History News Network, WA
Aug 10 2008
James Traub: Russia and Georgia Were Going to Erupt, It Was Really Just
Source: NYT (8-10-08)
The hostilities between Russia and Georgia that erupted on Friday over
the breakaway province of South Ossetia look, in retrospect, almost
absurdly over-determined. For years, the Russians have claimed that
Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has been preparing to retake
the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and have warned
that they would use force to block such a bid. Mr. Saakashvili, for
his part, describes today’s Russia as a belligerent power ruthlessly
pressing at its borders, implacably hostile to democratic neighbors
like Georgia and Ukraine. He has thrown in his lot with the West, and
has campaigned ardently for membership in NATO. Vladimir V. Putin,
Russia’s former president and current prime minister, has said Russia
could never accept a NATO presence in the Caucasus.
The border between Georgia and Russia, in short, has been the driest
of tinder; the only question was where the fire would start.
It’s scarcely clear yet how things will stand between the two when the
smoke clears. But it’s safe to say that while Russia has a massive
advantage in firepower, Georgia, an open, free-market,
more-or-less-democratic nation that sees itself as a distant outpost
of Europe, enjoys a decisive rhetorical and political edge. In recent
conversations there, President Saakashvili compared Georgia to
Czechoslovakia in 1938, trusting the West to save it from a ravenous
neighbor. `If Georgia fails,’ he said to me darkly two months ago, `it
will send a message to everyone that this path doesn’t work.’
During a 10-day visit to Georgia in June, I heard the 1938 analogy
again and again, as well as another to 1921, when Bolshevik troops
crushed Georgia’s thrilling, and brief, first experiment with liberal
rule.
Georgians are a melodramatic people, and few more so than their
hyperactive president; but they have good reason to fear the
ambitions, and the wrath, of a rejuvenated Russia seeking to regain
lost power. Indeed, a renascent and increasingly bellicose Russia is
an ominous spectacle for the West too. While China preaches, and
largely practices, the doctrine of `peaceful rise,’ avoiding
confrontation abroad in order to focus on development at home, Russia
acts increasingly like an expansionist 19th-century power, pressing at
its borders. Most strikingly, Russia has bluntly deployed its vast oil
and gas resources to punish refractory neighbors like Ukraine, and
reward compliant ones like Armenia.
A senior American official said that while the United States and
Russia have common interests, Russia has become `a revisionist and
aggressive power,’ and the West `has to be prepared to push back.’ But
the Bush administration also recognizes that Russia has legitimate
security interests, and that Mr. Saakashvili has played a dangerous
game of baiting the Russian bear. Officials were laboring into the
weekend ‘ in vain, they feared ‘ to coax both sides back to their
corners. For much of the diplomatic and policy-making world, the
border where Georgia faces Russia, with South Ossetia and Abkhazia
between them, has become a new cold war frontier.
Georgia ardently aspires to join the peaceable kingdom of Europe; but
to talk to Georgians about Russia is to enter a cold war time warp. I
was speaking one evening to the owner of a fine antiques shop in
Tbilisi when the conversation somehow swerved to Russia. `These
Russians are so stupid,’ he cried. `They do not know what is
friend. They would rather have angry enemies than real friends.’
Russia’s apparent hatred for Georgia provoked endless bewilderment,
and no little bit of pride. I heard from three different people about
a poll in which Georgia had just surged ahead of the United States as
the country Russians identified as Enemy No. 1. Georgians insist that
they are free of such zero-sum pathologies, though you might have
thought otherwise if you had listened to the crowd in Betsy’s Hotel in
Tbilisi during the Russia-Holland quarterfinal of the Euro Cup;
suddenly the Dutch were everyone’s darling.
The roots of this bitter relationship are deep and tangled, as is
practically everything in the archaic world of the Caucasus. Modern
Georgian history is a record of submission to superior Russian
power. Threatened by the expanding Persian empire, in 1783 the
Georgians formally accepted the protection of Russia; this polite
fiction ended when Russia annexed Georgia in 1801. The chaos of the
Russian Revolution finally gave Georgia a chance to restore its
sovereignty a century later. The Georgians were Mensheviks ‘ social
democrats, in effect ‘ and for three years enjoyed one of the world’s
most progressive governments. The Bolshevik government signed a treaty
respecting Georgia’s independence ‘ which Europe, as President
Saakashvili pointedly reminded me, naïvely insisted on taking
at face value. By the time the Europeans woke up to reality, it was
too late.
From the time of Pushkin, Russians viewed Georgia as a romantic,
exotic frontier. During the long puritanical deep-freeze of Communism,
Georgia served as Russia’s Italy ‘ a warm, lotus-eating sanctuary of
singers and poets and swashbuckling gangsters. The elite had their
beloved dachas on the Black Sea coast of Abkhazia. At the same time,
Stalin, though himself Georgian, kept the republic subdued through
brutal purges. The head of the Georgian Communist party was Lavrenti
Beria, a cold-blooded killer who would become the master architect of
Stalin’s terror. The Georgians, though helpless, never accepted their
Soviet identity, and preserved their language, culture, religious
practice and sense of national identity, as they had under the
czars. And when, at last, the Soviet empire collapsed as the czarist
one had, Georgia immediately broke away and declared its independence,
in 1991.
