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Analysis, book reviews and photography from Abkhazia and the wider Caucasus — updates most Wednesdays

8 May 2013 • 7:25 pm 0

Book review: Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus by Georgi M. Derluguian

bourdieu's secret admirer in the caucasus - coverBourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus — A World-System Biography

Georgi M. Derluguian

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
July 2005
416 pages
ISBN: 978-0-226-14282-1

A description of Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus must begin with an explanation of its somewhat unpractical, yet intriguing title. The admirer in question is Yuri Shanibov, or as he was known in his youth and again briefly during post-communist transition, Musa Shanib. Derluguian describes how when he first meets Shanibov during a banquet in 1997, he by accident discovers — upon uttering the phrase cultural field — that Shanibov is not just a Kabardian nationalist leader and a Professor of Sociology, but also a profound admirer of the great French sociologist Bourdieu.

As the subtitle indicates, the book gives the life story of Shanibov, but only as part of a larger sociological analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The two main questions that Derluguian aims to answer are Why was the Soviet project abandoned? (or equivalently, Why in 1988–1991, why not earlier (around 1968) or later?) and Why did the end of the Soviet project lead to such different outcomes in different places?

Derluguian’s answers to these questions can be summarised as follows. de-Stalinisation under Nikita Khrushchev was embraced by nomenklatura members because it meant they no longer had to fear for their personal security, indeed, their life. But when Khrushchev started to fight corruption too forcefully, aided by junior nomenklatura members like Shanibov looking for opportunities to fill senior positions, now that the cadres were no longer periodically being purged, the upper nomenklatura stepped in and removed him from power, replacing him with one of their own, Leonid Brezhnev. Derluguian surmises that if not for this coup, the room for experimentation under Khrushchev would have led to an analogue of the Prague spring, although he admits he is sceptical whether the resulting revolution would have succeeded.

With the help of the increased revenue of petrodollars following the 1970s oil crises, corruption became institutionalised under Brezhnev and dissatisfaction was bought off with subsidised consumer goods. Derluguian argues that contrary to the pervasive image of the Soviet Union as an all-powerful totalitarian state, this essentially made the nomenklatura unaccountable, and local party heads all but irreplaceable, deriving their power from local patronage networks. Even in cases when party bosses were replaced, their successors would prove just as corrupt.

When structural problems became so great that the top of the communist party under Mikhail Gorbachev did undertake serious systemic reform, it could not rely on the nomenklatura, but had to engender a revolution from below. This revolution then quickly derailed, in large part because the freedom of Glasnost was quickly employed to voice nationalist concerns. Many of these concerns hailed back to the time when a particular territory was incorporated into the Soviet Union, but the strongly territorial structural make-up of the Soviet Union served as an essential catalyst in their coming to the fore. Besides being in economic competition, the different national territories also each possessed their own elites, for while the Soviet Union managed in many ways to transcend the national, intellectuals in the humanities in particular were constrained to their territory by the nature of their education, and the patronage systems that governed economic life further penalised mobility into territories where a person had no contacts. Some nationalist causes, like those of the Armenians and Azeris, were incompatible and clashed, reinforcing each other in the process. These were particularly difficult for the Soviet leadership to appease, since any compromise decision would keep both sides unhappy. The rising tide of nationalism could in principle have been dealt with through a combination of forceful suppression and economic hand-outs, but these were exactly the tools that the reformist leadership intended to no longer employ. Instead, the crisis was deepened by the shortages caused by the economic reform of perestroika.

In order to explain the different outcomes of nationalist revolutions in Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan (chaos) and the Baltic States (liberal democracy), Derluguian employs the concept of the social class. Broadly speaking, Soviet society consisted of three classes relevant for his analysis. The nomenklatura formed the Soviet bureaucracy, the ‘ruling class’. The proletariat consisted of everyone else whose primary income was the wage they received from the Soviet State. One of the great achievements of the Soviet project was to proletarianise almost all of society, ranging from professors to farmers. Nevertheless, there were still those who came by or at least supplemented their income through other means, the sub-proletariat. This class was relatively large in the sub-tropical Caucasus, where favourable agricultural conditions allowed for independent income both directly through family plots and indirectly, through a blossoming black market. Thus, in the industrialised Baltic states, the revolution proceeded orderly because it was supported by a highly educated and liberal proletariat, and because the nomenklatura was relatively competent, accepting regime change without too much resistance, while in the agricultural Caucasus, the proletariat was weak, the nomenklatura much more corrupt and the sub-proletariat strong, inducing nationalist leaders to mobilise the latter.

Nationalist revolutions did not occur everywhere. In some places, like Central Asia, intellectuals were so weak that the nomenklatura could easily re-assert itself, symbolically adopting a few outward attributes of nationalism (although, in Tajikistan, only after a lengthy civil war). In many autonomous republics, like Kabarda, nationalist groups did mobilise, but not rapidly enough. By the time that they would have been able to take power, the Russian government had already regained enough power to allow the local nomenklatura to hold on to power. Moreover, when the pressure reached its highest point, Georgia invaded Abkhazia, provoking great sympathy for the latter among North Caucasian nationalists. (Derluguian points out that the war in Abkhazia was for North Caucasian nationalists what the Spanish civil war was for the western left or the war in Afghanistan for Islamists.) The leaders of the North Caucasian republics soon realised that it was in their own best interest not to prevent young men eager to take up arms from crossing the border with Abkhazia.

In Chechnya, however, the nationalist opposition did mobilise quickly enough to overthrow the communist elite. The driving force behind this mobilisation was the national trauma of Stalinist deportation, but it was able to proceed so fast also because the Chechen elite was not entrenched in and thus had no stake in existing bureaucratic structures, since after return from exile, Chechens had systematically been excluded from the ranks of nomenklatura.

What about the Ingush, who shared the trauma of deportation with the Chechens, but opted to remain with Russia, splitting the Checheno-Ingush republic? Appearances are deceiving, because this act of separation was in fact a nationalist revolution of sorts, of more radical local leaders against the conservative Ingush elite in Grozny, motivated by the fear of becoming a minority in independent Checheno-Ingushetia, and by the desire to regain the Prigorodny District, including half of Vladikavkaz, a territory that had been Ingush before the deportation but which remained with North-Ossetia even after the Ingush return from exile. The struggle to achieve this escalated into a short but bloody war, which the Ingush lost, burying with it the nationalist spirit.

The Ingush pattern of counter-mobilisation in reaction to the Chechen nationalist revolution was replicated elsewhere. In Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Georgia — presumably more confident about its own independence than Chechnya — reacted with war, which it lost. In Kabardino-Balkaria, where the Balkar minority lost its representatives in the first competitive elections, no war broke out, because the Kabardian revolution itself failed, and because the Kabardian nomenklatura, which thus stayed in power, reached a power-sharing agreement with the Balkars, achieving in effect a return to the Soviet status quo.

