(Adapted from an Oxford seminar-talk given on 20 May 1995)
| General Setting | History | Georgia under Russian Rule | Late- and Post-Soviet Politics | Georgia under Shevardnadze | What is to be done? |
General Setting The Georgian language belongs to the small family known as South Caucasian (or Kartvelian, from kartveli, the Georgian word for 'Georgian person'). Its 3 sisters are Svan, spoken in the NW province of Svaneti(a), Mingrelian, spoken in the W Georgian lowlands, and Laz, spoken almost exclusively along Turkey's Black Sea littoral from the Georgian border to Rize -- there are few Laz in Georgia but quite a few Georgians (= Imerxevian Georgians) in Turkey. Apart from Laz and Mingrelian, these languages are mutually unintelligible. No genetic relationship has been established between South Caucasian and any other language spoken today or in the past. Of the four only Georgian is written, with its own beautiful and unique script, which in all likelihood was devised towards the close of the 4th century to help disseminate Christian literature in the vernacular after the official adoption of Christianity by King Mirian of central Georgia in the 330s. It has a distinguished literary tradition, little known abroad. From 451 the Georgian & Armenian churches were united against the diophysite concept of the dual nature of Christ adopted at the Council of Chalcedon, but in 607 the Georgian church abandoned the monophysite view, adopting Chalcedonian orthodoxy, from which time Georgians and Armenians have been rivals in religion (and virtually every other sphere too!).
History Greek colonies were established around the Black Sea in the 1st half of the 1st millennium BC, including areas occupied by the ancestors of the Laz-Mingrelians and, to their north, the Abkhazians; Colchis was the name used by the Greeks to refer to this regrettably poorly defined region of the east Black Sea coast -- NB Colchis is NOT to be equated with Georgia, as was done by Isobel Montgomery in the British daily paper The Guardian on 7 Nov 1996 (she also wrongly styled Georgian 'a unique Indo-European language' and even managed to shift Europe's highest mountain, Elbrus, from the North Caucasus onto Georgian territory!). Xenophon came close to Georgia and may well have met Kartvelian speakers as he returned to Greece in the 4th century BC. The campaigns of the Roman general Pompey brought him to the region in the 1st century BC. And, of course, Persia was already an influence. The Arabs appeared in the mid 7th century, establishing an emirate in Tbilisi to rule E. Georgia; this lasted until 1122. It may have been at this time that Georgian speakers proper pushed westwards, splitting the Mingrelian community in the north from the Laz in the south (i.e. establishing Georgian in the areas of Guria, whence hails Shevardnadze, and Ach'ara/Ajaria) -- the Arab presence in the east is why the provinces of T'ao-K'larjeti in today's Turkey became the prominent centres of Georgian culture for the next few centuries.
With Byzantium's power on the wane along the Black Sea coast in Transcaucasia in the late 8th century, Leon II, potentate of the Abkhazians, took his opportunity and 'seized [in Georgian da-i-p'q'r-a] Abkhazia and Egrisi as far as the Likhi [Mountains] and took the title "King of the Abkhazians" (Chronicles 1 p.251 of S. Q'aukhchishvili's 1955 Georgian edition). The resulting Kingdom of Abkhazia, comprising the whole of today's Western Georgia, lasted for roughly 200 years until the accession of Bagrat III in 975 produced the first king of a united Georgia. This consolidation continued especially under David the Builder, who finally expelled the Arabs from central Georgia, and his great-granddaughter, Tamar (1184-1213), who defeated the threatening Seljuk Turks and under whom medival Georgia reached its apogee, controlling virtually the whole Caucasus. From c.780 to 975 the term 'Abkhazia' was generally used to refer to the whole of Western Georgia. During the period while Georgia remained united (upto c.1245) this term became synonymous even with sa-kart-v-el-o, which term seems to make its historical debut during this period.
