To the history of an Argument:

Ketevan Lomtatidze VS. Georgiy Serdyuchenko

Abstract

Academician Ketevan Lomtatitdze happened to work under the politically and ideologically extremely difficult circumstances. Nevertheless, she was still very young when became one of the leaders in the linguistics of Caucasian Studies. In 1949-1955 she had acute arguments with prof. Georgiy Serdyuchenko, an adept of the communist ideology. Georgiy Serdyuchenko started studying the Abaza dialects in the 30th of XX century. Soon he became an influential person and would control the linguistic situation in the North-West Caucasus. In 1945 G. Serdyuchenko started to work at the Institute of Russian language, in Moscow where he with prof. Fedot Filin and others persecuted those scientists, who were suspected in “cosmopolitism” and recognized the findings of “bourgeoisie linguistics”. In 1948 G. Serdyuchenko was appointed as the head of department of Caucasian languages at Moscow State University. After the notorious linguistic debates unleased in 1950, he as the persecutor of common sense, was removed from Moscow University and transferred to the Institute of Asian Peoples. G. Serdyuchenko had claims to be the most outstanding expert in the study of Abaza dialects. He was the one who K. Lomtatidze happened to have principal disagreements with and opposed in 1944. She gave a negative assessment to one of G. Serdyuchenko’s articles and noted that the author did not have enough competence to perceive the Abaza dialects, its word structure and even the elementary linguistic phenomena properly.