TRAVELS IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION
By Joshua Kucera

Washingtonpost
1588/
May 20, 2008, at 1:27 PM ET

TSKHINVALI, South Ossetia–The first time I enter Tskhinvali,
the capital of South Ossetia, the hotel staff immediately calls
the police. They tell me that no one can process my journalist
accreditation until Wednesday. It is a Sunday afternoon, and the
following Tuesday is the May Day holiday, making it a four-day
weekend. Can’t I just stay until then and see the town as a tourist,
I ask? Nope. So about 20 minutes after I arrive, the police drive
me back to the border with Georgia proper and tell me to try again
later. I come back on Wednesday and find that the accreditation process
consists of writing my name in a book and filling out a small piece
of paper that I am told to carry with me everywhere I go. It takes
about a minute.

I’m visiting South Ossetia as part of a tour across the southern edge
of the former Soviet Union, looking at the wildly different directions
the newly independent countries have taken since 1991. In the case
of South Ossetia, a self-proclaimed independent country that is,
in fact, neither independent nor a country, "nowhere" is probably
the best way to describe where it’s gone. It’s perhaps the closest
you can get today to experiencing the old Soviet Union, as well as a
good place to get the flavor of a good old-fashioned, Cold-War-style
proxy war between the United States and Russia. South Ossetia broke
away from Georgia after a chaotic 18-month war that killed 1,000 (of
a population of 60,000) between 1990 and 1992. Today, South Ossetia
is propped up by Russia: Moscow pays government salaries and provides
the bulk of the peacekeeping forces. Billboards around Tskhinvali
show Vladimir Putin with the legend "Our President." (This is during
the summer of 2007. The billboards were later replaced with signs
featuring new President Dmitry Medvedev that read, "The Russian Bear
Is the Friend of the Snow Leopard," leopards being a symbol of the
Ossetian nation.) Meanwhile, in Georgia proper, the United States is
conducting an extensive training program for the Georgian military.

Of course, Washington has bigger fish to fry than South Ossetia–it’s
training the Georgians to serve in Iraq, where the tiny ex-Soviet
country is the highest per-capita contributor of troops, with about
2,000 in the sandbox.

When I finally make it to Tskhinvali, I meet with the head of the
press office, Irina Gagloeva, and she asks me whom I want to talk to.

I give her the list of government officials I’d like to interview.

The president? He’s in Moscow. The prime minister? Likewise. The
minister of defense or the chief of the armed forces? Absolutely
impossible to talk to anyone about anything military, she says.

Finally, we set up meetings with the foreign minister and the deputy
prime minister. That shouldn’t take very long, she says, so you
can leave tomorrow. I tell her I also want time to talk to people
outside the government–journalists, academics, ordinary people–and
to get the flavor of South Ossetia. I was hoping to stay until Sunday,
a four-day trip. No, she says. Finally, she relents and lets me stay
until Saturday. "Saturday, 5 p.m., Joshua goodbye." She also forbids me
to visit Kurta, where a rival government advocating reintegration with
Georgia established itself last year. It’s clear that the government
does not want journalists roaming around South Ossetia.

That afternoon, I set out to walk around town and take some photos.

My first subject is a small group of palm trees that were given to
the government of South Ossetia by Abkhazia, its sister breakaway
territory. A policeman, who looks about 16, comes over and asks for
my passport and accreditation. Everything checks out, and he lets
me go. But a few minutes later, I see a picturesque abandoned shop
with two flags flying out front–South Ossetian and Russian. The
South Ossetian flag is almost never seen here without a Russian flag
alongside. I snap a picture, and another policeman comes up and asks
to see the last photo I took. I figure he thinks I had taken one of
a policeman or some other forbidden subject, so I confidently show
him the photo of the shop. "Come with me," he says, and we get in
his Lada Niva jeep and drive to the nearby police station. "Is there
a problem with the photo?" I ask. "Yes, there’s a problem." At the
police station, I wait on a ratty couch for about an hour, until
two officials from the foreign ministry arrive. They drive me back
to the hotel and tell me to stay there until morning. But I haven’t
eaten dinner, and there is no restaurant in the hotel, I protest. One
relents and says I can go out to eat. But nothing more, and I must
be back at the hotel by 9:30. They tell the receptionist to call the
police if I’m not back. What’s the problem? I ask again. "People might
think you’re a spy," one of them tells me. This is all for my safety,
he explains. What sort of dangers are out there in Tskhinvali? I
ask. "Maybe Georgians would attack you and blame us," he says. I
never find out why they were freaked out by the photo.

