“The Colonial Policy of Russian Tsarism in Abkhazia (1810–1870)”: an unpublished book (mid-1930s)

Abstract

The article deels to preparations for the publication of a never-published collection of documents on the history of the accession of Abkhazia to Russia in the 19th century. Work on the book occurred in the 1930s, when there was a turning point in Soviet historical science associated with new directives of the Bolshevik leadership on how to interpret the imperial past. The documented fate of the collection allows to see how new attitudes (from denouncing colonial policy to the concept of “lesser evil”) determined the content of historical publications, changed their content and assessments of the past.