Finally, Derluguian leaves some room for the influence of individual leaders. One additional reason why the nationalist opposition mobilised quicker in Chechnya than in Kabarda was probably that Jokhar Dudayev was simply more radical than the Kabardian national leaders. In Adjara, Derluguian goes so far as to credit Aslan Abashidze with a decisive role in shaping the outcome of the post-Communist transition. At first glance it might seem clear that the separate status Adjara was awarded in the Soviet Union should not impact on Adjarans’ self-identification as Georgians, albeit Muslim Georgians. But Derluguian points out that this outcome was in fact not so obvious, and that radical Georgian nationalists, emphasising the Christian identity of Georgia and taking over control of the economy, were quickly alienating large parts of Adjara, pushing it on the way of Bosnia. Abashidze managed to subdue these nationalists and appease the local elite, while not resisting Adjara’s entry into the new Georgian state, at least formally.

Derluguian’s account convincingly brings together structural conditions and historically accidental developments. Inevitably, however, some questions remain unanswered. For instance, why did the Ingush and Chechens not share a common national project, like the Georgians and Mingrelians, and even the Circassians, spread out over several Soviet republics? Was there Karachay independist mobilisation like in Chechnya, which one might expect given that the Karachay shared with the Chechens the trauma of deportation, and the privilege of constituting the largest non-Russian group in their republic (unlike the Ingush and Balkars)? There is also something unsatisfactory about the binary division between the outcomes in the Baltic states on the one hand and in Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan on the other. What about Armenia, Abkhazia, Belarus and the Ukraine? They seem to exemplify a middle way, where nationalists and members of the nomenklatura did come to an arrangement, but which ended up short of liberal democracy. Perhaps the answer lies in the nature and relative strength of the local nomenklatura.

Bourdieu’s secret admirer in the Caucasus successfully supplements a ‘journalistic’ account of conflict with a proper scientific apparatus. But Derluguian also explicitly positions the book as a contribution to the field of sociology. The theoretical discussion, concentrated in Chapter 2, is rather dense for the layperson, and regardless of its merits, feels a bit overblown, considering that the most important outcomes for the case at hand seem to be the insight that an analysis should combine long-term structural developments with short-term historical accidents, the concept of social capital and the realisation that the Soviet Union had a sub-proletariat that played a crucial role during the collapse of communism.

The book contains a few minor details that are somewhat problematic. When the author mentions that before or during the Abkhazian war a number of mosques had been built by volunteers from the Middle East that were subsequently abandoned and even in some cases blown up, some more specification or references would have been welcome. In another instance, Derluguian describes how Aslan Abashidze shot the nationalist leader of Adjara, while he was at the time his deputy, but accounts elsewhere suggest that the person shot — Nodar Imnadze — was in fact Abashidze’s Deputy, Abashidze himself having been appointed leader of Adjara by Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Nonetheless, the overall judgement must be that the reader profits tremendously from Derluguian’s personal experience in the region.

Bourdieu’s secret admirer in the Caucasus is also beautifully published — although only the paperback edition features the cover image of Shanibov on a green background advertised online — and is virtually free from typographical mistakes. Most importantly, while it is a difficult book, it is well worth the effort, since it succeeds to a very large extent in exposing the logic behind not just the descend into chaos in the early 1990s Caucasus, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in general.

Filed under: Abkhazia, Adjara, Balkaria, Book reviews, Chechnya, Georgia, Ingushetia, Kabarda, Russia, Wider Region, , , ,

17 April 2013 • 4:00 pm 0

Venezuela and Russia and flawed democracy

Following Tolstoy we may say that all happy democracies are alike. And probably, so are all totalitarian dictatorships. But all flawed democracies are flawed in their own way, as the Venezuelan Presidential election of last weekend demonstrates.

According to the official result, the election — following the death of Hugo Chávez — was won by Nicolás Maduro. His tiny majority (50.8%) puts paid to the commonly portrayed image of Venezuela in the west as a dictatorship. In comparison, such a close result is unprecedented in Russia, as is the fact that his challenger — Henrique Capriles, who scored 49.0% — is governor of Miranda, Venezuela’s largest state. Elections are fairer in Venezuela than in Russia. The problem with democracy in Venezuela is a weak rule of law and that, between elections, the President has near-dictatorial powers. Actually, these are also Russia’s problems. The difference lies in the fact that while Putin is generally recognised to be the choice of most Russians — however unfairly elections may be conducted — the administrative support Maduro enjoyed combined with even the smallest amount of manipulation make his popular majority dubious.

Filed under: Elections, Russia, Venezuela, ,

27 March 2013 • 5:00 pm 0

Book review: Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets

eight pieces of empire - coverEight Pieces of Empire — A 20-Year Journey through the Soviet Collapse

Lawrence Scott Sheets

Crown Publishers, New York
November 2011
336 pages
ISBN: 978-0-307-39582-5

The publication of Eight Pieces of Empire is good news, because Lawrence Scott Sheets — currently South Caucasus project director for the International Crisis Group — is one of the few Caucasus journalists deployed on the ground during the conflicts of the early nineties. Unlike his close colleague Thomas Goltz, Sheets has decided not to issue separate monographs for each conflict area — Eight Pieces of Empire is Sheet’s memoire of the whole of his reporting days.

As the title makes clear, Eight Pieces of Empire is also an overview of the fall-out of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The chapters cover the following ground:

  • Saint-Petersburg in 1989 to 1991, the coming apart of Soviet society
  • Early 1990s Georgia and the war with Abkhazia
  • Early 1990s Azerbaijan and Armenia
  • The two Chechen wars
  • The reburial of the Tsar Nicholas II and his family; the conversion of (former) security service members to Christianity
  • Uzbekistan and Afghanistan in late 2001
  • Eduard Shevardnadze during the Rose Revolution; a visit to the Ultas of Sakhalin; current day residents of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl; the Beslan hostage crisis

This amounts to seven chapters, and it is not immediately clear why the title speaks of eight pieces (the number of territories covered is actually greater than eight).

It is possible that Sheets considers himself to be the eighth piece. Throughout the book, the number of corpses accumulates steadily, some those of Sheet’s friends. Sheets more or less became a war reporter by accident, and in a moving passage at the very end of the last chapter, he expresses the damage inflicted upon himself due to his work, comparing the process to the sustained exposure over a long period to low-level radiation. This is the Faustic pact of war reporting: the most gripping parts of the book are those where Sheets is most deeply involved himself — besieged Sukhum, Beslan, and especially the shocking, surreal and deeply intense chapter on Chechnya.

Eight Pieces of Empire gives neither a full overview of the unraveling of the Soviet Union, nor of Sheets’s work — he alludes to several events he covered as a journalist that are not included in the book, like the Orange Revolution and the hostage crisis in Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre. This is a pity for the mere reason that Sheets would surely have had sensible things to say about them. But on the premise that Eight Pieces of Empire should cover precisely those events that Sheets can bring a unique perspective to, the selection of episodes may have been exactly right.

Thus the book includes the final days of the Georgian army in Sukhum before the Abkhaz reconquest in September 1993. Sheets even has the tenacity to return to Sukhum via Russia mere days later, to witness the full-scale looting then underway. In February 2004, he is present during the handover of Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s body to a Chechen delegation taking it for reburial in Grozny, catching a last glimpse when the coffin is briefly opened for the purpose of double checking the corpse’s identity. Sheets is also in the Presidential Office of Chechnya in November 1994, when TASS reports that Grozny has fallen to the opposition and that the same Presidential office is on fire. He is then connected by phone by Movladi Udugev to President Jokar Dudayev, who is sitting at home, eating borscht prepared by his wife. And Sheets is in Mazar-i-Sharif at the time of the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi in November 2001, the prison uprising with the first American casualty of the Afghan War, which ended in the massacre of a couple of hundred Taliban prisoners.