Central power in Georgia collapsed with the appearance of the Mongols in the 13th century, who caused the country to split into two kingdoms, which in their turn fragmented into smaller political units, constituting sovereign princedoms. At the close of the 13th century what we think of as Georgia comprised merely a conglomeration of such "princedoms" (Georgian samtavroebi), finally disintegrating into the three kingdoms of Kartli, K'akheti in the east and in the west Imereti plus the 5 western princedoms of Abkhazia, Mingrelia, Svanetia, Guria and Samtskhe. Up until the end of the 18th century the western region was subject to the influence and ravages of Ottoman Turkey, whilst in the centre and east the same could be said of Persia. Erek'le II (king of K'akheti 1744-1762, and of both K'akheti and Kartli 1762-1798) in 1783 signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with Catherine the Great's Russia, according to which Russia was to come to the aid of Georgia if threatened; Solomon I of Imereti (1751-1784) had already appealed to Russia for help against the Turks. The threat came in the shape of Agha Mohammed Khan, who devastated Tbilisi in 1795. The Russian troops offered no help. The situation became so desperate that E. Georgia was forced to ask to be taken under Russian protection in 1800 -- this lead to annexation in 1801, which gave Russia its first toe-hold in Transcaucasia; Mingrelia followed in 1803 and Imereti in 1804; note, however, that whilst Abkhazia came under Russian protection in 1810, it administered its own affairs until 1864. It should also be stressed that, as delineated above, there was no formal Georgian state until the October Revolution led to the appearance of an independent (Menshevik) Georgia in 1918. The arrival of Georgian troops in Abkhazia under Gen. Mazniev/Mazniashvili in June was regarded by Abkhazians as a military occupation. There was also trouble in South Ossetia during the 3 Menshevik years, and a British visitor Carl Eric Bechhofer summed up his general impressions of the country, thus: "The free and independent Social-Democratic government of Georgia will ever remain in my memory as a classical example of an imperialistic minor nationality both in relation to its seizure of territory to within its own borders and in relation to the bureaucratic tyranny inside the state. Its chauvinism exceeds the highest limits" (In Denikin's Russia and the Caucasus, 1919-1920, London 1921). The Menshevik period has come to be viewed through history's distorting prism as a sort of Arcadia to be recreated in post-Soviet conditions -- and indeed its worst aspects have effectively been recreated. Soviet Power was established with the invasion of the Red Army under the Georgian Sergo Orjonik'idze acting on orders from fellow-Georgian, Iosep Jughashvili (aka Stalin), in 1921.
Georgia under Russian Rule Having opposed the Bolshevism espoused by Stalin and Orjonik'idze, Georgia suffered at the hands of Orjonik'idze in the early 20s, just as it suffered, like everywhere in the Union, during the Purges of the 30s, the Mingrelian L. Beria being Stalin's enthusiastic local executor until transferred to Moscow in 1938. Georgian attitudes towards Stalin (and Mingrelian attitudes towards Beria) remain ambivalent to this day -- monsters, but local monsters made good who beat the Russians at their own game. In fact, most Georgians were rather adept at playing the Soviet system and winning. The derision and contempt in which they held their Russian masters ('Johnie -- or Ivan -- come latelies' who acquired both Christianity and a script 500 years after Georgians acquired the same) was perhaps matched only by that which characterised the Estonians and their Baltic neighbours during the Soviet period. Perhaps in part to justify this loathing, Georgians argued that their language and culture had suffered under the Soviet system, but there is little objective evidence to support this firmly held conviction: their language was never repressed, their script never altered, Georgian was always taught and functioned as the medium of instruction in Georgian language-schools, so that one could complete one's entire education from nursery through university in it. As John Russell says in his Minority Rights' Group 1990 Update on the Georgians: 'Given their relatively small numbers of less than 4 millions or 1.4% of the USSR population, the Georgians have exercised throughout Soviet history a significant influence on affairs in the USSR (and, indeed, in the world)', noting that in Gorbachev's Congress of Peoples' Deputies they had 3.2% of deputies, whilst the Supreme Soviet had 5.7% Georgian nationals. Living so far from the Centre, naturally disinclined to follow rules, relying on networks of family and friends, plus the already mentioned talent for playing the system and winning, Georgia became perhaps the most prosperous of the 15 Soviet republics, which cannot be entirely attributed (as some have suggested) to its generous climate and abundance of delicacies like fruit and nuts -- just an added bonus. As a result, many Russians came to resent both the high Georgian/Caucasian life-style and the swagger of self-assuredness that accompanied it. But at the same time this was part of what made Georgians so attractive to Western visitors, especially after the drabness of life and individuals further north. Georgia was, in the last decades of the USSR, always open to Westerners, which was not true of, say, the North Caucasus. Then again there are more Georgians than any other Caucasian tribe. And so the hail-fellow-well-met attitude coupled with a highly developed oriental cult of hospitality, which in truth characterises the Caucasus as a whole, came to be associated in the minds of those relatively few Westerners who had visited the Caucasus with the Georgians par excellence. But what could be seen by occasional and fleeting foreign visitors as the attractive feature of Latin-type bravado in a small people battling against almost 2 centuries of domination by the Russian bear turned into something much less appealing when directed inwards towards the republic's minorities, as happened from 1988. As for Western susceptibility to Georgian charm, even some of those who could see through Stalinist propaganda and knew Stalin for what he was often reported how alluring a person they found him on a personal level. What an inspired move, therefore, on the part of Gorbachev to appoint a later version of this model, Eduard Shevardnadze, as Soviet Foreign Minister in 1985 to work his charms on gullible Western leaders accustomed to the frozen 'nyet' of his Belorussian predecessor, Andrei Gromyko! With the political demise of Gorbachev in 1991, who was left to benefit from the boundless gratitude that those same Western leaders were keen to shower on someone in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, the freeing of Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany? -- none other than the mere external face of the regime that had collectively introduced the policies of perestrojka and glasnost', namely Shevardnadze in his new guise as the 're-born christian' (baptised 'Giorgi'!) and 'democratic' leader (as of 1992) of the newly independent state of Georgia!
