Malarial Durabilities: Tracing Echoes of Russian Imperialism in Abkhazia from the 1870s through the 1930s

• In Event: Echoes of Empire: Taming the Nature, Bodies, and Knowledge of Georgia's Black Sea Coast

Abstract

Russia expelled tens of thousands of Abkhazians from their homeland in several waves following the Great Caucasian War (1817-64) and the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78). Nestled along the Black Sea coast, the farmlands that Abkhazians left behind were simultaneously cast as swampy, diseased, subtropical, fertile, and full of opportunity. Administrators of the Russian Empire quickly learned that they would have to contend with endemic malaria if they were to have any hope of successfully colonizing their newly vacant lands. Using records of the expeditions of the Pirogov Society’s Malaria Commission, travelogues, and archival sources, this paper traces the ways malaria shaped political relationships between the Russian Empire, Georgia, and Abkhazia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this paper, I also engage with Suman Seth’s concept of “seasoned bodies” and Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of “imperial durabilities” to analyze a series of newspaper articles from 1877 by Iakob Gogebashvili. In his editorials, Gogebashvili argued that neighboring Mingrelians (themselves living in the Russian colony of Georgia) were best suited to colonize Abkhazia, as they were already acclimatized to the region and thus less likely to contract malaria. Ultimately, I argue that malaria offers a lens for better understanding the ways in which echoes of Russian imperialism persisted and mutated well into the Soviet period (and arguably beyond).

Author

• Molly Walker, Harvard U