Originality is also the factor that warrants the inclusion of the more tranquil episodes: Sheets’s experience in late-Perestroika Leningrad, his investigation into ‘virginity reparation’ doctors in early 1990s Georgia, and his visits to the Ultas of Sakhalin, whose traditional livelihood of reindeer herding has become unprofitable after the end of communism, and to the inhabitants of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, for whom resettlement is a worse fate than exposure to relatively low levels of radiation.

All in all, Eight Pieces of Empire recalls Vladimir Putin’s infamous statement that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century. It has rightfully been criticised, because, well, WWII and all that. And WWI. Not to mention communist terror the world over. Moreover — popular sentiments in the region notwithstanding — the consensus says that it is a good thing that the Soviet Union no longer exists. But while that in itself may be true, what Eight Pieces of Empire shows is that the collapse of the Soviet Union — the way it played out — really was a tragedy in many different ways.

Eight Pieces of Empire is not a comprehensive historical account of the fall of the Soviet Union, but it does combine a thoroughly interesting and moving personal story with an invaluable insight into the situation on the ground during a number of key moments.

Filed under: Abkhazia, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Book reviews, Chechnya, Georgia, North Ossetia, Russia, Sakhalin, Ukraine, Uzbekistan

20 March 2013 • 8:18 am 1

Banned in Russia

Or at least so it seems. Eric Lethier was so kind to point out to me on Twitter that Taklama is blocked in Russia:

I must say I’m a bit shocked — call me naive, but I’d have expected such crude measures of Iran, not of Russia.

If this is not some sort of technical mistake, it means two things:

Firstly, the Russian censorship agency has got way too much time on its hands, going after obscure websites like this one.

Secondly, while I don’t know what exactly invoked the ire of the censor, I like to think my writings are neither pro- or anti-Russian. Perhaps this ambiguity is being perceived as a much greater threat than the harsher treatment Russia receives elsewhere.

Filed under: Maintenance, Media, Russia,

6 February 2013 • 5:00 pm 0

Book review: The Ghost of Freedom by Charles King

the ghost of freedom - coverThe Ghost of Freedom — A History of the Caucasus

Charles King

Oxford University Press, New York
January 2008
314 pages
ISBN: 978-0-19-517775-6

The Ghost of Freedom is not really a history of the Caucasus, but rather a history of the Caucasus and Russia’s involvement therein since 1800. Moreover, much of the events until the end of the 19th century are described from the Russian perspective.

King’s ambition to provide a general overview of the region invites comparison to Let Our Fame be Great by Oliver Bullough and The Caucasus by Thomas de Waal, both published since and recently reviewed here. Luckily (since all three books are well worth reading), the books turn out to be largely complementary — all three cover events not found in the other books. And while Let Our Fame be Great treats the North Caucasus and The Caucasus the South, The Ghost of Freedom is devoted to both parts.

There is not much else to say about The Ghost of Freedom other than the fact that it is a good book. The best way to illustrate its contents is to list some of the most interesting issues and topics that King touches upon:

  • The military logic of the Caucasus wars, in particular life along Russia’s fortified lines in the North Caucasus.
  • The case of Polish soldiers who were sent to the Caucasus as punishment for rising up against the Russian state and who would often desert, either into the mountains or to the Ottoman Empire.
  • Ottoman slavery, in particular how it differed from American slavery, and how it could be preferable to Russian servitude.
  • The appearance of ‘Circassian’ women in American freak shows.
  • The disappearance of the climbing party of W.F. Donkin, Harry Fox and two Swiss guides on the slope of Mount Koshtan, and the subsequent mission sent out to uncover their fate.
  • The coming about of the first detailed accounts of the Caucasus written by Johann Anton Güldenstädt, Julius Heinrich Klaproth and Semyon Bronevsky.
  • The different rises of nationalism in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
  • The Armenian genocide and contemporaneous massacres of Turks.
  • The first Armenian, Georgian and Azerbaijani republics that existed between 1918 and 1921.
  • The fate of Caucasian leaders in exile after the Soviet takeover and militancy in the Armenian diaspora.
  • Soviet nationalities policy.
  • The GAI (State Auto Inspectorate) in the (former) Soviet Union.
  • The development of art, literature and scholarship in the Soviet Union.
  • The outbreak of conflicts when the Soviet Union unravelled, including the observations that the international community tolerated one kind of secessionism but not another, and that the decisive factor in the outbreak of war was the fact that unlike the Soviet government, elites on the republican level used force against regional claims to sovereignty.

Perhaps the most important quality of The Ghost of Freedom is the sound judgement King demonstrates in the many controversial issues that pass along. A rare mistake is the suggestion that it was Meliton Kantaria who first planted a Soviet flag on Berlin’s Reichstag (this honour probably belongs to Mikhail Minin) and that a spontaneous photo was taken (it was staged). Lastly, while its dramatic language may appeal more to some than to others, The Ghost of Freedom is also well written.

Filed under: Book reviews, Russia, Wider Region

30 January 2013 • 6:05 pm 1

Book review: Let Our Fame be Great by Oliver Bullough

let our fame be great - coverLet Our Fame be Great — Journeys Among the Defiant Peoples of the Caucasus

Oliver Bullough

Allen Lane, London
March 2010
508 pages
ISBN: 978-1-846-14141-6

Let Our Fame be Great takes its name from an episode of North Caucasus mythology. In the tale, the Narts — the heroes of these stories — are offered the choice between long, comfortable but uneventful life, and a short but heroic life and eternal glory. Naturally, they choose the latter, with the words let our fame be great.

The book is about the various peoples of the Caucasus who during the last two centuries were confronted with Russian injustice and, because they dared to stand up to this, horrendous punishment. According to Bullough, they have been cheated by history — they chose the path expressed by the book’s title, but their fame is anything but great.

More specifically, the author discusses the fate of three groups of peoples, and with them, three lowpoints of Russia’s involvement in the Caucasus. The book’s first part is devoted to Russia’s Nineteenth Century conquest of the Northwest Caucasus in the face of the bitter resistance of its inhabitants, and their subsequent expulsion to the Ottoman Empire, if not to death. In the second part, Bullough looks at Joseph Stalin’s deportation of the Karachays, Balkars, Chechens and Ingush to Central Asia, each collectively deemed ‘guilty’ of supporting the German enemy, carried out with enormous cruelty and additional loss of life due to disease and famine. Finally, the last two parts of the book are devoted to the conflict in Chechnya that has been ongoing since the early 1990s, and that has to some extent been exported to Russia and to the rest of the North Caucasus, but it also extensively discusses Russia’s Nineteenth Century conquest of the Northeast Caucasus, and Chechen and Dagestani resistance to it.

