August Uprising - Preparation

Preparation

In the course of the Red Army invasion, part of the defeated Georgian forces withdrew into the mountains and organized themselves into a number of small partisan groups. From 1921 to 1922, guerrilla warfare broke out in several regions of Georgia. In May 1921, the highlanders of Svaneti, northwestern Georgia, led by Mosestro Dadeshkeliani, Nestor Gardapkhadze and Bidzina Pirveli, rose in rebellion. After a resistance of six months, the revolt was put down and its leaders were purged. In early 1922, the rebellion against the Soviet rule broke out in Khevsureti, another mountainous district, but in northeast Georgia. Soviet troops using aviation managed to stop this rebellion from spreading, but could not crush it completely. Colonel Kakutsa Cholokashvili, who had led the revolt, managed to escape to the neighboring Chechnya, whence he made several inroads into Georgia, preventing the Bolsheviks from gaining a foothold in the eastern Georgian mountains. The local militsiya chief Levan Razikashvili was arrested and later shot for having sympathized with the rebellion.

Still, these revolts were local and spontaneous and did not attract large masses. Within the period of 1922–1923, 33 of 57 active guerrilla detachments disintegrated or surrendered to the Soviet authorities. The deplorable situation of the anti-Soviet opposition forced all major underground parties to seek closer cooperation. The negotiations proceeded slowly, however, and it was not until mid-1922 that the Mensheviks reached an agreement with their formal rivals—the National Democrats and some other political groups—to coordinate their efforts against the Bolsheviks. Soon the opposition parties congregated into an underground movement known as the Committee for the Independence of Georgia or the "Damkom" (short for damoukideblobis komiteti, Committee for Independence). Sponsored by the government of Georgia-in-exile, the Damkom began preparations for a general uprising in Georgia. The organization set up a "Military Center" and appointed General Spiridon Chavchavadze the commander-in-chief of all rebel forces. Several members of the former Menshevik government returned clandestinely from exile, including the former Minister of Agriculture, Noe Khomeriki, as well as the former commander of the National Guard, Valiko Jugheli. The organizers, encouraged by the Georgian emigrants in Europe, had still more expectations that the Western powers intended to help. They also hoped that the Georgian revolt would further other Caucasian peoples to rise in arms, but the secret negotiations with Armenian and Azeri nationalists yielded no results and even more promising talks with the Muslim Chechen leader, Ali Mitayev, were finally aborted due to mass arrests and repressions in Northern Caucasus.

The Georgian branch of the Soviet secret police, Cheka, with recently appointed Deputy Chief Lavrentiy Beria playing a leading role, managed to penetrate the organization and carried out mass arrests. A prominent Menshevik activist, David Sagirashvili, was arrested and then deported to Germany in October 1922 along with sixty-two other Mensheviks. A heavy loss was sustained in February 1923 by the Georgian opposition, when fifteen members of the military center were arrested. Among them were the principal leaders of the resistance movement, Generals Kote Abkhazi, Alexander Andronikashvili and Varden Tsulukidze; they were executed on 19 May 1923. In March 1923 the Cheka discovered an underground Menshevik printshop and arrested several oppositionists. The Menshevik leaders Noe Khomeriki, Benia Chkhikvishvili, and Valiko Jugheli too fell in the hands of the Cheka on 9 November 1923, 25 July 1924, and 6 August 1924, respectively.

Under these circumstances, some Georgians doubted whether the uprising could be successful. The captured rebel leader, Jugheli, urged Cheka officials to allow him to inform his comrades that their plans had been discovered and advise them to abandon their proposed revolt, but the Cheka refused. Jugheli’s message still reached the rebels, but the conspirators decided that this might have been a Cheka provocation and went ahead with plans for the uprising.

There are many indications that the Soviet intelligence had been, at a certain level, implicated in provoking the uprising. The Cheka, employing secret agents in local socialist circles, were well informed of the conspiracy and popular dissatisfaction of the Bolshevik rule. Instructed by Stalin and Ordzhonikidze, Beria and his superior, Kvantaliani, actually encouraged the rebellion so they would have a pretext for eliminating all political opposition and avenging personal scores with their former rivals in Georgia.