World Abaza Congress

The schoolmaster wrote in the reference of "the student Lakoba" that he read "illicit books and is friends with high school students." At the end of the school, Nestor continues his studies at the Theological Seminary, from which he is expelled a year later because of his participation in a secret revolutionary circle. He had to leave Tiflis, and he moved to Batum. Revolutionary ideas still attract the young man. In 1912 Nestor Lakoba joined the ranks of the Bolsheviks of the radical wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. After some time Batum police calls the propagandist-Abkhazian for questioning, and Nestor again decides to change his place of residence, choosing this time Grozny, where he enters the Grozny real school. In 1915, after graduating from college, Lakoba tries to continue his studies at the Faculty of Law of Kharkov University, but soon, due to the meager financial possibilities, he gives up the university and returns to his homeland.

The empire was going to pieces: the February Revolution of 1917, the March abdication of Nikolay II from the throne, - by April, popular unrest had reached Abkhazia. At a large meeting of peasants in the meadow of Lykhnashta Nestor Lakoba is elected as the district commissar of Gudauta. A little later, a revolutionary peasant squad "Kiaraz" was created, and Nestor became one of its leaders. From that time until the establishment of Soviet power in 1921, a struggle for power between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks developed on the territory of Abkhazia (Georgia was Menshevist-Ed.). The victors were changing. Nestor then had to hide somewhere, he again returned to Abkhazia, and at the end of 1918 he got to Sukhum prison. In 1920, fate again brought him to Batum, where he led an underground revolutionary movement. Here, settling in the house of his friend Adzhar Aki Dzhikh-ogly, he meets his sister, the young beauty Sariya, who was destined to become his wife.

In February 1922, Nestor Lakoba was elected chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and from April 1930 he was chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Abkhaz ASSR. Under the leadership of Lakoba, a revival of the decayed and desolate republic began.

Moreover, taking into account the peculiarities of the Abkhazian way of life, he did not victimize princes and representatives of the upper class and aristocracy, always referring to the fact that in Abkhazia there was no clear stratification of poor peasants and "enslaving" their princes. This policy of Nestor, which was considered fair and for which he was respected among the people, was contrary to the general Soviet plan of transformation and was not liked by everyone - the matter even reached Stalin: the well-wishers formed an anonymous letter, and Nestor had to appear before the leader with an answer. Despite the fact that everything was against the leader of Abkhazia, he made a speech in the Kremlin, which made everyone believe in his rightness. Needless to say, he possessed extraordinary oratorical abilities.

People were composing legends about him. One of them is described by the historian Ruslan Gozhba. About a shepherd, tending his herd in the high mountain village of Pskhu and hearing the conversation of three prophets who descended from heaven and appointed a certain "Chnagua" among themselves "ruler" of all Abkhazia. Later, this shepherd told what he saw to the sage named Mukba, and he, they say, met a young man who called himself Chnagua, on the way from Eshera to Sukhum, he was Nestor.

Of course, all this is just a legend, but it is firmly entrenched in the people who wanted to believe that Nestor was given to them by the supreme powers. People went to his house, told about their troubles - someone was hurt by people's commissars, someone asked to help starving relatives, and no one left without his attention.

Upon learning of this, he immediately informed the Kremlin that he was returning to Moscow, but Stalin replied that he did not have time for the funeral, so let him go to Lakoba - Trotsky's health for the party is more important. That he was deceived, Trotsky already found out in Sukhum, visiting Lakoba - Lenin's funeral was postponed for a day, and, having left when he intended, Lev Trotsky would have managed to come to parting with the leader. What happened was very bad for Trotsky's authority in the eyes of the party leadership, which, in fact, Stalin sought.

"Trotsky and Lakoba traveled all over Abkhazia, were frequent guests of the peasants, visited rural gatherings. On one of them in the village of Mokva, Trotsky made a speech. He began it according to all the rules of Abkhazian oratory. His first phrase was a ritual appeal, which he pronounced in Abkhazian: "The people, your hardships to me ...". The people gasped in amazement. For the peasants, this became the main thing in his speech," writes historian Stanislav Lakoba.

"He believed that Nestor contributed to strengthening his position in this difficult transition period," Stanislav Lakoba writes. "This is the mystery of Stalin's so long (almost twelve-year) disposition to Lakoba. On this basis, the leader brought Nestor closer to himself, and as if by accident, he publicly joked: "I am Koba (the party nickname of Joseph Stalin Ed.), And you are Lakoba." .

Taking the first steps along the career ladder, he quickly realized that, making friends with Lakoba, he could also reach out to Stalin. Beria even christened Rauf, the son of Nestor and Saria, and became well received in their house. The nomination of Beria took place with the assistance and, it can be said, at the request of Nestor, for it was he who advised Stalin "to nominate this young energetic Chekist for the leading party work." On November 12, 1931 Beria became the second secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee of the AUCP (b) (The All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) ed.) and first secretary CC CP (b) of Georgia (The Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) - ed.).

This manifested itself even in small things. When Stalin, walking through his dacha, half-jokingly suggested that we clean the garden of weeds, it was Beria, having got hold of an ax, with such frenzy, cut down the unfortunate bush, that to all who watched this scene, for a moment it seemed that he chopped not shrubs, but "heads of opponents". This episode is described in some detail by the brother of Saria Musto Dzhikh-ogly in his memoirs. Lavrenty Beria climbed the party ladder higher and higher, and eventually it turned out that Nestor Lakoba, who was originally much closer to Stalin, was in full submission to Beria.

And this idea, alas, was not new. Back in 1929, at a meeting of the Transcaucasian Regional Bureau of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), where all unanimously supported the entry of Abkhazia into Georgia as an autonomous republic, when everything seemed to have been decided, Lakoba was the last to be asked. And he answered: "I heard nothing. The hearing aid does not work well for me." It was considered impossible to repeat everything anew, and the question was postponed for a while, although later it was decided positively.

In the evening of the same day, the mother of Beria began to call the hotel room of Lakoba, then his wife Nina came and persistently invited Nestor to dinner for his favorite dish - fried trout. He came to Beria's house, but he did not touch anything, only drank some cognac and ate a piece of fish. Already after ten minutes he left, feeling bad. He will say only one word in Abkhazian in the car to the driver: Syrshit. (In translation from the Abkhazian "They killed me" - Ed.). On the same evening Nestor Apollonovich was summoned to watch ballet in the Beria's theater box. From there he was taken almost unconscious. At midnight on December 26, Lakoba died in Tbilisi. Later it will be reliably established - he was poisoned with cyanide.

With the death of Nestor, began one of the darkest times in the history of Abkhazia – he will be called "public enemy", closest relatives, including the wife Sariya Lakoba and the son Rauf, will perish in the NKVD chambers (the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR - ed.). But even the dead Nestor caused trouble for someone. First, his body will be reburied from the crypt of the Sukhum Botanical Garden to the Mikhailovskoye cemetery, and later a semi-detective story will begin with the remains: according to one version it will be burned in the limestone pit in the Mayak area, according to the other - the wife and mother, after learning that the grave is about to be leveled with the ground, managed to secretly organize a reburial, but showed the burial place to no one. Anyway, Nestor's graves does not exist today.