The Ajarian Autonomous Republic was established on July 16, 1921, as a result of Turkey ceding Batumi to Georgia, along with territory to its north, in accordance with the terms of the Russo-Turkish Treaty of March 16, 1921. Ajaria (capital: Batumi) occupies 2,900 square kilometers in southwestern Georgia and borders the provinces of Guria, Meskheti, and (predominantly Armenian) Dzhavakheti; the Black Sea; and Turkey (Lazistan and the old Georgian region of Shavsheti). The last Soviet census (1989) showed 324,806 Ajar residents, constituting 82.8 percent of the autonomous republic’s population. The local dialect suggests both Laz and Turkish influence-Islam was introduced here and in other border regions to the east by the Ottoman Turks. Ajarians share with the Abkhazians, some of whom settled the area in late-tsarist times, a subtropical microclimate with similar agriculture, although Ajaria held first place in the USSR for precipitation, with sea-facing slopes experiencing an annual rainfall of 2,500-2,800 millimeters.
When Stalin deported to Central Asia the neighboring Meskhians (usually called “Meskhetian Turks,” though their precise ethnicity is disputed), Hemshins (Islamicized Armenians), and other Muslim peoples in the northern Caucasus in 1943 and 1944, the Ajars escaped this fate. The regional leader, Aslan Abashidze, appointed by Georgian president Zviad Gamsakhurdia in the dying years of Soviet rule, managed, in the turmoil that followed Georgia’s 1991 independence, to turn Ajaria into a personal fiefdom to the extent that central government writ was (as of January 2002) no longer running in what had by then effectively become an undeclared but de facto independent state. See also: CAUCASUS; GEORGIA AND GEORGIANS; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
AJARS
In 1913 Josef Stalin posed the question, “What is to be done with the Mingrelians, Abkhasians, Ad-jarians, Svanetians, Lezghians, and so forth, who speak different languages but do not possess a literature of their own?” Of the Ajars, however, who call themselves Ach’areli (plural Ach’arlebi), he more accurately observed, two paragraphs later, that they were a people “who speak the Georgian language but whose culture is Turkish and who profess the religion of Islam.”
Burdett, Anita L. P., ed. (1996). Caucasian Boundaries: Documents and Maps, 1802-1946. Slough, UK: Archive Editions. The Golden Fleece (Songs from Abkhazia and Adzharia). (1993). Leiden, Netherlands: Pan Records Ethnic Series. Stalin, Joseph. (1913). “Marxism and the National Question.” In his Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. London: Martin Lawrence.
(b. 1944), president of Kyrgyzstan who served in that post throughout the country’s first decade of independence.
Askar Akayev was born in the Kyrgyz Soviet Republic (Kyrgyzia) and earned a doctor of sciences degree at the Leningrad Precision Mechanics and Optics Institute. He returned to Kyrgyzia in 1972, assuming a teaching post at the Politechnical Institute in Frunze (now Bishkek). He authored more than one hundred scientific works and articles on mathematics and computers, and in 1989 became president of the Kyrgyz Academy of Sciences. He also served as a department head for the Central Committee of the Kyrgyz Communist Party.
As the Soviet Union began to break apart, he was elected to the presidency of the republic in 1990 by the republic’s legislature, and in 1991 Kyr-gyzstan gained independence and Akayev was elected president in a popular election. In contrast to other post-Soviet states in Central Asia, whose leaders retained their power from Soviet times, Kyr-gyzstan made an attempt to break with the Soviet past. In his first years in office, Akayev won international acclaim as a backer of political and economic liberalization, aiming to turn his country into the “Switzerland of Central Asia.” Akayev was reelected president in 1995 and in 2000. In the mid-1990s, however, some called his democratic credentials into question as he launched campaigns against journalists, imprisoned political opponents, and pushed through constitutional amendments to augment the powers of the presidency. In 2000 elections he won 75 percent of the vote, but observers claimed these elections were marred by fraud. Throughout 2002 and 2003, he was the target of protesters in Kyrgyzstan, who blamed him for chronic corruption and mounting economic difficulties. Nonetheless, in February 2003 he won approval of more changes to the constitution that enhanced his powers still further and won support in a referendum to confirm his term of office until December 2005. After these events, critics charged that he had become much like the Central Asian dictators.
While in office, Akayev has tried to assure inter-ethnic harmony in the country (30% of the population is ethnically Uzbek) and cracked down on small groups of Islamic militants. He has maintained good relations with Russia, and in 2001 of Kyrgyzstan president Askar Akayev. COURTESY OF THE EMBASSY OF
KYRGYZSTAN
fered air bases and other support to U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan. See also: KYRGYZSTAN AND KYRGYZ; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET
Akayev, Askar. (2001). Kyrgyzstan: An Economy in Transition. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Press. Anderson, John. (1999). Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia’s Island of Democracy? Amsterdam: Harwood Academic.
(1889-1966), leading Russian poet of the twentieth century; member of the Acmeist group.
Anna Akhmatova (Anna Andreyevna Gorenko) was born on June 23, 1889, near Odessa, and grew
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up in Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial summer residence, where Pushkin had attended the Lyceum. She studied law in Kiev, then literature in St. Petersburg. She married poet Nikolai Stepanovich Gu-milev in 1910, and the couple visited western Europe on their honeymoon. She made a return visit to Paris in 1911, and Amedeo Modigliani, still an unknown artist at the time, painted sixteen portraits of her.
In 1912, Akhmatova published her first collection of poetry, Vecher (Evening), and gave birth to her son Lev. The clarity, simplicity, and vivid details of her poetry amazed her contemporaries. For instance, in 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva praised Akhmato’s “Poem of the Last Meeting,” extolling the lines “I slipped my left-hand glove/Onto my right hand” as “unique, unrepeatable, inimitable.”
Also in 1912, Gumilev founded the Poets’ Guild, a group whose opposition to the Symbolists led to the name “Acmeist,” from the Greek akme, “perfection.” The Acmeists, including Gumilev, Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelshtam, advocated simplicity, clarity, and precision over the vagueness and otherworldliness of the Symbolists.
Akhmatova’s marriage with Gumilev was unhappy and ended in divorce. Her second collection, Chetki (Rosary), published in 1914, revolves around the decline of the relationship, her sense of repentance, and her identity as a poet. In her following collections, Belaya Staya (White Flock, 1917), Podor-ozhnik (Plantain, 1921), and Anno Domini (1922), Akhmatova assumed the role of poetic witness, responding to the chaos, poverty, and oppression surrounding the Revolution and civil war.
In 1921, Gumilev was charged with conspiracy and executed. None of Akhmatova’s work was published in the Soviet Union between 1923 and 1940. Yet, unlike many of her contemporaries, Akhmatova refused to emigrate. Her view of emigration is reflected in her 1922 poem from Anno Domini, “I am not one of those who left the land.”
Between 1935 and 1940 Akhmatova wrote the long poem Requiem, a lyrical masterpiece. Dedicated to the victims of Josef Stalin’s terror, and largely a maternal response to her son Lev’s arrest and imprisonment in 1937, it recalls the Symbolists in its use of religious allegory, but maintains directness and simplicity. Akhmatova’s next long poem, the complex, dense, polyphonic Poema bez geroya (Poem without a Hero, 1943) interprets the suicide of poet and officer Vsevolod Knyazev as a sign of the times. Some critics place it alongside Requiem as her finest work; others see it as the beginning of Akhmatova’s poetic decline.
At the outbreak of World War II, Stalin briefly relaxed his stance toward writers, and Akhmatova was published selectively. In 1946, however, Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee, denounced her and
