I wrote Chapter Two: “Enter the Memes”

Note February 2016: the formatting of this is likely going to be rather strange.

The Georgian tragedy is a story of a dominant nationality that made war on its minorities, only to have that war metastasize into a civil war of Georgians against Georgians.ⁱ

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For twenty years many reporters and commentators have interpreted Russia through a series of preconceptions or “memes”. These memes are considered to be so true as to need no evidence, and Georgia has figured among them. For example, one meme is that Russia “wants its empire back”: Georgia was part of that empire. Another is that Russia wants to control energy routes: one passes through Georgia. Another is that Moscow “hates democracies,” and that Georgia is one. The characteristics of memes are that they determine what the “facts” are and that they are very resistant to mere reality. Despite the reality that in August 2008 Moscow did not conquer Georgia, seize the pipeline route, or overthrow the Georgian government, the memes remain strong in many minds. This chapter attempts to illustrate this effect. In direct contradiction to the causal explanations created by these memes, it attempts to show how Russia has in fact been significantly and adversely affected by events that were fundamentally of Georgian origin. In short, Russia was not the actor, as the memes imply, it was the reactor.

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Russians often complain that an “information war” is being waged against themⁱⁱ. Whether or not, as the term implies, there is some centrally-directed policy in the service of some grand geo-political game of controlling and directing Western media outlets so as to blacken Russia’s name for their consumers, it is undeniable that the Western media is ever-ready to assume the worst, taking for granted assumptions about the malevolence of Russia’s intentions. These I call “memesⁱⁱⁱ” and this chapter will discuss several that adhere to common Western discussions and reporting of Russia-Georgia relations. But there are other memes as well: one is that Putin kills reporters and other opponents. A small but revealing case of this assumption at work – in the complete absence of any evidence – involved the Russo-French Lawyer Karinna Moskalenko who found mercury in her car in October 2008. Several media outlets^iv immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was another dastardly deed against one of Putin’s enemies. But a few days later French police identified the cause: the car had been previously owned by an antiques dealer who had broken a mercury barometer inside it.

This rush to judgment, assuming the worst, is very common. One of the most demonstrable examples of this is found in the case of Georgia’s accusations against Russia: they are almost always taken for granted, despite the number of times that Moscow’s assertions have been proven true. Russians can be forgiven for believing that there is an “information war” against them^v.

Inevitably Moscow’s attitude to the outside world is affected. When every approach is rejected, every action condemned, every motive suspected, every utterance misquoted, it would be surprising indeed if Moscow were not more suspicious and hostile. Putin’s famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 was branded as “inflammatory”^vi, “attacking the Western world” and so on. According to the BBC it was regarded either as threatening a new Cold War or just letting off steam^vii. Few made any attempt to try to understand what he was saying. In essence what he was saying was quite simple: Russia is not happy in a world in which its point of view is ignored; and it is not helpless. The second message was that a unipolar world is not a secure world; he even quoted Franklin Roosevelt: “When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.”^viii These are messages that he and other Russian spokesmen have endlessly and reasonably reiterated. Putin, back as President of Russia – a Russia that is on the way back up after the collapse of the 1990s – is visibly less patient than he was in 2000. The habit of so much reporting of Russia as if one were preparing a charge sheet for some indictment has contributed to this.

Georgia has been a prominent part of the charge sheet of Russia’s crimes. This statement from the influential Economist in 1993 can stand as the prototype:

An independent state of Georgia existed for 2 ½ years, until Trotsky’s Red Army snuffed it out in 1921. Mr Yeltsin has given its successor exactly the same amount of time. More or less secretly, Russian forces have backed rebellions by Muslims in the Abkhaz region and by Georgian followers of the former president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. In this squeeze the current president, Eduard Shevardnadze… despairingly appealed to Moscow for help, and got it on terms that in effect mortgage his country’s independence^ix.

This is a fine example of the “charge sheet” against Russia not just because it was one of the first to look at Georgia and see Russia: it has two characteristics that we will see again and again. There is the easy assumption of Russia’s malevolence as the real explanation for Georgia’s misery. And, almost every sentence in it is untrue; it is erected on an almost complete ignorance of reality. First, to call Abkhazia “Muslim” is incorrect – in fact a bishop from Pitsunda attended the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. It is true that with Ottoman influence many Abkhazians became Muslims but, after the Russian conquest in the late Nineteenth Century, many of the Muslim Abkhazians left and moved to the Ottoman Empire. Today’s Abkhazia is majority Christian. Second, the likelihood of Moscow supporting Gamsakhurdia, its implacable enemy and ally of another enemy, Jokhar Dudaev of Chechnya, is quite absurd. Third, the troubles between Sukhum^x and Tbilisi began long before 1993 – they were rooted in Stalin-Jughashvili’s decision to subordinate Abkhazia to Tbilisi and subsequent events. The “rebellion” The Economist is talking about is not the first Abkhaz “rebellion” of the twentieth century against Tbilisi’s dominance. Fourth, it was not “Trotsky’s Red Army” that “snuffed out” the Georgian Democratic Republic in 1921; the invasion was engineered by the two most prominent Georgians on the Bolshevik high command – Stalin-Jughashvili and Orjonikidze^xi; but to say that – assuming the authors even knew it – would be to complicate the simple picture of Russian hostility that they want to sell. And finally, note the assumption that the Abkhaz viewpoint is irrelevant. In this construction, Georgia is a sort of canary in the coal mine of Russian imperialism. The assumption that Russia has imperialistic designs requires no proof beyond mere assertion:

The Russian ruling elite has not reconciled itself to the separation of the fifteen dependent republics…^xii

So, in the earliest post-Soviet period, we find the memes that troubles in the former USSR are to be laid at Moscow’s door and that Georgia, in particular, illustrates this pattern of Russian trouble-making.

The next development affecting Georgia’s position in the “charge sheet” came with the discovery of large deposits of petrocarbons in the Caspian Sea. Georgia now became one of the fields of struggle in what was quickly called “the new Great Game”, an imagined struggle between Russia and the West to control the deposits and their transportation routes. To many it was a zero-sum game: either Russia benefitted or “we” did. Ariel Cohen laid down the markers in 1996:

Will a neo imperialist Russia (aided and abetted by Iran) dominate the development of Eurasian oil and its exports, or will Russia be an equal and fair player in the region… the West has a paramount interest in assuring that the Caucasian and Central Asian states maintain their independence and remain open to the West. Otherwise, Moscow will capture almost monopolistic control over this vital energy resource, thus increasing Western dependence upon Russian dominated oil reserves and export routes…. The wars in Chechnya, between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and in Georgia were started or exacerbated by the Russian military, and the outcome of these wars may determine who controls future pipeline routes…^xiii

Others joined in the chorus

Moscow’s strategy of reasserting its economic and military political influence in the region includes the goal of dominating the production and transportation of Caspian oil to world markets… Russia is suspected of being behind efforts to destabilize Azerbaijan and Georgia as part of its long term strategy to control the Caucasus and its oil wealth.^xiv

Russia has also intervened decisively in the wars in Georgia, forcing Eduard Shevardnadze to take his country into the Commonwealth of Independent States…^xv

