Why is McCain Insisting on Defending Borders Drawn by Joseph Stalin?

Where to draw the line?

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.

Martin Sieff, writing for UPI, sums up the policy well:

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.

[Paul Goble for the Moscow Times offers additional insight on this legacy.]

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!

Vartan Gregorian of the Carnegie Corporation sums up the contradictions inherent in the Soviet Union's "friendship of nations" policy:

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?

Rumors of a new Cold War are greatly exaggerated...

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.

How did the USA come to imprison more people than the USSR?

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?

One day in the life of us....

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.

Here's to the man from Kislovodsk who endured.

царствие небесное.

Interior of Soviet Forced Labor Camp, circa 1937