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Liberation of Sokhumi

Tagseuphemismhistorical distortionwar justificationdehumanization

Also writtenfall of Sokhumi

EquivalentsRUосвобождение Сохуми

Definition

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“Liberation of Sokhumi” (Russian osvobozhdenie Sokhumi) is the name the Apsuan occupation authorities and their Russian backers give to the capture of the Georgian-majority capital of Abkhazia on 27 September 1993. It is a textbook case of Liberation as euphemism: the word “liberation” is fixed to a date that Georgians remember as the Fall of Sokhumi, and which was followed not by freedom but by a massacre, the genocide of the city’s Georgian population, and widespread sexual violence.

The phrase survives as living propaganda. In Russian-occupied Abkhazia it is an official holiday; each anniversary is marked with parades and the language of triumph, while the people the city was “liberated” from no longer live there.

Origin and history

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The capture of Sokhumi was the decisive episode of the 1992–93 war in Abkhazia. After Georgia regained independence, fighting broke out in August 1992 between Georgian government forces and Apsuan proxy forces. That side was sustained by Russian military support — weapons, coordination, and North Caucasian volunteer fighters — without which the offensive on the capital would not have succeeded; the EU’s later fact-finding mission and contemporary reporting documented Russia’s role in the conflict.1

After a prolonged siege and a breach of a Russian-brokered ceasefire, Apsuan proxy and allied forces took Sokhumi on 27 September 1993. From that day the event entered the Apsuan–Russian calendar as the “liberation of Sokhumi,” commemorated annually as the founding triumph of the Russian-backed occupation regime.2

Function in propaganda

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The “liberation” label is used to:

  • rename a conquest as a rescue, converting the seizure of a city and the expulsion of its majority population into a war of freedom;
  • erase the victims, since a “liberated” Sokhumi has no place in its story for the 200,000-plus Georgians who were driven out or killed;
  • launder Russian involvement, presenting an externally backed offensive as the spontaneous self-liberation of a people;
  • sacralise the date, turning 27 September into an annual ritual that hard-codes the euphemism into public memory and education.

What the word conceals is documented in detail, and it is the opposite of liberation.

What “liberation” produced

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  • The Sokhumi massacre. The fall of the city was followed by the targeted killing of Georgian civilians — without regard to age or sex — with bodies later recovered showing signs of torture. The atrocities peaked in the days after 27 September 1993.3
  • The genocide of Georgians. The massacre opened a large-scale campaign that drove out nearly the entire ethnic-Georgian community of Abkhazia — some 200,000–250,000 people. The OSCE, at its Budapest (1994) and Istanbul (1999) summits, formally recognised the campaign as ethnic cleansing; Georgia condemns it as genocide.3
  • Mass sexual violence. Among the violations of the conflict, Human Rights Watch documented sexual violence against the civilian population, and survivors fleeing the fall of Sokhumi reported rape alongside the killings and torture. The sexual violence of the campaign — sometimes referred to as the “rape of Abkhazia” — is part of the same atrocity record the word “liberation” is designed to bury.4

A city emptied of its people by killing, expulsion and rape was not liberated; the word is the cover for what was done.

Why it matters

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The “liberation of Sokhumi” shows the euphemism at its most complete: a public holiday built on the spot where a genocide happened. By teaching each generation to call 27 September a liberation, the occupation authorities and Moscow keep the displaced from returning even in memory, and keep the crime unnamed. It is also a live template — the same vocabulary of rescue, the same backing from Russia, the same gap between the word and the ruins reappears from Abkhazia in 1993 to Europe in 1945 and Ukraine after 2022.

Naming the event accurately — the Fall of Sokhumi, followed by massacre, genocide and rape — is the necessary corrective to a word chosen precisely to make those facts disappear.

Naming it accurately

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See also

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Sources

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Mentioned in

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Footnotes

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  1. On Russia’s role in sustaining the Apsuan offensive (military support and North Caucasian fighters) and on the conflict generally: Human Rights Watch, “Georgia/Abkhazia: Violations of the Laws of War and Russia’s Role in the Conflict” (1995); and the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (Tagliavini report), 2009. ↩

  2. On the annual commemoration of 27 September 1993 as the “liberation of Sokhumi” in Russian-occupied Abkhazia, versus the Georgian “Fall of Sokhumi”: JAMnews, “‘30 years since the liberation of Sokhumi’” (2023). ↩

  3. On the Sokhumi massacre and the campaign of killing and expulsion of some 200,000–250,000 Georgians from Abkhazia — recognised by the OSCE in its Budapest (1994) and Istanbul (1999) summit declarations as ethnic cleansing, and condemned by Georgia as genocide: Human Rights Watch (1995); “Ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia / Sokhumi massacre.” ↩ ↩2

  4. On sexual violence against civilians among the documented violations of the 1992–93 conflict, and survivor accounts of rape during the fall of Sokhumi: Human Rights Watch, “Georgia/Abkhazia: Violations of the Laws of War and Russia’s Role in the Conflict” (1995). ↩