VIDEO: A State at a Crossroads - Georgia: Donald Rayfield at TEDxTbilisi

Historian Donald Rayfield draws lessons from Georgia's long and complex history to illuminate the foreign policy choices of the present. In 1973 he first visited Georgia and has since written a history of Georgian literature, edited a Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary and, recently, published a history of Georgia.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

BOOK: Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. By Donald Rayfield - Review by Professor Ronald Grigor Suny (history.ac.uk)

Review by Professor Ronald Grigor Suny, review of Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, (review no. 1375) www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1375 Date accessed: 19 November, 2017

Think of what you are about to read more as a dialogue between two scholars of Georgia than a conventional review of a colleague’s book. Those few of us outside of Georgia who chose to study the Georgian language and delve into the three millennia history of that beautiful and beleaguered country have usually shaped our narratives in the template of national history – the story of a distinct people who managed to maintain a continuous existence despite invasions, occupations, exile, and the fall of their polities. Writing in a mode that only became imperative in the nationalist 19th century provides a coherence and continuity that belies the eclectic, disjointed, and cosmopolitan actualities of the Caucasian longue durėe. Yet since sources often are generated by states, and archival materials are usually organized by governments, the imprimatur of nation effaces the more complex variations of how people in the past understood themselves and others.

Donald Rayfield, Professor Emeritus of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London, has undertaken just such a national story, even while his book’s title – Edge of Empires – affirms Georgia’s liminal position between great multiethnic states. His subtitle suggests that he is presenting one possible account and that others will offer different readings. When I first went to Georgia nearly half a century ago, Donald Rayfield was somewhat of a legend, a stellar student with fluent Georgian and a deep knowledge of its literature. Yet despite the proximity in our scholarly interests, over many decades we never met. He had left Georgia before I arrived, and though he apparently came to a lecture I delivered in London, he left with making himself known to me. When I published The Making of the Georgian Nation in 1988, Rayfield gave the book a relatively critical review in which he even took issue with the title. How could this book, which centered on the 19th and 20th centuries, be about the making of a nation whose origins reached back into prehistoric times? I finally met Professor Rayfield a year ago when we shared glasses of wine after the successful dissertation defense of one of his protégés. Later I bought his extraordinary two-volume dictionary of Georgian, which his wife delivered to me in a plastic bag in Victoria Station.

After the usual linguistic and archaeological introduction, Georgia’s history is conventionally said to begin with its first king, Parnavaz, who may or may not have existed, but who is enshrined in chronicles both Georgian and Armenian. Georgia’s mixed heritage is attested to by Parnavaz’s name and his mother, both Persian. The king married a North Caucasian (Chechen or Ingush) and gave his daughter in marriage to an Ossetian. The Georgian king Mirian III converted to Christianity circa 317, and a century later the first Georgian alphabet was devised. Georgians had their own identity, religion, and language but were deeply embroiled in the shifting alliances, allegiances, and imperial rivalries that roiled through Caucasia and Anatolia. King Vakhtang Gorgasali, founder of Georgia’s eventual capital, Tbilisi, was also the son of a Persian mother and the husband first of a Persian wife and later a Byzantine royal. His country’s affinity with Iran marked Georgian culture until the 19th century. Colchis (Lazica), Western Georgia, remained more firmly in the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine sphere of cultural and political influence until the coming of the Ottomans. The fateful decision of Catholicos Kvirion II in the seventh century to accept the dyophysite Christology of Byzantium ended the centuries-old closeness with the monophysite Armenians and secured Georgia as an eastern outpost of Orthodox Christianity.

The Arab invasions in that same period were an even more radical rupture in the history of Caucasia. Three Christian peoples – Georgians, Armenians, and Caucasian Albanians – would henceforth live with the threat, as well as the promise of tolerance, from Islam. Throughout the following centuries Georgia was more like a mini-empire, with a diverse population, and hierarchical inequitable relations of power among its peoples, than an ethnically and religiously homogeneous nation-state. Its history paralleled those of its neighbors (Armenia, Persia, Turkey, and Russia) at least until late Soviet times. Rather than ethnicity, it was religion and language that determined who might pass for Georgian. Rayfield is fond of the definition of Georgia offered by the ninth century author Giorgi Merchule: ‘We can consider as Greater Georgia wherever Mass and prayers are said in Georgian’ (p. 62). But as in Armenia, so in Georgia, many of the towns were inhabited by Muslim merchants and workers. A traveller in the late tenth century observed that Tbilisi was ‘wholly Muslim’ (p. 72).

