ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter is divided into three sections. The first, “Denouement,” details what happens in Abkhazia following the removal of Lakoba and his group, how Beria and then Stalin’s client Akaki Mgeladze take control of Abkhazia and make use of its patronage opportunities for Soviet higher politics. The second section, “Changing Tides and Brewing Storms,” returns to the original question posed in the first chapter about the role of clientelism and Soviet nationality policy in Lakoba’s effectiveness and capacity to maintain his network’s control in Abkhazia, concluding that the intersection of these factors created a situation in which local ethnic networks could hold on to power as long as they could preserve their aura of irreplaceability. The changing focus both in Soviet patronage and also in Soviet nationality policy by the late-1930s fundamentally transformed the playing field in Soviet politics, undermining the position of local patronage networks and rendering moot the necessity to maintain even the pretense of titular-based ethnic leadership groups in the smaller national territories. The final section is an epilogue, entitled “Soviet Nationality Policy, National Identity, and the Unintended Consequences of Memory,” which goes beyond the specifics of the case of Lakoba’s network in Abkhazia to reflect on the longer term consequences of the ethno-territorial focus and indigenization aspects of Soviet nationality policy. Intended to depoliticize nationalism so that it would one day disappear from people’s consciousness, resulting in a Socialist future free of ethnic animosity, in practice Soviet nationality policy had the opposite result: politicizing exactly those supposedly non-political elements of “form” that the regime had conceded to the nationalities, and because so much of the contest for position in the Soviet ethnic hierarchy was organized around ethnically based client networks, political conflicts became reinterpreted as ethnic conflicts at the same time that ethnic identity, rather than disappearing, became essential to people’s identity. Rather than eliminating nationalism and ethnic hatred, these very policies intensified them, leading to violent ethnic conflicts decades later when the Soviet system began to unravel.