Geography made Georgia part of this “new Great Game” because any route that avoided Russia (Iran was not regarded as an option) must necessarily pass through it in order to get to the sea, and so Georgia became a key part of the strategy of denying Russia “almost monopolistic control”. Evidence of Russia’s enmity was simply asserted: “As is generally known, Russia has had great difficulty adjusting to the fact that its empire, built by conquest over centuries, disappeared in 1991, depriving it of rich borderlands and nearly half its population.”^xvi Caspar Weinberger warned “Russia has a truly ominous enlargement initiative of its own – ‘dominance of the energy resources in the Caspian Sea region.’”^xvii A popular theory, often uttered in the same breath, was the assertion that Russia was busy de-stabilizing the countries of the Caucasus so as to gain monopoly over the routes:

Georgia for a while resisted Russian demands for closer cooperation. To subdue it, Moscow initiated a ‘national liberation’ movement among the 100,000 Abkhazians, a Muslim people occupying the western regions of Georgia. In the course of the rebellion, a quarter of a million Georgians residing in Abkhazia were expelled. The rebellion stopped only after Georgia agreed to let in a force of some 8,000 Russian soldiers, forces they have been trying to get rid of ever since.^xviii

And

At the moment, Russian armies are in Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan and participate in some of the local civil wars with a strategy that seems designed to make the new republics all of them members of the United Nations rue their independence and return to the womb of imperial Russia…^xix

“[Russia] maintains bases on the territory of Georgia after fomenting a civil war there… ”^xx.

Therefore, from early times, the assumption was that Russia wanted its empire back partly because that’s just what Russians were like and partly in order to gain a monopoly of the routes out of the Caspian to the West. In the pursuit of both aims it was fomenting wars in its southern neighbors. Georgia’s independence had to be protected against Russia’s “neo-imperialism”. What never occurred to the zero-summers was that Moscow needs the money just as much as the customers need the oil and gas. Also absent from their consideration is that Moscow might want as much stability as possible in the turbulent Caucasus. But for them the assumption was that Russia was nothing but expansionist; no further thought was required.

The third element in the Georgian portion of the “charge sheet” against Russia, while never completely absent^xxi, intensified with the arrival of Mikheil Saakashvili after the so-called Rose Revolution. To the “canary” and “new Great Game” memes was added Moscow’s assumed hostility to a “democracy” on its borders. Until his mendacity in the 2008 war, most Western pundits believed everything Saakashvili said.

The Georgian Catastrophe

The post-USSR history of Georgia has been a succession of disasters. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, elected President in May 1991, was overthrown in January 1992. South Ossetia and Abkhazia sought to preserve the rights they had had under the Soviet system against Tbilisi’s refusals to countenance any such thing. The coup makers imported Eduard Shevardnadze in March 1992 and his position was regularized by election in 1995. Gamsakhurdia fled to his native Mingrelia to raise forces in the west; central Georgian forces invaded Abkhazia in August 1992 and a real war started there. North Caucasian volunteers, hoping to re-create the short-lived Mountaineer Republic of 1918, went to Abkhazia to fight.^xxii Gradually fighting expanded in South Ossetia. Tbilisi’s forces were driven out of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In the years that followed, Zviadists^xxiii, sometimes allied with Chechens, attempted coups or assassination attempts against Shevardnadze. Chechen fighters and Arab mujahaddin took advantage of the vacuum and moved into the Pankisi Valley. It is hardly surprising that Georgia did not flourish. Shevardnadze was pushed out in 2003 and Mikhail Saakashvili took power. At first the darling of the West, Georgia’s experience under him has been a disastrous war, large protests, the defection of many of his associates to the opposition, little genuine economic improvement and very high unemployment. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are lost to Tbilisi for the foreseeable future, Saakashvili’s dream of NATO membership is gone and the recent overcoming of Tbilisi’s “veto” on Russia’s membership on the WTO shows that the bloom is indeed off the rose.

For the most part, Western commentators naively repeated Tbilisi’s side of the story, ignored the desires of the Abkhaz or Ossetians, and fitted events – when they noticed them at all – into the well-worn trope of Russian neo-imperialism and the “new Great Game”. The 2008 war, however, may have forced some revision of these assumptions.

One of the most momentous errors of the standard Western coverage of events in Georgia is the lack of interest in Ossetians and Abkhazians^xxiv. This is implicit in the quotations above: there is no curiosity about how Moscow was supposedly able to foment trouble. Mingrelia, Svanetia and Javakhetia have not historically been very happy with domination from Tbilisi and yet Moscow was unable to “initiate” troubles there. This blindness persisted in the EU report on the 2008 war: there was no curiosity about why Ossetians would fight Georgians. There was no curiosity about why Abkhazia seized the opportunity to drive the last parts of Tbilisi’s forces out of Kodori. Throughout the issue has been conventionally treated as if the only actors were Russia, Georgia (and the West). But Georgia’s modern troubles began with Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s attempts to hold what they had and Tbilisi’s refusal to accommodate them.

Other successor states of the USSR had similar secessionist problems. Russians and Ukrainians living in Transdnestr did not want to suddenly find themselves in Romania which, at the time, was the aspiration of many in Moldova. Armenians living in Karabakh were not happy under Baku’s rule. Chechens wanted out of Russia. These disputes led to fighting. But fighting was not the only option. Crimea, absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1783 and whimsically transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Khrushchev in 1954, was an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic with certain privileges under the Soviet system and the inhabitants wished to retain them. This could have led to trouble, but in 1992, Kiev was wise enough to listen and begin negotiations and Crimea is today an autonomous republic within Ukraine.^xxv A similar wise arrangement was made in Moldova to accommodate the language and cultural rights of the Gagauz, a Turkic people washed up by the tides of history in Central Europe. Reasonable compromise damped down the passions that elsewhere erupted into fighting.

The USSR, following Stalin’s famous apothegm “nationalist in form, socialist in content”, had dealt with the multi-ethnic reality of the Russian Empire by the construction of carefully graded national entities. Highest were the fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs), in them were Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSRs), Autonomous Oblasts (AOs) and Autonomous Okrugs^xxvi (AOs). There was a strong element of fakery in these constructions because real power flowed through the Party structure but there was also a not meaningless degree of local language and cultural rights for the titular nationalities. The Center continually meddled with the concept, changing borders and abolishing entities and changing the very number of accepted ethonyms over time and ideological requirements.^xxvii One change is very important in the Georgian context: Abkhazia’s status was changed from co-equal with Georgia to subordinate to it (i.e. from an SSR to an ASSR). But then Stalin, who ordered it – born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori in 1878 – was a Georgian as was his then South Caucasus lieutenant and later political police chief, Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria. Perhaps there was an element of Georgian chauvinism in the decision.