Georgia (sakartvelo) was first united only in the early 11th century under Bagrat III, king of the Abkhaz. But soon the kingdoms of Caucasia, particularly the Armenian, faced a new and mortal danger – the invasions of the Seljuk Turks. Georgia’s monarchs made strategic agreements with the invaders, heralding a period of expansion and prosperity under the two most eminent rulers of the medieval period, David aghmashenebeli (the Builder) (1089–1125) and Tamar (1178–1213). David gave up his Armenian queen for a Qipchak to promote his kingdom’s security interests, while Tamar’s consort, David Soslan, was an Ossetian. Their empires, with their cosmopolitan capital at Tbilisi, were devastated in the early 13th century by the Mongols, and Georgia’s fortunes ebbed and flowed in the ensuing half millennium until by early modern times its monarchs repeatedly petitioned Russian tsars for protection against the predations of the Persians and the Ottomans.

Rayfield’s opus is very informative, in the sense that it is chock full of information – reigns, dynasties, foreign incursions, efforts at unification, and multiple failures to hold fragile states together. Like an earlier specialist, Cyril Toumanoff, he is obsessed with how various princes were related to one another, who was legitimate and who a pretender or usurper. His focus is on politics, the role of elites, rather than on society and social relations more broadly. He largely leaves out culture and literature, perhaps justifiably since he has treated Georgian writing extensively in his earlier history of Georgian literature. When the rulers of Georgia cease to be native royals, Rayfield follows the adventures and misadventures, amorous and military, of the various Russian governors and viceroys. In such a history from the top down, with much of the down left out, Georgia recedes from view as palace intrigues and personalities take center stage. The emancipation of the serfs is given short shrift. The dominance of Armenians in Tbilisi and other towns is mentioned in passing. Thanks to a Georgian study, he provides interesting details on anti-Semitism, which was largely a local Russian rather than a Georgian problem.

For all its suggestive material Rayfield’s construction of the Georgian past fails to give much analysis of why events or processes occurred. The story is Georgian–centric and Georgian-philic, a national narrative focused on the steady march forward of the Georgians themselves. Georgians’ implicit nationalism is taken for granted rather than investigated. The rule of Russians is largely seen as a negative imperial imposition, though Rayfield concedes at several points that the authorities ‘did some good’ or ‘Not all government measures were reactionary’ (pp. 304, 310). Almost completely missing are the complex relations of Georgians with the other peoples of Georgia, particularly their social rivals, the Armenians, which in my understanding was a primary ingredient in the generation of Georgian nationalism and even the particular Menshevik brand of Marxism that became hegemonic in the national liberation movement.

Still, what Rayfield gives us is usually reliable and clearly presented. The single doubtful episode comes with the appearance of Stalin, whom he claims framed an innocent watchseller, Arsena Jorjiashvili, for the assassination of General Fedor Griaznov in 1906, which in fact Stalin organized. Rayfield’s source is a post-Soviet article, but close reading of the evidence from earlier memoirs indicts Jorjiashvili, who carried out the killing even as Stalin’s group of terrorists was preparing to murder the hated officer (p. 315). There is also no evidence connecting Stalin with the murder a year later of the nationalist poet and political figure Ilia Chavchavadze (now Saint Ilia), which Rayfield pins on the Bolshevik leader.

The chapter on the revolution and Georgian independence (1917–21) is bizarre in two ways. Rather than using recent research and writing on the period, Rayfield depends almost exclusively on memoirs, for example, of the German general Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein. The years in which masses of people moved onto the stage of history are told as the maneuvering of key leaders, a throwback to older modes of diplomatic and military history. The word ‘soviet’ is studiously avoided in favor of ‘council,’ and the role of the Mensheviks is grossly underestimated.

