Akakii Chkhenkeli
Chkhenkeli, Akakii Ivanovich
Born 1874 in the city of Khoni, now the city of Tsulukidze, Georgian SSR; died 1959, in Paris. A leader of the Georgian Mensheviks.
Chkhenkeli joined the social democratic movement in 1898. Between 1907 and 1914 he was a Liquidator. Chkhenkeli served in the Fourth State Duma (1912–17) as a deputy from Kars and Batumi oblasts and Sukhumi Okrug. During World War I he was a defensist; that is, he supported the war on the grounds of national defense.
After the February Revolution of 1917, Chkhenkeli became a commissar of the bourgeois Provisional Government in Transcaucasia and a member of the Special Transcaucasian Committee. In April 1918 the Transcaucasian Seim confirmed him as head of the Transcaucasian Provisional Government. He subsequently served as minister of foreign affairs in the Menshevik government of Georgia and as the Menshevik government’s envoy to France. Chkhenkeli became an émigré in 1921.