Introduction
On August 28, 1923 a Georgian expedition led by the academic Giorgi Nikoladze made a successful ascent on the Kazbegi peak, an imposing five thousand meter mountain overlooking the Georgian Military Highway made famous in both Russian and Georgian literature. Nikoladze’s summit was followed a few days later by an equally successful research expedition led by Professor Alexander Didebulidze from the recently formed Tbilisi State University. At the time, these two summits had little impact beyond the Transcaucasian Federation, but they would eventually be memorialized as the first Soviet ascents and a key event in Soviet sports history. Writing in 1948 for a collected edition celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Soviet alpinism, the alpinist E. Rokotian argued that these two expeditions exhibited the fundamental principles of a specifically Soviet form of mountaineering, namely its “patriotism, mass nature, collectivism, manifestation of genuine friendship of the peoples, combination of political, sport and scientific-research goals, careful preparation to the ascent, (and) care for human life.”1 On the surface, Rokotian was right – both expeditions entailed long and detailed preparations, no participant sustained any serious injuries, and Nikoladze’s expedition in particular, where thirteen men and five women successfully summited through collective effort, exhibited the
1 E. Rokotian, “Voskhozhdeniia sovetskikh al’pinistov na kavkaze” in K vershinam sovetskoi zemli, ed. D.M. Zatulovskii (Moskva, 1949), 105.
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“mass character” and a commitment to gender inclusion that made up the stated goals of Soviet alpinism.2
Rokotian’s account reflected a relatively new focus on the history of Soviet alpinism and the memorialization of specific ascents that emerged in the post-war period. And while he was undoubtedly influenced by Georgian arguments about the centrality of the 1923 expeditions to Soviet alpinist history, his account represented an uncontroversial consensus that Soviet alpinism began in 1923. However, despite the fact that the two 1923 expeditions retroactively fit within larger Soviet discourses and came to be intimately conceptualized as “Soviet” summits, written accounts from the participants at the time make clear that the expeditions had a much narrower national focus and should be seen as part of a specifically Georgian nation building project that had its roots in the pre-revolutionary period. The 1923 expeditions began a decades long project by Georgian alpinists to both physically and discursively lay claim to mountainous regions and mountainous peoples as inherently Georgian, a project that often conflicted with larger Soviet nation-building efforts. Instead of “friendship of the peoples,” alpinism (and ultimately tourism more generally) was frequently a sphere of conflict between Georgian alpinists and the
institutions that governed the sport in Moscow. At its core, this tension was about the meaning of the Georgian nation and the limits of the Soviet anti-imperialism.
This chapter examines the initial formation of a Georgian climbing community in Tbilisi and the first several expeditions organized by Georgian alpinists. Throughout the 1920s,
Georgian alpinists received almost no resistance from the Soviet center as they developed a practice of climbing that focused on the importance of fostering relationships with local people and climbing peaks in the name of the nation. As I illustrate, these practices were deeply
2 For the list of participants see: Giorgi Nikoladze, “pirveli kartuli asvla mq’invar-ts’verze” (The first Georgian summit on mq’invar-ts’verze), The Geographical Society of Georgia Bulletin, no. 1, 1924: 14-15. For more on the goals of Soviet alpinism see, Maurer, “An Academic Escape to the Periphery?,” 159-178.
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influenced by ideas about the centrality of mountainous space and mountainous peoples to the Georgian nation that stemmed from nineteenth century Georgian literature. In forming their own geographic society in 1924, the organizers of Georgian climbing oriented themselves not towards Moscow or Leningrad, but towards western Europe and in particular London. All of these
developments made the Georgian climbing community unique within the burgeoning world of Soviet alpinism and created the possibility for sustained conflict as the sport began to centralize in the following decade. Understanding this conflict, however, requires a deeper examination of first several expeditions in the 1920s, which proved foundational to the wider practices of Georgian climbing. Despite institutional upheaval or political change, the goals of Georgian alpinism remained remarkably consistent from 1923 until the immediate post-Stalin period. Before reconstructing the most important expeditions from the 1920s, however, it is necessary to step beyond the revolutionary divide and examine how nineteenth century ideas about the nation influenced the development of Georgian climbing in the Soviet period.
