Russia is Back

By Thomas Goltz *

"Extreme Poverty will be their punishment" Russian General A.Yermalov, 1820

08.08.08: The Texas Solution, Istanbul, Turkey, August 11, 2008

Well, it is war again.
The long awaited one, you might say, or perhaps more accurately the war that never really went away. The centuries-long, smouldering conflict between Georgia and Russia, now being expressed over South Ossetia (and Abkhazia) has now turned into a paroxysm of death and destruction that threatens to fundamentally alter political and economic alignments in the East-meets-West and North-meets-South hinge area known as the Caucasus, and in a way that is almost impossible to gauge aside from a visceral sense that the date 08.08.08, the day most folks in the world were sitting back and waiting for the Olympic Games to begin in Beijing, will go down in history as the day that Moscow officially began to re-assert itself as an old-style world power.
As far as Georgia goes, this is the role that Russia has been playing with its tiny south Caucasus neighbour for the past 225 years. That is because 1783 was the year when Catherine the Great 'offered' Russia's protection to Georgia in the face of Persian/Ottoman Turkish threat of incursion, and then did nothing when first the Persians and then the Ottomans actually invaded. That situation changed slightly in 1801, when the last Georgian King Giorgi XII allegedly 'willed' his kingdom on the Kura River to the Russian Tsar Paul ('the Mad') in exchange for Tsarist protection, but under certain conditions--such as the continued use of diverse titles and rights and privileges of Georgian nobility. Paul's son Alexander I tore up those terms and just annexed Georgia that same year, and began imposing the Russian idea of 'empire' on the Caucasus state. Resistance to Russification, such as the 1820 peasants' revolt in the western province of Guria in protest of the replacement of Georgian as the liturgical language of the church by Russian, and the imposition of Russian-style serfdom for farmers, was ruthlessly suppressed by General Alexis 'Ermalov (Yermalov in some sources). 'Extreme poverty shall be their punishment,' he reportedly said while salting the land.
Meanwhile, Georgia became a romantic chunk of the larger whole of Tsardom, a place of wine and poetry on the south flanks of the towering Caucasus Mountains much like it seemed to be coming over the last couple of years of exaggerated favouritism by the United States and European Union. It also became the 19th century Imperial Russia's jump off point to conquer the entire south Caucasus (mainly, the territory that makes up today's states of Armenia and Azerbaijan, along with much of today's north-eastern Turkey) from the Persian Qadjars and Ottoman Turks much like it has served American (and to a lesser extent, European) 'regime-changing' do-gooders in the general region ever since George Soros inspired 2003 'Rose Revolution' in Tbilisi that brought besieged President Mikheil Saakashvili to power.
Anyway, after the halcyon days of the mid and late 19th century in the Caucasus, captured in Russian literature classics ranging from Tolstoy's Hajji Murat to Lermontov's Prisoner of the Mountains, came World War I, when 'Georgia' (or more precisely, the part of the Russian Empire more or less corresponding to the territory of today's state) found itself allied with the Entente against Germany and the Ottoman Empire, and served as the main Tsarist base for fielding armies in the East. That role ended in February 1917 with the fall of the Tsar in Petrograd, followed by the Bolshevik coup of October that same year and the descent of all Russia into Red/White civil war.
It was a confusing period. With German and then Ottoman Turkish support, the three 'nations' of the so-called Trans-Caucasus (Georgians, Armenians and 'Tatar' Muslims) were cobbled together into a short-lived state of radically conflicting interests, the main one being the long-smouldering question of identity. Was one fighting to be part of a unitary tsarist, republican or Bolshevik Russia, or should the vast landmass be divided up into dozens or scores of independent mini- and micro-states, all based on the fuzzy concept of national 'self-determination'? The problem with the latter concept was that it pitted Armenians against Tatars (Azerbaijanis) against Georgians and a couple of other marginal groups, too, such as the Abkhaz and Ossetians. (Compounding the self-determination approach was the presence of multiple stripes of so-called Circassians ­ 'so-called' because it was easier to lump them all together under a single label than to name all by separate type: Avars, Balkars, Chechens, Dargins and Kabardins are but a few of the scores of self-identified 'nations' of the region. Some of them set up a short-lived 'North Caucasus Mountaineers Islamic Emirate' in 1918 near today's Chechnya for ethno-religious spice.)
