This is not a roller coaster. Roller coasters get pulled back up the track before you can go barreling down hill again. And roller coasters are fun on the way down.
But be glad that your money - if you have any left - is more likely than not invested in blue chips on the New York Stock Exchange. The above picture is not of the Dow Jones Industrial Average - which has only lost about a third of its value on the year (so far) - but of the RTS Index. The RTS Index includes the major Russian energy, telecommunications, metals & mining and financial companies - many of which are partly owned by the Russian government. Gazprom, Norilsk Nickel, Lukoil, Sberbank, and Rostelecom are some of the marquee companies listed on the exchange. As the chart above makes clear, the Russian stock market has dropped precipitously from its historic highs early in the summer of 2008 and has lost about 70% of its value.
Dow Jones Industrial Average
So which market is better positioned to recoup some of its losses by the end of the year? Place your bets (if not your cold hard cash) by voting in the poll above.
Bush has promised the government of Georgia $1.07 billion in U.S. aid over the next year. If that aid were administered like the recent U.S. stimulus package, each Georgian family would receive a check for about $980. And just in time for the Christmas shopping season.
U.S. Soldier on Shore Leave from Delivering Aid to Georgia Purchasing a Souvenir
The bill that passed Congress appears to have appropriated a more modest amount - about $365 million (this figure does not include the $55 million in emergency relief that Georgia received from around the world in August or the value of the goods delivered by U.S. armed forces in Operation Assured Delivery). But, with the Europeans pitching in and the IMF pledging $750 million in financing, Georgia is set to get a wildly disproportionate share of foreign assistance.
In 1992, in inflation adjusted dollars, the United States provided about $117 million in foreign aid to Russia (not counting loans or other support from international institutions). In a country of 148 million people, that comes out to about $.75 a person - at a time when the Russian economy was in free-fall. In a typical year immediately after the fall of Communist Party rule, Russia received a United States handout that equaled about .00095% of its GDP. Others argue that western aid to Russia - including efforts of the IMF - totaled much more in those first post-Communist years - but I have yet to find conclusive evidence that the United States made a meaningful effort to support Russia in the 1990's. The Congressional Research Service reports that total U.S. aid to Russia from FY 1992 to 2006 amounted to $14.9 billion - and most of that was earmarked for "security-related" programs instead of for democracy, infrastructure or supporting a functioning market economy.
In contrast, the Bush-proposed U.S. giveaway to Georgia would have been equivalent to about one-tenth of the Georgian economy (as measured by GDP) - or one-third of the entire government budget.
Let's compare the Georgian sweepstakes to United States efforts in Afghanistan - the consensus choice for the main "front line on the war on terror" - a place where key U.S. interests are undoubtedly at stake.
As Senator Biden remarked in the Vice Presidential debate, U.S. humanitarian and reconstruction aid to Afghanistan has not come anywhere close to getting the job done: "we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country." Since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, the United States has dispersed a mere $5 billion in aid to Afghanistan. In a country of about 32 million people (or little less than eight times the size of Georgia), that aid translates into about $22 a person per year since October of 2001.
I don't mean to belittle the hardships of the Georgian people or to suggest that the small country is in some way not deserving of foreign assistance. But before we invest American taxpayer money, shouldn't there be some open debate about our priorities? If this is about poking our collective finger in Putin's eye, couldn't we have found a less expensive way to jab?
Besides, this pledge of aid to the Republic of Georgia is not occurring when America is otherwise flush with extra cash. Our own economy is sputtering under the weight of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
You have to go further back into the archives of world politics to find much traction for the idea of launching a new Marshall plan to reconstruct Russia and the other former Soviet Republics after the end of the Cold War. Imagine what standing we would have throughout that part of the world (and not just with select former Soviet Republics) if we had taken that course, as opposed to offering bungled economic advice and limited resources in the midst of Russia's epic transformation from a planned economy. There is no doubt the time for that kind of investment has passed - but surely we can learn something from the missed opportunity.
Regular people all over the former Soviet Union were hungry for change, were open to western ideas that had been suppressed as anathema under the Communist dictatorship, were excited about the possibilities that would come with real political reform.
The Scorpions song "Winds of Change" was immensely popular in Russia in the early 1990's - symbolic of the hope of a better future after the fall of the Soviet Union (performed here in 1991 in Russian and English):
Now, many of those same people who embraced the winds of change - only to suffer through the economic calamity that Russia experienced through most of the 1990's - now see America and the west as intent on weakening and isolating Russia. Needless to say, this narrative is reinforced by propaganda on Putin-friendly mass media.
But why do we continue to make the Kremlin's job of pushing a chauvinistic version of Russian nationalism so easy?
For most anyone from the former Soviet Union, Yuri Yulianovich Shevchuk needs no introduction. He is the lead singer, songwriter and soul of the band DDT - one of the longest lasting and most influential Russian rock bands of all time. Raised in the industrial city of Ufa in the western Ural mountains, he emerged in the early 1980's as a rebellious voice in the underground rock scene. Relocating to St. Petersburg in 1987, DDT performed with other legendary Soviet bands associated with the Leningrad Rock-Club (such as Kino, Akvarium, Television and Alica). His songs draw on the tradition of the Russian bards, Pushkin's poetry, and the absurdity & tragedy of Soviet and post-Soviet life. By 1989, DDT had achieved widespread fame throughout the former USSR. The 1992 hit "What is Autumn" (Что такое осень) is probably one of the best known rock songs in the Russian language.