Mountainous Space and Georgian Literature: A Question of Authenticity
Nineteenth century Georgian literature influenced the expeditions Georgian alpinists in the 1920s, and helped to inform their own approach to developing an alpinist community. Although mountains may seem like they would be an intrinsic part of modern Georgian
literature, the relationship between key Georgian writers and mountainous regions and peoples was in fact not straightforward and fluctuated across the nineteenth century, complicated by the realities of Russian imperial expansion. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Georgian writers remained deeply influenced by Russian romanticism and constructed the alpine sublime in many of the same ways that Russian authors did, foregrounding the landscape over local
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people and local culture. As Harsha Ram and Zaza Shatirishvili have shown, Georgian romantic poetry from this period reflected the complex relationship of the Georgian nobility to their Russian colonizers, one that entailed resistance to Russian empire at home but significant cooperation with the imperial conquest of North Caucasus.3 What this meant is that the
subjugation of North Caucasian mountainous populations was seen in the service of the Georgian nation, “just revenge” for earlier raids on Georgian lands in the previous century.4 For romantic Georgian authors, there was nothing necessarily inherently Georgian about mountainous space.
This relationship changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s, there was a dramatic shift in the conception of mountainous space and its relationship to the Georgian nation, perhaps best seen in Ilia Chavchavadze’s “Letters of a Traveler,” first published in 1871. As Paul Manning notes, in “Letters of a Traveler,” “Ch’avch’avadze radically revises the geopoetics of these earlier Romantics, who often sought to align Georgia with Russia against the Caucasus, by creating a novel geopoetics in which the Caucasus, in the form of the Terek River, is identified with Georgia as opposed to Russia.”5 “Letters of a Traveler” reflected a tension between the emergent Georgian intelligentsia and the mountainous Georgian peasantry, illustrated through a conversation between the narrator, an educated Georgian traveling from Russia, and a local peasant from the mountainous region of Khevi, Lelt Ghunia. Here, Chavchavadze minimizes the difference between the two groups, suggesting that authentic
3 Harsha Ram and Zaza Shatirishvili, “Romantic Topography and the Dilemma of Empire: The Caucasus in the Dialogue of Georgian and Russian Poetry,” The Russian Review Vol. 63, No. 1 (January 2004): 1-25. Paul Manning notes that “If earlier Russian and Georgian Romantics exulted over the natural beauty of the Caucasus, it was a nature alien to humanity and devoid of human voices” citing Ram and Shatirishvili’s discussion of Aleksandr Chavchavadze’s poem “K’avk’azia” in “Romantic Topography.” See Paul Manning, “Describing Dialect and Defining Civilization in an Early Georgian Nationalist Manifesto: Ilia Ch’avch’avadze’s ‘Letters of a Traveler,’”
The Russian Review Vo. 63, No 1 (January 2004): 36, footnote 25.
4 Ram and Shatirishvili, “Romantic Topography,” 17. In particular, see Ram and Shatirishvili’s section on Nik’oloz Baratashvili’s poetry, pages 13-17.
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Georgian culture is best represented by mountainous peasants like Ghunia, but one that can only be understood by the Georgian intelligentsia as a member of the same nation.6
This impulse to see mountainous space as integral to the Georgian nation only accelerated in the following decades as Russian imperial expansion physically incorporated Ottoman Georgians into the nation itself. As Paul Manning has shown in his excellent examination of late nineteenth century Georgian print culture, Ottoman Georgia offered an “unassimilable alterity” that challenged the way in which the Georgian intelligentsia conceived of the nation and their place in it. The newly incorporated Georgians were predominantly
Muslim, and as such represented a form of eastern backwardness in the orientalist geographies of the urban Georgian intelligentsia based in Tbilisi. As Manning argues, “it is as if the East
Georgians, unable to incorporate the alterity of Ottoman Georgia into their sense of identity at the end of the 1870s, instead turned their attention to the mountains in the 1880s in
compensation.”7
By the 1880s there was a shift towards ethnographic realism that further stressed the centrality of mountainous culture to the nation, perhaps best illustrated by the works of Alexander Kazbegi. Kazbegi was born to a wealthy family in the village of Stepantsminda in northern Georgia, an important stop on the Georgian Military Highway and one that would be a frequent site of engagement for Georgian alpinists in the Soviet period. But his father’s untimely death curtailed his education in Moscow, and Kazbegi soon chose to spend seven years as a shepherd.8 His stories reflected this experience, and as Donald Rayfield has noted, made the
6 Ibid, 32-36.
7 Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land,18. See also chapter two, “Imperial and Colonial Sublime: The Aesthetics of Infrastructures,” 59-79.
8 See Rebecca Gould “Afterword: Aleksandre Qazbegi’s Mountaineer Prosaics,” in Aleksandre Qazbegi, The Prose
of the Mountains: The Tales of the Caucasus trans. by Rebecca Gould (Budapest, 2015): 192-194; Donald Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia: A History (London, 2010), 196-206.