The next day, I meet with Deputy Prime Minister Boris Chochiev. When
I tell him about my experiences with the police, he looks concerned
and says he will investigate. Then he adds: "You know, people don’t
trust foreign journalists. The international journalists who travel
from Georgia are usually following someone’s orders." Whose orders?

"The orders of those who support Georgia. They don’t want true
information; they want to represent us as just a small bunch of
separatists that don’t want to live with Georgia. But why don’t we
want to live with Georgia? This is what they don’t want to write."

Chochiev, a jovial man with a bushy mustache, is also a historian,
and he gives me two books that he wrote on this very subject:
South Ossetia: A Chronicle of the Events of the Georgian Aggression
1988-1992 and Memories of a Nation: Victims of Georgia’s Aggressive
Policy Against South Ossetia.

Ossetians say they have nothing in common with Georgia and that
South Ossetia is an artificial creation thrown together by ethnic
Georgian Bolsheviks who wanted to separate and weaken the Ossetian
nation. (A much larger portion of the Ossetian people lives in North
Ossetia, a part of Russia just across the Caucasus mountains from
South Ossetia.) They say that throughout the Soviet era, Georgia
populated South Ossetia with ethnic Georgians and restricted the use
of the Ossetian language.

South Ossetia now appears to be a police state. Close to half the men I
see on the street are police or military, and many men not in uniform
openly wear pistols. Many of the police are engaged in make-work
duties, it appears (including monitoring foreign journalists). There is
a large detachment on the top floor of my hotel, allegedly providing
security for the hotel (although I seem to be the only guest), and
when some rowdy teenagers disrupt a concert celebrating Victory Day,
the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II,
a dozen or so police, including OMON forces (comparable to a SWAT team)
are there to intercede.

There are very few shops and little activity on the streets, even
for a town of 40,000–but especially for the capital of a would-be
independent republic. The biggest industry besides the security
apparatus, which is almost all funded from Moscow, is subsistence
farming.

People here blame the United States for providing military support
to Georgia and emboldening Tbilisi to act against South Ossetia, and
there is no ambivalence about the relationship with Moscow. Russia
and Ossetia have been military allies since at least the 19th
century. Moscow has traditionally relied on its fellow Christian
Ossetians against the many Muslim nations in the Caucasus as well as
against the independent-minded Georgians.

In 2001, the speaker of the South Ossetian parliament wrote a letter
to Russian President Vladimir Putin asking him to annex the country.

Foreign Minister Murat Djioev tells me that joining Russia is also
his desire, but independence is the first step on that path. For now,
though, Russia seems satisfied to exercise de facto control over South
Ossetia. It has given Russian passports to South Ossetians–who can’t
travel on their South Ossetian passports–and now 96 percent of South
Ossetians are Russian citizens. I ask Djioev about the Russian flags
and Putin billboards around town. "I want us to be part of Russia,
but I understand this won’t happen quickly. As Russian citizens, we
want to demonstrate that the Russian flag is our flag and Putin is our
president," he says. Several top officials, including the minister of
defense and the head of the security service, are Russians. Djioev
makes no apologies for it. "When it’s necessary to invite a Russian
specialist here, we’ll do it. In San Marino, many of the top officials
are Italians, and nobody criticizes them for it," he says. (Russia
will, in 2008, move to formalize ties with South Ossetia as well as
Abkhazia, further ratcheting up tensions with Georgia.)

One night at the Café Farn, where I had gotten to know many of the
regulars, a burly, jolly, and extremely drunken man comes over. "He’s
spetsnaz"–a special-forces soldier–one of my friends at the table
tells me. "Russian or South Ossetian spetsnaz?" I ask.

"Russian," he says, to the visible discomfort of the other people at
the table. "Well, Russian and South Ossetian," he says. "But never
mind," he adds and pours a round of vodka shots.

South Ossetia’s position has lately become more precarious. Dmitri
Sanakoev, a former South Ossetian defense minister and veteran of
the 1990-92 war, changed sides, and in 2006 he was elected president
of South Ossetia in an "alternative" poll organized by a few ethnic
Georgian villages in South Ossetia. He now runs a separatist state
within this separatist state, advocating reintegration with Georgia
from a village just on the outskirts of Tskhinvali. It is widely
assumed in South Ossetia that Sanakoev changed sides only because the
Georgian government offered to pay off his considerable gambling debts.

The Georgian government initially held Sanakoev at arm’s length,
but it is now cooperating with him in increasingly high-profile ways.

During my visit, several members of the Georgian parliament went to
Kurta, his capital, for a meeting and photo-op with the government
there.

