LIVE meetings series: the Trails of Nestor Lakoba

Ilia State University (ISU) professors of the Master-level Programme in History present a series of weekly live meetings.

The sixth lecture in the series will be conducted by Timothy Blauvelt, Associate Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Ilia State University.

Topic of the Meeting: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba: Clientalism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom.

About the Lecture   

In the 1920s-1930s the Bolshevik revolutionary Nestor Lakoba became the unquestioned boss of Soviet Abkhazia, constructing a powerful local ethnic “machine” that became an influential component of Soviet patronage politics.  Lakoba and his group faced a series of trials, both figuratively and literally, through a succession of investigatory commissions, reports and tribunals over allegations of malfeasance in Abkhazia – of nepotism, corruption in tobacco production, blood feuds, embezzlement, racketeering, and extrajudicial murder – that shocked even hardened Party investigators. Time and again Lakoba and his network were able to convince their powerful patrons of their irreplaceability, until at last during the peak of the Stalinist Terror they were destroyed through a public show trial. Combining documents from Lakoba’s personal papers with extensive research in the Georgian and Transcaucasian Party and Control Commission archives, this project uses the prism of Lakoba’s network in Abkhazia to explore the intersection of patron-client relations, nationality policy, and federalism in the early Soviet periphery.

 About the Speaker

Timothy Blauvelt has been on the faculty of Ilia State University since 2011, and he is currently Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Prior to that he taught Soviet political history at Tbilisi State University for five years. He initially came to Georgia to conduct research for his PhD dissertation in 1999-2000 (which he defended at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2001), and returned as a Fulbright visiting professor in 2002-3. He is currently also Regional Director for the South Caucasus for American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS. He has published numerous articles about Russian and Soviet, and Caucasus political history, clientalism, nationality policy and nationalism in Ab Imperio, Europe-Asia Studies, Communist & Post-Communist Studies, Kritika, Nationalities Papers, War & Society, Revolutionary Russia, The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Caucasus Survey, and Central Asian Survey.

Venue: Ilia State University Facebook page