Late- and Post-Soviet Politics The 1989 Soviet census reveals the following demographic picture for the main populations of both Georgia and Abkhazia, compared with that obtaining in 1979:
Main Population of Abkhazia (1979 & 1989) The reason why 'Georgians' are presented in quotes is that after the 1920s the Mingrelians and Svans (plus those few Laz living in the USSR together with the North Central Caucasian Bats living in Georgia) lost the right to call themselves anything other than 'Georgians', which I suggest was a deliberate piece of demographic manipulation designed to increase the so-called 'Georgian' percentage of the population. But even if one accepts these figures as accurately reflecting ethnic self-awareness, one sees that no less than 30% of the population was non-'Georgian' (or, as I prefer, non-Kartvelian). In these conditions one needed leaders and political programmes which could unite the whole population if Georgia was to seize the opportunity and strike out for viable independence from Moscow. Instead of this, divisiveness based on demagogic and racist claims became the norm. Ch'ant'uria's National Democratic Party conceived as its slogan 'Georgia for the Georgians (viz. Kartvelians)', and it was in this context that non-Kartvelians were branded as 'guests', one writer notoriously arguing in the press that only 5% of 'guests' could be tolerated; a State Programme for the Georgian language gave no recognition to the needs of any of the country's other languages and insisted on a qualification in Georgian language & literature being taken by anyone wishing to enter higher education in the republic; the danger of being swamped by Muslims and the consequent need to enforce birth-control were discussed in the context of the high birth-rate of the country's Azerbaijani population; restrictions on citizenship were mooted based on adherence to Georgian language & religion; any Mingrelian who dared to ask out loud or in print whether Mingrelians were really Georgians became the object of instant abuse in the media and in one well-known case physical violence; finally, anti-Abkhazian and anti-Ossetian campaigns began, rooted in ludicrous claims as to when these peoples first arrived on 'Georgian'(!) soil. Prof. Donald Rayfield of Queen Mary Westfield College in London has written that in this period one found not so much a de-Stalinisation of Georgia as an attempted de-georgianisation of Stalin...
As to the North West Caucasian Abkhazians, they had been the only people south of the Caucasus to fight Tsarist Russia in its long Caucasian War to subjugate the North Caucasus in the 19th century, and most of the North West Caucasians migrated to Ottoman lands after Russia's victory in 1864. This left Abkhazia denuded, and the 1989 population-balance there largely results from Beria's and his Svan successor K'andid Chark'viani's attempt to swamp the Abkhazians on their own soil by forcibly implanting mainly Beria's fellow-Mingrelians in the 1930-40s. In the 40s Abkhaz schools were closed and their literature banned, and later that decade a wild, unscholarly theory was published by a Georgian self-taught literature-expert, P'avle Ingoroq'va, which claimed today's Abkhazians only arrived in 'Georgia' in the 17th century -- this was widely interpreted as laying the foundations for their expulsion to Central Asia (after the manner of the Chechens et al.), but this plan was abandoned, as the intermingling with Mingrelians was felt bound to bring about the assimilation of the Abkhazians within a couple of generations. And in 1989 the Ingoroq'va-fantasy was revived and strenuously promoted by academics, including a tendentious and a prioristic linguistically based article from 1991 by none other than Acad. Prof. Tamaz Gamq'relidze, honorary member of both the American and British Academies, and holder of an honorary doctorate from Chicago University!