Things go downhill both for Georgia and the book when we reach the ‘Soviet annexation.’ After 1921 the history of Georgia as told here was one of unremitting repression, executions, and resistance. Sanguinary as the Communists could be, they managed to create a degree of loyalty as formerly subaltern people moved up the social ladder and peasant Georgia was transformed into a modern urban and industrial society. Literacy, mass education, better health care, and public support of literature and national culture were also products of the Soviet state. Yet here Soviet power is depicted basically as a terror regime built on unspeakable brutality. How raw power translated into a grudging legitimacy needs to be explained. Rather than conceptualizations or interpretations, we are given reportage and indictment. It should be noted that Rayfield has uncovered fascinating material on Georgian émigré activity against the USSR and Soviet counterespionage targeting Georgians, though one might question the balance between the treatment of the emigration and internal affairs. Rayfield’s Soviet chapters are clearly post-Soviet history, a post-revisionist chronicle that reflects the current anti-Soviet, even anti-Russian, mood of present-day Georgians. What the Soviets called their dostizheniia (achievements) have fallen into a deep memory hole and left on the surface are the ruins of a cruel failed experiment in human engineering.

Rayfield regains his footing in the last chapter, which covers the years of restored independence. Although he was once a friend of the troubled dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who became Georgia’s freely elected president in 1991, Rayfield is balanced and judicious in sorting through the contentious politics and suicidal civil and ethnic wars that divided and ultimately led to the disintegration of Georgia. While there is no love lost with the former communist, and second president of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, the author acknowledges that this survivor of numerous assassination attempts was able to disarm the reckless paramilitaries and reestablish a modicum of state authority. Rayfield is equally critical of Mikheil Saakashvili, the flamboyant young lawyer who overthrew Shevardnadze in the “Rose Revolution” of November 2003. Unlike some pro-Georgian Western writers, Rayfield does not claim that Russia rather than Georgia initiated the disastrous Russo-Georgian war of August 2008. In this dubious adventure Saakashvili was the provocative David to Russia’s slow-footed Goliath. Rayfield’s narrative ends on the eve of Saakashvili’s electoral defeat by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili in 2012.

This book will fascinate anyone interested in the turbulent, tangled past of the Georgians. What it lacks in analysis and overriding interpretation it makes up with recovered tales of willful characters who in their zeal usually brought disaster to their country. When I attempted five decades ago to bring some coherence, if not unbroken continuity, to Georgia’s history, I emphasized the theme of cultural and social construction of national identity and argued that only in modern times did politics, culture, territory, and popular sovereignty come together in a discourse of nationhood. Whatever Georgia was in its thousands of years – tribal society, dynastic realm, ethnoreligious community – it became a nation only in the 19th century with the rise of its secular intelligentsia and even more forcefully in the 20th century in the years of Soviet rule. A second argument in The Making of the Georgian Nation was that the histories of small peoples like Georgians and Armenians cannot be told in isolation from the histories of the empires with which and within which they existed. Empires both thwarted and enabled the making of nations. That complex story may be underplayed in Rayfield, yet he gives us sufficient detail to illuminate the paradoxical interplay between the imperial and the national. Georgians were made and remade over time, both by their own efforts and the restraints imposed and possibilities provided by those that dominated them.

BOOK: Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, by Donald Rayfield. Review by Tony Barber (ft.com)

(ft.com) The forging of Georgia

Review by Tony Barber

Looking longingly to the west but lodged in a hostile neighbourhood, this south Caucasus nation has rarely been secure in its independence

Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia, by Donald Rayfield, Reaktion Books, RRP£35, 512 pages

 

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This month’s parliamentary elections in Georgia fell short of the standards expected of a mature democracy. They nevertheless produced an outcome barely conceivable in most of the states that, like Georgia, emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The opposition won, and the government accepted the result.

No less striking were the visions of Georgia’s place in the world spelled out by President Mikheil Saakashvili, whose party lost, and Bidzina Ivanishvili, the victorious billionaire businessman and prime minister-designate. The two men dislike and distrust each other. But each reaffirmed that he saw Georgia as a nation anchored in the Euro-Atlantic community of prosperous, law-based democracies. The chief difference between the pair concerned not the destination but whether, in getting there, Saakashvili might antagonise Russia too much and Ivanishvili might compromise Georgia’s independence.