But the biggest problem came from the biggest populations. Some, such as the Armenians and the future Azerbaijanis, remained ambivalent about independence, and said they would settle for 'autonomy' within a unitary (but not Bolshevik) Russia rather than have their own state. But not the Georgians. Citing specifics of the never-implemented 1783 Treaty of Georgievsk and the first Russian 'protectorate,' the leadership in Tbilisi declared itself independent of everyone, and announced the birth of the Democratic Republic of Georgia. The date was May 26, 1918, and is still the day celebrated as Independence Day in Georgia today.
That state of independence, however, only lasted a little over two years. Then, as a WWI-weary world rolled its eyes (and after a few underhand deals that define the concept of 'perfidy,' mainly connected to the continued flow of oil from Baku on the Caspian to Batumi on the Black Sea) the Bolsheviks seized power first in Azerbaijan, next in Armenia and finally Georgia. On February 25th, 1921, the Georgian national leadership fled Tbilisi to Istanbul, while Stalin's commissars cleansed his native land of dissent, prepping it for 'federation' with the defunct Azerbaijan and Armenia republics as the Trans-Caucasus Soviet Socialist Republic, which became a founding member of the USSR in January, 1922. Georgia had just disappeared from history ­ again.
It only re-emerged with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
What does any of this history have to do with the unfolding situation today?
Everything, I would argue.
As I write these words, Russian forces are said to have pushed Georgian forces (and residents) not only out of the contested area known as South Ossetia, but deep into 'pure' Georgian territory, including the city of Gori (and perhaps Zugdidi in western Georgia, too). As an excuse, Russia's Vladimir Putin has adopted the vocabulary of the West against unspeakable tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and Radovan Karadzic, but applies terms such as 'ethnic cleansing,' 'genocide' and 'war-mongering' against Georgian President (and western-style democracy darling) Mikheil Saakashvili, mocking all attempts by the West at creating a cease-fire until Russia has accomplished its 'humanitarian' aims.
After all the attendant hand-wringing about who did what right and who did what wrong, what role western support for breakaway Kosovo in Serbia has to do with lack of support for breakaway South Ossetia, the use and abuse of information to foment a mood in America receptive to the invasion of Iraq (etc., etc.), is that the geopolitical situation in the post-Soviet south Caucasus has been seismically changed, and there is no going back to the 'western' year zero of 1991.
The seventeen year hiatus of independence enjoyed by Georgia since the collapse of the USSR might seem longer than the 1918-21 period of sovereignty, but the results are starting to look strikingly similar: A resurgent Big Power provokes a Smaller Power to do something stupid, such as defend itself against aggression by appearing to become the initial aggressor, and then brings the hammer down.
In some circles, we call this the 'Texas Solution,' only today the Alamo is called South Ossetia, and President Polk is Prime Minister Putin.
Russia is back, and Georgia is effectively gone.

The Creeping Caucasus Catastrophe, Tbilisi, Georgia, August 23, 2008

Russian troops and tanks may have at least partially completed their pull-out from territory seized during its August 8 blitz of this tiny post-Soviet country, but that should be little reason to celebrate, as the real (if creeping) catastrophe has just begun.
In addition to humiliating the Georgian army and reducing any Georgian military installations to rubble, the Russian blitz has humiliated the EU, the US and NATO by exposing just how little 'friends of Georgia' could do in the country's hour of need. Even after Russia announced that it regards itself in compliance with all points of the emergency cease-fire plan negotiated by France, Russian troops continue to occupy numerous locations in western Georgia, and are in the process of setting up a self-declared 'security zone' well outside the legally defined geographic limits of the two contested 'autonomous' areas of Georgia. Moscow keeps one hand on Georgia's economic throat, the other a mail-fist ready to smash this proud, ancient nation of poets and artists.
At the last checkpoint outside the hub-city of Gori yesterday, scores - nay, hundreds -- of Russian tanks and Armoured Personal Carriers poured out of feeder roads and fields as part of the well-ordered pull-back, but there was absolutely no sense that the Kremlin was bending to any outside pressure in doing so. Rather, the sense was that the Russian military was flaunting its success, quite content with allowing a damaged Georgia to understand the enormity of the disaster which had just washed over it, tacitly encouraging a spirit of revolt to fester against the government of the young, brash Mikheil Saakashvili, whom many have incorrectly blamed for igniting the conflict in the first place.