While the three conflicts covered in Let Our Fame be Great have in common the fact that they originate in Russia’s desire to subjugate the North Caucasus, they are not the same scenario played out thrice. Stalin’s deportations are perhaps the most straightforward, because they were largely unprovoked — people were accused of collaboration with the enemy despite living in areas not even reached by German troops.

Bullough looks in detail at one episode where a few hundred local troops did rise up against Soviet authorities. These troops had been part of the Kabardino-Balkarian cavalry division that had been sent into battle against German tanks and consequently masacred. They subsequently deserted and withdrew to the Cherek valley, where they resisted Soviet troops ordered to subdue them. More drastic measures where then taken, as the NKVD sent in a unit of 152 soldiers led by Captain Nakin, who, encouraged by his superiors, killed everyone they encountered — men, women and children — systematically moving from village to village. During the lingering days of Glasnost in the early nineties, the Karbardino-Balkaria Parliament declared the event a genocide, but before and since it has mostly been ignored and hushed over by authorities.

In contrast, the war in the Northwest Caucasus started out like many others. It ended in genocide because of the enormous social and economical differences between Russia and the Circassians, and the blank refusal of the latter to compromise with injustice. Its primitive economy meant Circassia had great difficulty to sustain its war effort and had to sell off men of weapons-bearing age into Ottoman slavery. Its lack of central government and its otherwise admirable tradition of consensual policy making prevented the planning and execution of any effective long term strategy. Nevertheless, for decades the Circassians resisted, eventually leading Russia to conclude that it had to permanently destroy the Circassians’ way of life.

Bullough illustrates the Circassians’ ineffectual war effort with one episode where for once, a large number of Circassian fighters had taken the initiative to stage a surprise attack on Russian troops accross the frozen river Kuban. The decision to proceed with the plan required much deliberation and the Russian troops received advance warning of it. When the Circassians arrived at the Kuban and it turned out that the ice was fracturing, most withdrew, but a significant number of young horsemen went ahead anyway, rather pointlessly, and right into a waiting Russian ambush.

Finally, the war in the Northeast Caucasus initially started out similarly to the war in the Northwest, but it soon took a different turn when Chechen and Dagestani forces were united by a number of successive political-religious leaders, of which the most famous is Imam Shamil. On the one hand, Shamil managed to organise resistance against Russia much more effectively than the Circassians. On the other hand, his ideology of Muslim reform represented itself a new force in the region, setting him apart from the more traditional population of Chechnya. His ultimate defeat did not require the physical elimination of all Chechens, only the abandoning of their support for him. In two very interesting chapters, Bullough describes Shamil’s life after his capture, and his surprising appreciation for Russia’s efforts to pacify the Caucasus.

The continued presence of the Chechen nation in the Caucasus, their traumatic deportation by Stalin and the continued discrimination after their return made possible the renewed conflict since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Although Russia started the war in 1994, Bullough does not fail to point out the spectacular failure of the Chechens to build their state, and the injustifiability of the invasion of Dagestan that triggered the second war in 1999. He also gives a nuanced picture of Akhmat Kadyrov, Chechnya’s Head Mufti who went over to the Russians at the start of the second war and whose son Ramzan now holds a sway of terror over Chechnya. (It is all the more surprising that he does not discuss the similar — although of course not identical — role played by Communist Party Head Doku Zavgayev during the first war, being dismissed from the narrative through the September 1991 revolution with the words that it “effectively ended [his] career”. He is currently Russia’s ambassador to Slovenia.) Most of all, however, Bullough condemns the way Russia has waged war, destroying Grozny and its mostly Russian inhabitants apartment block by apartment block and inflicting torture, rape and death on thousands, in turn provoking the transformation of Chechen troops into terrorists reduced to exploiting vulnerable women as suicide bombers and killing innocent Muscovites out of revenge and cold calculation, as exemplified by the very gripping story of Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, who in the last moment decided not to blow herself up. The final irony is that while for all intents and purposes, Russia has won a military victory, under Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya has de facto almost become independent.

Besides covering the main events of the three conlicts, Bullough also provides a few short excursions to related topics. These include an account of the British mountain expeditions to the Caucasus and the various attempts to scale the Elbrus, which is interesting, but somewhat unrelated to the rest of the book. Of more direct relevance is a very interesting discussion of Russia’s 19th century Caucasus literature. Here the only regret is that Bullough does not mention Lev Tolstoy. His absence is especially frustrating because Bullough provocatively (but otherwise persuasively) argues that Mikhail Lermontov‘s A Hero of Our Time is the only great Caucasus work, and because Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat is based on the eponymous real-life resistance fighter who repeatedly switched allegiance between the Russians and Imam Shamil.

Let Our Fame be Great is not a straightforward history book. Rather, Bullough approaches the subject matter by looking at individual lives, to demonstrate how catastrophic the various conflicts have truly been. To this end, the author has interviewed a large number of people, not staying in the Caucasus but seeking out elderly survivors of Stalin’s deportations in Central Asia, members of the Circassian and Dagestani diasporas in Turkey, Israel and Jordan and more recent Chechen emigrants in Europe, which results in a number of heart-wrenching stories. Among the interviewed are the Chechen Umar Israilov, who was first tortured by Kadyrov’s troops, then became one of his bodyguards, then fled to Vienna and then was murdered — not long after the interview. And the mother of Rasul Kudayev, a former wrestling champion turned Guantanamo detainee, eventualy extradited to Russia and released without trial. After the 2005 Nalchik attack that he was likely not involved in, Kudayev was again arrested by the Russian government — he has not been released since, nor faced trial. Bullough also courageously defends the mystifying case of Nur-Pashi Kulayev, the only (known) surviving hostage taker of Beslan, whose claims that he did not have an active part in the operation, and that he did not know of it in advance, may in fact be true — although Bullough is careful to acknowledge that there is no hard evidence either way.

For the events of the Nineteenth Century where there is no one left to interview, Bullough instead carefully investigates the primary written sources available. Both approaches must have required a tremendous amount of work by the author, and the labour was not in vain — they make Let Our Fame be Great a genuinely authorative account. The written sources ultimately cannot rival the intimacy of the interviews, making the tragedies of the Nineteenth Century harder to imagine than the more recent ones. Bullough is not to blame for this, but curiously, it seems to affect himself as well, when he describes the Chechen conflict of the 1990s as “the most brutal war the mountains has ever seen”. The sheer death toll of the Northwest Caucasian Genocide at the very least means that Bullough should have provided an explanation for this claim.

About the only things about Let Our Fame be Great that leave something to be desired are the occasional use of hyperbole, and the fact that the book is structured a bit confusingly. It covers three eras and three groups of peoples, but these don’t completely correspond to each other. In fact, the western and eastern theatres of the 19th century Caucasus wars are relatively self-contained, giving us a total of four components, but these still don’t correspond to the four parts of the book. Moreover, of the four components, one stands relatively apart — the 19th Century war in the Northwest Caucasus, since it ended in genocide. Conversely, Stalin’s deportations and the Chechen conflict organically connect to each other, since the Chechens were one of the deported peoples and this has played a crucial role in their national awakening and desire for independence towards the end of the Soviet period. Moreover, as the second Chechen war fizzled out and transformed into a terrorist conflict motivated more by religion, it has also spread to Dagestan, Ingushetia, Karachaya and Balkaria, the other territories affected by the 19th Century war in the Northeast Caucasus and/or Stalin’s deportations.