The title for today's post comes from a a black flag waved by a fan at a DDT concert in 1996. I saw the show as it was broadcast on Russia's main TV channel (ORT) from the four story apartment building in Mary, Turkmenistan where I was then residing. The phrase is a play on an old slogan from the early days of the USSR - "Вся власть советам!" -- All Power to the Soviets." Before there was the Soviet Union, there were "soviets" - workers councils that emerged during the first revolutionary uprisings in 1905. By 1996, there was nothing particularly subversive about bastardizing a piece of Soviet propaganda, but there is nevertheless something profound and deeply Russian about the pun. In Russia, poetry may be king, but poetry has no political power.
Performing in St. Petersburg, Yuri worked the crowd with the enthusiasm and spirit of Bruce Springsteen - and the people responded in kind. I remember thinking that rock and roll isn't dead, that it lives on in a spirit of resistance to conformity and commercialization back in the USSR.
But Yuri doesn't just rock - he talks. It is worth listening to what he has to say. Last week, he gave an interview on the independent talk radio station, Echo of Moscow:
The entire interview is available on the Echo Moscow - Эхо Мосвкы website. He consistently returns to the same theme - urging his fellow citizens to think critically, to not just absorb government propaganda unquestioningly:
You will not meet any nation in history - at least I personally don't know of an example - where all the people, the grandparents, young people, etc., petition their government to go launch a war on their neighbors, and the government answers, 'well, if that's what you demand, let's do it.' What does this tell us? Politicians start wars. That our politicians have been involved in Tskhinvali [capital of South Ossetia] for 15 years...they failed us. What do we have to be happy about? 150 million people defeated 4 million Georgians. Why would we celebrate that? **** Let's recall those 15 years, when our high society politicians could have done something as politicians. We feed our politicians - they don't work in the coal mines. And for what reason do Russians need politicians? In order to avoid wars, in order to solve by political means the terrible legacy left by Stalin.
Yuri immediately places the conflict in Ossetia in the broader historical context, lamenting twenty years of ethnic conflicts that have occurred in the former Soviet Union. Fighting between Armenians and Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh began in 1988, followed by conflicts in Tajikistan, Georgia, Chechnya and more, right down to the present day. Politicians have failed the people in the newly independent states of the old Soviet Union. Let's hope Ukraine isn't next. The new round of militarism in Russia, Shevchuk believes, is a deliberate attempt to distract people from internal problems that persist in post-Soviet Russia. He sees parallels between the current manufactured brand of state-sanctioned patriotism under Putin's United Russia party and the Brezhnev era slogans excessively lauding the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
здравствует КПСС или «Единая Россия», опять эти парады, парады. В головах, в мозгах, в речах… Это невероятно, мы опять куда-то катимся. Опять ложь постоянная, информационные войны, нет объективной информации.
Again these parades, parades. In our heads, in our minds, in our speech...It is inconceivable that we that we are rolling down this path again. Again there are constant lies, information wars, there is no objective information.
Yuri Shevchuk is talking about an aspect of what is really happening inside Russia and how it effects the people living in Russia. Not that American or European politicians are superior, in his estimation. He suggests solving future conflicts by creating a new reality show, where generals, nationalist politicians and those Americans who think they should rule the world are given weapons - only not nuclear weapons - and left on an island to fight it out on camera.
It is no surprise that he can speak freely on Echo of Moscow. Coincidently, the station itself was recently featured in an article by David Remnick in the the New Yorker. Remnick reviews the development of the radio as the primary tool of Soviet propaganda and its evolution under Glasnost, when Echo Moskvy got its start. What is remarkable about Echo is that it continues to provide a platform for more or less independent, critical voices in a landscape otherwise dominated by a mass media that is functionally controlled by the Kremlin.
But, as Remnick notes, freedom of speech is threatened even at Echo. Aleksei Venediktov - the station's editor in chief - was recently called to the carpet by Putin himself in a meeting between the Prime Minister and journalists. Putin thought that Echo had gone too far in airing criticism of Moscow's actions in Georgia. In front of the assembled journalists in Sochi, Putin told Venediktov that "you will have to answer for this!"
In the Echo interview, Yuri also alludes to a piece he wrote for Novaya Gazeta. That's the paper where the journalist Anna Politkovskaya worked before she was mysteriously slain. At least 260 journalists have been murdered since the fall of the Soviet Union. That kind of physical intimidation, on top of overt government control over the main broadcast television stations and implicit limits on other forms of media, puts a real limit on what many news outlets will broadcast. But so far, it does not appear to have slowed down Shevhcuk as a citizen rocker. For example, he participated in the Dissenters March earlier this year:
Hello my dear friends. There are bearers of culture, and there are peddlers of culture. Yesterday we saw peddlers of culture on television in red square....But I want to tell you for us, rock musicians in St. Petersburg, rock music is not just Chuck Berry or Little Richard, it is soul and freedom -- freedom before of all things. It is that freedom that brought me here to be with you.