Donald Rayfield’s panoramic Edge of Empires is an impressive work that helps us understand why this south Caucasus nation of 4.6m people, lodged in a hostile and unstable neighbourhood, looks so longingly to the west. From the Middle Ages to the 20th century, foreign intervention and internal factionalism have repeatedly foiled Georgia’s dreams of shaking off the oppressive rule of larger, non-western powers and constructing a viable polity. Georgia’s independence is today officially recognised across the world, but violent domestic upheavals and partial dismemberment at Russia’s hands in a brief yet brutal 2008 conflict have scarred the experience of freedom over the past 20 years.

Since the second world war, comprehensive surveys of Georgian history in western languages have been few and far between. David Marshall Lang, a British scholar, published A Modern History of Georgia in 1962 but its coverage of the late tsarist era and early communist decades now looks dated. In 1994 there appeared Ronald Grigor Suny’s The Making of the Georgian Nation, a work by an acclaimed American historian that is still in print. Rayfield, emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary, University of London, is the author of a history of Georgian literature and editor of a Georgian-English dictionary. Edge of Empires, which stretches from prehistoric times to the present day, is the most wide-ranging and reliable history of Georgia one is likely to find for many years to come.

The book devotes several fascinating chapters to Georgia’s glorious medieval era, which began with the 1089-1125 reign of Davit the Builder. The nation’s greatest monarch, Davit “reunited the kingdom and expelled all invaders, created a flourishing civil administration, army, legal system, church, feudal hierarchy and secular culture, and made Georgia for the next century the regional power”. 

Yet Georgia, which converted to Christianity in the early fourth century, could do little to overcome its geopolitical weakness. From its origins, Georgia has existed in a peculiarly dangerous and much-contested part of the world. One after another, the ancient Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Persians and Russians – latterly, fitted in Soviet clothes – have occupied or sought to control the country. This often involved setting Georgia’s rival ethnic groups and political clans against each other, a practice visible in the post-communist era, too, when Russia has backed Abkhaz and South Ossetian separatists against the central government in Tbilisi.

Georgia’s historical experience differs from that of other small nations such as the Baltic states and Finland, which fell under Russian or Soviet rule but eventually made a more complete escape. Georgia was absorbed into the tsarist empire in 1801, its royal family deported to Russia and its language replaced with Russian in public life. An opportunity for freedom arose after the February 1917 revolution, which overthrew the tsar, but after declaring independence in May 1918, the Georgians proved unable to sustain their state for more than three years.

Rayfield points out that whereas Vladimir Lenin let the Balts and Finns go their own way, similar forbearance was unlikely in Georgia. The impulse to conquest was strong among Moscow-based Bolsheviks and thuggish Georgian comrades such as Josef Stalin and Sergo Orjonikidze. The Kremlin wanted Azerbaijan under its control because of the Baku oilfields. Armenia and Georgia would have to go the same way. It barely crossed the minds of western governments, disillusioned with their ineffective intervention in Russia’s civil war, to uphold Georgia’s independence.

As might be expected of the author of Stalin and his Hangmen (2004), which painted devastating portraits of the dictator’s secret police chiefs, Rayfield is excellent on Georgia’s experiences under the ghoulish Lavrenti Beria. Descended from western Georgia’s Mingrelian minority, Beria was a psychopath and rapist who killed his victims’ husbands and lovers and ordered the arrests and deaths of tens of thousands of Georgians. In 1936 he invited Armenia’s communist party leader to his office and shot him. He poisoned Abkhazia’s leader and personally blinded and deafened Evgeni Mikeladze, Georgia’s leading conductor, before having him executed.

Beria was executed on the post-Stalin leadership’s orders in 1953. But when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes at a party congress in 1956, Georgians took his speech as an act of colonial Russian oppression and rioted in the streets. Some 150 people were killed and hundreds wounded. Rayfield observes that this was the moment when Zviad Gamsakhurdia, elected Georgia’s post-communist president in 1991, and other young malcontents broke with the Soviet system. “The Georgian dissident movement was baptised in fire,” he writes.