Encouraged by perestrojka, a number of leading Abkhazian intellectuals had already sent their so-called Abkhazian Letter to the Kremlin in June 1988, setting out their historical and continuing dissatisfaction with the subordinate status to Tbilisi which Stalin had imposed on them in 1931, for from 1921 to 1931 Abkhazia had been a full republic with special treaty-ties to Georgia; this had led in 1978 to a request to secede from Georgia and join Russia. Knowledge of this Letter seems not to have reached Tbilisi until late '88 or early '89, which shews both that Georgian anti-Abkhazian feeling was not solely motivated by reaction to this Letter and that Abkhazian resentment towards Tbilisi was not solely caused by re-emergent nationalism in 1988. However, mutual resentments festered and grew throughout 1989, especially after the killing by Soviet troops of about 20 demonstrators in the centre of Tbilisi on 9 April; the mass-blockade of Tbilisi's centre was chiefly a demand for independence but in part was concerned with developments in Abkhazia too. In the event the first ethnic clashes in Georgia took place not in Abkhazia but in the Azerbaijani areas of Marneuli and Dmanisi south of Tbilisi; this was in July and has been largely ignored in Western discussions of ethnic tensions in post-Soviet Georgia. But by the middle of that month, as a result of provocations instigated largely by K'ost'ava, Gamsakhurdia and their followers, clashes occurred in Abkhazia, resulting in about 14 deaths and the despatch of Soviet Interior Ministry troops to keep the peace, which they did most successfully. Abkhazian leaders decided that, reduced under Georgian control to a mere 17% of their own population, they would be destined to extinction, especially in the atmosphere created after June 1989, and they thus embarked on an attempt constitutionally and peacefully to free themselves from Tbilisi's tight control, crucially having the support of the non-Kartvelian residents of Abkhazia, all of whom naturally felt threatened by the rabid racism emanating from Tbilisi.
K'ost'ava was killed in a mysterious car-crash in October, leaving Gamsakhurdia as the main oppositionist, eventually to become the first elected post-communist president. However, trouble was brewing in S. Ossetia, and 4,000 Daghestani residents of E. Georgia were expelled by Gamsakhurdia's supporters; tensions were rising in the Armenian populated area also. As the autonomous republics and regions in the North Caucasus were acquiring full republican status in the autumn of 1990, South Ossetia, an autonomous region within Georgia and already the scene of clashes with Zviadist thugs, likewise declared full republican status. Gamsakhurdia immediately nullified not only this but autonomy of any sort for the region, beginning a nasty war which was to lead to a mass-outflow from the region; most of Georgia's Ossetian population actually lived outside South Ossetia, and, if the figure of 120,000 refugees to North Ossetia is correct, then the bulk of Georgia's 165,000 Ossetes must have left during this period.
South Ossetia was Gamsakhurdia's war. But he had other problems to contend with. Elected to achieve independence, he sought to cut ties with Russia, and independence was indeed attained in the wake of the failed August coup in Moscow in 1991. However, he managed to isolate Georgia not just from Russia but from the rest of the world as well, whilst his increasing authoritarianism at home alienated many supporters, both in and out of government. With such figures as Ch'ant'uria and the warlord Dzhaba Ioseliani gaoled, mayhem descended upon Tbilisi in Dec 1991, as oppositionists and Zviad-loyalists shelled each other along the beautiful old Rustaveli Prospect. Zviad was expelled, taking refuge with the late Gen. Dudaev in Grozny in January 1992, and an illegitimate State Council took control, with Ioseliani as its hard-man. Sentenced to 25 years for an armed robbery in which a man was killed, Ioseliani later became an orientalist and man of letters, vaunting his criminal past on the grounds that anti-Soviet activities on the part of a Kartvelian should be regarded as the actions of a Georgian patriot. Though never a proponent of Mingrelian distinctiveness, Gamsakhurdia came from Abasha in Mingrelia, and continuing support for him was concentrated in Mingrelia. And so for most of the first half of 1992 Ioseliani and his Mxedrioni (= 'Cavalry') militia ravaged any area in Mingrelia where Zviadists could be found -- this virtual civil war was again largely ignored by the Western media, most of whose representatives had (have?) never heard of Mingrelians and were (are?) unaware of the importance of this possible split in Georgia along essentially ethnic divisions.