The list of projected problems directly associated with the disaster is truly ominous. According to European Union experts, the country suffered some $1 billion in direct infrastructural losses, and will lose a projected $1 billion more in direct foreign investment over the next year or so, as foreign capital shies away or decides to cut losses and walk away-and just when Georgia, with a population of about five million, seemed to have turned the economic corner and was starting to look and feel like a prosperous place.
"We are looking at a creeping catastrophe," said Peter Semneby, EU ambassador to the three Caucasus countries of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. "The only silver linings I can see are the level of international political support expressed to Georgia as a result of this crisis, as well as the strange fact that it seems to have shocked Armenia and Azerbaijan into more serious dialogue to resolve their long standing problems."
This may turn out to be mere wishful thinking, although both Armenia and Azerbaijan sent railway construction crews to work side by side with their Georgia counterparts to help repair a critical bridge blown by the Russians.
So why or how did Georgia find itself in this mess that is now impacting the entire South Caucasus and even the greater world beyond?
There is sufficient evidence to suggest that Saakashvili was warned by the United States and others that Russia was planning a provocation that would result in destruction of infrastructure and eventual social cohesion and stability if Georgia rose to the bait.
"We had to do it," he told me, when I was summoned to a meeting in the presidential apparatus at around 3 AM Friday morning, referring to the initial Georgian resistance to the mass of Russian armour that poured into northern Georgia like a steel tsunami on the early morning of August 8th, when the fiction that Georgia was merely over-reacting to South Ossetian militiamen had been lifted. That fiction had begun with skirmishing on the 7th, with said 'militia' forces employing types of weaponry theoretically not allowed in the 'Peace Keeping zone,' and using Russian 'Peace Keepers' there as sort of willing (military) human shields. Willing, that is, until some ten were killed. After this 'outrage,' the propaganda campaign on both sides went into high gear.
While a certain amount of fuzziness exists, the main point is that Georgian forces inside the South Ossetian region were responding to provocations against the Georgian civilian population living there, provocations that continued to grow in force, leading Saakashvili to call for the first unilateral cease fire on the evening of the 7th. And then 'violate' it when fighting continued with reports of Cossacks entering South Ossetia-meaning northern Georgia--from Russia proper. By dawn of August 8th, there was clear evidence that a well-prepared 58th Russian Army itself was entering the fray from Russia, and the decision was taken in Tbilisi to bomb bridges and close the main road north of Tskhinvali. Satellite photographs now provided by a UN body called UN0SAT clearly show that the main destruction caused by Georgian firing in the vicinity of Tskhinvali is not in the city itself (although there is some there) but on the road leading to the Roki tunnel that the Russian army would use.
By mid-morning of the 8th, Russian planes were bombing not only Georgian positions in and around Tskhinvali, but other 'targets of opportunity' around the main Georgian military base at Senaki, and eventually hitting radar installations in Poti and outside Tbilisi while their tanks pushed the out-gunned Georgian forces out of South Ossetia towards the city of Gori. The Russian rationale for the invasion was by that time being expressed by the the claim that some 2,000 'Russian citizens' (Ossetians who had been given Russian traveling documents over the past few years) had been killed during the first 24 hours of the conflict in an act of 'ethnic cleansing' and even 'genocide' mounted by marauding Georgians. The bodies of these alleged victims of Georgian atrocities have yet to be displayed; the morgue in the regional capital of Tskhinvali confirmed that it had only processed some 44 corpses for burial during the same period. It soon became clear that this was nothing more than a well-constructed pretext for Russia to project strength and seize territory, and possibly topple the obsessively pro-western Saakashivili government and forever dash Georgian hopes of becoming a member of NATO (and possibly the European Union as well).
But Saakashvili decided that even if he ducked and dodged on August 8th, there would be another provocation, and then another, and that the only thing to do was make a stand, allow the conflict to escalate, and then hope for some sort of international intervention. Brinksmanship, in a word, in true Caucasian style.