Similar violence turned the Georgian nation decisively against communism in 1989. Soviet interior ministry troops attacked pro-independence demonstrators with sharpened shovels and gas pistols, killing 21. Independence was regained in 1991 but Georgia lapsed into an extended period of lawlessness, rampant official corruption and ethnic minority tensions. Rayfield quotes Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister turned Georgian president, as saying before his overthrow at Saakashvili’s hands in the 2003 Rose revolution: “What can we do? We’re a failed state.”

This was perhaps too pessimistic: real social and economic progress has occurred in the past nine years. Yet the outcome of the 2008 war was little short of catastrophic: Russia took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and western governments, exasperated with Saakashvili, froze all consideration of bringing Georgia into Nato. Rayfield’s history is an excellent starting point for readers asking themselves what twists of fate await Georgia in the future.

Tony Barber is the FT’s Europe editor

 

In FT Weekend Magazine, Neil Buckley meets the winners and losers in Georgia’s election

AmazonShop: Books, Maps, Videos, Music & Gifts About The Caucasus

EURASIANET BOOK REVIEW: Rediscovering Lost Tales from the Caucasus. By Alex van Oss (eurasianet.org)

Folklore scholar David Hunt has assembled an anthology of stories that present a fascinating side of the Caucasus rarely encountered by diplomats or students of international relations. He also renders a great service with this collection, culled from 19th and 20th century Russian ethnographic archives and field interviews.

These legends come primarily from the North Caucasus, with a dip into Azerbaijan, but, unfortunately, with no Armenian examples. There are tales from the Abkhaz and Lak; the Ingush and (now extinct) Ubykh peoples; from the Kabard, Georgian, and Lezgin traditions--and many others besides.

And what a feast it is!

Here we learn about Prometheus—but not the familiar classical Greek figure. In this compendium Hunt offers the reader no fewer than 10 permutations of the story, out of 44 Promethean legends identified in the Caucasus. It recounts, for example, how a certain Balkar named Susuruk obtained fire for the Narts—who are a "legendary heroic race of warriors," according to Hunt's helpful glossary.

Hunt also provides two dozen versions of another “Greek” story: that of the familiar Homeric Cyclops--but the tales here come from various Caucasus traditions, ranging from the Abaza to the Ossetian, all with protagonists escaping from one-eyed giants by means of cunning subterfuge. (One Chechen-Ingush Cyclops story revolves around the seductive intervention of the prisoner-hero's sister).

From Hunt’s notes on geography and terrain we learn why Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe, has twin peaks, and about how a certain Biblical figure docked his boat temporarily at its summit before floating elsewhere. A later footnote informs us that on the eastern slope of Mount Kazbegi there is a crag resembling a dragon, a feature explained by a charming cautionary Georgian tale:

"Having a false idea of his own importance, Amirani decided to measure his strength with Christ-God himself. For this, God chained him to the slope of Mkinvartsveri ['the peak of ice-houses,' i.e. Mt. Kazbegi]. A dragon, the unremitting enemy of Amirani, decided to take advantage of this. He crawled down from the summit of Mkinvari and got ready to swallow the chained Amirani. But Saint George found out about it and appeared there right away. After making threatening gestures at the dragon with his finger, the saint said, 'Stop! We chained Amirani so that he would repent of his sins, not to satisfy your hunger. Become a stone at once!'

"The dragon turned to stone there and then."

Elsewhere Hunt describes the finer points and honorable aspects--according to Caucasus tradition--of horse-stealing; and he entertains us with an eye-opening story of how (and why) a Balkar shepherd named Sozuk impregnated, of all things, a rock ....

Why haven't we read, or even heard about, these wonderful stories before? Hunt explains that they were written down late: "The bulk of [Caucasus] languages spoken in the mountainous and countryside regions had no alphabet until the early years of the 20th century, and so nearly all communication was oral. All knowledge, including the classical history, literature and music of the people was retained in the collective memory, particularly of those who specialized in memorizing and passing on their knowledge to the next generation."