A crew from South Ossetian state television covered the event, and they
invited along me and Zarina, a 21-year-old assistant press officer
for the South Ossetian government. Zarina has already given me the
South Ossetian nationalist party line: Georgians hate Ossetians and
denied everything to Ossetians under communism. They killed Ossetian
children in the war. The hypercarbonated Ossetian mineral water is
far better than the famed Georgian Borjomi. Oh, and the Internet is
bad in South Ossetia because Georgians interfere with it.

The Kurta government turns on the charm for the visitors from
Tskhinvali. While we wait for the parliamentarians to arrive, a series
of government staffers comes over to the Tskhinvali visitors to make
friendly small talk and offer us coffee. One sixtysomething woman,
wearing an evening dress with a plunging neckline, comes over to
us. Soon she is crying theatrically: "Why can’t we live together?

Why do we have to be divided," she says, sobbing.

The Kurta prime minister introduces himself, flashing a big smile
of gold teeth. "Welcome to Kurta, please come anytime!" he says and
gives each of us his business card, which features the same symbol
the Tskhinvali government uses, but in the Georgian language as well
as Ossetian and Russian.

Zarina is unimpressed with the prime minister and the rest of the
Kurta hospitality. "If someone is smiling at you, and inside you know
he hates you, what can you think?" she asks after he leaves. "He is
the prime minister of four villages," she adds with as much disdain as
she can muster. She seems unaware of the irony of these words coming
from a representative of a government that rules over 60,000 people
but has a president and a foreign ministry.

We notice that the podium flies a South Ossetian flag next to a
Georgian flag. Zarina, again, is appalled. "Our people cannot tolerate
that the Georgian flag and the South Ossetian flag are together after
this genocide, after they killed little children," she says.

It is tempting to dismiss this as hysteria from a government
apparatchik, but the emotion Ossetians feel about the war is real.

After my interview with Chochiev, I went to get lunch at the Café
Farn. When my new friends saw Memories of a Nation, they somberly
paged through, looking for photos of friends and family who had
been killed. After all, 1,000 people in such a small community is
a lot, and the war touched everyone here. Zarina tells me that as a
5-year-old, she lived in nearby Gori, where her father was stationed
as a Soviet army officer. She remembers Georgian soldiers breaking
into the barracks and forcing the family out because they were ethnic
Ossetians. They fled to Tskhinvali. "I didn’t understand anything,
but I was so scared," she says.

Eventually, the parliamentarians arrive, meet, and have a short press
conference. Then the charm offensive resumes, and the Kurta government
press officers invite the Tskhinvali visitors to the cafeteria for
lunch. The Tskhinvalians are mortified at the prospect of breaking
bread with the enemy, torn between two Caucasian imperatives:
hospitality and their nation. The Kurta officials literally have to
drag them by the crooks of their elbows into the cafeteria, and the
Tskhinvalians give in. A bottle of homemade wine is produced. "Let’s
toast! No politics, just to us, all of us," one of the Kurtans
proposes.

We eat as quickly as we can, make awkward conversation, and say our
goodbyes. I ask Zarina what she thinks of it all. "They are monsters,"
she says.

___________________________________________ _________________________________

From: Joshua Kucera Subject: The Cult of Heydar Aliyev Posted Tuesday,
May 20, 2008, at 1:27 PM ET

______________________________________________ ______________________________

GANJA, Azerbaijan–In the State History Museum of Ganja, Azerbaijan’s
second city, there is a painting called "A Great Voice Rises From
Moscow." It shows an ethereal being plunging a fiery sword into
a chaotic city full of rioters. Clearly, there is a message here,
but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is.

"This is in 1990, when Russians and Armenians were attacking our people
and we said, ‘Heydar Aliyev, come help us,’ " explains my guide, Ulker,
a second-year university student in history. But I don’t understand
the sword and who is holding it, I say. "This is God saying, ‘Enough,’
" she explains.

That painting is subtle compared with one in the next room that
features a bare-chested Mikhail Gorbachev peering over the turret of
a tank that he is driving across a map of Azerbaijan.

Gorbachev–who is portrayed as hairy as a gorilla–is thrusting a
long spear at Baku, the capital. From outside Azerbaijan’s borders,
sharks and wolves attack from various directions.

"This one is about how everyone attacked us like animals," Ulker
explains.

By most measures, Azerbaijanis shouldn’t have this victimization
complex. Their economy is the fastest-growing in the world, and with
vast, recently discovered reserves of oil and gas off the Caspian
Sea coast, they (unlike most of the neighbors) have largely been able
to run their country without interference from the United States or
Russia, both of which are eager to curry favor with the government
rather than strong-arm it.