The Georgian SSR had within it three autonomous regions: the Abkhazian ASSR, the Ajarian ASSR and the South Ossetian AO. Neither Abkhazians nor Ossetians are Kartevelian^xxviii peoples. As Georgians agitated for independence from the USSR, non-Kartevelians became nervous about their futures. And not surprisingly given that they were hearing things like this:

Georgia stands on the brink of a real catastrophe – of extirpation. What devil ruled our minds, when we yielded up our land, gained inch by inch over the centuries, defended and soaked with our blood, to every homeless beggar that has come down from the fringes of the Caucasus, to tribes that have neither history nor culture? We must make every effort to raise the percentage of Georgians in the population of Georgia (currently 61%) to 95%. The remaining 5% must consist of only those who know Georgian, who have a proper respect for Georgia, who have been brought up under the influence of the Georgian national phenomenon. We must persuade other nationalities, which are multiplying suspiciously in the land of David the Builder, that ideal conditions for the development of their personalities are to be found only in their homelands.^xxix

And this from a 1992 pamphlet devoted to countering claims that Ossetians and Abkhazians might have for independence or any retention of their Soviet-era privileges:

The most important fact to be pointed out is that when Georgia was declared an independent state on the 26^th of May 1918, its frontiers contained only a part of those territories which used to belong to it since the time of formation of the Georgian ethnos and statehood, i.e. for some millennia. Not an inch of this land which is now the country of Georgia, has ever been conquered by it, and the national minorities inhabiting its territory, except the Abkhaz, have lived together with the Georgians from time immemorial when they had come to Georgia in search of better life and shelter and safety, leaving their homelands.^xxx

“Homeless beggars” who would be better off somewhere else were quite capable of taking the hint. An intimation of the future appeared in the Soviet referendum of 17 March 1991 on the question of support for the proposed new confederation. A number of jurisdictions – Georgia included – refused to hold the referendum at all on the grounds that they legally had never been part of the USSR.^xxxi However, the Abkhaz SSR voted anyway and a little over half opted to stay in the proposed new post-USSR union evidently believing that the future looked better under Moscow than under Tbilisi.^xxxii

The collapse of the USSR unleashed many national dreams and the dream of Georgian chauvinists was the Greater Georgia that existed about eight centuries ago reaching its apotheosis under the granddaughter of King David the Builder,^xxxiii Queen Tamar (reg 1184-1213). During that time, one Georgian state ruled most of the South Caucasus. The eastern part of this Greater Georgian state was destroyed by the Mongol invasions. A remnant of a united Georgia survived in western Georgia until Alexander I (reg 1412-43). After his death, the kingdom was divided among his sons and, from then until the twentieth century, the territory of today’s Georgia was divided into numerous kingdoms and principalities ever fearful of destructive invasions from the south. A terrible sack of Tbilisi in 1795 by Persians ended independence; Russian protection was sought and Georgian territories were absorbed into the Russian Empire.

The root of the chauvinist Georgian position today is the notion that this Greater Georgia of eight hundred years ago is the “true Georgia.” It was precisely this sort of talk, very common in the Gamsakhurdia period – indeed the official version – that sparked off wars of independence by the Ossetians and the Abkhaz. “Georgia for Georgians” and “Nature has outlined the borders of Georgia and history has confirmed them”^xxxiv are not calculated to make non-Kartevelians comfortable. The same thing had happened in the first independent Georgia of the Twentieth Century and, in its short existence, it had wars with the Ossetians and the Abkhaz as well as border scuffles with Armenia.^xxxv It was this chauvinism, not Russian interference, which sparked the wars. Shevardnadze, who has said different things at different times to different audiences, after defeat in Abkhazia, had this to say:

did we not create a terrible phenomenon of modern times, which is provincial fascism?.. we were punished, we should have been punished and we were punished…we were robbing them [the Abkhazians]… let us also remember how we drove the Ossetians out of Tbilisi [and] how we tortured Ossetians.

As far as the so-called Russian responsibility, he said this:

of course there was a betrayal from Russia’s reactionary forces but, despite all this, Sukhumi would not have fallen under any circumstances, had it not been for the betrayal [of the Georgian forces at the last moment by the Zviadists].^xxxvi

Thus Georgian chauvinist behavior^xxxvii, informed and fed by the dream of a Greater Georgia into which all non-Georgians had come, by invitation – a conditional invitation – was the impetus for the Ossetians and Abkhazians to get out of a state which seemed to have no place for them^xxxviii. This feeling was redoubled in Abkhazia because of attempts, probably engendered by Beria, to suppress Abkhazian culture in the 1940s^xxxix.

The election of Zviad Gamsakhurdia – who embodied this chauvinism – began a terrible period for the inhabitants of the former Georgian SSR. His overthrow led to a civil war between his supporters and the coup makers. This war merged into the struggles of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to preserve their Soviet-era status. As usual, atrocity bred atrocity and the demands ramped up to full independence. The following armed groups – each with its own lines of command and interests – struggled: Tengiz Kitovani and Tbilisi’s official forces; Jaba Ioseliani’s^xl paramilitary Mkhedrioni; Gamsakhurdia’s forces; Abkhazian and South Ossetia militias; North Caucasians fighting on the side of the Abkhazians. “Russian”^xli troops were involved in this because they were stationed here and there in bases or at certain installations of importance to the Soviet defense system^xlii. By the end of 1993, Abkhazia and South Ossetia had driven Tbilisi’s forces out of their territories, the North Caucasians had gone back to Russia to start wars there and Gamsakhurdia was dead. An uncertain standoff was preserved by peacekeeping forces, dominated by Russians but with participation from the other two combatants, along the South Ossetia and Abkhazia borders. Under Shevardnadze things were comparatively quiet – even stagnant. There were assassination attemptsxliii on him, continual skirmishing along the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and periodic bomb explosions and political murders but at least nothing got dramatically worse.

The prevalent meme requires that Georgia’s troubles be fitted into a story of “neoimperialistic” Russia versus Georgia. Very few Western commentators who subscribe to the Georgia as “mine canary” or field of the “new Great Game” ever mention Abkhazians or Ossetians and when they do the assumption seems to be that they are simply tools of Moscow’s trouble making. But they are not: they are crucial actors too.

The casus belli in Abkhazia, as elsewhere in the Caucasus, has historical roots. The Abkhaz are autochthonous: in Classical days Abkhazia was known as Colchis. A thousand years ago, their leading family was united in marriage with King David’s dynasty, but this association was broken by the Mongol destruction of Greater Georgia in the Thirteenth Century. Russia annexed Abkhazia in 1864 and a large part of the Muslim population emigrated, or was forced out, to the Ottoman Empire, leaving the Abkhaz a minority in their land.^xliv After 1917, Abkhazia was part of the short-lived Mountain Republic but was invaded by independent Georgia, which claimed it. The issue had not yet been resolved when the Red Army extinguished Georgian independence. The Bolsheviks solved the problem of Abkhazia’s status by proclaiming it a Soviet Socialist Republic in March 1921; in December, with a union treaty, it became associated with the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. But in 1931, it was taken into the Georgian SSR as an ASSR losing the co-equal nature of the relationship.^xlv When the musical chairs that the communists had been playing with the internal borders of the USSR stopped in 1991, the West and the United Nations recognized Stalin-Jughashvili’s border.

