RUSSIA VS GEORGIA: A WAR OF PERCEPTIONS

ISN, Switzerland
International Relations & Security Network
Aug 27 2007

Image: WikipediaBy Donald Rayfield (27/08/07)

An intimate past and bitter present make it hard for Russians and
Georgians to live as neighbours but impossible to separate completely,
says Donald Rayfield. From openDemocracy.

The second alleged incursion of a Russian aircraft into Georgian
territory during August 2007 has further heightened tension between the
two states. An already difficult relationship is mired in accusation,
denial, rumour and suspicion over the sorties (the Georgian deputy
defense minister Batu Kutelia claims there have been nine in the last
three months). The fact that such incidents, minor in themselves,
can provoke such heated reactions confirms that something has gone
badly wrong in a once almost familial bond. What is it, and can it
be repaired?

It is hard to disentangle reality from myth regarding the airspace
violations amid the deluge of propaganda on either side. But most
international experts now agree that on 6 August 2007, Russian aircraft
did venture three times into Georgian airspace from the direction of
Vladikavkaz – and that on the third sortie an aircraft deliberately
fired a missile, which fortunately failed to explode when it landed
near the village of Tsitelubani.

This was followed on the night of 21 August by the entry of a Russian
military jet which seems to have discharged a missile which fell on
a cornfield (and also did not ignite) in the vicinity of Georgia’s
border with the disputed territory of South Ossetia.

Both incidents have been given the full diplomatic treatment – official
statements, condemnations, appeals to scientific evidence, calls for
solidarity from allies and the international community (including
the United Nations). The west’s anxiety about becoming embroiled in
further confrontation with Russia mean that Georgia’s attempts to bring
its grievance over Russian behavior to the attention of the Security
Council will probably be as ineffective as the missile itself. There
is a recent precedent: the Russia-originated cyber-attack on Estonia
in April-May 2007 which targeted the government’s computer system –
in apparent revenge for Estonia’s moving of a city-centre statue
commemorating the country’s "liberation" by the Red Army in 1944 –
has not met with any effective protest or sanctions.

But if Georgia will find it difficult to persuade the world to take
the incidents seriously enough, the violation of its territory is part
of a pattern that reveals much about the mindset currently animating
Russian policy. A key aspect of this is the deep xenophobia that
pervades Russian politics and public opinion directed at Americans,
western Europeans, and Chinese but, above all, at the people of nations
which have secured their independence since the fall of the Soviet
Union. In this sense the Georgians are only one target of a wider
"blame culture" in Moscow (as the Estonia example confirms). But
it is also the case that the bitterness directed against them (and
reciprocated in full) reflects the illusions of a Russia that thinks
it "knows" and understands Georgia – and has not yet understood that,
in fact, it no longer does.

Russia’s telescope The first Russian illusion is indicated by
a recent feature on the Moscow radio station Ekho Moskvy, where
listeners were asked to estimate the population of Georgia. The mean
response was 30 million (the true figure in 2007 is approximately 4.6
million). Moreover, the signifier "Georgian" (like Azeri, Armenian,
Avar, Circassian or Abkhaz) has now been replaced by the overall term
"person of Caucasian ethnicity," thus losing a series of imaginary
distinctions drawn in imperial and Soviet Russia: between civilised,
Christian Caucasians (Georgians, Armenians and in part Ossetians)
and wild, pagan and Muslim Caucasians (all the rest); and between
settled Caucasians who meekly accepted the imperial yoke (Georgians,
Armenians, Azeris, Ossetians) and noble savages (Chechens, Avars,
Circassians) who resisted it.

A second Russian illusion is that Georgia is ungrateful, having
enjoyed a privileged position under Soviet rule (mainly thanks to
its being the homeland of Joseph Stalin). True, in Georgia’s lush
climate the sun shone and fruit grew on trees even in the 1930s; and
in the 1930s-1940s only 1 percent of the Soviet prison-camp system
was Georgian, though Georgians made up 2.5 percent of the Soviet
population – a disproportion corrected in 1951 under Stalin himself,
when a new persecution doubled the number of Georgians in the gulag.