The reader will note that I have a reluctance to use the term 'South Ossetia' as the place the conflict began. The reason for this is that it is my contention that using this somewhat exotic term only serves to confuse the root nature of the conflict, and that it might be more accurate (or at least informative) to describe the conflict area as being 'northern Georgia,' Pure and simple. While it is true that the area enjoyed the status of being an 'autonomous district' of Georgia during Soviet times, theoretically serving as a sort of national homeland for Georgians citizens of Ossetian ethnicity, in reality the population of some 60,000 that lived in the region as defined on maps was in fact not exclusively Osset, but about half ethnic Georgian, and it was these citizens who Saakashvili had to protect. (Indeed, of the total population of Ossetian citizens living in all of Georgia, who number around 100,000, only half lived inside the 'autonomy,' with the rest scattered around the rest of the country.)
So what was the root cause of the invasion? In addition to the standard (and true) canard about 'Resurgent Russia Under Vladimir Putin' , the conflict can be traced back to the time leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, when there (briefly) existed a rabidly nationalist and anti-Soviet regime in Tbilisi that declared its policy as one of 'Georgia for the Georgians.' As part of this policy, the regime made efforts to dissolve the special status of the autonomous district, resulting in a brief, bitter war of secession that effectively detached about a third of the territory from the control of the central government. But another third remained under de-facto Georgian control; the remaining third of the region was more or less uninhabited. The 'Ossetian' third sought and received protection from Russia, and soon devolved into a 'black hole' criminal state famous throughout the region for smuggling and contraband activities that enriched the elite but left average citizens increasingly impoverished. Tension ebbed and flowed over the intervening years, even as the Georgian state under Saakashvili endeavoured to share much of the increased prosperity it has seen in recent years in an effort to re-integrate the area into the national whole. At the same time, the Ossetian third of the South Ossetian region, along with a second breakaway region on the Black Sea known as the 'autonomous republic of Abkhazia' , served as a Trojan Horse for Russian efforts to destabilize Georgia, cripple its economy and permanently put paid to Saakashvili's efforts to have his country accepted as a full member of NATO. The irony is that Russia apparently decided to invade following the NATO summit meeting in Bucharest, Romania in April of this year, when and where Georgia was denied the fast-track membership program known as the MAP, precisely because certain European members of the alliance-specifically, France and Germany-were concerned that including Georgia under the NATO umbrella of collective security (known as Article Five) might drag the entire alliance into conflict with resurgent Russia.
In the event, the fighting was fast and furious and over almost as soon as it began, with Russian forces dispatching the newly trained Georgian forces with unsurprising ease.
But it may not be over yet. The most disturbing news I have received since the guns fell silent is that Russia may still be attempting to force renewed violence by means of truly devious provocations, such as false-flag 'volunteers' to the Georgian cause, getting Georgia to accept mercenary muscle in the form of Blackwater-like 'private security companies,' and then exposing this in a propaganda coup.
"The last thing Georgia needs at this moment are guys with guns wandering around the countryside outside of the direct control of the central government," said Patrick Worms, a PR media affairs consultant to the government of Georgia, Worms also noted that the arrival in Tbilisi of a group of some 80 Estonian humanitarian relief specialists nearly resulted in a diplomatic rupture between the tiny Baltic state and behemoth Russia, raising deep concern that Russia might use the ' pretext of 'savings its citizens' in another area on its long frontier.
Lastly, there is the question of where all this leads.
At this point, the west has few pressure points on Moscow. Weirdly, the best might be oil. If the west (and now China and India) could wean themselves of their hydrocarbon addiction and cause the collapse of Russia's main stream of income and control over much of Western Europe, Russia's behaviour might be modified.
Fat chance.
In the short term, Moscow has all the cards.
Get ready for a long, cold winter in Georgia, with social chaos around the corner.

Of Georgia, Jamtland and the Texas Solution, Tbilisi/Baku, August 28, 2008

Well, it seems to be over, surprise, surprise, unless it turns into WW III, which I hope it does not.
The Caucasus War of 8.8.8 that is, the two-week (or two day) hurly burly in the mountainous southwest corner of the defunct Soviet Union that was a national debacle for West-obsessed Georgia and a crushing victory for a resurgent Russia.
