Ilia State University (ISU) professors of the Master-level Programme in History present a series of weekly live meetings.<\/p>\n
The sixth lecture in the series will be conducted by Timothy Blauvelt, Associate Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Ilia State University.<\/p>\n
Topic of the Meeting:<\/strong>\u00a0The Trials of\u00a0Nestor\u00a0Lakoba: Clientalism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom.<\/p>\n About the Lecture\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n In the 1920s-1930s the Bolshevik revolutionary\u00a0Nestor\u00a0Lakoba\u00a0became the unquestioned boss of Soviet Abkhazia, constructing a powerful local ethnic \u201cmachine\u201d that became an influential component of Soviet patronage politics.\u00a0\u00a0Lakoba\u00a0and 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 \u2013 of nepotism, corruption in tobacco production, blood feuds, embezzlement, racketeering, and extrajudicial murder \u2013 that shocked even hardened Party investigators. Time and again\u00a0Lakoba\u00a0and 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\u00a0Lakoba\u2019s personal papers with extensive research in the Georgian and Transcaucasian Party and Control Commission archives, this project uses the prism of\u00a0Lakoba\u2019s network in Abkhazia to explore the intersection of patron-client relations, nationality policy, and federalism in the early Soviet periphery.<\/p>\n \u00a0About the Speaker<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u00a0Ab Imperio,\u00a0Europe-Asia Studies,\u00a0Communist & Post-Communist Studies, Kritika, Nationalities Papers, War & Society, Revolutionary Russia, The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Caucasus Survey,\u00a0and\u00a0Central Asian Survey.<\/p>\n Venue:<\/strong>\u00a0Ilia State University Facebook page<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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:\u00a0The Trials of\u00a0Nestor\u00a0Lakoba: Clientalism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom. … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":577,"template":"","tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geomodernhistory.iliauni.edu.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event\/576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geomodernhistory.iliauni.edu.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geomodernhistory.iliauni.edu.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/event"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geomodernhistory.iliauni.edu.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geomodernhistory.iliauni.edu.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geomodernhistory.iliauni.edu.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geomodernhistory.iliauni.edu.ge\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}