The West, quite rightly, had not recognised Georgia under the regime of Gamsakhurdia. The State Council realised that, if the West hadn't recognised Georgia under a democratically elected leader, their illegal coup would hardly lead to any recognition or help, and so they turned to the one Georgian who, commanding respect abroad, seemed in a position to bring some benefit to his native country, Eduard Shevardnadze. Whether, as Gamsakhurdia never tired of charging, Shevardnadze had been controlling events in Georgia behind the scenes all along must remain an open question, but, as has been observed, if he hadn't been closely in touch with the leading players, he wouldn't be much of a political leader. He returned from Moscow at the beginning of March, and instead of lending a hand to help steer the young state towards peace and stability, the West (largely under the misguidance of Messrs. Bush, Baker, Major, Hurd, and Herren Kohl and Genscher) embarked on a course that surely gives it a share of the responsibility for what was to follow.
Georgia under Shevardnadze Mark 2 ('Democrat and Christian') The Abkhazians were strongly supported by local non-Kartvelians and North Caucasian volunteers and were able to buy arms from sympathetic Russian militarymen. The Georgians were finally expelled from Sukhum and routed from the occupied southern half of Abkhazia at the end of Sept 1993. The bulk of the local Kartvelian population decided they had better flee before the arrival of the victorious allies in case of reprisals (according to Caucasian law of vendetta). Note that the 2nd report of The Unrepresented Nations & Peoples' Organisation (Cental Asian Survey, 14, 1, 1995, 127-154) makes it abundantly clear that this is how the exit happened rather than through any official policy of ethnic cleansing, as Georgian propaganda and, following this, a poor quality Western media plus the UN & other worthy bodies have maintained -- the first UNPO report (Central Asian Survey, 12, 3, 1993, 325-345) should also be consulted in order to dispel earlier Georgian propagandist claims about this conflict. Nor is it true, as is regularly stated by the UN and UNHCR etc.., that there are 250,000-300,000 refugees in Georgia from Abkhazia. Many non-Kartvelians were targetted by the occupying Georgian forces and fled (to Russia, Armenia, Greece & Israel), and their fate has been largely ignored by the UN and others, who seem only concerned with Kartvelian refugees. Only Kartvelians will have fled to Georgia proper, and since by no means all did leave, and since there weren't 250,000 of them prior to the war, it follows that there cannot be as many as is claimed unhoused to the east of the Ingur river. In fact, since many more (Russians, Ossetes, Daghestanis, Armenians, etc..) than this figure have fled FROM Georgia in recent years, there ought to be plenty of accommodation available for these displaced persons.
What is to be done? The view of the major international players (i.e. Western governments) seems to have been that Georgia, like the other union-republics of the USSR, deserved its freedom from Moscow and that Shevardnadze would be a stabilising factor, able to steer his native land to a democratic future, presumably outside Moscow's direct control. This judgment was seriously flawed from the start, for it was based on the paradox that the man who had always been a mere Georgian executor for decisions taken by Russian policy-makers and thus loathed for his pro-Russian sympathies during his 13-year reign as Party Boss in Tbilisi was going to break the pattern of a lifetime. Returning home without a power-base of his own, he found great oppostion in and out of Parliament to his acceptance of the need for Russian bases to remain in Georgia. Of course, Georgia needed/needs good relations with its largest neighbour, and one could argue that any sensible leader would recognise this and act accordingly, but, in addition to fact of Realpolitik, Shevardnadze has always been and will remain the Kremlin's man. However, to try to win popularity back home he simply adopted his predecessor's stance vis-a'-vis Georgia's minorities -- hence the Abkhazian war.
After the Abkhazian victory Gamsakhurdia returned to Mingrelia and began what at one stage looked like a march that would sweep him to power again in Tbilisi. Shevardnadze put himself at the mercy of Moscow, dragged Georgia (screaming!) into the CIS, and gained Russian 'humanitarian' support in the battle with Zviadists, who were soon routed. Zviad died in Mingrelia in Jan 1994 -- his widow has accused Shevardnadze of infiltrating agents into his bodyguard. Working for closer ties with Russia throughout 1994, Shevardnadze faced continuing and growing opposition. Having announced at the start of December that his National Democratic Party would enter into an anti-Shevardnadze alliance, Ch'ant'uria was assassinated at the end of the week by unknown assailants...