The Gorbachev period awoke ambitions clamped shut in former years and the present troubles began in March 1989, when a gathering resolved that Abkhazia should regain the status of an SSR. Many of the Kartevelian residents opposed this and trouble began. Union MVD troops gradually restored order. Then ensued a period of conflicting declarations: the Abkhaz parliament declaring “state sovereignty” and the Georgian parliament overruling it. But the real trouble began after Gamsakhurdia’s overthrow. As a Mingrelian, his strength was in the west of Georgia and he fled there to set up his resistance to the coup makers. In March his supporters seized some towns in western Georgia and central troops and members of the Mkhedrioni^xlvi assembled to move there. In July, Abkhazia abolished the 1978 constitution and reverted to that of 1925 in direct response to Tbilisi’s abolishing all Soviet legislation and declaring that the 1921 pre-Soviet constitution was re-established, a constitutional arrangement in which Abkhazia had no special status. Up to that point, the Abkhazian-Georgia disagreement had been legalistic (apart from the violence of 1989) but fighting started in August after Gamsakhurdia’s forces took the Georgian Interior Minister and other officials hostage in Zugdidi (the central city of Mingrelia). Shevardnadze authorized a military/police action and, on 14 August 1992, Georgian forces entered Abkhazia and ran riot on Sukhum^xlvii despite the fact that Gamsakhurdia had nothing to do with Abkhazia. Now serious blood had been shed^xlviii.

Four days later, the Parliament of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, meeting in Groznyy, demanded Georgian withdrawal from Abkhazia and, a few days later, called for volunteers to fight in Abkhazia. In the end, several hundred volunteers from Circassia and Chechnya went to fight. Fighting, accompanied by much destruction, massacres and atrocities, continued until the spring of 1993 when the Georgian forces, divided among themselves and harassed by the Zviadists, suffered serious reverses. A Russian-mediated ceasefire was achieved on 22 July 1993. Then the Zviadists struck – on 7 September they took the town of Gali (just inside Abkhazia), and gradually over the next few days extended their control through Mingrelia. The Abkhazians and their supporters grasped the opportunity and attacked the Georgian forces still in Sukhum. They pushed the Georgians out on 27 September and moved down the coast forcing the Georgians out of most of Abkhazia. The Zviadists then struck at the disorganized and retreating Georgian forces and took town after town in Western Georgia. Eventually a Russian-provided peacekeeping force together with UN monitors was established in the summer of 1994.

As now customary, Western commentators unaware of the background fitted these wars into the “new Great Game” and Russian imperialist templates. We have already seen The Economist’s take. Henry Kissinger opined in March 1997:

Even post Communist Russia is conducting some policies redolent of traditional Russian imperialism…it maintains bases on the territory of Georgia after fomenting a civil war there… ^xlix

Deep water harbors were what Moscow was after we were told:

The breakup of the Soviet Union deprived Russia of deep water harbors on the Black Sea coast. Such ports, however, existed in Georgia. In the summer of 1992, Abkhazia, the northwest corner of Georgia, was visited by Russian defense and intelligence officials. A short time later, the Abkhazians declared their independence. When Georgian troops tried to crush the revolt, they were defeated by an ‘Abkhazian’ army which appeared out of nowhere and whose ranks were filled with mercenaries recruited by Russian intelligence.^l

Georgian spokesmen were happy to avoid their own responsibility for this disaster and blame Moscow:

The civil war in Georgia was inspired, plotted, and provoked by forces from outside Georgia, particularly in Russia. Russian civilian and military intelligence organizations perpetuated the civil war.^li

But the question of Russian involvement was not as straightforward as here claimed. Abkhazian sources claimed that Moscow supported Tbilisi:

‘Experts’ constantly disparage Abkhazian prowess by asserting it was Russians who inflicted the defeat on ‘hated Georgia’, but such ‘experts’ forget that Russia was supplying weapons to Georgia gratis, whereas Abkhazians had to pay dearly for everything not gained as booty, and that Russian planes actually bombed Abkhazian lines in the final push, as an outright Abkhazian victory in no way suited the Kremlin’s purpose.^lii

Zviadists in their turn saw a plot by Shevardnadze, supported by Russia, to set Mingrelians against Abkhazians:

It must be known that Abkhazian war was necessary for Shevardnadze for following reasons. He aimed first of all on creating ethnical conflict between Abkhazians and Megrelians [Mingrelians] and involving population of Megrelia into this war, thus two most fierce enemies of Shevardnadze: Megrelians and Abkhazians would be in permanent war and kill each other, what would give him better chances for establishing his dictatorship in Megrelia and Abkhazia, politically defeating President’s [i.e. Gamsakhurdia – who was, after all, the lawfully elected President of Georgia^liii] supporters in both regions, turning great part of population to refugees and creating good situation for his marauding bands in that parts of Western Georgia. Reactionary forces of Russia also had interest in this, for strengthening their control over Abkhazia and Black Sea shore, which is very important from strategic point of view and as best resort zone and gave Russia good perspective in joining Abkhazia to Russia. By that reason units of Russian army, Cossacks and North Caucasians are involved in conflict, thus turning Caucasus into another Yugoslavia. [sic]^liv

So the interesting thing is that all three sides agree on Russian involvement but always on the other side. For what it is worth – and to a devotee of Russian conspiracy theories, it is worth precisely nothing – official Russia many times called for a ceasefire and a restoration of the status quo ante bellum. The charge that Russia fomented the Abkhaz wars in presumably otherwise peaceful Georgia is important – David Satter, for example, uses it as one of the main buttresses to his argument that NATO expansion is necessary for protection against Russia.^lv No great Russian interference is necessary to explain the Georgian defeat in a war which it provoked by its policy of “Georgia for the Georgians,” Kitovani’s attack on Sukhum and was then carried out by three different and opposed groups: the National Guard, the Mkhedrioni and the Zviadist forces; led – and incompetently led – by men who were later to fall out with each other and with Shevardnadze. Little surprise that a small force of Abkhazians and determined and ruthless North Caucasians defeated them.

The Ossetians were also made nervous by the outburst of chauvinism in Georgia in the late Gorbachev period. Their lands are split between Russia and Georgia with about two-thirds living in North Ossetia-Alania in Russia. They also had reason to fear an independent Georgia – they remember what they call the “first genocide” in the time of the Georgian Democratic Republic when they say thousands of Ossetians were killed. As soon as Georgia started its moves towards independence from the USSR, the Ossetians moved too. On 20 September 1990, the parliament proclaimed itself as the South Ossetia Soviet Democratic Republic and part of the USSR. The Georgian Supreme Soviet promptly overruled this and, a couple of months later, abolished the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast altogether and ruled that the elections there had been illegal. Violence was already general and was gradually brought under control by central forces. Gamsakhurdia’s election, with the concomitant increase in chauvinism, exacerbated the situation and South Ossetia called for union with North Ossetia. After the collapse of the USSR in December 1991 fighting intensified around Tskhinval. On 19 January 1992, a referendum was held and the voters overwhelmingly demanded to be incorporated into the Russian Federation. Ceasefires were announced and broken and the fighting did not stop until a Russian-Georgian-Ossetian peacekeeping force was established in the summer of 1992. Skirmishing was intermittent until the Georgian attack of August 2008 resulted in another Georgian defeat and the proclamation of full independence.

