Was Menshevik Georgia a model?

 3 December, 2025 

Paul Abbot

 Workers' Liberty

Eric Lee’s The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism deals with the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Georgia in 1921 and the lead-up to the failed August Uprising in 1924, picking up where his earlier book The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution, 1918-1921 left off.

His central argument is that the events in Georgia played an important role in the final break between the two internationals, which he refers to as “the birth of democratic socialism”. This international context is the real original contribution of Lee’s book, and whilst I am unsympathetic to his assessment of the conflict and the conclusions he draws from it, it surely good that he has clearly and lucidly laid out the case for his side.

Georgia was a significant base for the Mensheviks, who enjoyed genuine dominance among the working class there. After the February Revolution, the Mensheviks controlled the Tiflis (now Tbilisi) Soviet, but argued that an alliance of the working class, soldiers, and the progressive bourgeoisie were at the heart of the revolution, and it was of utmost importance to preserve this alliance.

Difficult

The Mensheviks in power were faced with a difficult situation: they were a socialist party that drew their power from the working class and overall sought to remain part of Russia, yet were thrust into a position of national leadership at the head of a newly independent Georgia. They opposed dual power, and under their leadership the Tiflis Soviet renounced any claims to state power and subordinated itself to the (also Menshevik-ran) traditional bodies of the state. In their eyes, their task was to rule as befit a nation whose productive forces were unready for socialism: Prime Minister Noe Zhordania argued that they could not “avoid serving in one way or another … the interests of the bourgeoisie”.

For criticism of the Georgian Mensheviks in power, see Paul Vernadsky’s review of The Experiment and the ensuing back and forth, and the more recent debate in Solidarity between Lee and Vernadsky over German support for Menshevik Georgia.

In February 1921 a Bolshevik uprising broke out in Lori (disputed between Armenia and Georgia), at the very least in part engineered from Moscow. This came after Stalin’s ally Orjonikidze had repeatedly pushed for an invasion of Georgia, and the uprising was used as a pretext for invasion. Trotsky argued for more “preparatory work inside Georgia in order to develop the uprising and later come to its aid”, but was away in the Urals when the decision was made. Lenin acquiesced to the invasion, but expressed reservations which would grow over time.

Georgia was quickly conquered, and the new rule certainly was repressive. Lee chronicles the repression carried out against the trade unions, the church, intellectuals, cooperatives, peasants, and the Menshevik Party. Local communists were also badly treated by Moscow, with Stalin and Orjonikidze purging those who counseled more sensitivity towards national sentiment in Georgia: this episode was at the centre of Lenin’s final struggle against Stalin, and he worked hard to try and support Georgian communists such as Mdivani.

Despite the repression the Mensheviks endured underground, and in 1923 would form a committee (Damkom) to coordinate an uprising against Soviet rule, alongside the right-wing National Democrats, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Social Federalists, and Skhivists (dissident Mensheviks). Shortly before the uprising was due to take place one of its leaders was captured. He attempted to warn the others that the Cheka knew about their plans, but they carried on with the uprising at the end of August 1924.

Damp squib

For the most part it was a bit of a damp squib: the first shots were fired a day early in the city of Chiatura due to a miscommunication, and other local revolts the next day were small and isolated. The chief exception to this was Guria, an area which had experienced a Menshevik-supported peasant rebellion in the run up to the 1905 Revolution, where large numbers of peasants joined the August Uprising. Within a few days it was all over, and the government response was bloody.

Events in Georgia were closely followed by the European socialist movement, and Second International figures such as Karl Kautsky saw it as a practical and real-world alternative to Bolshevik Communism. In 1922 the Berlin Conference was held as a final attempt at reconciliation between the Second and Third Internationals (also including the Second and a Half International which was wavering between the two), and somewhat unexpectedly the Soviet invasion of Georgia came to dominate the proceedings. The discussions at the conference were acrimonious, and no practical cooperation came out of the conference.

Following the failure of the August Uprising, Kautsky wrote that Bolshevism had gone “from being the beneficiary of the revolution to its gravedigger”, and that when spontaneous revolts arose in the Soviet Union the Second International could not “condemn participation”.

Persuasive

Lee argues persuasively that the invasion of Georgia in 1921 provided a model for later Soviet invasions of bordering nations they saw as within their domain: namely, presenting the invasion as aid for local communists, either in power (Hungary and Afghanistan) or involved in a workers’ revolution.

Overall however, his conclusions are wrong. His opposition to the Bolsheviks is made less coherent by the cast of characters he selects as worthwhile critics of them: it is a grave insult to put Rosa Luxemburg alongside Samuel Gompers, the racist pro-war American union leader. On the war, Lee largely skirts over the fact that many of the book’s heroes fully supported their own government’s war efforts, such as Zhordania and Irakli Tsereteli.

The book’s epilogue about the refoundation of the Second International in 1951 is when things really go off the rails. Lee praises them for choosing sides in the Cold War and giving their “full support” to collective security and the foundation of NATO, pointing to former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as part of this tradition.

Lee writes off the Bolsheviks as a whole. He is wrong to do this, and his alternatives are not very convincing. However, the invasion of Menshevik Georgia in 1921 was a terrible crime, not only against Georgia but against the Bolshevik project itself. It helped to inaugurate the rule of a bureaucratic anti-democratic clique, and cement the idea that workers’ rule could be implemented from outside at the tip of a bayonet.