial, including even those in prison at the time of the rebellion. Hundreds of arrested were shot directly in railway trunks, so that the dead bodies could be removed faster, a new and effective technical invention authored by the Cheka officer Talakhadze.

The exact number of casualties and the victims of the purges remains unknown. Approximately 3,000 died in fighting. The number of those who were executed during the uprising or in its immediate aftermath amounted to 7,000–10,000 or even more. According to the most recent accounts included also in The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999), 12,578 people were put to death from 29 August to 5 September 1924. About 20,000 people were deported to Siberia and Central Asian deserts.