Had Tbilisi reacted to the first stirrings from Abkhazia and South Ossetia for retention of their autonomous status with the wisdom that Kiev showed in Crimea, perhaps none of this would have happened. As had happened in 1918, it was the behavior by actors in independent Georgia that provoked the wars of 1991. No Russian interference was needed to ignite the fire. The evidence for Russian interference is mostly assertion and a product of the two already established theories that Georgia was a “mine canary” for supposed Russian imperialism and the “new Great Game”. No actual knowledge of the background – “hosts and guests”, “homeless beggars”, Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s memories of the previous period of an independent Georgia – was thought worth gathering.^lvi The truth is that these wars were caused as much by Stalin as by anyone (although Zviad Gamsakhurdia deserves special responsibility).

The Fire Spreads to Russia

Memes function as epistemological filters that determine what are seen to be facts and motives and where to look to find them. The memes made their believers think that they understood what was really happening – the principle of all Moscow’s actions with respect to Georgia was an attempt to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The 2008 war was fitted into this theory: Moscow was seizing its chance to defeat and humiliate Georgia and secure a measure of control over its behavior^lvii. But the adherence to the memes, together with the general ignorance of the context, Tbilisi’s ambitions, the views of Ossetians and Abkhazians, blinded their adherents to Moscow’s pre-eminent concern. And that was that Moscow feared that a fire set in Georgia would spread across the mountains into the Russian Caucasus. Moscow feared this in 2008 because it had seen it happen before. Tbilisi’s wars against the Ossetians and Abkhazians in the early 1990s had been a direct cause of the first Chechen wars when the victorious North Caucasian fighters returned home to complete the job; that war in turn attracted fighters from the international jihad who started the second war and the subsequent jihadist activities in the North Caucasus that continue today. Moscow’s principal motive in 2008 was to stop this from happening again.

The inhabitants of the North Caucasus – or “Mountaineers” as they are often called – were conquered by Russia after long and brutal wars. Thousands died and thousands more left their homelands for the Ottoman Empire. When the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917 the Mountaineers resumed their struggle for freedom. An assembly of North Caucasus peoples proclaimed the Republic of the North Caucasus in May 1918. Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey recognized this new state but it was evanescent, falling to General Denikin’s White army. In 1919 Sheikh Uzun Haji declared the “Emirate of the North Caucasus” in southern Chechnya and the Bolsheviks recognized and supported his Emirate against Denikin. When Denikin was defeated in February 1920, the Bolsheviks entered the North Caucasus, dissolved the Emirate and appointed Sheikh Uzun Haji as Mufti.^lviii The Bolsheviks, with their slogans of independence from the “prison of nationalities” were at first welcomed by the Mountaineers but, as they revealed their “war communism,” the Mountaineers rose against them and in August 1920 a new war began in Dagestan and Chechnya. The Reds threw enormous forces into the efforts and by mid-1921 (assisted by forces attacking from the newly-absorbed Georgia) had crushed the Mountaineers.

Meanwhile in January the Bolsheviks convened a congress of the Mountaineers in Vladikavkaz which Stalin, then Commissar for Nationalities, attended. He promised amnesty for all who gave in (although the Red offensive in Dagestan was in full swing) and declared that the Bolsheviks supported sovereignty and independence for the Mountaineers. He proposed the creation of a Mountain Peoples’ Autonomous Republic – comprising the territories of the Chechens, Ingush, Ossetians, Kabardins, Balkars and Karachays together with Dagestan – to be an autonomous Soviet Republic. The assembly accepted this proposal, which accorded well enough with their aspirations, along with the additional provision that their traditional law (adat) be continued. These promises were of course only temporary and wore away as the Bolsheviks consolidated their rule. There was another outbreak of fighting against Bolshevik power upon the introduction of forced collectivization but that was also crushed. Resistance never ended: the Chechens boast that the last abrek^lix, Khazaki Magomedov, died in combat against the communists in 1979.

The collapse of the USSR re-ignited the dream of a North Caucasian Federation and an organization of that name was founded in Groznyy the day after Dudaev was sworn in as President of Chechnya. In April 1991 a founding meeting of the Assembly of the Mountain People of the Caucasus had already been held in Sukhum, Abkhazia. That November, delegates from the North Caucasus and Abkhazia formed the Confederation of Caucasian Mountain Peoples. And next year, in October, the Congress of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus met in Groznyy with delegates from Chechnya, Adygeya, Abkhazia, Ingushetia, Ossetia, Dagestan, Kabarda and Circassia and delegations from the Karachay, Akin Chechens^lx and Tatars. Dudaev was happy to host the meeting and believed that Chechens were the natural leaders:

The union of all Caucasian nations on an equal basis is the only possible way for the future. As we hold a central geographic, strategic and economic position in the Caucasus and have the necessary human potential, we must be the initiators of this future union.^lxi

At this point Chechnya was a powerful little entity in its local context. It had acquired quite a few weapons after the departure of Soviet forces^lxii, had seen off Yeltsin’s attempt to cow Dudaev in 1991 and had money to spend from oil sales. The military wing of these efforts was led by the Chechen Shamil Basaev who took fighters from the North Caucasus into Abkhazia to fight the Georgians. Western reporters, knowing little of this and wedded to the notion that Moscow was stage-managing the efforts, heard the Chechens and Circassians in Abkhazia speaking Russian and using Soviet weapons and assumed they were Russians sent from Moscow. But Russian was the only common language and every weapon was ex-Soviet^lxiii.

In the summer of 1993 Dudaev announced that Chechen armed formations had left Abkhazia. And they had been victorious: they had secured the western end of the putative Mountaineer Republic and they returned to Chechnya to complete the task there. Chechnya had in the meantime declared independence. Finally Moscow had had enough and instituted a disastrously ill-prepared and ludicrously over-optimistic “police action” to secure Groznyy and force Dudaev out. This first Russian-Chechen war of recent times ended in September 1996 with Russian defeat. The fighters had secured their second victory at other end of the putative Mountaineer Republic.

Perhaps the Chechens would, once again, have fought Russia to secure the independence they had lost with the Imam Shamyl’s surrender in 1859 but the war that actually happened was a follow-on from the successful war in Abkhazia which in turn was in no small part a consequence of the chauvinism and brutality of Tbilisi against its minorities. Basaev’s fighters, triumphant, blooded, returned to Chechnya to create the Eastern half of their Mountaineer Republic. After a terribly brutal war, they won de facto independence in 1996.

But there was more to come. The first war in Chechnya attracted foreign jihadists, in particular a carefully picked team led by the Arab Khattab,^lxiv to use Chechnya as the basis for an Islamic Emirate in the North Caucasus. Some time after 1996^lxv Shamyl Basev’s objectives shifted from the reestablishment of the Mountaineer Republic to the creation of a jihadist emirate. Together Khattab and Basaev invaded Dagestan in August 1999, igniting the second Chechen War.

This war, however, was to have a significant difference: this time, many Chechens who had fought Moscow the first time around, most notably the Mufti (and his son after he was murdered), fought against the foreign jihadists. Chechnya is much quieter and ostensibly back in the Russian Federation, but a low-level jihadist insurgency has spread across the North Caucasus.

A spreading fire indeed. While it would be otiose to blame Gamsakhurdia in particular and Georgia in general solely for the Chechen horrors, the direct connection is plain to see – Kartevelian chauvinism about Abkhazia, the resistance of Abkhazians, the dream of a new independent “Mountaineer Republic”, Basaev’s and other North Caucasian militia activities and the defeat of Georgian power in Abkhazia fed ambitions that encouraged Dudaev. The last thing Moscow needs is more Georgian adventures in Abkhazia. That is probably Moscow’s main interest in Georgia being as quiet as possible.