Yuri notes in the Echo interview that DDT is not regularly featured on radio or television, but that it is still easy to perform live shows. In response both to the recent war in the Caucus mountains and to the militaristic brand of nationalism that is on the rise in his homeland - Shevchuk recently organized two concerts in Moscow called "Ne Stryelyai." The concert is named after an early DDT song, which simply means "don't shoot" - (see DDT perform Не Стреляй - Ne Stryelyai in 2003), written when the first Soviet soldiers began coming home in coffins from Afghanistan. The concerts featured musicians from Georgia, Ukraine, and Ossetia and sent a powerful message of peace and understanding. But will the state dominated media in Russia allow the message to spread beyond clips on RuTube?
As I have reflected on the Russia-Georgia conflict on this blog, it has been easy to loose site of the basic truths expressed by Yuri. He is right to first recall the young, poor boys from the countryside who are sent off to fight in wars like this one, while the sons of the policians live lives of decadence and ease. He is right to think first of the tragic disruption in everyday life brought on by this fighting. My goal has been to offer context and perspective to a situation that is too often described in the United States from an outdated Cold War perspective. Shevchuk reminds us that Russia's military action in Georgia is partly designed for domestic consumption. He uses the great Russian phrase that literally translates to "hanging noodles on your ears" - a version of "pulling your leg" - when describing the Kremlin's chest beating about Russia's strength. If Russia would focus on using its wealth to build its economy, its infrustructure - to humanize, then Ukraine and other neighbors would come to close relations with Russia on their own.
Everything he says goes double for us back in the U.S. If instead of reckless adventures in Iraq, we had a responsible defense budget...if we focused less on showing off our military hardware on the world's stage and instead focused more on building our infrastructure, maintaining oversight over our financial markets, and educating our people, think of how much further we could have come in the last several years. Think of all the wasted opportunities.
U.S. politicians and pundits criticize Russia, but in many ways, politicians there are emulating U.S. policy more than we might like to recognize.
There is much to love about Shevchuk - the way he rolls his "r's," his dramatic facial expressions, his poetic writing, and his sense of humor:
When the Oil Runs Out (Когда Закончится Нефть) (performed in 2007)
When the oil runs out.... You will be with me again When the gas runs out You'll come back to me in the Spring
We'll plant forests and Build paradise under canopy of branches When everything runs out There'll be a fullness in our souls
As if the entire premise of the song is not provocative enough, in other performances of the song, Shevchuk adds the line: "when we run out of oil, our president will die!" Here's to hoping that regardless of whether the oil runs out anytime soon, Russian politicians don't take down the whole country with them on their demise.
I leave you one of the all time great DDT songs, "Дождь" ("Rain"):
Despite U.S. instance on honoring Georgia's borders as they existed when the Soviet Union collapsed, those borders were contested before Georgia itself obtained independence in 1991.
Though the recent fighting in Georgia was triggered by events in South Ossetia, Abkhazia is another region where tensions had been brewing between the two former members of the Soviet Union.
Georgian spy-drone aircraft after being shot down over Abkhazia in May of 2008
Initially, the Abkhaz Autonomous SSR experienced very little autonomy in the 1920's and 1930's. Georgian was made the official lanaguage and Soviet authorities allowed large in-migration of Georgians, Russians, and Armenians.
After Stalin's death, Abkhazians began to receive more autonomy over internal affairs in the region, as did many of the so-called Autonomous regions in the USSR. Even though the Abkhaz people did not make up a majority of the Abkhaz autonomous region, Moscow granted special privileges to the Abkhaz people within the province. These advantages included placing Abkhaz nationals in privileged party and administrative positions and promoting the Abkhaz language and culture. More importantly, Abkhazia received an out-sized budget allocation from the central government. These favors from Moscow weakened Georgian authority within the Georgian SSR. Over the years, it also led to an Abkhaz dependence on Moscow, so that when the Soviet Union unraveled, the Abkhaz feared losing their status under an independent Georgia and had every incentive to stay close to Mother Russia.
Predictably, it also led to Georgian resentment. After Khrushev's economic reforms allowed for greater local control at the Union Republic level, Georgian authorities made efforts to reduce the influence of ethnic minorities. As Georgian nationalism rose, calls for greater and greater autonomy - and eventually, independence - from Moscow grew. Predictably, Georgia's growing nationalism ran into direct conflict with aspirations of the Abkhazians, who wanted to retain close relations with central Soviet authority. Abkhazian officials threatened to secede from Georgia as early as 1978. Edvard Shevardnadze, then running Soviet Georgia, staved off further moves towards Abkhazian independence from Georgia by granting further privileges to the Abkhaz people in the autonomous region.
Beautiful Abkhazia - Potential Tourist Paradise
As the USSR was in its final days, Georgians in the Georgian SSR voted to secede from the Soviet Union, while an overwhelming majority in Abkhazia voted to stay with the Union. Armed conflict resulted and by 1993, the Georgian military and nearly all Georgian civilians had been pushed out of the province. Russia encouraged and supported the Abkhaz separatists even as it put the hammer down on Chechen separatists in Russian territory. Georgia - as an independent state - never really exerted firm control over Abkhazia.