Legends of the Caucasus should be placed on the bookshelf next to three other recent and important works: John Colarusso's compendium of Nart sagas; Donald Rayfield’s The Literature of Georgia; and C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor's From Scythia to Camelot, which describes their research into the Sarmatians and Alans, the ancestors of today's Ossetians. (According to the authors, these ancient peoples roamed through Western Europe and spread stories that evolved into the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail.)

David Hunt arranges his material into sections covering Caucasus history and politics; rustling, blood feuds, and battle; hunting and sheep herding; family relations and the dead--each topped with a short introduction wherein the reader learns, for example, about such real-life legends as Timur the Lame, Tokhtamysh of the Golden Horde, and the great 19th century Avar leader, Imam Shamil (revered to this day in Caucasus culture clubs throughout the former Ottoman Empire).

Particularly intriguing are details about adat ('unwritten customary code,' or mountain tradition); and feudal tussles between pshis (princes) and uorks (nobles), and between highlanders and valley dwellers.

One cannot but regret that Legends of the Caucasus is not illustrated. But all in good time, for surely this cornucopia will be discovered by children's book and graphic novel artists--not to mention Hollywood, for it contains a potential gold mine (or golden fleece) for filmmakers.

Editor's note: Alex van Oss is the Chair of Caucasus Advanced Area Studies at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, DC.

AmazonShop: Books, Maps, Videos, Music & Gifts About The Caucasus

OPEN-DEMOCRACY: Just Pubished About The Region. (opendemocracy.net)

Russia and the Georgia war: the great-power trap, Ivan Krastev
Europe has entered the new 19th century. The Russia-Georgia war of 8-12 August 2008 has acted as a time-machine, vaporising the "end of history" sentiment that shaped European politics in the 1990s and replacing it with an older geopolitical calculus in modern form.
An older calculus - but not a cold-war one. Indeed, though the conflict over South Ossetia has generated heady rhetoric of the cold-war's return, the real constellation of power and ideology it has revealed is...
more »

Abkhazia and South Ossetia: heart of conflict, key to solution , George Hewitt
On the second full day of the Georgia-Russia war of 8-12 August 2008, Russian patrol-boats operating off the Black Sea shore of Abkhazia sank four Georgian vessels apparently intent on landing in the territory. The identity of these vessels is not yet clear, but it is interesting to note that a published list of military equipment in the possession of the Georgian government - equipment largely supplied over many years by Tbilisi's western friends - includes a ship called the General...
more »

After the war: recognising reality , Neal Ascherson
The Russian soldiers are not the worst. They have won their victory, and now hang about Georgia mopping up. Much more terrible are the civilians and volunteers who come behind the soldiers, the big-bellied men with guns, knives and army jackets thrown over their T-shirts. They are doing the murdering, the looting and burning, the "cleansing" as they drive the last Georgians out of South Ossetia. The flight of the Georgian army has let them into Georgian territory as far as Gori, so...
more »

South Ossetia: children of war, Peter Nasmyth
Among the many words and voices emerging from this conflict there are very few, if any, coming from those who experience it the most keenly - the region's children.
These paintings were created by children in South Ossetia during late 2006 and 2007 and also ten years earlier, while the memories of the previous battle for Tskhinvali (1991-2) were still strong in their minds. The children are both Georgian and Ossetian, some living in Tskhinvali, some in Atchabeti (a Georgian village...
more »

Citizen war-journo? A Caucasus test , Evgeny Morozov
To watch Russian leaders and media make the public case for war with Georgia when the conflict was still in its infancy was also to wonder why at that point there was still so little factual evidence - particularly photos and videos - from observers on the ground in South Ossetia's capital, Tshkinvali. The Kremlin's spokespersons wanted the world to believe that the city had just suffered a Stalingrad-like devastation - though there was as yet no visible proof of the thousands of...
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The Georgia-Russia conflict: lost territory, found nation, Donald Rayfield
The embers of the five-day war between Georgia and Russia of 8-12 August 2008 are not quite extinguished, but the ceasefire agreement skilfully negotiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and agreed with his counterparts Dmitri Medvedev (Russia) and Mikheil Saakashvili (Georgia) gives hope for an end to this intense, destructive and tragic conflict.
Donald Rayfield is emeritus professor of the school of modern languages, Queen Mary University of London. Among his books is Stalin...
more »