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mountainous populations of northeastern Georgia “into new representatives of the national struggle.”9 Kazbegi’s impact on Georgian literature and Georgian understanding of mountainous space was enormous. As Rebecca Gould has argued, “since Qazbegi transformed Georgian fiction, Georgia’s mountaineers have been treated in Georgian literature as the bearers of
sanctified traditions lost to Georgian lowlanders.”10 Kazbegi’s biography was mirrored by one of his literary counterparts, Vazha-Pshavela, who was born in neighboring region of Pshavi, had his own aborted Russian education in St. Petersburg, and lived as a mountain peasant.11 It is
certainly difficult to compare the novellas of Kazbegi with the folk poetry of “Vazha,” as he is affectionately known in Georgia, and the latter’s influence on Georgian literature was arguably much greater, but what they both shared was the ability to narrate the ethos of Georgia’s mountainous populations as authentic mountaineers – that as, those from the mountains themselves.
By the turn of the century mountain peasants like Lelt Ghunia, were understood not just seen as part of the nation, but as its most authentic representatives. Here, however, there was still a contradiction. Chavchavadze’s narrator and Ghunia may have been part of the same nation, but this could not conceal the ethnic difference that separated them. As Chavchavadze notes in his text, the narrator initially mistook Ghunia for an Ossetian, while Ghunia mistook the narrator for a Russian.12 The problem facing the often-Russian educated Georgian intelligentsia was how to collapse these differences and be authentic representatives of the nation in the eyes of peasants like Ghunia. The examples of Alexander Kazbegi and Vazha-Pshavela offered little help, since they were themselves of the mountains – their authenticity was never in question.
9 Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 196. 10 Gould “Mountaineer Prosaics,” 211
11 See Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 207-208. 12 Manning, “Describing Dialect,” 41-44.
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Georgian alpinism emerged in the early 1920s as a product of these tensions and offered a unique solution to the problems of authenticity. As I explore below, the founder of Georgian mountaineering, Giorgi Nikoladze, was intimately connected to the nineteenth century
intelligentsia and had a personal relationship with Chavchavadze himself. That Nikoladze would see alpinism in the service of the nation is unsurprising, and he demonstrated a remarkable attention to the intersections between physical and discursive conquest in his own writing. For Nikoladze and at least the first two generations of Georgian climbers, alpinism was a means to reclaim mountainous space in the name of the nation and to insist that Georgia was not just a land of wine and grapes but also one of towering peaks, a theme explored more fully in the following chapter. Even in the post-war period, Georgian alpinists were utilizing medieval manuscripts and Chavchavadze’s own poetry to discover an important religious cave site near the Kazbegi peak, a discovery that, as they highlighted, illustrated the long history of Georgian engagement with mountainous areas. But alpinism also had the unique ability to solve the problem of difference between the urban elite and the mountainous peasantry, the problem of Chavchavadze’s narrator seeing Lelt Ghunia as an Ossentian and Ghunia seeing the narrator as a Russian. Nikoladze sought out the cooperation of Mokhevian hunters and guides like Iagor Kazalikashvili and Gakha Tsiklauri, and explicitly articulated the importance of local
participation as a fundamental principle of Georgian climbing. The precedent set in 1923 would have lasting effects on the development of Georgian alpinism, and ensure the participation of communities in mountainous regions like Khevi, Svaneti, and Khevsureti. More importantly, this participation forced the actual bodies of the urban elite and the rural peasantry into the same space in ways that had a radical ability to promote a sense of equality between the two groups. The shared sacrifices of climbing, the intimate nature of alpine camps, and the necessity of trust
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and cooperation, often in the face of death, pushed these two groups together in ways that helped to erase social difference. In this way, alpinism solved the tension between intelligentsia and peasant that existed in the nineteenth century, marking both as authentic representatives of the nation.
Giorgi Nikoladze and the Georgian Intelligentsia
The initial idea for the 1923 expeditions to Kazbegi came from Giorgi Nikoladze, an engineer, mathematician, and gymnast from one of Georgia’s most prominent intellectual families. Born in 1888 in didi jikhaishi, a small village in the Imereti region in western Georgia, Nikoladze’s life reflected the peripatetic existence of many Georgian intellectuals during the late tsarist period. Nikoladze’s provincial upbringing was complemented with trips to Russia and western Europe where his family had contacts among the Russian and western European
intelligentsia.13 Educated initially at the prestigious First Gymnasium in Tbilisi, Nikoladze would go on to study at the Petersburg Institute of Technology where he graduated with honors as an engineer in metallurgy in 1913. Upon graduation, he worked in the Donbas as an engineer at two different metallurgical factories before returning to Tbilisi in 1918. Nikoladze remained in Tbilisi after the fall of the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia in 1921, working as an engineer in the nascent Soviet metal industry.14
In many ways, Nikoladze’s wide technical and literary interests mirrored those of his father, Niko Nikoladze. A contemporary of Ilia Chavchavadze, Niko Nikoladze was a prominent journalist, publisher, and intellectual and one of the most important members of the second generation of Georgian intellectuals known as the “meore dasi” or “second group” that were