But Azerbaijan still smarts from the humiliating loss of nearly 20
percent of its territory, including the former autonomous region of
Nagorno-Karabakh, to its enemies, the Armenians. Aliyev, who died
in 2003 and was succeeded by his son, Ilham, skillfully manipulated
this humiliation to build his personality cult into one of the most
extensive in the world.

Today, Azerbaijan is full of Heydar Aliyev boulevards, parks, statues,
and billboards. Every history museum has at least one room devoted to
Heydar Aliyev, and every major town has a museum devoted exclusively
to him. An American who taught in Azerbaijan tells me that the school
curriculum is similarly Heydar-heavy.

Throughout the museum in Ganja, a simple narrative explains the
country’s recent history: Armenia attacked Azerbaijan without
provocation, Russia schemed behind the scenes to help the Armenians,
and no one in the world was on Azerbaijan’s side. Then Heydar Aliyev
came to lead Azerbaijan into the era of peace and prosperity it
currently enjoys.

"All people love Heydar Aliyev," Ulker says. "Before, we used to be
poor. Now we are rich. He doesn’t think about his family; he only
thinks about the Azerbaijani people," she says.

Ulker asks whether I’d been to Armenia and whether I liked Armenian
people. "Of course. They’re good people, like everywhere," I say. She
is shocked: "No! They killed our people." I say that Azeris killed
Armenians, too. "No, they didn’t," she insists.

I expected the anti-Armenian propaganda. But what surprises me is
how many anti-Russian elements the narrative contains. The standard
villain is "the Armenians and Russians," always paired together. In
the room on World War II, Ulker explains how Azerbaijan sent people
to fight fascism and Moscow took 80 percent of Azerbaijan’s oil.

"Before, the Russians took all our oil and gave it to other countries,
and we were poor. Now we’re independent, and we can sell the oil
ourselves," she says.

Over-the-top propaganda notwithstanding, most Azerbaijanis do seem
to like Heydar Aliyev. Even his critics admit that he was shrewd and
highly intelligent and that his strong hand was what Azerbaijan needed
in the chaos of the early 1990s, during which he succeeded two feckless
post-Soviet presidents at a time when many observers doubted Azerbaijan
could survive as an independent country. And most people, while rarely
as devoted as Ulker, don’t admit any reservations about him. They do,
however, seem faintly embarrassed about the abundance of memorials.

"When he was ruling the country, he didn’t let this cult of personality
get too out-of-hand," says Eldar Namazov, a former top aide to Heydar
Aliyev who broke with the president in the late 1990s and now heads
a small opposition political party. "He was smart, and he knew what
he was doing."

"But the people in charge now aren’t as smart. They’re going too far,
and now people are laughing at it," he says. He describes a fountain
in Baku, which, at its grand opening, spouted a wall of water on which
was projected a movie of Heydar Aliyev saying, "The independence of
Azerbaijan will be forever." Namazov laughs at the memory. "I wouldn’t
believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes," he says.

The current regime has concerns about its legitimacy, and the
celebrations of Heydar Aliyev are a way of shoring up their authority,
one Western diplomat tells me. He says the government is tying the
broad national agenda that Heydar Aliyev established–secularism and
a Western orientation–to the personality of Aliyev, who is regarded
by most Azerbaijanis as the founder of their nation.

"Ataturk is everywhere in Turkey, and he represents secularism and
democracy. Here it’s the same thing: Heydar Aliyev represents a secular
government and an orientation toward the West," the diplomat says.

The proliferation of Aliyev memorials across the country is not
ordered from the top, both the diplomat and Namazov say; overzealous
local officials are to blame.

"Power is pretty much concentrated at the top here, and local officials
understand that to curry favor with the central government they can
put up these statues and parks," the diplomat says.

Namazov tells me the narrative that I saw in the Ganja museum is one
that Heydar Aliyev himself established. "He had a standard story that
he told a million times whenever he met international officials or
journalists. If the person was new in the region, he told the long
version, which took maybe an hour. If the person knew what he was
doing, he got the short version, which was 15 or 20 minutes."

"There were several key episodes in the story," he says. Heydar Aliyev
was invited to go to Moscow to be part of the Soviet government, but
he didn’t want to go. If he hadn’t been from a Muslim republic, he
would have been premier of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev schemed against
him. He left the Communist Party as a protest against Soviet policy
on Nagorno-Karabakh. He then went back to Nakhcivan, his hometown,
to be a private citizen. After the first two disastrous governments of
independent Azerbaijan, "the people" demanded that he come to Baku and
lead them. As president, there were two assassination attempts and,
again, "the people" saved him.

"He also told this story around Azerbaijan, and this is the same
story you see today–maybe with some embellishments," he says.

"Like the sharks."

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