Fighting in South Ossetia also broke out between Georgians and Ossetians before the August Putsch in 1991 that heralded the end of the USSR. The Washington Post recently reposted Michael Dobbs's reporting on the first round of fighting between South Ossetia and Georgia in 1991:
But this is also a war in which notions of right and wrong, oppressors and oppressed, have become impossibly tangled with centuries-old ethnic disputes. There seems little doubt that the Kremlin has been using minority grievances as a means of bringing pressure to bear on rebellious Soviet republics, such as Georgia. At the same time, Georgia's own treatment of its ethnic minorities has drawn sharp criticism from Western human-rights activists. During a three-week occupation of Tskhinvali in January, Georgian militia units ransacked the Ossetian national theater. The plaster statue of Ossetia's national poet, Kosta Khetagurov, was decapitated. Monuments to Ossetians who fought with Soviet troops in World War II were smashed to pieces and thrown into the river.
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Georgian mistrust of the Ossetians is deeply rooted. For [Georgian nationalist leader] Gamsakhurdia, along with most of his compatriots, the present conflict is a replay of what happened in 1920-22, when a fledgling Georgian state was crushed by the Red Army. The Ossetians sided with the Bolsheviks against the Menshevik government in Tbilisi during the Soviet civil war. In return, the Georgians say, the Ossetians were rewarded with an "autonomous region" within Georgia in addition to the autonomous republic of North Ossetia in Russia.
The New York Times today published an account of the difficulties endured by South Ossetians at Georgia's hands beginning in the late 1980's.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia were not unique. The decision to place the Armenian dominated Nagorno-Karabakh under the jurisdiction of Azerbaijan had a similar effect -- and similarly, led to armed conflict when the Soviet Union ceased to exert central authority. With the stroke of a pen, Stalin could redraw the lines of the internal borders of the Soviet Union. For example, according to a recent article in Izvestiya, Stalin almost used his line-drawing power in 1925 to place North Ossetia - currently part of Russia - into the Georgian Republic. Similarly, Khruschev gave Crimea - likely the site of coming conflict - to Ukraine in 1954.
In short, the borders that McCain - at least by his bellicose rhetoric - would have the U.S. military fight to protect are borders that are an artifact of an intentional policy, originated by Stalin, to help Moscow keep control over its vast empire.
Where do you draw the line on the use of force?
Georgia and its allies in the U.S. - including McCain with his Yosemite-Sam-bluster - have repeatedly thrown around "territorial integrity" and "disproportionate force" in making the case against Russia's actions in Georgia.
Wrapping Russia's knuckles with these phrases has not caused the Russians to flinch. Whether it is a fair analogy or not, Russian officials point to the west's decision to wrest Kosovo from Serbia as precedent for ignoring territorial integrity when an ethnic minority enclave wants to secede from its erstwhile state. And when it comes to disproportionate force, the United States led NATO military action to "liberate" Kosovo resulted in 38,000 sorties, many aimed directly at Serbia's civilian infrastructure (including the Zastava Automobile plant, -pictured below - source of the once beloved Yugo), doing far more extensive damage in Serbia than did the Russian military in Georgia.
I recognize that Russia's claims of "genocide" by Georgians in South Ossetia are most probably bogus; the Kosovar Albanians received more despicable treatment from Slobodan Milošević's Serb army than anything the South Ossetians got from Georgia. Christopher Hitchens has explained many reasons why Russia's attempt to rely on Kosovo as precedent for recognizing South Ossetian or Abkhazian independence is not justified. But these recent, European ethnic conflicts are not as simple as they seem -- Hitchens, for example, fails to recognize that the worst atrocities in Kosovo did not begin until the NATO bombing campaign commenced and that the KLA had themselves committed a number of atrocities against Serb civilians living in the province. I am not suggesting that responsible policy makers in Europe or the U.S. should simply shrug off confronting such ethnic conflicts -- but it is hard to take sides without collaborating with very bad actors on one side or the other.
The former British ambassador to Yugoslavia, Sir Ivor Roberts, states the problem we have created for ourselves: "when the United States and Britain backed the independence of Kosovo without UN approval, they paved the way for Russia's 'defense' of South Ossetia, and for the current Western humiliation.
"What is sauce for the Kosovo goose is sauce for the South Ossetian gander."
I suspect that Russia goaded Georgia to launch its ill fated attack in South Ossetia, thus providing pretext for its military intervention. It is fair to label Russia's military actions in Georgia as disproportionate when compared to the Georgian incursion into South Ossetia. But for the United States to preach this sermon sounds to me like Hugh Hefner lecturing on the virtues of celibacy.
Where do you draw the line on hyperbole?
Putin has said that the disbanding of the Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century." Considering the vast human suffering caused by Soviet authorities, one might be more inclined to think that the formation of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the last century. Putin went on to explain that the "catastrophe" became a "tragedy" for ethnic Russians who ended outside of Russia after the final break-up. Which brings us back to nationalism in the former Soviet Union.
Russian nationalism is on the rise. And with it, hope of Russia establishing an open society dwindles.
Putin has skillfully exploited Russians' resentment at losing so much in such a short amount of time. Putin's emergent imperial nationalism follows Boris Yeltsin's brand of nationalism, which was premised on Russia withdrawing from the Soviet Union in order to focus on reconstructing itself. Despite the cultural and linguistic dominance of Russian in the Soviet Union, Russia did not reap economic benefit from its membership in the USSR; under the centrally planned economy, wealth flowed out of Russia and into development projects in the far corners of the Soviet Union. Though Russia has a long way to go to build its own, modern infrastructure, Putin's brand of nationalism includes using Russia's military muscle to exert its influence in its so-called "near abroad." There has yet to be a coherent United States response to this shift.