A Georgian-Russian treaty has been signed allowing Russian bases to stay in Georgia for 25 years; Russian Defence Minister at the time, Grachev, flew to Georgia at the time and, with nauseating theatricality, was baptised in Tbilisi with his then Georgian counterpart, Nadibaidze, as his god-father! Russian peace-keepers have been stationed on the Abkhaz-Georgian border since 1994, but from the start of 1996 at the behest of Shevardnadze a land-and-sea blockade has been imposed (notionally by the Commonwealth of Independent States but in actuality by Russia alone) in an attempt to bring Abkhazia to heel. Every time Shevardnadze makes a speech about Abkhazia he threatens to resort once more to violence, and, unlike 1992, he is now backed by Russian arms and training. While Russia can take pride in the outspoken opposition to its government's genocide in Chechnya by people like Yelena Bonner, Sergei Kovalyev and Anatole Shabad, not a single Georgian could be named who has similarly condemned his government's bloodletting in Abkhazia.
Meanwhile the inflexible world-attitude to the Abkhazian issue rests on the stale philosophy of the 'preservation of territorial integrity' -- Georgia was precipitately and mistakenly recognised and given membership of the most exclusive state-club, the UN, and states protect their own. The UN-sponsored peace-talks that have periodically taken place in Geneva or Moscow are attended by representatives of a shady organisation called The Friends of Georgia (FOG!), comprising in the main Britain, France, Germany and America: it has no official meetings and issues no public statements about its activities and aims, but it certainly puts what pressure it can on the Abkhazian delegation to abandon at the negotiating-table the de facto independence they won in a war they did their best to avoid in the first place. One such reported attempt by FOG was to draw the Abkhazians' attention to Western inaction over events in Chechnya, to add that no-one would lift a finger if Georgia re-attacked them, and to conclude with the threatening remark that the delegation had it in their own hands to destroy their own people -- quite an insight into the standards of Western diplomacy! And as a mark of his neutrality in this conflict, Boutros-Ghali accepted an honorary doctorate on his visit to Tbilisi University in November 1994 shortly before he was due to chair a summit-meeting, which eventually failed to materialise, between the Abkhazian and Georgian presidents! The West did nothing to stop or reverse the invasion in 1992 and seems now to be offering no guarantees of its own if the Abkhazians were to return to essentially their pre-1992 status by accepting the Shevardnadze plan, advanced in a secret missive he sent to Yeltsin on 9 March 1995: the idea is for a federation to be formed between Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ach'ara, with their autonomy guaranteed by Russia (in other words, a complete regeneration of the autonomous structures of Soviet times, with which nobody was satisfied, though now Russia and Georgia are independent countries). Where are the advantages that should flow from a victory in a war that only the Georgians wanted and which they started? That the Kartvelian side is no more willing than in 1989 to acknowledge the legitimacy of any Abkhazian concerns was shewn in a Georgian interview given by Gia Gvazava, a Mingrelian member of the so-called Abkhazian Government in Exile, on Radio Liberty at the end of April 1995. He revived the Ingoroq'va accusation that Abkhazians were late-comers to Abkhazia, adding that he, a Mingrelian, was in fact a true Abkhazian! So, it's back to square one, with again the Kartvelian side calling for a military solution.
The Abkhazians have always been ready for a confederation between equal partners with Georgia and for nothing more demeaning. The world talks of the dangers of aggressive separatism, and not surprisingly Shevardnadze has strongly backed Yeltsin's slaughter in Chechnya by saying (at Chatham House on 16 Feb 1995) that it should be put down wherever it occurs no matter what the cost. In Georgia's (Russia's) case, however, one should rather speak of 'aggressive territorial integrationism', and a further distressing thought is that the state-structures the West is here stubbornly buttressing in respect of Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabagh and Chechnya are constitutional arrangements fashioned by that paragon of social benefaction and engineering, Joseph Stalin. What the Caucasus with its intricate ethnic balance required as communism collapsed was men of vision, able to handle its needs with sensitivity and intelligence -- what it got was true heirs of Stalin in both Tbilisi and Moscow who have been enabled to act as hand-fistedly as they wish thanks to the tacit approval of the political pygmies with whom we in the West happen to be cursed. What is the raison d'ętre for states if not the collective safeguarding of the citizens living within their borders? When the state itself is the source of oppression of any particular group or ethnic minority among its citizenry, surely it sacrifices its right to survival? This applies just as much to Shevardnadze's Georgia (and Yeltsin's Russia) today as it ever did to the former USSR. That our leaders and institutions choose to ignore this point in the post-Soviet world, having argued it loudly in the days of the Cold War, places us sadly but firmly on the side of the post-Soviet bully.