But a closer look at the statistics reveals that the "great terror"
affected Georgia at least as badly as Leningrad or Moscow. The ruthless
prosecutor Nikolai Yezhov’s targets for repression in August 1937
set the proportion for "Category 1" (to be shot after arrest and
interrogation) at 50 percent of those arrested in Georgia (compared
to 16 percent for Moscow). But these limits were everywhere exceeded
by a factor of nine, meaning that the secret-police chief Lavrenti
Beria (himself a Mingrelian, from a region in western Georgia)
had some 50,000 Georgians shot in 1937-38, the same proportion as in
Russia’s two main cities. During the "great patriotic war" of 1941-45,
the Georgian male population had perhaps the highest casualty rate
of any Soviet republic: some 300,000 young men died (mostly in the
Kerch landings of 1943), about a third of those of military age in
the country.

The third Russian illusion about Georgia is one of patronage, that
Moscow can effectively direct Tbilisi’s choice of political leader.

The extraordinary antagonism displayed by Vladimir Putin’s officials
and army officers towards Georgia can be perhaps explained by their
initial support for the "rose revolution" of 2003-04 that brought
Mikheil Saakashvili to power: so great was their hatred for Eduard
Shevardnadze (Saakashvili’s predecessor as Georgia’s president and
the former Soviet foreign minister, whom they blamed for the Soviet
system’s demise) that anyone who overthrew him was bound to find some
sympathy in Moscow.

Moreover, Saakashvili followed his political triumph by ejecting
Adzharia’s warlord Aslan Abashidze from his fiefdom in southwest
Georgia; as a business associate of Moscow’s mayor, Abashidze was
particularly obnoxious to Putin. The Russians no doubt thought that
Saakashvili would prove another deluded, manipulable nationalistic
intellectual (like the unlamented first president of independent
Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia) who would reduce his country to helpless
destitution and dependence on Russia’s tutelage. Instead, and to
Moscow’s chagrin, Saakashvili has proved astute at home and popular
abroad with relationship.

The single overriding Georgian illusion is that Russia is the great
Christian kingdom of the north which will come to the rescue of a
small Christian nation threatened by Turkic and Persian, Islamic,
rule. This view of the northern protector is one that has persisted
since the crusades: that a fellow-Christian kingdom will come to the
aid of a beleaguered Christian nation threatened by barbarians.

Georgian history teaches otherwise. The crusaders did the very
opposite, and ravaged the eastern Christians more thoroughly than they
did the Muslims; in the 18th century, several western rulers (Louis
XIV, Louis XV, Pope Clement XI) told Prince Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani
(uncle of the Georgian king, Vakhtang VI) that their trading links
with Persia superseded their concern for a Christian nation threatened
by that Islamic state; the British withdrew all their support staff
the moment that the Red Army threatened Tbilisi in 1921. In 2008,
nobody should doubt that if Russia were to invade Georgia the west
would confine its support to a few unenforceable resolutions in the
United Nations – and would go on buying Russian oil and gas.

This is where illusion meets reality – with a crunch. For a combination
of choice and circumstance is redirecting Georgia’s economy towards the
west. Georgian railways are about to be managed by a British firm for
the next 89 years; Turkey has become Georgia’s chief trading partner,
and Georgia’s exports to Russia have declined by more than half in
2007, thanks to Russia’s ban on Georgian wine and mineral water. Even
the land border- crossing to Russia has become an obstacle-course,
as Georgia prepares to open a third crossing to Turkey (and very soon
a direct rail link, which Armenians too will be able to use).

The underlying logic is that Soviet-era industry died in Georgia
in 1990 and cannot be resurrected. The agricultural sector is still
operating largely as subsistence farming, producing less than a third
of what it did in the mid-1980s, when Georgia supplied Russia with
citrus fruit, wine, lamb, tea and cheese. Western markets, flooded with
cheap produce, are not going to import Georgian agricultural products,
except for the recently revived wine industry which is producing
wines of high enough quality to find a niche market (Tbilisi will
soon again be producing brandy to rival French cognac.)