What I do not understand is why the U.S. is assisting Putin, why America is fueling the flames of this resurgent nationalism. What vital U.S. interests are served by having Georgia or Ukraine join NATO? Why did the U.S. continue George Kennan's policy of containment against Russia even after the wall came down and Russia made efforts to adopt a western, capitalist system? The U.S. appears to be pursuing a dizzying array of shifting priorities in the region: securing nuclear weapons material; promoting democracy; ignoring democracy - by engaging with despotic and/or undemocratic regimes like those in Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan to negotiate gas or oil pipelines bypassing Russia and Iran; and relying on Russia's assistance to negotiate with Iran or North Korea. What will be next?
The U.S. will probably have little role in redrawing the map of Georgia, but it should put some thought into whether it is helping or hurting the cause of promoting civil society in Russia. Nader Mousavizadeh, former special assistant to the UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan, has written a thoughtful summary of the choices the U.S. faces in the Times of London:
Which brings us to the real lesson of the Georgian debacle: Tbilisi's freedom to challenge Russia had already been traded away by its Western allies - whether they realised it or not. When Kosovo declared independence in February, a senior European official remarked that the West would pay a price for its decision to offer recognition in the face of fierce Russian opposition.
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The lesson is not that the West was wrong to recognise Kosovo or that Nato was right to delay Georgia's membership. Rather, it is to suggest that we increasingly live in a world of choices. We may be able to enjoy the satisfaction of supporting the Kosovans or encouraging the Georgians, but we may not be able to do so without paying a price in another arena.
Instead, the U.S. government continues to draw rhetorical lines in the sand with regard to "acceptable" Russian actions -- apparently oblivious to the reality that America cannot have it all. As Putin and Medvedev understand, we lack the resources, will and stomach to put our money or military where our mouth is when Russia crosses those lines. Though the U.S. does not want to concede that Russia is playing in its neighborhood sandbox, calling Russia a bully from a balcony down the street is not likely going to make any difference to other kids on Russia's block.
This question has confronted the international community - and the U.S. presidential campaign - ever since open war broke out between Georgia and its imposing neighbor to the north.
The United States has been talking tough about the sanctity of Georgia's "territorial integrity" over the last few weeks. U.S. policy towards the former Soviet Union starts from the premise that the boundaries of the old USSR are inviolate. American foreign policy officials have not, however, articulated what particular interests the U.S. has with regard to whether Abkhazia or South Ossetia ends up as part of an independent Georgia or as part of an independent Russia.
Why is it that the U.S. puts so much weight on what were - until relatively recently - internal Soviet boundaries, largely drawn by Stalin and succeeding General Secretaries of the Communist Party? If the principal of "territorial integrity" for these newly independent states is to be sacrosanct, shouldn't we at least understand how these borders came to be drawn? Why did Stalin craft borders that resulted in the South Ossetians being split from their brethren to the North? Why, after the 1930's, did Moscow grant favored status to Abkhazians - a minority ethnicity within the Abkhazian Autonomous region? Is there any good reason for respecting Georgia's claim to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, even though neither area has been under its control since the Soviet Union disintegrated?
Before the 1917 Revolution, Georgia was part of the Russian Empire. Georgians had ruled over a larger kingdom back in the 13th century, but it has been a long time since a unified Georgian kingdom exercised independent power in the region. Russia established its hegemony over Georgia in about 1800 and succeeded in fighting off Persian and Ottoman forces, expanding the territory over the next 75 years to include additional provinces, such as present day Abkhazia. After the 1917 Revolution, Georgia experienced only a brief period of independence.
But the Red Army was on the march, and it was not long before the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party had established control over Georgia and the other former south caucus regions that had recently been under Russian Imperial rule. From the early 1920's until 1936, Stalin governed the entire region as the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (TSFSR) -- Закавказская Советская Федеративная Социалистическая Республика (ЗСФСР). From 1936 and until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the three Transcauscus Republics - Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia - were governed as Union Republics, each with nominal administrative authority, but all under the thumb of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Georgia and Armenia maintained their alphabets, national churches and perhaps slightly more autonomy than many of the other Soviet Union Republics, but severe limits on local power remained.
Stalin's policy towards ethnic minorities is largely responsible for the current Caucasus kerfuffle. As has been widely reported, Stalin himself was a Georgian. But he did not show any special favor to his homeland during his reign.
In 1918, in the midst of the civil war, Joseph Stalin was named by Lenin as the People's Commissar for Nationalities' Affairs . In this capacity, he was tasked with establishing Soviet power over the many, diverse, non-Russian peoples in the former Russian Empire. One strategy he pioneered to maintain the Communist Party's grip over the far-flung people's of the Soviet Union was to exploit ethnic identity.
As commissar for nationalities, Stalin specialized in drawing borders that were conflicting, contradictory, deliberately ambiguous and confusing, impossible to maintain and expressly designed to pit neighboring peoples against each other for generations to come. Having studied carefully the ancient Roman principle of "divide and rule," he applied that to the new Soviet state he helped Lenin to construct.