A 'counter attack' assumes an initial attack, and the Georgians, while perhaps guilty of being lured into a trap, never attacked Russia. Rather, in the days prior to 8.8.8, Georgia had been responding to an escalating series of provocations inside South Ossetia and to a lesser extent in Abkhazia. That is how the war began, and how it should be remembered: it was and is a war of provocation followed by creeping annexation, and planned and executed with a surprising degree of efficiency, and complete audacity.
This was nowhere more in evidence than the decision by the Upper House of the Russian Duma on August 25th to recommend the recognition of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, IE, to tear these territories away from Georgia, and forever. The parliamentary decision was next passed by the Lower House and then signed by President Medvedev within 24 hours of its initial getting tabled, to the joy of the Ossetians and Abkhaz, the shock and anguish of Georgia and the baffled (and, after the recognition by the west of breakaway Kosovo last year, hypocritical) cries of 'foul play!' in western capitals. A bed-rock of the international system of relations between countries in place since 1945, namely, the inviolability of the territorial integrity of existing states, had just been removed, and Pandora's Box opened.
In some cynical circles, we call this The Texas Solution, because it so resembles the series of US provocations of Mexico that started with the Alamo and ended with the storming of the Halls of Montezuma and the creation of the (temporary) Texas Republic of 1840 before its annexation as the Lone Star State into the United States in 1845.
For an alternative history of that war, I would recommend The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Although most of the book is devoted to Grant's reduction of the Confederacy, it is the first part of the Memoirs that pertains to Russia's creeping annexation of northern and western Georgia, namely, how a young Lt. Grant viewed President Polk's ‘Remember The Alamo!' campaign against Mexico, starting with the sort of cross-border provocations that would force Mexico to retaliate, and young Grant's participation in the entire campaign.
"The occupation, separation and annexation (of Texas by the US in 1845) were, from the inception of the movement until its consummation, a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union," he wrote.
And more.
"The Southern Rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican War.(and) Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."
Grant declared himself bitterly opposed to the war, which he regarded as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.
What will the unintended consequences of Russia's creeping annexation of the two Georgian autonomous territories be, when it has its own fair share of legally recognized sub-republics, such as Chechnya? Will a Russian lieutenant in the 58th Army in the war against Georgia of 8.8.8 one day write his memoirs about a distant, footnote in history?
I truly hope so, because the wash of propaganda coming out of Moscow right now needs correction, even fifty years hence.
As for the Georgian response to the disaster, only time will tell if Mr Saakashvili can survive; there is sufficient animosity growing against him both domestically and even in western capitals that would suggest that he cannot remain in power much longer, particularly after the 'formal' departure of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Russians have made it absolutely clear that they will not tolerate any military adventures that Tbilisi might want to mount, and short of going into a stand-off that might lead us into WW III, no western power, however friendly to Georgia, is going to challenge Moscow on the matter with military might. Like 'Old Mexico' being forced to live with the reality of first an independent and then US state of Texas across the Rio Grande River, future generations of Georgians are apparently just have to get used to living without the chunks of their ancestral homeland once known as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Other paradigms, all evoking the concept of the 'phantom limb' syndrome experienced by amputees, are the Kingdom of Jordan's loss of the West Bank and Jerusalem through war with Israel in 1967, and then final renunciation of all Jordanian claims to that territory a decade later, or Syria's now very passive, even plaintive whisper that the province of Iskenderoon, which became Turkey's province of Hatay by quasi-rigged plebiscite in 1938, come home to the motherland some day.
Other observers of shifting frontiers will have their own favorite lost-limb stories, but mine concerns the Scandinavian regions known as Jamtland and Harjedalen, forcibly ceded by Norway to Sweden following the 1645 Peace of Bromsebro, a loss that was not even papered over by the union between those Nordic states during the friendlier period of 1814-1905. To this day, the King of Norway (and indeed all naval officers) keeps two buttons unbuttoned on their dress togs remembering those two, obscure chunks of fjord and mountain, and hoping for their eventual return.
I shared that anecdote with Saakashvili at a late night meeting last week; he almost seemed to smile. * Thomas Goltz is a professor at Montana State University/Bozeman and author, among other books, of "Georgia Diary--A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus," M.E. Sharpe, Arnouk NY, 2006