Ultimately then, Let Our Fame be Great tells two big overarching stories, covering on the one hand the Northwest Caucasian peoples, who were broken in 1864 with some finality, and who best exemplify the philosophy behind the book’s title, and on the other hand the Northeast Caucasian peoples and the Karachay-Balkars, whose conflict with Russia is ongoing to this day. (Inter alia, it is refreshing to read about the Karachay-Balkars, who — undeservedly — of all the peoples of the Caucasus perhaps least capture the imagination, because they only rarely make news headlines and perhaps because they are seen as not very Caucasian, being of Turkic stock, a fate that somehow less affects the Indo-European Armenians and Ossetians.) Since the book is quite long, it might perhaps profitably have been split into two, especially since Bullough makes it clear that his goal is not to give a comprehensive account of all Russian injustice ever in the Caucasus, leaving untold for instance Stalin’s deportation of the Pontic Greeks.

Splitting the book in two would also have left room for some minor expansions in other areas. As it is, Let Our Fame be Great is mostly about the peoples that did not compromise with Russia, but in each case, there were close neighbours that did. While most Northwest Caucasian peoples so bitterly resisted Russian conquest in the 19th Century, the East-Circassian Kabardians mostly acquiesced. This stark difference is especially interesting in the light of the generally accepted view that Circassians are one people divided by Soviet national policy. Moving to the present, Bullough visits the resorts on the Black Sea coast line and concludes that the remaining Circassians have been marginalised and Russified, but this begs for a comparison with present-day Kabarda, where Circassians still form a majority, and with Abkhazia, where for the first time since the 19th century, an independent Northwest Caucasian state has once more become reality. To what extent have they been able to preserve or resuscitate their traditional culture? In the Northeast Caucasus, Chechnya’s rapid descend in the late 1980s and early 1990s towards independence also strongly suggests comparison with neighbouring Ingushetia. Why did it not follow suit, given that its historical path had been roughly similar up until that point, and even formed part of the same Soviet Republic with Chechnya, necessitating a formal split when Chechnya declared independence?

These issues of a more conceptual nature demonstrate the ambitious scope of the project undertaken in Let Our Fame be Great. But the potential avenues not explored in the book do not diminish the worth of the material that is contained in it. Backed up by an impressive amount of research, the moral at the heart of Let Our Fame be Great is simple: Russian military interventions in the last two hundred years have more often than not had horrible consequences. The undesirability of a conclusion like this oftentimes makes people want to ignore it. But Bullough is right: the millions of people affected by smaller and greater tragedies deserve better. Most of all, the modern day inhabitants of the North Caucasus and Russia at large have a moral obligation to be aware of their shared history.

Filed under: Abkhazia, Balkaria, Book reviews, Chechnya, Cherkessia, Circassians, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabarda, Karachaya, Russia, Wider Region, , , , , , ,

19 December 2012 • 8:00 am 2

Book review: The Caucasus by Thomas de Waal

the caucasus (de waal) - coverThe Caucasus — an introduction

Thomas de Waal

Oxford University Press, New York
August 2010
272 pages
ISBN: 978-0-1953-9976-9

It is always possible to find fault with a book if only one makes an effort. In the case of The Caucasus, Thomas de Waal’s new book, the most serious issue thus revealed is an off-hand remark about Abkhazia’s 2004 Presidential election. The author states that this “did not involve its Georgian population”, which is inaccurate, because unlike in the later elections of 2009 and 2011, the Georgian residents of the Gali District actually did participate. The reason why this is even worth bringing up here is that in the ensuing post-election crisis, the question whether their participation — without holding Abkhazian citizenship — was constitutional constituted the principal legal challenge against the narrow victory of opposition candidate Sergei Bagapsh. Moreover, it is probably not an exageration to say that he would not have won without the Georgian vote.

If pressed further, one quickly enters the realm of the trivial, which to bring up would not do The Caucasus justice. In fact, throughout the book, Thomas de Waal’s extensive knowledge of the region is apparent as he lays connections and interjects delightful bits of extra information, like the wonderful anecdote that one member of the Georgian Mkhedrioni described it as a ‘paramilitary charity organisation’.

The book can be said to consist of two parts. The first three chapters give a very good overview of the history of the South Caucasus — the first chapter is devoted to the pre-Russian period and the development of the regions’ major religions and nations, the second to the period that the South Caucasus formed part of the Russian Empire and the third to the Soviet period. The second part of the book covers political developments since the unravelling of the Soviet Union, with two chapters on Georgia and its conflicts with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, a chapter covering Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Nagorno Karabakh conflict and a chapter about Energy politics.

Specific topics as diverse as wine, Rustaveli Avenue and Baku Jazz are fleshed out in dedicated sections throughout the main text. Controversial subjects like the Armenian Genocide, Stalin and the August 2008 War are treated deftly and with a lot of nuance. Furthermore, De Waal demonstrates that after the death of Stalin, the Soviet Union was not the totalitarian, uniform dictatorship it is commonly believed to have been, as street protests were not uncommon and local governments did in fact determine local policy, with nationalism playing a significant role — historians propagated their nation’s version of history and thousands of people migrated — Armenians from Tbilisi to Armenia, Azeri from Armenia to Azerbaijan.

Overall, there are only two minor things left to remark, which Thomas de Waal may have had no control over. Firstly, the title, which is too general (and incidentally, exactly identical — subtitle included — to the October 2009 book by Frederik Coene reviewed earlier), because Thomas de Waal has limited himself to the history and the politics of the South Caucasus — a legitimate choice in itself. Even if simplicity was the primary aim behind the title, one could have simply chosen The South Caucasus — An Introduction.

Secondly, the book contains a number of small editorial mistakes. Frankly, this comes off as unprofessional for what is a major publication. Curiously, the mistakes start to appear only in the fourth chapter, as if error-checking had stopped there.

Neither of these issues should distract from the fact that The Caucasus is a wonderful book, which confirms Thomas de Waal’s stature as a leading expert on the region.

Filed under: Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Book reviews, Georgia, Nagorno Karabakh, Russia, South Ossetia, Wider Region, , , , ,

5 December 2012 • 8:00 am 0

Book review: The Post-Soviet Wars by Christoph Zürcher

The Post-Soviet Wars — Rebellion, Ethnic Conflict, and Nationhood in the Caucasus

Christoph Zürcher

New York University Press, New York
November 2007
302 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8147-9709-9

Despite its general title, The Post-Soviet Wars covers only the major wars that took place in the Caucasus: the Karabakh war, the two Russo-Chechen wars, the 1991–1992 Georgian-South Ossetian war, the Georgian civil war and the 1992–1993 Georgian-Abkhazian war.