As a result, from the very beginning, the Soviet republic of Georgia in the Caucasus was saddled with two quasi-autonomous internal regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that were encouraged to look to the Soviet capital in Moscow for survival and protection against the local Georgian rulers down in Tbilisi.
As long as all political and military power flowed from Moscow - enforced by the Cheka, the GULag, and if need by, the Red Army - the plan worked to help keep local authorities off balance. Overlaying the policy towards ethnic minorities was a ubiquitous Russian linguistic and cultural supremacy accompanied by the slogan "дружба народов" - friendship between different peoples of the Soviet Union - giving lip-service to the idea that all people's in the USSR were equal.
The Great Stalin - the Banner of the Friendship of Nations of the USSR!
This goal was best exemplified in the “Stalin” constitution of 1936, under which, eventually, 100 different national cultures living in 16 soviet federated socialist republics, including 6 territories, 123 regions, 20 autonomous republics, 8 autonomous regions and 10 autonomous districts were ostensibly granted the right to secede from the union but at the same time, pressed to recognize their obligation, in the name of proletarian solidarity, to denounce even the possibility of such a move. After all, Marxist theory, as formulated by Joseph Stalin, held that “a nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture,” and that those countries and peoples comprising the Soviet Union had joined it voluntarily. Sustaining this proposition was easier said than done. In reality, the same ethnic and nationalist tensions that beset the Russian Empire fermented beneath the Soviet structure even though the Communist Party hierarchy asserted that it had been able to solve the nationality question and hence, had successfully confronted the issue of nationalism.
Because communist ideology was firmly opposed to colonialism or imperialism, it was important to maintain the illusion that the member republics of the USSR had joined voluntarily and could leave at will. By the time Gorbachev's Glasnost policy had revealed the state of decay of the Soviet Union, a number of republics and autonomous regions were ready to exercise what had heretofore been only a nominal right of secession.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia had as much legal right to secede from Georgia as Georgia had to call it quits with the Soviet Union.
Next post - how the legacy of Soviet policy towards ethnic minorities has played out in Abkhazia and South Ossetia (spoiler alert - while Georgia pushes for its right to self determination and independence from Russia, it stomps down on the people of South Ossetia who seek to exercise those same rights by attempting to join with their fellow Ossetians to the north - and I am not referring to this month's military action, but to 1991, before an independent Georgia existed). And why is the United States perpetuating its containment policy against Russia, helping to perpetuate Putin's exploitation of a resurgent Russian nationalism to build an authoritarian Russian state?
As soon as I launched the Weblog Archipelago to reflect on the legacy of the cold war, conflict erupted between the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Suddenly, headlines were atwitter with news of a new cold war with Russia.
The initial reports in the American press were worthy of Pravda; all details of the story that put the U.S.'s emerging ally in a bad light were omitted and all facts that fit the Russia-as-brutish-bully narrative were amplified. By the last couple of days, the analysis - at least in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Slate - was more balanced, and included mention of the fact that this latest round of fighting would not have occurred but for Georgia's military incursion into South Ossetia (complete with Georgian troops shelling civilian areas of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali). And Georgia's receipt of military aid and training from the United States - including support for its bid to join NATO, surely emboldened the Caucasus nation. Military aid that came complete with on-the-job training in Iraq, where tiny Georgia (population 4.6 million - about the size of South Carolina) until recently had the third largest contingent in the "coalition of the willing" - behind only the U.S. and Britain.
I imagine that the Bush administration's finger wagging about the need to respect a sovereign nation's borders and the moral imperative not to use disproportionate force will be met by Russia with shoulders shrugging and finger pointing to a map of Iraq. "International law doesn't envision double standards," Medvedev reportedly said in response to western pressure to halt its military operations in Georgia. Indeed.
But the headlines announcing a return to cold war tensions miss their mark. Russia is clearly stronger now than it was ten or fifteen years ago (and this year resumed its tradition of showing off its massive military hardware on the annual victory day parade in Red Square), but that's where the cold war analogy ends. We are not living in a bipolar world. Whatever differences our short-sighted U.S. administration may have with Putin's Russia, they are not rooted in a deep, ideological struggle or a contest for world influence. Russia is asserting its power on its doorstep, not in far away neighborhoods of the globe. Moreover, Georgia, went out of its way to thumb its nose at Russia: it lobbied hard for NATO membership (an alliance built for the sole purpose of countering Soviet Russia's strength in Europe) and has sought and received military aid and training from the United States. It is true that Tony Blair was mocked for being Bush's "poodle" in the run up to and participation in the Iraq fiasco. But if there was a contest for the world leader who is the most obsequious lapdog for Bush, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia would win best in show. After all, is there any other country that has named a major boulevard in its capital for W.?
So what are America's interests in Georgia? Not surprisingly, Bush & Co. say that we are supporting a young democracy. A more likely explanation comes from geography - Georgia is an important conduit for oil and gas from the Caspian sea, providing the only path for pipelines bypassing both Russia and Iran en route to Turkey, Europe and the west.
And while it is important to support democracies, U.S. military aid and training to Georgia predated the Rose Revolution that brought Saakashvili to power, begging the question of what our real interests in the region are. The question remains: are those interests worth an all out shooting war with Russia? Imagine if Europe had given in to Bush's demands to have Georgia join NATO - the U.S. and its allies would now be obligated to rush to Georgia's aid, even if this current conflict was sparked by Saakshvili's imprudent incursion into Ossetia.