Georgia is called sakartvelo in Georgian -- the GR-components, seen also in the Russian form Gruzija, have nothing to do with St. George (as is often erroneously stated), the country's patron-saint, but seem to have derived via Persian in an attempt to render the Armenian VR-sequence of Virk', the old nominative plural meaning 'Georgians', vs i Vrac' 'among the Georgians' -- recall that today's eastern Georgia was known to the ancient world as Iberia/Iveria. Of the three Transcaucasian states (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) Georgia is the westernmost and occupies part of the Black Sea coast.
Many (if not most) Georgians tend to suffer from a naďve belief that the frontiers of Georgia as presently recognised have always encompassed a Georgian state -- some carry this to extremes and feel that territory either occupied by any group of Kartvelians or subject to Georgian control at any time in the past remains in some sense God-given Georgian land. I firmly believe that part of the country's present troubles can be traced to this view, and external observers should strenuously guard against falling prey to the same assumption.
Split into at least the 2 gubernias of Tbilisi and Kutaisi (Georgia's second city, in Imereti), Georgia became something of a lazy backwater, with the language repressed for most of the 19th century in favour of Russian. The capital was largely occupied by Armenians, and Georgians were happy to acknowledge as late as the 80s the fact that old Tbilisi had been largely constructed by Armenians, joking with sentiments to the effect that: 'We Georgians like to sit, drink and debate, while Armenians are grafters with an eye for money'. The revivalist movement was started in the 3rd quarter of the century by the writers Ilia Ch'avch'avadze and Ak'ak'i Ts'ereteli plus the educationalist Iak'ob Gogebashvili, founding such organisations as the Society for the Spread of Literacy among the Georgians. The movement was very much centred on the Georgian language and its associated great literary tradition. With Russian scholars taking an interest towards the end of the century in the rich linguistic and cultural heritage of the Caucasus as a whole, we find the first signs of resentment among Georgians at observations that Mingrelians, having their own language, deserved to be given a liturgy of their own; Gogebashvili wrote a pamphlet that claims some ecclesiastical publication in Mingrelian was publicly burnt by Mingrelians in anger at being asked to give up the Georgian liturgy. The question of Mingrelian identity remains extremely sensitive; matters concerned with Georgian attitudes to Mingrelian language and separateness are addressed in my article 'Yet a third consideration of Völker, Sprachen und Kulturen des su/dlichen Kaukasus' in Central Asian Survey 14, 2, 285-310. 1995.
As the Soviet peoples were invited to raise grievances stemming from their membership of the USSR, forces in Georgia began to discuss their greatest grievance of all -- their very involuntary membership of this Union -- and to agitate for national freedom. Various groupings or parties sprang up, often led by known dissidents, amongst whom the most prominent were: Merab K'ost'ava, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and Gia Ch'ant'uria; all 3 were of Mingrelian origin, and all 3 are now dead. The first two had together set up the Georgian branch of Helsinki Watch in 1975 and had subsequently been arrested -- K'ost'ava served his full 12 year term of imprisonment and internal exile, whilst Gamsakhurdia quickly recanted on all-Union TV and was released, thereby losing much of his previous respect amongst the dissident-community, though (to the dismay of many) on his release K'ost'ava willingly began working with him again. Tragically these (and other) unofficial leaders all decided to play the nationalist-card (hysterically so from 1989), which set the state on the road to war, political turmoil and consequent ruin on all fronts. Why was nationalism based on a concept of Georgianness certain to prove fatal in the context of Georgia?