The infant country spent the next decade stagnating under the
Soviet-style rule of Eduard Shevardnadze, the former foreign minister
to Mikhail Gorbachev. But in 2003, Mr. Shevardnadze was peacefully
overthrown in what came to be known as the Rose
Revolution. Mr. Saakashvili was elected the following year. Since
then, Georgia has become a poster child for Westernization. The growth
rate has reached 12 percent. The countryside remains impoverished, but
what the outside world sees of Georgia is delightful. Tbilisi is a
charming city, its ancient Orthodox churches restored to life, the
lanes of the old city lined with cafes and art
galleries. Mr. Saakashvili has also made Georgia one of the world’s
most ‘ or few ‘ pro-American countries. President Bush received a
rapturous welcome when he visited in 2005, and the road to the airport
has now been named after him, complete with a large poster of the
president.
RUSSIA RESURGENT
It was, of course, at this very moment that another ambitious young
figure was reshaping Russia’s politics, economy and self-image. The
combination of Vladimir Putin’s reforms and the dizzying rise in the
price of oil and gas have rapidly restored Russia to the status of
world power. And Mr. Putin has harnessed that power in the service of
aggressive nationalism.
Marshall Goldman, a leading Russia scholar, argues in a recent book
that Mr. Putin has established a `petrostate,’ in which oil and gas
are strategically deployed as punishments, rewards and threats. The
author details the lengths to which Mr. Putin has gone to retain
control over the delivery of natural gas from Central Asia to the
West. A proposed alternative pipeline would skirt Russia and run
through Georgia, as an oil pipeline now does. `If Georgia collapses in
turmoil,’ Mr. Goldman notes, `investors will not put up the money for
a bypass pipeline.’ And so, he concludes, Mr. Putin has done his best
to destabilize the Saakashvili regime.
But economic considerations alone scarcely account for what appears to
be an obsession with Georgia. The `color revolutions’ that swept
across Ukraine, the Balkans and the Caucasus in the first years of the
new century plainly unnerved Mr. Putin, who has denounced America’s
policy of `democracy promotion’ and stifled foreign organizations
seeking to promote human rights in Russia. Georgia, with its open
embrace of the West, thus represents a threat to the legitimacy of
Russia’s authoritarian model. And this challenge is immensely
compounded by Georgia’s fervent aspiration to join NATO, one of
Russia’s red lines. Russian officials frequently recall that President
Bill Clinton promised Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not expand beyond
Eastern Europe. Of course NATO is no longer an anti-Soviet alliance,
and the fact that Russia views NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat
to its security is a vivid sign of the deep-rooted cold war mentality
of Mr. Putin and his circle.
Still, they seem to mean it. Both Mr. Putin and his successor as
president, Dmitri Medvedev, have reserved their starkest rhetoric for
this subject. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has threatened that
Georgia’s ambition to join NATO `will lead to renewed bloodshed,’
adding, as if that weren’t enough, `we will do anything not to allow
Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO.’
After Mr. Saakashvili, then 37, became president, Mr. Putin made no
attempt to court him, and Mr. Saakashvili, made a point of showing the
regional hegemon no deference. The open struggle began in late 2005
and early 2006, when Russia imposed an embargo on Georgia’s
agricultural products, then on wine and mineral water ‘ virtually
Georgia’s entire export market. After Georgia very publicly and
dramatically expelled Russian diplomats accused of espionage,
Mr. Putin cut off all land, sea, air and rail links to Georgia, as
well as postal service. And then, for good measure, he cut off natural
gas supplies in the dead of winter.
ECHOES OF TRAGEDY
This new round of bellicosity struck Georgians as frighteningly
familiar. Alexander Rondeli, the director of the Georgian Foundation
for Strategic and International Studies, recited to me a thought he
attributed to the diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan: `Russia can have
at its borders only enemies or vassals.’ Here, for him, was further
proof, as if it were needed, that imperialist expansion and brute
subjugation are coded in Russia’s DNA. The Georgian elite came to view
Russia as an unappeasable power imbued with the paranoia of the
K.G.B., from which Mr. Putin and his closest associates rose, and
fueled by the national sense of humiliation over Russia’s helplessness
in the 1990s. `You should understand,’ Mr. Saakashvili said, mocking
the Europeans who urge forbearance on him, `that the crocodile is
hungry. Well, from the point of view of someone who wants to keep his
own leg, that’s hard to accept.’
And yet the crocodile might have been held at bay were it not for
Abkhazia and South Ossetia ‘ the first a traditional Black Sea resort
area that defined Georgia’s western frontier, and the second an
impoverished, sparsely populated region that borders Russia to the
north. Georgia is a polygot nation, and views both regions as
historically, and inextricably, Georgian. Each, however, had its own
language, culture, timeless history and separatist aspirations. When
the Soviet Union collapsed, both regions sought to separate themselves
from Georgia in bloody conflicts ‘ South Ossetia in 1990-1, Abkhazia
in 1992-4. Both wars ended with cease-fires that were negotiated by
Russia and policed by peacekeeping forces under the aegis of the
recently established Commonwealth of Independent States. Over time,
the stalemates hardened into `frozen conflicts,’ like that over
Cyprus.
But the Georgians are intensely nationalistic, and viewed these de
facto states on their border as an intolerable violation of
sovereignty. Mr. Saakashvili cashed in on this deep sense of
grievance, vowing to restore Georgia’s `territorial integrity.’ Soon
after taking office, he succeeded in regaining Georgian control over
the southwestern province of Ajara. Then, in the summer of 2004,
citing growing banditry and chaos, he sent Interior Ministry troops
into South Ossetia. After a series of inconclusive clashes, the troops
were forced to make a humiliating withdrawal…
Posted on Sunday, August 10, 2008 at 3:30 PM
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