The Pankisi Gorge controversy

The memes, now well imbedded, caused most Western commentators reflexively to take Georgia’s side in any controversy with Russia. A small but revealing case was the issue over Georgia wine exports. When Russia stopped the import of Georgian wines in 2006, many news outlets treated this as another example of Russian pressure on Georgia.^lxvi Many fewer reported the admission that the Georgian wine industry was rife with forgery and adulteration^lxvii. But more important was the earlier Pankisi Gorge issue in which, as events were to prove, what Moscow said was mostly true and what Tbilisi said was mostly false. This revelation was not, however, taken to heart.

The Pankisi Gorge lies in the north-eastern part of Georgia close to Chechnya on the Russian side of the border and it is difficult of access from either the south or the north. For many years Chechens have lived there (locally they are known as Kists) and, fleeing the wars on the other side, many Chechens crossed the mountains as refugees. But with them came fighters – especially Ruslan Gelayev’s force which appears to have moved there after the fall of Groznyy in 2000. Arab jihadists also set up operations there centering themselves on the villages of Tsinubani and Khalatsani. Moscow started complaining about this almost immediately and Tbilisi responded with continual denial^lxviii. The Wall Street Journal took up Tbilisi’s line:

Having faced exaggerated claims for years now that it is harboring terrorists (a Russian euphemism for any Chechen)…it seems clear that this latest crisis isn’t about combating terrorism at all. Rather, as Vladimir Socor explains on the page opposite, it’s part of Russia’s longstanding desire to reassert control over its Westward-looking former satellite… It still dreams of former SSRs, such as Georgia and Moldova (another unwilling host to Russian military bases), as subordinates…^lxix.

In 2002 Russia complained to the UNSC and the OSCE:

The successful progress of the counter-terror operation has forced the remaining bandits to flee to Georgia, where the Georgian authorities turn a blind eye to the fact that they are living a free and comfortable life there, and continue to receive military, financial and other assistance from abroad^lxx.

But in 2002 Washington was listening to different things than it had before. Soon Tbilisi gave up the pretence that nothing was happening in the Pankisi Gorge. Paata Batiashvili, the head of the Kakhetia district division of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security admitted in November 2002.

If you look at the village of Tsinubani, three to four months ago it was mainly occupied by Chechen fighters and Arab terrorists.^lxxi

And next year a Georgian official finally admitted that everything Moscow had been saying was correct:

The [film] footage publicized by the Security Ministry depicts movements of very well-equipped fighters in the gorge. According to the Ministry’s information, there were around 700 Chechen and 100 Arab fighters in the gorge, which is only 30 kilometers in length. The Ministry named all the field commanders that have ever found shelter in Pankisi. These are: Ruslan (Hamzat) Gelaev, who had 200-250 fighters in his group and who’s arrest and extradition was repeatedly requested by Russia; someone called Batia (“Short”) with 100-120 fighters, Doka Omarov (Hasanov) with 130-150 fighters, Husein Esebaev (Isibaev) with 130-140 fighters and Amjet (Abu Hapsi) – commander of 80 mojaheddins. Most of these commanders were more or less known to the public, however information about Amjet has been released for the first time. As the security official says, this person was very close to Osama Bin-Laden and is wanted by Interpol… Laliashvili stated that the Arab emissaries were very well organized. Along with the fighters, there also were Arab religious emissaries (“Spiritual Fathers of Wahabism”) in the Pankisi gorge, who were responsible for functioning of the wahabist schools in Pankisi. There were several such schools in the gorge, where children were taught wahhabi ideology. “There are children in Pankisi, who speak Arab better than Georgian,” Laliashvili told Civil Georgia. There also was an Internet center in Pankisi, with several notebook computers and a satellite communication system, used for propaganda and volunteer recruitment activities… Along with wahabist schools and the Internet center, the gorge also had several fighters’ training centers as well. “We have recovered textbooks from these centers, which gives the detail explanation how to explode residential buildings, make explosive devices and so on,” Laliashvili said. The Georgian State Security Ministry does not rule out the possible link between the London poison case and Pankisi. Laliashvili says the deadly poison ricin, which emerged most dramatically when traces of the poison and facilities for its production were discovered in north London on January 5, could be produced in Pankisi gorge. State Security Ministry reports that the militants in Pankisi had excellent financial support. They were receiving money directly from Al-Qaeda… ^lxxii

What forced Tbilisi to confront reality was, of course, post-911 realities in Washington. 911 (temporarily as it happened) awoke it to what Putin had been trying to tell it for some time: namely that there really was a “terrorist international” and it was present in Chechnya and Georgia too. As Washington learned more, Pankisi began to appear in its viewfinder. On 11 February 2002 the American chargé d’affaires in Tbilisi said that some terrorists from Afghanistan were in the Pankisi Valley.^lxxiii

The United States began an operation to “train and equip” Georgian security forces. Finally the Georgian authorities began an operation. There is quite a lot of evidence that it was a joint Georgian, Russian and American operation. The Civil Georgia website admits this: “The Ministry’s Spokesman told Civil Georgia that collection of this information and restoration of order in Pankisi was made possible with tight cooperation with the US and Russian special services”.^lxxiv Shevardnadze also alluded to Russian cooperation and his newly appointed National Security Council Secretary flat out said that Russians had been in the area for a long time.^lxxv Eventually, after several false starts, by the end of 2002 their efforts had had sufficient effect to push the Chechens and Arabs out. Gelaev’s men entered Ingushetia and the Arabs dispersed out of Pankisi^lxxvi.

Everything Moscow had charged was correct and everything Tbilisi had said up to the final admission was false and Tbilisi’s friends were quite wrong to have uncritically added Moscow’s allegations into the “charge sheet”. The OSCE’s failure during Gelaev’s invasion of Abkhazia^lxxvii – still an extremely murky event – did not contribute to Moscow’s trust of that organization’s impartiality and Moscow’s support for it has visibly declined since.

The Pankisi Gorge episode ought to have taught some lessons: Russia is an ally in the war against jihadism; the power vacuum in Georgia can have longer and larger consequences than merely local ones but, most important, that Moscow can be telling the truth about Georgia. But, gradually, these lessons were forgotten and the long-familiar memes of Georgia came back to dominate the discourse.

Post-911 Opportunities Missed

When the United States was attacked by al-Qaeda, President Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to telephone President Bush and offer condolences and assistance. Condoleezza Rice tells us that on the morning of 11 September she phoned Putin to tell him that the heightening of the US security posture had nothing to do with Russia; Putin answered that he had already stood the Russian military down and offered his help^lxxviii. Given that Russia itself had been under attack for years by international jihadism in Chechnya and elsewhere in the North Caucasus, it was perhaps Putin’s hope that this first step would lead to some recognition of a common interest between Washington and Moscow. Moscow had earlier tried to tell the West about this threat – most notably at the Munich Security Conference in Spring 2001 when Sergey Ivanov had spoken of how Russia was in the front line defending against a common threat^lxxix. We have just learned from a BBC documentary that the Taliban approached the Russians and suggested an anti-American alliance. Moscow’s answer was a rude “no!”. We also learn that, at their first meeting, Putin had warned Bush that the US would be targeted^lxxx.