openDemocracy.net/Russia reports, debates and blogs the Georgia war

COMMENT: Schröder slams McCain on Georgia

By Kanishk Tharoor 19 - 08 - 08

The conventional wisdom has it that this month's eruption of violence between Russia and Georgia played squarely into the hands of John McCain. With pundits and hacks fulminating about a return to the Cold War, McCain has ratcheted up the rhetoric, supposedly sending a muscular to the Kremlin. He demanded that "Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory." McCain, who has in the past called Vladimir Putin a "totalitarian dictator", went on to belittle the more cautious tone struck by the Obama campaign as "bizarrely in sync with Moscow." Such claims amount to preposterous misrepresentations of Obama's position and are calculated to appeal to the cruder, blustering passions of the American people. It's not just the benighted of the developing world, after all, that seek solace in their strongmen.

One of the many misfortunes of the flare up in the Caucasus is that an opportunity to probe more deeply into the roots of the conflict is being lost amidst the rhetoric of overheated Cold War nostalgists. For cooler, informed insight on the Russia-Georgia crisis, there are few better places to turn than to openDemocracy, which has long reported on Georgia's internal problems and the failures of Georgian nationalism on their own terms. Get up to speed with oD's Caucasus archive here.

full text >>>

Recent:
Abkhazia and South Ossetia: heart of conflict, key to solution

By George Hewitt

The Georgia-Russia war of August 2008 carries a vital lesson: the small territories that broke from Georgia's control in the early 1990s have their own voice, identity, and interest. They must be active participants in deciding their own future, says George Hewitt, the leading scholar of Abkhazian linguistics and history.

The Georgia-Russia conflict: lost territory, found nation

By Donald Rayfield

The new Caucasus war exposes the problem of Georgia - and of western myths about the country

Citizen war-reporter? The Caucasus test

By Evgeny Morozov

The Georgia-Russia war exposes some of the flaws in the idea of citizen journalism.

After the war: recognising reality
By Neal Ascherson

A messy conflict reflects collective forgetting. It's time to recall history, break the cycle, and build the future in Abkhazia and Georgia

Also on Abkhazia in openDemocracy:

Thomas de Waal & Zeyno Baran, "Abkhazia-Georgia, Kosovo-Serbia: parallel worlds?" (2 August 2006)

Thomas de Waal, "Abkhazia's archive: fire of war, ashes of history" (20 October 2006)

Nikolaj Nielsen, "A small bomb in Gali" (8 July 2008).

Among openDemocracy's articles on Georgian politics and the region:

Neal Ascherson, "Tbilisi, Georgia: the rose revolution's rocky road" (15 July 2005)

Donald Rayfield, "Georgia and Russia: with you, without you" (3 October 2006)

Robert Parsons, "Russia and Georgia: a lover's revenge" (6 October 2006)

Vicken Cheterian, "Georgia's arms race" (4 July 2007)

Donald Rayfield, "Russia and Georgia: a war of perceptions" (24 August 2007)

Alexander Rondeli, "Georgia: politics after revolution" (14 November 2007)

Robert Parsons, "Georgia's race to the summit" (4 January 2008)

Robert Parsons,"Mikheil Saakashvili's bitter victory" (11 January 2008)

Jonathan Wheatley, "Georgia's democratic stalemate" (14 April 2008)

Robert Parsons, "Georgia, Abkhazia, Russia: the war option" (13 May 2008)

Thomas de Waal, "The Russia-Georgia tinderbox" (16 May 2008)

Robert Parsons, "Georgia's dangerous gulf" (30 May 2008)

Alexander Rondeli, "Georgia's search for itself" (8 July 2008)

Thomas de Waal, "South Ossetia: the avoidable tragedy" (11 August 2008)

Ghia Nodia, "The war for Georgia: Russia, the west, the future" (12 August 2008)

Donald Rayfield, "The Georgia-Russia conflict: lost territory, found nation" (13 August 2008).