Yet the break with Russia has its costs. The approximately 500,000
Georgian workers in Russia are subject to increasing pressure from
authorities to prevent them trading, being educated, or remitting money
home. Even Russian citizens of Georgian origin – such as the writer
Boris Akunin (born Grigori Chkhartishvili) and the sculptor Zurab
Tsereteli – have been targeted by Russia’s notorious tax authorities.

The problem of the lost lands, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, is even more
painful for Georgia. The dispute over the "frozen territories," which
wrested themselves from Tbilisi’s control in the small wars of 1992-93,
is further from a solution than ever before. In South Ossetia, the
idea of unity with North Ossetia (part of Russia) has been encouraged
by the Russian foreign minister and by the authorities in the north;
while Tbilisi uses a mixture of charm and bluster in the effort to
replace the breakaway Eduard Kokoity government with the pro-Tbilisi
puppet, Dmitry Sanakoyev.

In Abkhazia, hotels, villas and building land have been bought by
Russian businessmen and officials who have a vested interest in seeing
that Abkhazia will become a puppet – if not yet an actual integral part
– of the Russian Federation. The award of the 2014 winter Olympics to
Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi has allowed Abkhazian territory to
be proposed for use in accommodating the athletes and even hosting
events. No Georgian politician can seriously foster any hope of
recovering Abkhazia by diplomatic or military means – although any
Georgian politician who admitted this publicly would cease to be a
politician, or even to be alive, the very next day.

An intimate acrimony In this difficult environment, all Mikheil
Saakashvili can do – while cultivating his gift for memorable,
provocative remarks – is to try to make Georgia a safer, freer and more
prosperous country to live in, and thus encourage western investment
and sympathy while. Here he has had partial success: everyday bribery
has been vastly reduced (you can drive across the the country and never
be stopped by an acquisitive traffic policeman, though the number of
expensive restaurants with very large black Mercedes outside and very
fat politicians and officials inside suggests that at higher levels
corruption has only become a little more discreet).

Tbilisi’s opera house and theatres now open for performances;
readers can afford to buy books again and therefore publishing houses
are printing them; and best of all, the Georgian cinema, once the
pride of the USSR, is coming back to life. The president’s wife,
Sandra Roelofs (Dutch by origin, and a fluent speaker of Georgian),
has opened a classical-music radio station. The education system has
been purged, to the annoyance of parents and university teachers who
both preferred the payment of bribes as the most convenient selection
process for students. In his own way, Putin has helped the Georgian
economy by frightening several Russia-based Georgian oligarchs into
taking their wealth and their need for efficient infrastructure home to
Georgia, where their impact almost matches that of the 1,000 American
military and intelligence agents and the dozens of international NGOs
in providing employment.

There is a long way to go. The pro-western government of Saakashvili
speaks the benign international language of peace and transparency,
but investigations into the mysterious death in February 2005 of
prime minister Zurab Zhvania, the brains behind the rose revolution,
have been obstructed. Saakashvili’s refusal to pursue these, indeed
his persecution of any journalists that continue to probe the affair,
cast doubt on his commitment to democracy and the rule of law. Other
moves, such as the decision to expel the Georgian union of writers
from their building in order to privatize the property, show an
ill-considered contempt for Georgia’s intelligentsia.

The frequent crises and the intemperate tone of the current
Russia-Georgia relationship are, then, part of long-term shifts on both
sides. The relationship is both full of bitterness and extremely close,
reminiscent of that between an acrimoniously and recently divorced
couple. Even today, no serious Georgian politician will ever undertake
a significant decision without taking into consideration what the
Russian reaction would be. Russian-Georgian ties, however near rupture
and however twisted, remain impossible to disentangle or to disavow.

This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net under a Creative
Commons licence.