In the Preface, Zürcher thanks Graham Stack and Erica Richardson respectively for translating a previous version of the book into English and for editing the style and language. The result could easily have been messy, but is actually eminently readable. There remain only a number of typos (especially with dates) and some inconsistencies (the table on pages 28–31, the repeated introduction of a cease-fire in three consecutive sentences on page 126, and the claim that Shamil Basayev received his first combat experience in Abkhazia, whereas he participated in the Karabakh war before that). These are regrettable, but don’t distract from the pleasant reading experience.

The book starts with an overview of the history of the Caucasus. At times, this is very good, at times, less so. Thus, it glosses over the entire North-Western theatre of the 19th Century Caucasian war, stating that “the epic struggles in the North Caucasus through the 19th century [...] took place in the east” and “in 1859, the wars in the North Caucasus ended”, whereas at that point, fighting in the North-West had yet to reach its climax with the mass expulsion of Circassians, Ubykh and Abkhaz in the period 1860–1867, which is only hinted at in the text.

Perhaps of more concern for the rest of the book, the characterisation of the formation of the Soviet federal framework also leaves a lot to be desired. Most vexing is the claim that in all South Caucasian union republics, autonomous territories were instituted “as counterweights to any possible nationalist politics”. This is a claim made all to often all too easily by those who wish to somehow frame the Soviet Union for pre-engineering the conflicts of the early 1990s. As such, it needs to be backed up by actual evidence. (Moreover, it is also inaccurate because the Armenian SSR did not contain any autonomous territories.) The running text also does not mention Abkhazia’s initial, peculiar, status as a treaty-SSR, nor the Transcaucasian SFSR. Lastly, in this chapter, and in general throughout the book, Zürcher appears to exaggerate the ‘positive discrimination’ enjoyed by the titular nationalities in the autonomous territories. While a case can be made that this applied in Abkhazia (after 1953) and Adygea (not discussed in the book), it cannot for Nagorno Karabakh and South Ossetia and certainly not for Chechnya, where — as Zürcher himself points out — Chechens were systematically kept from power.

The core of the book is formed by three chapters (the wars involving Georgia are grouped together) in which Zürcher gives succinct but sharp analyses of how the conflicts unfolded and how one of the parties managed to gain the upper hand. That these overviews are not overly detailed and focus mostly on the early stages is due to the fact that Zürcher’s primary goal is not description but explanation. Taking recent insights from quantitive conflict theory as his starting point, he aims to determine whether they apply in the cases at hand and whether these conflicts can provide new insights for conflict theory. To further this end, Zürcher also looks at two territories where war was avoided, Dagestan and Adjara.

Zürcher has many sensible things to say about the causation of conflict, and he successfully demonstrates that one has to take into account exactly how a conflict unfolds to determine whether a certain factor contributed to it. For instance, Zürcher demonstrates that the presence of resources did not play a decisive role. Azerbaijan and Chechnya both possess oil reserves and various diasporas and neighboring kin people can be viewed as an economic resource, but while these did perhaps prolong war, they did not cause it.

However, other aspects of Zürcher’s analysis raise more questions. Notably, some of his claims are undercut by insights presented elsewhere in the text. Since analysis of the causes of the conflicts is Zürcher’s ultimate aim, the rest of this review will address these issues in some greater detail.

Evaluating another of the risk-factors established by quantitive research, Zürcher remarks that the Caucasus was not a particularly underdeveloped place in 1990, neither in a worldwide nor in a Soviet context. However, in each of his analyses of the individual conflicts, the dramatically reduced recruitment cost of fighters due to the economic collapse of the Soviet Union at the time of its break-up plays a crucial role to explain the proliferation of armed formations, which does seem to lend credence to the view that economic hardship makes war more likely.

Zürcher also argues that somewhat counter-intuitively, the Caucasian conflicts do not support a third risk-factor, mountainous terrain. In Chechnya, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the principle battles were fought in the plains, and while mountainous terrain may have prolonged the war in Chechnya, it cannot be said to have caused it. But while these cases are convincing, the case of Nagorno Karabakh is less clear. Zürcher points out that Armenian ‘rebels’ there were actually at a disadvantage because Azeri forces held the high ground in the beginning of the war. But in his description of the escalation of violence in Nagorno Karabakh, an important role is reserved for the failure of Soviet troops to bring under control Armenian and Azeri armed formations. Mountainous terrain may very well have played an important role in this.

Another claim commonly made in the literature is that war is caused by ‘a history of wrongs suffered’. Here too, Zürcher’s analysis is inconsistent. In the cases of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, he states that this does not explain the conflicts, claiming that appeals to past injustices were only invoked to support a cause already awakened by other concerns — the fear of demographic domination and loss of control over economic resources. However, it remains unclear how he makes the decision that these are the primary causes. Zürcher suggests that there was no political disagreement between Abkhaz and Georgians before Glasnost, but at the same time admits that Abkhaz had never accepted their incorporation into the Georgian SSR, sending out appeals to Moscow on a semi-permanent basis. His rejection of ‘wrongs suffered’ in the case of Chechnya receives even less explanation, despite the fact that it seems obvious that this played a big role in Chechnya’s desire to become independent. Conversely, in the case of Nagorno Karabakh, Zürcher admits that it is hard to deny that past injustices were one of the causes for the conflict. Zürcher gives no reason for this difference, but it may be related to the fact that he barely mentions the conflicts between Georgia and Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the period 1917–1921, the incorporation of Abkhazia into the Georgian SSR in 1931 and the Georgification of Abkhazia under Beria and Stalin.

The one risk-factor put forward by quantitive conflict research that Zürcher does embrace is state instability, which in the cases at hand was caused by the collapse of the communist system. However, given that this applied throughout the Soviet Union, but most places were spared war, Zürcher rightly reasons that one has to investigate in detail how state instability contributed to the outbreak of war. One very useful variable in this respect is the relationship between nationalists and nomenklatura during the transition from communism. Territories where nationalists did not pose a great challenge to the nomenklatura (Central Asia, Dagestan) or where nationalists managed to co-opt the Soviet apparatus (Baltic states, Armenia) maintained far greater stability than territories where nationalists broke radically with existing institutions (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya). In particular, the failure of the Georgian government to control its armed formations directly led to the war with Abkhazia. (Although it is a shame that Zürcher does not discuss Doku Zavgayev, who in 1989 became the first Chechen First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, had a hand in the Russian invasion of Chechnya and then became Russia’s first counter-President of Chechnya. He is now the Russian ambassador to Slovenia.)

Zürcher also blames Soviet ethnofederalism for the Georgian wars, pointing out that Armenians and Azeris, who had no autonomous territory, made no attempt to secede from Georgia despite actually being more numerous than Ossetians and Abkhaz. But correlation is not causation, and there is a plausible alternative explanation. The existence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as distinct administrative units in the Soviet Union is a direct consequence of their political ambitions in the period 1917–1921. This same ambition then may have meant Abkhazia and South Ossetia were not willing to join an independent Georgian state in 1991.

In fact, even the correlation does not hold — Zürcher’s incomplete sample of post-Soviet wars leads to oversimplification. The cases of Nistria and Gagauzia in the Moldovan SSR show that administrative status in the Soviet Union was not a necessary condition for territories to declare independence when it dissolved.