At first there was meaningful cooperation – the Pankisi problem was tackled and Russia provided weapons to support the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. But the cooperation faded away over time and, once again, Georgia had a role in the change. Despite the confirmation that what Moscow had been saying about the Pankisi Gorge was true, President Bush appears to have been completely taken in by Saakashvili’s version of reality. Medvedev relates that when he was Head of the Presidential Administration and visiting Condoleezza Rice, Bush walked into the room and the very first thing he said was: “You know, Misha Saakashvili is a great guy.”^lxxxi This admiration for Saakashvili was reiterated in Bush’s memoirs where he described him as a “charismatic young democrat” and, during the South Ossetia war said “It was clear the Russians couldn’t stand a democratic Georgia with a pro-Western president”^lxxxii. This was his response to Medvedev’s trying to tell him that Saakashvili had actually fired first. Rice in the interview above, protested that cooperation with Russia had been good on several issues but the two problems were always democratization in Russia and its relations with its immediate neighbors, mentioning Georgia and Ukraine specifically.

Thus, what might have been, and what Moscow was certainly interested in: an alliance against a common enemy, was wrecked partly by Washington’s perceptions about Tbilisi.

And many people suspect something even worse. There is nothing to suggest that Tbilisi encouraged the jihadist and Chechen fighter nest in the Pankisi Gorge before 2001: the most likely truth was that there was nothing that it could do about it. However, today there are those who suspect that Saakashvili’s relationship with the jihadists is close. Julia Goren, for example, asserts that Tbilisi hosted a conference of Jamaats in 2009^lxxxiii and the assertion is repeated by a Georgian parliamentarian^lxxxiv and an American observer.^lxxxv Nino Burjanadze (Saakashvili’s partner in the “Rose Revolution” trio, now in opposition) has said Georgia is training Ingush fighters.^lxxxvi Whether this is true is not clear but it is not unbelievable.^lxxxvii If Saakashvili is indeed supporting jihadists today, this is more than merely a “lost opportunity”.

Saakashvili and the 2008 War

The immediate cause of the overthrow of Shevardnadze was the parliamentary election of 2 November 2003. Bolstered by all the usual appurtenances of “colored revolutions”, large-scale cheating was alleged; perhaps the precipitating event was the statement by a US foreign policy spokesman that Washington did not accept the results. Whether or not Shevardnadze intended to make a fight of it, it was evident that the security forces would not. Eventually the troika of Mikheil Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania and Nino Burjanadze took power. It is perhaps worth observing that today in 2012, Zvania is long-dead (murdered in Shevardnadze’s opinion^lxxxviii) and Burjanadze is one of the leaders of Saakashvili’s opposition^lxxxix. The unity did not last long.

From the beginning, Saakashvili was determined to regain Abkhazia and South Ossetia and one of his first actions was to make a pilgrimage to the grave of King David and swear to do so^xc. He was also strongly opposed to Russia, which he believed to be the source of their defiance. And he was determined to get as close to Washington as possible and get Georgia into NATO.

The dangerous power vacuum in the Pankisi Gorge encouraged the USA to begin a training program for the Georgian security forces so that they would not again be unable to control their territory. But the training program had different effects from those originally planned. Saakashvili began to believe that the Georgian armed forces were the best in the area. Ludicrous propaganda films appeared^xci and he felt encouraged to dream of a military conquest of Abkhazia and South Ossetia^xcii. His then Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili (now in the opposition^xciii) dreamed along with him, famously boasting “new year in Tskhinvali^xciv” in 2006.

Georgia then engaged in an arms buying spree acquiring large numbers of tanks and self-propelled guns from Ukraine and the Czech Republic in particular^xcv. Weapons that had nothing to do with the peacekeeping and internal security purposes for which the Americans were allegedly training them. The Georgian army was, as events were to prove, poorly disciplined, with poor-quality officers and no ability to hold in adversity. At its test in August 2008, it failed, broke and ran in panic.

By the summer of 2008 the memes about Georgia were well-practiced reflexes: it was the very gauge of Russia’s “neo-imperialism”; it was an essential energy route that Moscow “coveted” (the Baku-Çeyhan pipeline through Georgia was now operating); Saakashvili was acclaimed as a “democratic ruler” and Moscow could not abide a “democracy” on its border. Perhaps the only country which did not whole-heartedly subscribe was France where Salome Zurabishvili (Saakashvili’s former Foreign Minister, now in opposition) had been a member of its Foreign Ministry and still maintained contacts there.^xcvi

Saakashvili had always intended re-conquest of South Ossetia and Abkhazia if he could not get them otherwise we are told by Irakli Okruashvili.^xcvii When Saakashvili’s Ambassador to Russia (now in opposition), Erosi Kitsmarishvili, returned home in the summer of 2008, he heard that there was a plan to attack Abkhazia. For some reason that he did not know, that had been put off and he was told that Tbilisi had Washington’s backing to attack. Kitsmarishvili was so concerned that he actually met with the US Ambassador to Georgia to ask if that was true.^xcviii He was assured that it was not and returned to his post in Moscow.

A review of events will show that on 7 August 2008, after Saakashvili announced a ceasefire and called on Moscow to broker a peace, Georgian forces attacked South Ossetia, in the process killing some of the Russian peacekeeping force that had been there since the 1990s. The Georgians were soon stopped in the center of Tskhinval by the Ossetian militia. Russian forces entered from the north, moving down the single road as refugees moved north, crossed the chokepoint at Didi Gupta^xcix and engaged the Georgian forces bogged down in the center of Tskhinval. Soon the Georgians broke and fled back to Tbilisi, abandoning Gori and a battle group’s worth of armored vehicles and other weapons in one of the brand-new bases there. Georgian gunboats attacked a Russian ship, the Russians landed forces in the west and advanced in pursuit of the fleeing Georgians discovering another heap of abandoned weapons at another new military base in Senaki. Abkhaz forces, probably with some Russian assistance, re-occupied Kodori, the only part of the former Abkhazian ASSR under Tbilisi’s control.

When the war finally ended, Georgian forces had been routed. Russian forces pulled back to Abkhazia and North Ossetia (taking the captured weapons – including some US vehicles) with them. Moscow then recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries. One reason being, Medvedev said, to prevent this from happening again.^c

The Western media – Der Spiegel being the sole honorable exception^ci – fortified by two decades of the memes, passively re-typed Tbilisi’s story.^cii More to the point (and surprisingly given Kitsmarishvili’s strong hint that Saakashvili was planning to attack) so did the US Embassy; passing on what it was told.^ciii

Moscow’s version of events never varied. It said that Georgia attacked on the night of August 7 and that Russian troops did not arrive in Tskhinval until the next day. Saakashvili’s story, on the other hand, changed several times. On the 7^th, a few hours before his forces opened fire, he made a speech, in which he said he had ordered a ceasefire adding “And I am offering the Russian Federation to be a guarantor of the South Ossetian autonomy within Georgia… I offer a very important role to Russia in resolving this conflict… Georgia is a natural ally for Russia… We need a real mediator.^civ” The next day, when he believed victory was at hand: he claimed that Georgian forces now controlled “most of South Ossetia” and “A large part of Tskhinvali is now liberated and fighting is ongoing in the centre of Tskhinvali”. In this speech he made two assertions to justify the attack: first that “South Ossetian militias responded to his peace initiative on August 7 by shelling Georgian villages” and second that “Georgia had come under aerial attack from Russian warplanes”. There was no mention of Russian troops entering South Ossetia then.^cv Of course, his victory announcement was premature and a few days later, he needed a bigger justification for the advancing catastrophe. It was then that he started claiming that the Russians moved first.

