Georgia's Unsettled Borders & America's Unsettled Choices....

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.

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?