Union of United Mountaineers
Union of United Mountaineers
a counterrevolutionary organization in the Northern Caucasus, created by mountaineer (gortsy) feudal lords and the bourgeois nationalist intelligentsia at the First Congress of Mountaineers, held in May 1917 in Vladikavkaz. The union was headed by the Kumyk prince R. Kh. Ka-planov, the Chechen oil industrialist T. Chermoev, the former Ingush official V. Dzhabagiev, and the Kabardin stud-farm owner P. Kotsev. In November 1917 the union proclaimed the creation of the Gortsy Republic and the Gortsy Government. It published the newspaper Gorskaia zhizn’.
The union belonged to the Southeastern Union of Cossack Troops, Mountaineers of the Caucasus, and Free Peoples of the Steppes, and its leadership belonged to the Terek-Dagestan Government. With the formation of the Terek Soviet Republic in 1918, the Gortsy Government fled to Tbilisi, where it continued its counterrevolutionary activities until February 1921, when it emigrated abroad.