I am sickened by the speculation that Georgia started anything,’ Mr Saakashvili told reporters on 13 August. ‘We clearly responded to the Russians… The point here is that around eleven o’clock, Russian tanks started to move into Georgian territory, 150 at first. And that was a clear-cut invasion. That was the moment when we started to open fire with artillery, because otherwise they would have crossed the bridge and moved into Tskhinvali.

Saakashvili brought out all the memes: “I think they’re not just trying to kill a country, but the ideal of free democracy and successful prosperity. They want to show the west who is boss. They’ve tried to cut off energy lines”. “What we’re seeing now on the ground is the long-standing effort to purify this area. No population, no problem – Stalin’s slogan. No Georgia, no problem!” And even this: “They leveled Tskhinval, and they said the Georgians did it.^cvi” Then the story changed again: on September 23 in a piece he wrote in the Washington Post, Saakashvili claimed that “Russia then started its land invasion in the early hours of August 7, after days of heavy shelling that killed civilians and Georgian peacekeepers.^cvii” He expected his readership to believe that the Russians had had an 18-hour head start on a 60-kilometer race and that Georgia had invaded anyway.

Saakashvili’s stories collapsed one after the other: the first story about a response to heavy Ossetian shelling was directly contradicted by two former British officers who were part of the OSCE team in the area: they reported “Georgian rockets and artillery were hitting civilian areas in the breakaway region of South Ossetia every 15 or 20 seconds” and denied that there was the shelling of Georgian villages that Saakashvili claimed on the 8^th.^cviii The second story of the Russians entering South Ossetia just before – “supported” with the laughable claim of an intercepted telephone call mysteriously “lost” for several weeks – collapsed in a BBC program in October.^cix Americans were finally introduced to the accurate version in the New York Times nearly three months after the war began^cx. As Saakashvili’s stories crumbled, his supporters in the US State Department tried to change the subject: “I think we need to get away from looking at, you know, who did what first, because as I said, I don’t think we’ll ever really get to the bottom of that.^cxi”

Der Spiegel had been correct: lies. Finally, the long–overdue and exquisitely feeble EU report appeared over a year after the war had started. Yes, the Georgians had fired the first shot and the Ossetians and Russians had responded.^cxii

Aftermath

The aftermath of the August 2008 war ought to have put to rest the Georgian memes. If they had been true; if Moscow had always wanted Georgia back in its empire; if Moscow wanted to get control of the “new Great Game” oil routes; if Moscow wanted to eliminate a hated democracy next door; the August war was its opportunity to do them all. There certainly wasn’t much stopping the victorious Russian forces from moving south.

The (slow) revelation of Saakashvili’s false claims has destroyed his credibility. Perhaps the final blow was the preposterous “War of the Worlds” broadcast of spring 2010.^cxiii More damage to his reputation will be done if he becomes Prime Minister in 2013 when his term ends: his compliant majority has changed Georgia’s Constitution so that the “President will no longer direct and exercise domestic and foreign policy of the state – as the current constitution says. This authority will be delegated to PM and the government”.^cxiv NATO membership is highly unlikely and the foreign aid that propped up Georgia’s economy has fallen off. Saakashvili’s attempt to capture South Ossetia by a coup de main relying on support from the West backfired. The war began eroding Saakashvili’s reputation as reliable, truthful and democratic. Suddenly we are hearing that Georgia’s mass media is under “strict censorship,^cxv” that Georgia is fourth in the world in jailed citizens,^cxvi that Saakashvili’s economic reforms were more appearance than reality,^cxvii the opposition – most of them former allies who know the man well – are finally finding an audience in Western media.

But Saakashvili still has his friends in the United States. Hillary Clinton has more than once demanded that Moscow end its “occupation of Georgian territory”.^cxviii And the memes endure there, seemingly oblivious to reality: Mitt Romney, likely the Republican candidate for President, managed to utter most of them at once.

He is convinced that Putin dreams of “rebuilding the Russian empire”. He says, ‘That includes annexing populations as they did in Georgia and using gas and oil resources’ to throw their weight around in Europe.”^cxix

“Vladimir Putin has called the breakup of the Soviet empire the great tragedy of the 20th Century^cxx. Will he try to reverse that tragedy and bludgeon the countries of the former Soviet Union into submission, and intimidate Europe with the levers of its energy resources?”^cxxi

Late in 2010 Senator Marco Rubio, perhaps a Vice Presidential candidate, attempted to push through an amendment calling on Washington to fast track Georgia’s membership in NATO. It was blocked by another Republican Senator, Rand Paul.^cxxii However faded they may be in Europe, the memes will not soon die in the United States, bolstered by innumerable slanted news reports and lobbyists.

Conclusion

Cause and effect in a nation’s behavior is never easy to determine and as Lord Palmerston observed, nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Russia’s interests, in the larger and more general sense have not changed much since the 1990s: Russia wants a quiet life in order to repair its internal deficiencies. As Stephen Cohen has argued^cxxiii Washington has missed three important opportunities for a mutually beneficial relationship with Russia. The first when possibilities opened by the end of the USSR were met with NATO expansion; the second when Putin’s overtures after 911 were ignored or forgotten; the third today. Three US Administrations: three spoiled chances. In each of these missed opportunities, the effect of the Georgia memes can be seen. Russia’s alleged hostility towards Georgia and other former Soviet or Warsaw Pact states was an argument for expanding NATO; Russia’s alleged hostility towards Georgia (despite the validation of all that Moscow had said about Pankisi) and Saakashvili’s image were significant contributors to the failure of the second chance; today we have the stubborn insistence that there is no validity to the point of view of Abkhazians or Ossetians; they are seen as modern-day serfs – when the territory changes ownership, so do they.

We have seen three principal memes assumed in most discussion of Russia-Georgia disputes: Russia wants to swallow Georgia, Russia wants the pipelines and Russia hate democracies. And always, Russia is lying. If Moscow is less amenable in the future, the Georgia memes are part of the reason.

Bibliography

Author’s Note: The principal characteristic of memes is that they exist prior to the event; the event is then interpreted through these memes and facts become “facts” only when they fit the memes. Therefore the useful sources in discussing memes are the immediate ones. Books written years later will have only slight effect on the now deeply-embedded memes. What follows, therefore, is less of a bibliography than suggestions for further reading.

Leslie Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise, Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York, 1960. (About the Imam Shamyl and the Great Caucasus War; useful to give some background on the latent passions).

Marie Bennigsen Broxup (Ed), The North Caucasus Barrier, London, Hurst & Co, 1992.

Nicholas Griffin, Caucasus, St Martin’s Press, New York, 2001.

Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus, Oxford University Press, 2008

Thomas de Waal, The Caucasus: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2010