13 A.N. Bogoliubov, Georgii Nikolaevich Nikoladze (Moskva, 1973), 36.
14 For a general overview of Nikoladze’s life, see: I.A. Aslanishvili, “G.N. Nikoladze – zachinatel’ sovetskogo al’pinizma” in Pobezhdennye vershiny (1951): 389-394.
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influential in the mid to late nineteenth century.15 As the first Georgian to receive a doctorate from a European university, Niko Nikoladze’s education represented some of the new
opportunities for Georgian intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century and a more direct
connection to western European intellectual society, a connection that benefited his son.16 Niko Nikoladze’s work developing the port city of Poti on the Black Sea, the manganese mines of Chiatura in central Georgia, and rail and pipeline connections throughout Georgia likewise illustrated a deep commitment to Georgia’s economic development. In general, Nikoladze’s politics reflected the larger reformist tendencies of this “second group,” which were
characterized by an emphasis on economic growth often through some form of state sponsored capitalism.17 Nikoladze’s contributions to both Georgian literature and economic reorganization simply cannot be underestimated. As Ronald Suny points out, Nikoladze and his contemporaries “operated with a confidence and energy unseen in earlier generations” and both his literary and economic projects were critical aspects of Georgian nation building in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.18
Nikoladze’s mother, Olga Guramishvili, likewise was an active participant in Georgian public life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in Georgia and in Georgian communities in Europe and Russia. Forbidden by her father to study abroad, an undeterred Olga ran away from home to study in Switzerland where there was a large group of Georgian émigrés. According to one story, she cleverly slipped past the border guards without a passport, while in
15 Georgia had three separate generations of intelligentsia that were invested in nation building in different ways that spanned the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Niko Nikoladze was a part of the second group known as the
meore dasi (from meore meaning second and dasi meaning group). For more on the development of Georgia’s
intelligentsia see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington, 1994), 118-143. 16 Ibid, 131.
17 Suny, Georgian Nation, 131-134. This focus on economic growth and reorganization separated this generation both from the more conservative gentry politics of the pirveli dasi (first group) as well as the more radical Marxist politics of the mesame dasi (third group) that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century.
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another she used the passport of Niko Nikoladze’s older sister to travel to Zurich in the early 1870s.19 In Zurich, Guramishvili was an active member of Georgian society “ugeli” (yoke), an organization that focused on national liberation by uniting Georgian youth who were living in Zurich, developing Georgian literature, and integrating itself with other European social movements.20 A few years later, the majority of the group moved to Geneva where it became more closely aligned with revolutionary movements in Russia and Europe, and especially with intellectual leaders of Georgia’s own national liberation movement like Giorgi Tsereteli.21 Guramishvili would continue to be an important member of Georgian intellectual society in Switzerland and later St. Petersburg, before being forced to return to Georgia after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. There, Guramishvili was invited by the famous Georgian reformer and educator Iakob Gogebashvili to teach in the Noble Gymnasium in Tbilisi.22 By the early twentieth century, Olga Guramishvili was a well-known pedagogue in Georgia who helped to develop new methods of instruction in Georgian schools.23 Guramishvili’s reputation as an educator was so well known that she was one of the first Georgian women to teach in a men’s gymnasium.24
Giorgi Nikoladze was clearly influenced by the social circles and intellectual interests of his parents and developed a deep love for Georgian literature. As a child, Giorgi often read Chavchavadze’s newspaper Iveria and would later read his father’s Russian language newspaper
19 See Nino Chikhladze, Gruzinskie zhenshchiny – deiatel’nitsy natsional’noi kul’tury (Tbilisi, 1987), 186; Bogoliubov, Nikoladze, 15.
20 Chikhladze, Gruzinskie zhenshchiny, 186-187. Olga Guramishvili herself came up with the name “ugeli.” See Ibid, 186.
21 For more on Ugeli and Guramishvili’s role, see: Chikhladze, Gruzinskie zhenshchiny, 186-193.
22 Chikhladze, Gruzinskie zhenshchiny, 196. Gogebashvili was actively involved in promoting Georgian language and literacy, and his children’s book “Mother Tongue” is still widely used today.