"John McCain says that Americans are supporting Georgia. We are Georgians today. Everybody is a Georgian today." So sayeth Saakashvili today in Tblisi. He should know, because McCain's chief foreign policy adviser was, until very recently, a chief lobbyist in D.C. for the government of Georgia. Since 2002, Randy Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies, has pocketed $900,000.00 (and that's Dollars, not Rubles) from the Georgian government to help press its interests in Washington (according to Talking Points Memo). I wonder who whispered in McCain's ear on a key foreign policy point this time? [Pictured left: Sen. Lieberman gently correcting McCain after he said that Iran was training Sunni insurgents]
I don't doubt that Russia used "disproportionate" force in its counter-offensive in Georgia. But the Georgian gambit -- that the U.S. and other western countries would somehow come to its aid -- was foolish and irresponsible. Bush and the Neocons bear a great deal of responsibility for this foolishness (an editorial in the U.S. News & World Report summarizes U.S. complicity in the whole affair), but as usual, they will not be the ones to pay the price. They can wring their hands and call for a stronger response against Russia, while Georgian soldiers, in desperate retreat, wonder aloud what happened to the implicit promise of American support.
The Russian government said clearly, back when the U.S. and many European nations were embracing Kosovo's independence from Serbia, that it would in turn recognize the right of the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to self determination, to be independent from Georgia. It was Georgia, however, that forced Russia's hand. It was Georgia's decision to launch a preemptive strike in Ossetia, knowing full well that doing so would put Russian peace keeping soldiers and Russian citizens in harm's way. The end result will likely be the annexation of both provinces into Russia, and it is not clear that there is any way that can be stopped.
The point of this post is not to apologize for Russia's military actions in Georgia (I do not condone bombing or shelling civilian areas under any circumstance - and this is certainly a war that could have easily been avoided if calmer heads had prevailed on both sides), nor to agree with Russia's calls to try Saakashvili for war crimes for Georgia's shelling of civilian areas of Ossetia. The Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, one of the few independent voices in the Russian media, has a good column on the conflict, titled "Madness". Putting the conflict in the context of international law, it aptly reflects on the illegal actions taken by all sides (including hardliners in South Ossetia, who certainly had a role in provoking the Georgian military action). Speaking about all sides, the paper writes:
Может быть, именно это безумцы назовут победой?!
Их победа — это унижение и боль, невосполнимые потери и страдания, попрание свобод и права на жизнь, уловки, хитрости, подлости и грязные приемы, приведшие к разрушениям и гибели людей.
Translation: Maybe these madmen will call this victory?!
Their victory is humiliation and pain, irreplaceable losses and suffering, trampling on freedom and the right to life, subterfuge, monkey business, baseness, dirty tricks, bringing to people death and destruction.
The translation may not be smooth, but you get the idea. This is a war that has brought great loss on Georgia and the people of South Ossetia, with no good purpose - but in no reasonable way does it herald a return to the cold war.
Over one year ago, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that over 2.3 million individuals were incarcerated in jails and prisons in the United States. Add to that another five million or so under probation or parole, and pretty soon, we're talking about a significant slice of humanity. Thanks to draconian sentencing laws passed over the last couple of decades, the number increases every year, regardless of a steady decline in the crime rate (both property and violent crime).
Before delving further into how we got to the place where about 2.5% of all people in America are under some form of penal supervision, allow me to offer an overview the blog. The name has been rattling around my head for a while, a placeholder for otherwise disconnected thoughts spread across the frozen tundra of my mind. I started to read Solzhenitsyn's GULAG Archipelago a couple of weeks ago - many might say a ridiculous project given how far history has marched since his experiment in literary journalism first rocked the world - but in any event, the book and its author's recent death got me thinking again about this blog.
Through the Weblog Archipelago, I will seek to explore the legacy of the cold war - particularly on U.S. domestic affairs. These topics are subject to change, but I am interested in exploring: the overreaching in U.S. foreign policy that has been unleashed since the counterbalance offered by the Soviet Union evaporated in 1991; the parallels - or lack thereof - between mass incarceration in the USA and the former USSR; how it is that we did not learn the lessons of the ineffectiveness - not to mention illegality - of torture from direct experience during the previous ideological struggle; whether the U.S. led military expedition in Afghanistan will fair better than the Soviet adventure in that part of Central Asia a quarter of a century ago; how low prices for fossil fuels in the late 1980's simultaneously left the USSR in a lurch and set back investments in efficiency in the USA - accelerating the pace of climate change; and why the Soviet Winnie-the-Pooh (Vinni-Pukh) is superior to the Disney version. As the previous post makes plain, it is not that I think the world would be better off if the KPSU - the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - was still in the driver's seat. Despite having met countless people in the far southern corner of the former USSR who longed for the good old days of Brezhnev ("everything was better then" was the constant refrain five years after independence was forced on Turkmenistan), I am not nostalgic for something I never knew. And while I do not doubt that Secretary General Gorbachev wishes that he had introduced more effective market reforms before instituting glasnost (see China), the catastrophic mismanagement of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, and the inability to keep a lid on the lie that life was better for the average person in the 1980's in Russia than in Europe or America would have made it nearly impossible for any politician to keep any semblance of legitimacy under the Marxist-Leninist banner. As Martin Luther King, Jr. so forcefully reminded us, "truth crushed to earth will rise again."
