During the Stalin years, a purge was carried out against Communist Party officials and intelligentsia of Abkhaz provenance on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, then-the Party Secretary in Transcaucasus and himself a native of Abkhazia, in order to break a resistance to forced collectivization of land. The Abkhaz party leader Lakoba suddenly died shortly after his visit to Beria in Tbilisi in December 1936. There was a strong suspicion that he was poisoned by Beria who declared Lakoba an "enemy of the people" posthumously. The purges in Abkhazia were accompanied by the suppression of Abkhaz ethnic culture: the Latin-based Abkhaz alphabet was changed into Georgian and all the native language schools were closed, ethnic Georgians were guaranteed key official positions, many place names were changed to Georgian ones. In the terror of 1937-38, the ruling elite was purged of Abkhaz and by 1952 over 80% of the 228 top party and government officials and enterprise managers were ethnic Georgians; there remained 34 Abkhaz, 7 Russians and 3 Armenians in these positions. Between 1937 and 1953 tens of thousands of peasants from Western Georgia were settled in Abkhazia. In the 1926 Soviet census, the Abkhaz accounted for 26.4% of the region's population. The demographic engineering of the late Stalin period brought this proportion down to 17—18%. Abkhazia is mountainous and has a shortage of arable land, which made it difficult to send in new settlers. This was one of the reasons why in 1949 the Greek and Turkish minorities were deported from Abkhazia to Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics, and Georgians were settled in the formerly Greek and Turkish villages. Abkhazia experienced collectivisation in 1936–1938, much later than most of USSR.