Varlam Cherkezishvili

Who was Varlam Cherkezishvili?

Prince Varlam Cherkezishvili was a Georgian politician and journalist, involved in anarchist communist movement, and later in the Georgian national liberation movement. He was also known as Warlaam Tcherkesoff or Varlam Cherkezov in Russian manner.

He was born into the family of the Georgian Prince Aslan Cherkezishvili in Tbilisi, Georgia. He was sent to be educated in Russia in the 1850s. He joined the Russian socialist movement at its very beginnings, and was arrested twice between 1866 and 1869. Following a trial in the summer of 1871, he was imprisoned at the Peter and Paul Fortress, and then exiled in Tomsk in 1874. Two years later, he escaped to Western Europe, where he worked with the press in the circles of Russian emigration and fellow anarchists. He was also prominent in his criticism of Marxist ideas. His main work, Pages of Social History, was translated into nine languages. Actively involved in the Georgian national liberation movement, he helped to found the Georgian Socialist-Federalist Party. He wrote for the Times a series of articles in 1877 to bring to the attention of an English speaking audience the situation in Georgia.