And even if one does want to make the point that their administrative status was of crucial importance to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, blaming this situation on Soviet ethnofederalism suggests that leaving Abkhaz and Ossetians without an administrative territory was a historical plausible alternative, let alone the only alternative. This is doubtful at best, especially if one considers that Abkhazia at first enjoyed union republic status.

Finally, while Armenians and Azeris may have been more happy to become part of an independent Georgian state than were Abkhaz and Ossetians, the flat claim that “Armenians and Azerbaijanis living in Georgia did not mobilize, and [...] demonstrated no separatist tendencies” is not true.

While Zürcher critically evaluates the real explanatory power of the factors singled out by quantitative research as making war more likely, there are two inherent problems he fails to fully acknowledge. Firstly, if a war takes place between two territories, then where do we evaluate the presence of risk-factors? For the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, do we look at Nagorno Karabakh, Armenia, Azerbaijan or all three? And if the latter, what do we do if this gives conflicting results?

What use is it to assess the demographic situation in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Chechnya when Zürcher finds that ethnic relations remained remarkably peaceful until war was introduced by external forces? In fact, this may resolve one minor puzzle raised by Zürcher. According to quantitive research, ethnic diversity increases conflict risk, although as Zürcher points out, only if a territory has a dominant ethnic group that makes up 45% or more of its population. The common explanation of this finding is that an ethnic group will only be more keen for conflict if it can be confident to dominate the rest of society, and that it will otherwise be opposed by a coalition of other ethnic groups. Zürcher remarks that this makes a wrong prediction for Abkhazia, where it was Georgians who formed 45.7% of the population, with Abkhaz at 17.8% only. However, there is nothing surprising here if war was started by a Georgian invasion. And as predicted by theory, the other ethnic groups then mostly rallied around Abkhaz opposition to this invasion.

Secondly, it is actual military conflict we are concerned about, not just political conflict, but of the wars studied, all but the Karabakh war had a clear starting point. These were invasions by Russian (Chechnya) and Georgian (Abkhazia, South Ossetia) forces and a coup (the Georgian civil war). According to Zürcher, these invasions and the coup against Gamsakhurdia were all essentially due to internal politics. Doesn’t that mean then that ‘a desire to strengthen one’s domestic position’ is the main cause of war in the cases at hand?

This is especially relevant for the case of Adjara, where war was avoided. One might think that conflict risk was reduced by the fact that Adjarans speak Georgian and are now generally considered part of the Georgian nation, the main difference being religion (Adjarans are muslim) — perhaps not that salient in late Soviet times. However, Zürcher argues that there was enough distinctness left in Adjara for it to want to go its own way, plus the necessary state apparatus. Moreover, for quite some time, the situation actually deteriorated in parallel to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with rising tension, heated rhetoric and low-intensity violence. In the end, Zürcher attributes the avoidance of war to a mix of the persistence of communist elites, the succesful Georgification of Adjara in Soviet times, Aslan Abashidze’s personal character and chance. But while these are undoubtedly valid points, it seems that the overriding difference vis-à-vis Abkhazia and South Ossetia was that Georgia didn’t send its troops into Adjara. The question then becomes why Georgia didn’t do so, but Zürcher doesn’t investigate the side that could have started war.

One could argue that one should focus on the side that declares independence, because such an act automatically triggers war. But that is not true. Chechen nationalism around 1990 can be said to have been no more radical than Georgian nationalism, and yet no Russo-Georgian war broke out. The relevant difference is that Russia accepted Georgia’s independence, but not Chechnya’s. For another example, consider once more Gagauzia. Its declaration of independence did not induce Moldova to start a war. It is probably not a coincidence that in 1995, Gagauzia was peacefully incorporated into the Moldovan Republic. Most independence declarations in the disintegrating Soviet Union did not lead to war, so the thought that Chechnya, South Ossetia and Nagorno Karabakh willingly chose war by declaring independence is an oversimplification, due to the knowledge of what followed. (And Abkhazia hadn’t even declared independence, and was still actively seeking a political agreement with Georgia when the war started.)

While the study into the development of nationalism is certainly relevant, it is not clear whether in the cases where war is started by an invasion from one side, structural factors have any explanatory power. Of the wars Zürcher considers, only the Karabakh war did not have a clear start, with violence slowly spiralling out of control. Perhaps only in this case the question becomes pertinent what factors stimulated this process.

Finally, it would also have been useful to set the Georgian civil war apart from the other conflicts in The Post-Soviet Wars. Unlike the other wars, this was not an ethnic war over political status, and it also had a clear cause that calls into question the relevance of structural factors — the coup against Zviad Gamsakhurdia. In order to understand why this coup was followed by a war, it is not sufficient to look at Dagestan and Adjara — one would have to investigate similar situations that did not provoke a civil war, the most pertinent being the ousting from power of Abulfaz Elchibey in Azerbaijan.

All analyses can be argued with, so the fact that The Post-Soviet Wars invites criticism is not surprising. By going beyond mere description of the conflicts, Zürcher has taken a risk, with mixed results. But even if it is not definitive, The Post-Soviet Wars contains important insights, and Zürcher has provided a worthwhile contribution to the study of the Caucasian conflicts of the early 1990s.

Filed under: Abkhazia, Adjara, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Book reviews, Chechnya, Dagestan, Gagauzia, Georgia, Moldova, Nagorno Karabakh, Pridnestrovie, Russia, South Ossetia, ,

28 November 2012 • 3:38 pm 0

Book review: Georgisches Reisetagebuch by Jonathan Littell

Georgisches Reisetagebuch

Jonathan Littell
Translation: Hainer Kober

Berlin Verlag, Berlin
October 2008
56 pages
ISBN: 978-3-8270-0854-1

Georgisches Reisetagebuch is a translation into German and slight adaptation and extension of an article by the author Jonathan Littell, originally written in French for Le Monde 2 (the supplementary magazine now simply called M).

The book is Littell’s account of the situation on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the August 2008 war. Littell visits Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia and talks to various actors involved, tempering their conflicting views with valuable context and well-informed criticism (barring a single instance where Littell dismisses Eduard Kokoity’s Presidency as self-styled).

At 56 pages, and written soon after fighting had stopped, Georgisches Reisetagebuch cannot and does not intend to be a full account of the August 2008 war. Instead, it is exactly what it sets out to be, a very well written journalistic impression. Besides providing an accessible (and cheap, at €5,-) introduction to the conflict, it is most valuable for Littell’s first hand descriptions of prisoner exchange meetings and civilian suffering, in the form of ruined villages, burned corpses and a general feeling of insecurity.