1979 1989 1979 1989
Whole Population 4,993,182 5,400,841 100% 100%
'Georgians' 3,433,011 3,787,393 68.8% 70.1%
Armenians 448,000 437,211 9.0% 8.1%
Russians 371,608 341,172 7.4% 6.3%
Azerbaydzhanis 255,678 307,556 5.1% 5.7%
Ossetians 160,497 164,055 3.2% 3.0%
Greeks 95,105 100,324 1.9% 1.8%
Abkhazians 85,285 95,853 1.7% 1.8%
Whole Population 486,082 525,061 100% 100%
Abkhazians 83,097 93,267 17.1% 17.8%
'Georgians' 213,322 239,872 43.9% 45.7%
Armenians 73,350 76,541 15.1% 14.6%
Russians 79,730 74,913 16.4% 14.2%
Greeks 13,642 14,664 2.8% 2.8%
The legacy of Gamsakhurdia was an economy in steep decline, a war in South Ossetia, and rumblings of discontent among various other minorities, notably the Abkhazians, plus a veritable civil war in Mingrelia. What the West should have done was to make certain promises to Georgia via its new figure-head on certain conditions. The promises would have been: recognition of the country and exchanges of diplomats, membership of the UN, and credits from the World Bank and the IMF. The conditions would have included: acquisition of legitimacy in the promised elections on 11 Oct that year, resolution of the war in S. Ossetia, cessation of hostilities in Mingrelia, and clear indications that a new state-structure would give meaningful recognition to the rights of Georgia's minorities (which in my view would at the very least have meant the creation of a federal structure with local administrations not only in Abkhazia, S. Ossetia and Ach'ara, but also in Mingrelia, Svanetia, and the Armenian and Azerbaijani areas as well). In this way, the West would have demonstrated both a willingness to support a Georgia under Shevardnadze but also a determination to have no truck with the dangerous nationalism that Gamsakhurdia and others had unleashed in 1988. Instead of this, all the carrots were offered to the Georgian donkey at once and the stick was cast aside -- a noble precedent for the world to set for anyone minded to overthrow a democratically elected government! The result was all too plain for anyone with a knowledge of the country and with eyes to see (neither of which qualifications applied to Washington, London or Bonn). True, fighting in S. Ossetia was brought to an end (albeit after an initial flare-up) with tripartite Russian-Ossetian-Georgian peace-keepers sent in -- no political solution has even now been reached, however. Mingrelia was in no mood to be pacified, and, with Georgia's rail-link to Russia totally disrupted by skirmishes in this region, the economy collapsed even further. Though negotiations were in progress with the Abkhazians on the form of future constitutional links between the two states (assuming a return to the arrangement of the 1920s), Shevardnadze treacherously sent his troops into the region on 14 August 1992, in what looked almost like a celebration of Georgia's admittance days earlier to the UN and its implied right to act as it wished thereafter in defence of the modern godhead of 'territorial integrity'; thus did Shevardnadze begin an even bloodier war than his predecessor's savagery in S. Ossetia. And the most likely vulgar pretext for Shevardnadze's military adventure was a hope of uniting his own and Gamsakhurdia's Mingrelian supporters against what he thought would be viewed as the common foe. This weak calculation utterly failed, and the cost was thousands of lives, widescale human misery, further disruption to the Russian rail-link, and an economy in total ruin -- outside the rouble-zone, Georgian coupons become ever more worthless; even today with massive Western help the country cannot pay its fuel bills to Turkmenistan and thus regularly finds itself, particularly in the high-rise Soviet slum-creation schemes of Tbilisi, without gas, electricity and water. Bread-queues became the order of the day in this one-time wealthiest of republics -- although recent improvements have been reported, figures were quoted in early 1995 to shew that the Georgian economy had fared worse than any of the other former Soviet republics! In this environment, where everyone apparently had a gun, there were severe problems of law and order; drug-taking and trafficking in narcotics were reported to be widespread. In the meantime on 11 Oct 1992 Shevardnadze, the only candidate (!), won over 90% of the vote in an exemplary throwback to the communist tradition and predictably set about appointing former apparatchiks to leading posts. Elections could not, of course, take place in those areas affected by war, and the observers sent by British Helsinki Watch stated in their report that, when they raised questions about the State Council's treatement of Zviadist prisoners, a German diplomat in Tbilisi rebuked them with the reminder that they were there only to legitimise Shevardnadze's election and not to raise issues of human rights!
Governmental and NGO help is being lavishly channelled into Georgia, though apparently not at a level to allow all debts to be cleared. One cannot deny, given the desperate straits in which ordinary individuals have found themselves, that help has been sorely needed. But attitudes towards the country should be predicated on a mature and holistic assessment of the facts rather than on a manifestly superficial appreciation of the character of the country's current leader. Much of Georgia's troubles have been entirely self-inflicted, as I hope to have outlined above.