Moreover, as devastating as the terrorists acts were in September of 2001, and as hard as our current leaders work to scare us silly at the specter of further terrorist assaults on our homeland, there is nothing quite like the fear of MAD - mutual assured destruction - and the thought of total nuclear annihilation. As troubled as I am about the possible catastrophic consequences of climate change, there is something even more terrifying about all-out nuclear war followed by the slow death of radiation poisoning (see The Day After).
Instead, I am interested in the now forgotten ideological struggle that defined the forty years in between World War II and the fall of Dzerzhinsky's statute in Lubyanka Square in 1991. What relevance might it have for us today, what insight might it provide into how we do what we do now, at home and abroad, in the midst of a new and improved (though less clearly defined) ideological struggle?
Monument to Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police, predecessor to the KGB). After the failed coup attempt in 1991, a joyful mob cheers on as the statue is brought down by a crane and loaded onto the back of a truck. If the Soviet Union had not gone kaput, would the United States have invaded Iraq? See how simple it was for the Red Army to keep the capitalist imperialist west in check:
Oh, Behave!
Seeing pictures of Dzerzhinsky's monument being taken down in 1991 brings to mind another powerful image from recent years:
How much difference do you think it makes when it is a foreign, occupying army that drives in the crane to bring down the the statue?
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born into a smoldering world, a month after Germany signed the armistice on November 11, 1918, bringing World War I to a close. He was brought into being during the Russian Civil War, during the first faltering steps of the establishment of Bolshevik power in Russia. The only Russia he knew was Communist Russia; until his arrest, he did not question Marxist-Leninist ideology.
While serving as an officer in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War (World War II to us amerikantsi), he was arrested by the secret police. Tortured at the Lubyanka -- the notorious KGB headquarters near the heart of Moscow -- he was soon convicted under Article 58, paragraphs 10 and 11 of the penal code of Soviet Russia. His crime? Critical remarks about the conduct of the war, written within months of victory in 1945. A few words folded in a triangular envelope and sent to a friend. Private thoughts shared from a low ranking officer that would never have again been read, a stone so small that it would not have caused the slightest ripple.
Punishing this so-called "anti-Soviet and counterrevolutionary propaganda" with over eight years in the corrective labor camps, the Chekists helped to set in motion the end of the Soviet regime. They got in return works of literature and investigative journalism that, as much as any other individual act, brought down the Soviet Union. Not right away; the red wheel had more turns to make before finishing its revolution. But the regime could not reconcile its foundational narrative -- that it was liberating the proletariat from the degradation of capitalism -- with the reality that its "workers' paradise" was actually built by millions of forced laborers, made to toil in secret camps throughout the Soviet Union. The overwhelming majority of whom were, like Solzhenitsyn, imprisoned for no sensible reason.
Solzhenitsyn revealed that the GULAG -- an official acronym for the head administration of labor and corrective camps -- was not an aberration of what was otherwise a noble human endeavor, but was the central cog that made the entire engine run; the prison system was the root, rotting and diseased, spread underneath the dying tree of the Soviet state.
His life stretched out longer than the USSR itself. He survived to see his beloved homeland fall out from under the thumb of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and into desperate, chaotic, robber-baron capitalism. He lived to scold his comrades for their fascination with consumerism. He believed in Russia, in her people, in her great and powerful language. Not that he can be praised without qualification. His rants against the vacuousness of contemporary culture veered into the comic; his drifts into jingoism and antisemitism were tragic. Moreover, the nationalism he embraced could easily run out of hand and carry his motherland headlong back into a police state. And it is hard to reconcile his love for the current leadership of Russia -- made up as it is by former KGB officers -- with his own heroic struggle against the KGB's crimes against the Soviet people.
But today he was put to rest. Today he is lowered into the ground at Donskoi Monastery. Today he should be remembered.
The President of Russia has already proclaimed that Solzhenitsyn will be memorialized by an official scholarship in his name. Medvedev has asked the Moscow government to name a street in his honor. No doubt there will be other monuments.
But he has left us a more enduring monument than any boulevard or avenue: his words , his story. He has left us his legacy, a story of human struggle to write truth to the state, a story of vigilance and discipline pitted against raw, brute power. His of course were not the only stories of life in the GULAG, but his spread the furthest and left the biggest mark.
Here's to the strength of language. To the power of Russian, which survived a totalitarian effort to tame it, to yoke it to crude, ideological ends -- and whose poetry instead provided refuge through long, dark times. To the truth that human institutions are inherently fallible and corruptible, that they need to be watched, investigated, and held accountable. To the writers who help us see.
Drawn from living in remote corners of the former Soviet Union in 1993 and again between 1995 to the end of 1997, studying the Russian language and post-Soviet affairs (on and off, both formally and informally) from August 1991 to the present, and inspired by the cognitive dissonance between Reagan era propaganda about the Soviet Union and the real thing.
The basic premise of the Webblog Archipelago is that Cold War myths and attitudes persist in U.S. policy and media, clouding our collective perceptions and judgments towards Russia and ourselves, and contributing to poor domestic and foreign policy choices. This blog is also a space for personal reflection on Soviet and post-Soviet culture, the Russian language, and general impressions of the former USSR.
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