On this day 87 years ago in the small Georgian town of Chitura, citizens took up arms against the Soviet government in what is now called the August Uprising.
The Soviet Union had been in control of the tiny nation since it's invasion in 1921. The remnants of the Georgian military that managed to escape fled to the mountains and organized partisan factions. For the next two years, sporadic guerilla fighting broke out in various towns, but failed to attract popular support. By 1923, 33 of the 57 known factions had disintegrated or surrendered to the Russians. This forced those that remained to work in close cooperation. Political rivals put their differences aside as they laid plans for a wide-spread armed revolt.
The first wave of attacks was to being at 2am on August 29, but a miscommunication led the town of Chitura to rise up a day early. Much of western Georgia managed to free itself from Russian control and even established a interim government. These victories were short-lived. Soviet response was swift and brutal. The Red Army blockaded the coast and then invaded with ground troops, artillery and aircraft. By August 30, the rebels were forced into the woods and mountains. The Russians now attacked the eastern half of the country.
In a last-ditch desperate attempt to turn the tide, rebel commander Colonel Kakutsa Cholokashvili led a surprise attack against the city of Dusheti on September 3. The Soviet counter-offensive forced him to withdraw, and by September 5, the prominent resistance groups had all been destroyed. Total rebel casualties are thought to be around 3,000.
The Georgians were punished in typical Communist fashion: a nation-wide purge that killed an estimated 10,000 people, including all the members of the interim government and rebel commanders. The exact number is unknown, since arrests and executions continued for several weeks. Stalin himself said "all Georgia must be plowed under."
Surprisingly, the purges sparked outcry among socialists in other parts of the world. Stalin and the Politburo were forced to pay lip service by saying that the Russians "may have gone too far" and that the uprising "could have happened anywhere in Russian unless the attitudes towards the peasants are changed." Amnesty was give to the surviving rebels, but for years to come, the uprising was a taboo topic, denounced by the Soviet propaganda machine as "a bloody adventure." It would be the last attempt in Georgia to oust the Bolsheviks. As the Berlin Wall prepared to collapse, rebel commanders became popular icons of resistance. It wasn't until May 2006 that Russian archives were published listing names of those who died in the purges.
The saddest fact of all is that Stalin himself was a native Georgian.
In the US, on this day 54 years ago, Senator Strom Thurmond began his infamous filibuster of the Civil Rights Act. It holds the record as the longest in the nation's history at 24 hours 18 minutes.
