Lakoba, Nestor Apollonovich

Born May 1, 1893, in the village of Lykhny, now in Gudauta Raion, Abkhazian ASSR; died Dec. 28, 1936, in Tbilisi. Soviet government and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1912. Son of a peasant.

In 1911, Lakoba was expelled from the Tbilisi Ecclesiastical Seminary for revolutionary propaganda. He did party work in Adzharia, Abkhazia, and then the Northern Caucasus. In May 1917 he was a delegate to the First Caucasus Regional Congress of Soviets. In 1918 he was one of the leaders of a revolt against the Georgian Menshevik government, vice-chairman of the Sukhumi military revolutionary committee, and organizer of a partisan detachment. In late 1918 the Menshevik government imprisoned him in Sukhumi, and in the spring of 1919 he was exiled from Georgia. In 1920, on assignment from the Caucasus bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (Bolshevik), he directed a clandestine Bolshevik organization in Batumi and was the representative of the Kuban’–Black Sea Revolutionary Committee in charge of mountaineer affairs. In March 1921 he became vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Abkhazia and people’s commissar of military and naval affairs of Abkhazia. In February 1922 he became chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Abkhazian ASSR; from 1930 to 1936 he was chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Abkhazian ASSR. He was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Georgian SSR, the Central Executive Committee of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, and the bureau of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party (Bolshevik). He was a delegate to the Thirteenth and the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the RCP (Bolshevik). He was awarded the Order of Lenin and two other orders.