Filed under: Abkhazia, Book reviews, Georgia, Russia, South Ossetia, , ,

10 April 2012 • 4:49 pm 0

A reply to Popjanevski and Cornell

Last week Johanna Popjanevski and Svante Cornell released a report with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program (link), in which they detail the findings of their investigation into a series of (attempted) bomb attacks that hit Georgia between 2009 and 2011. These most notably include a car bomb on 5 May 2010 in Batumi killing a Interior Ministry official and seriously injuring his co-passenger, an explosion on 22 September 2010 near the Unites States embassy in Tbilisi and an explosion on 22 November 2010 outside the Labor Party headquarters which killed a 65 year old woman. Georgia has arrested and convicted a number of persons for these attacks, which it says testified that they had been acting upon the orders of Russian Security Service operatives stationed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

On 21 July 2011, the story was covered by Eli Lake in the Washington Times (link). This prompted rather sceptic reactions by Joshua Kucera at EurasiaNet (link), Joshua Faust at The Atlantic (link) and Daniel Larison at The American Conservative (link 1, link 2, link 3). Others, like Thomas de Waal writing for The National Interest (link 1, link 2) were convinced by the evidence, but argued that elements of the Russian ‘deep state’ must have been responsible, since the Russian leadership could not be so incompetent as to direct operations that do significant damage to Russia’s standing in the United States while having practically no effect on Georgia’s stability.

Popjanevsky and Cornell’s initial objective is to re-evaluate the evidence behind the alleged Russian involvement. To corroborate the findings of the Georgian investigation, Popjanevski and Cornell recast the bomb attacks in a wider context of security incidents between 2005 and 2011. They also interviewed a number of the people convicted for the attacks who implicated Russian security operatives during their investigations. The authors conclude that the Russian operatives must indeed have been responsible. Next, they consider the theory that while the attacks were planned by Russian operatives, these might not have been acting upon orders from Russia’s leadership, and end up rejecting it. Finally, they distil from their findings a series of recommendations to governments in the west.

In the end, the report does not contain a lot of new facts. The most significant finding is that the persons convicted for the attacks repeated their statements in interviews with the authors.

Popjanevski and Cornell do not investigate the possibility that the attacks might have been planned by the Georgian government itself. This may seem contrived. However, there is precedent. On 1 May 2008, an attack was staged on two minibuses in the Georgian village of Khurcha, close to the Abkhazian border. The minibuses came from Abkhazia and carried Georgian voters for the parliamentary elections that day. The attack injured 3 people, one of whom seriously. Georgia’s authorities alleged that the attack had been perpetrated by Abkhazian and Russian troops in order to disrupt the elections. However, a subsequent investigation by the Norwegian Helsinki Institute and the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) (link) revealed that the attack had instead been staged by Georgian troops. The minibuses had been driven not to the voting booths in Khurcha, but instead straight to the site of the incident, where they were targeted with grenades, under the eye of the media whose presence had conveniently been arranged beforehand.

This omission does not mean that the conclusion of Russian culpability is necessarily unwarranted. One strong piece of evidence consists of the Russian officer stationed in Abkhazia who on 3 October 2010 called the European Union Monitoring Mission (EUMM) to ask about a non-existing train accident with casualties and the subsequent discovery of a bomb on the tracks four days later. A rather uncommitted statement by the EUMM (link) cast some doubt on the veracity of this story, but the authors claim that the phone call was confirmed to them by the EUMM. It appears that Russia is indeed responsible for some, if not many, of the incidents in the wider period between 2005 and 2011 listed in the report.

The authors conclude that the attacks cannot have been the work of rogue operatives, acting without direct consent from Russia’s leadership. They base this conclusion on the similarity of the explosives used, the large number of operatives implicated from two different security services, the large amount of money offered for one of the attacks ($50,000) and the opinions of a number of experts of Russia’s Security Services. Whether this is justified remains hard to judge.

If we grant Russian responsibility for the attacks, the question then is whether this warrants the recommendations by Popjanevski and Cornell, which boil down to: “Georgia is an innocent victim of Russian aggression so the west should renew and strengthen its support for Georgia”. The fact of the matter is that the conflicts in the Caucasus are played dirtily, by all sides involved. The authors give a whole list of security incidents in Georgia with alleged Russian involvement. But they conveniently ignore similar security incidents in Abkhazia and South Ossetia with alleged Georgian involvement. In June and July of 2008, a total of five bomb attacks (link) hit Abkhazia in the middle of the tourist season. The attacks targeted markets, railway tracks and security structures in the border Gali District, killed 4 and injured 18. On 29 January 2010, a mine blast in the Gali District (link) killed 3 and injured 7. Finally, Valmer Butba, one of the people implicated in the confessions in the report, was assassinated in the night of 28 and 29 December 2010 (link).

These are only three in a long list of bomb attacks and targeted assassinations of officials, which seem to have abated in recent times only. Georgia clearly profits: the attacks harm tourism and therefore economic recovery in Abkhazia, they hinder normalisation, state building and integration in the Gali District and they allow Georgia to call for international troop presence. And note that Abkhazia’s authorities do not (as one might think) gratuitously accuse Georgia for every security incident that takes place — they did not, for example, when Deputy Interior Minister Zakan Jugelia was assassinated (link) or following any one of the six assassination attempts (link) on President Alexander Ankvab. Without a proper investigation, we cannot know for certain whether Georgia is responsible for any of the incidents in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But it seems extremely premature to portray Georgia as an innocent victim of Russian aggression.

It does not help that Popjanevski and Cornell take a very politicised stance in their report, of which it suffices to give just a few examples. The authors adopt the ridiculous Georgian claims that Russia has been occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia since August 2008 and that Russia should want to destroy Georgia’s political system merely because it is afraid of the democratic example it sets. This latter claim is squarely contradicted by another claim of the authors, namely that Russia is behind the April 2010 revolution against President Bakiyev, which has made Kyrgyzstan a more democratic place. It is also contradicted by the continuing development of democracy in Abkhazia, which, after all, the authors claim is occupied by Russia.

The authors also mention the Russian invasion of Georgia during the August 2008 war, but they ignore the fact that this was a direct reaction to Georgia’s attack on Tskhinval, the capital of South Ossetia. Likewise, one of the security incidents included is the shoot-down of a Georgian spy drone over Abkhazia by an initially unidentified fighter jet on 21 April 2008. The authors point out that the subsequent UNOMIG fact finding report established that the fighter jet had been Russian, but they omit another finding of the report, namely that the use of the unmanned drones had itself constituted a violation of the 1994 cease fire.

That Georgia may not be as innocent as portrayed by Popjanevski and Cornell does of course not mean that we should accept these attacks to and fro as facts of life, or that the west should not raise security incidents with Russia if it has sufficient evidence of Russian involvement. But the authors are right in suggesting that more substantive measures are needed to bring real peace to the region. One of their proposals is that the west should pressure Russia to allow the EUMM access to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This is vain, Abkhazia and South Ossetia will never allow the presence of international troops under a mandate that treats them as part of Georgia. Instead, the west needs to come to terms with the situation on the ground. The conflicts are decided, Abkhazia and South Ossetia will simply not give up their independence.

The West has to normalise the international positions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as has been done for Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, Taiwan and other places whose sovereignty remains contested. Firstly, the west should strive to end the embargo of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, to the point where trade and demographic mobility might make bomb attacks disadvantageous for all sides involved. Secondly, the west wants a lot of things: minority rights, the return of refugees and security for civilians, but it is unwilling to deal with the governments of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This is impossible, the west cannot have it both ways. It can only appeal to their responsibility and bind them to international agreements if it accepts the governments of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as legitimate partners.

Filed under: Abkhazia, Georgia, Reports, Russia, South Ossetia, United States of America, ,

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