The Unending Struggle

Peter Hitchens writes:

One of my many pieces of great good fortune was the chance to visit the country we rather oddly call Georgia, several times. Actually, in Soviet days its name was ‘Gruziya’ and its own citizens called (and still call) it Sakartvelo. But this doesn’t appeal to the PC fanatics who like to call Bombay ‘Mumbai’ or Peking ‘Beijing’ - on the grounds that ‘that’s what the locals call it’ - which isn’t even true in the case of Bombay. By the way, if you read France’s grandest left-wing newspaper, Le Monde, you’ll find that the Chinese capital is ‘Pekin’. Likewise, Germany’s grand Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, calls it ‘Peking’. The ‘Beijing’ cult is very odd, and needs to be examined more carefully.

I think the PC media choose to call it ‘Georgia’ , in the hope this will influence Americans, who feel a sort of kinship with it because it shares a name with one of the 50 states, but who would be unmoved by the travails of a tiny faraway country called Sakartvelo. We’ll come back to that. It’s a very beautiful place, and its capital, Tbilisi, one of the most fascinating cities in the world, built around a river gorge and – despite terrible destruction in recent years – still handsome and unique. It has its own cuisine, much of it delicious, and makes wines, mostly too sweet for Western tastes, but not all. Try the Mukuzani red if you ever get the chance, a lovely, wistful wine that tastes of rugged valleys and ancient culture. For a good dry white, I recommend Tsinandali , accompanied by Hachapuri, a delicious combination of flatbread and cheese. It is also a rare Christian culture in that part of the world, a form of Orthodoxy, but quite distinct from the Russian or Armenian versions nearby.

It lies between the great Islamic powers of Sunni Turkey and Shia Persia, and was within reach of the destroying armies of Tamerlane. It is an uncomfortable fact that Russian rule (beginning in the 18th Century) probably saved Georgia’s unique culture, language and alphabet - and rescued its beautiful land from absorption into the Islamic world. There was, as there always is, a hard price to pay for Moscow’s protection, including the absorption of the Georgian church into the Russian, which meant much destruction of art and the imposition of the Russian liturgy.

But this utterly fascinating and captivating part of the world (the Caucasus was once called ‘the mountain of languages’, as it seemed to be the origin of so many tongues) is also very dangerous. It is incredibly sensitive. In one direction lie the Caspian Sea and the great steppes, leading on to China – and nowadays that means Georgia is close to the great Caspian Bubble of oil and gas which is the subject of a fierce diplomatic and political struggle about which the world knows and cares far too little. A vital pipeline from this region crosses Georgia. It is Russia’s southern frontier with Asia, a frontier that until very recently was highly dangerous and much–contested (and could be again, as the Chechnya wars showed). And it is very close to the explosive parts of the Middle East. Imagine, if you want to see how complex, valuable, dangerous and unstable this region is, how impossible it would be to build a railway line from Moscow to Jerusalem – a journey I for one would love to make before I die.

Those who live in the Caucasus are used to hard choices, though it doesn’t mean they like them any more than we do. When the Russian Revolution came, Georgia received special attention from Moscow, because Stalin was of course Georgian by birth – look at that face, not Russian at all. But it was also a place where the hand of the Kremlin always seemed to lie lighter on the land than elsewhere. To fly down from Moscow to Tbilisi was to go somewhere lighter, and more light-hearted, a country of wine rather than of vodka, more than little gangsterish, a little like a sort of Soviet Sicily. There was also a confusing pride in being the birthplace of Stalin. The only remaining statue of the old horror still stood, in those days, in the town of Gori (has it gone yet? I think so).  On the fine classical boulevard in Tbilisi called Rustaveli, there used to be, high on a grand building, a carved relief of Stalin’s very recognisable profile. It must have been about 60 feet above the street, and was only visible if you looked for it, or if it was pointed out to you. But everyone in Tbilisi knew it was there. By 1991, when I first visited, someone had managed to throw a paint-bomb at it. It’s gone now, thanks to the furious civil wars which broke out soon afterwards, scarring Tbilisi and beginning a terrible era of instability, refugees and pain.

The Communist Party and the KGB fought very hard to stamp out Georgian nationalism. In April 1989, Soviet troops attacked nationalist demonstrators with sharpened spades, and also with gas, with indescribably hideous results. Most of the 19 dead victims were young women. So it was hard for the outsider not to sympathise with such figures as Zviad Ghamsakhurdia, the independence leader I interviewed on that first visit – an extraordinary and rather romantic moustachioed figure, whom I remember (perhaps inaccurately) as faintly hysterical, wildly loquacious, and clad in a sort of zoot suit. He died later in mysterious circumstances, and I won’t here attempt to go in detail into the immensely complex struggles which have been taking place in that small (population less than five million) and unhappy country ever since.

Turn elsewhere for explanations of Ossetia, Adzharia and Abkhazia (except that Stalin always made sure that there were inconvenient minority populations within the borders of the Soviet ‘republics’. This was so that he could use them to make trouble for those republics if they ever grew restive and independence-minded. And so it has proved) . First there was the unpleasant Shevardnadze era, which more or less destroyed the reputation of the man who had once been Mikhail Gorbachev’s highly respected Foreign Minister. Then came the mob putsch which has since been given the rather sickly-sweet name of ‘the Rose Revolution’.

This is a classic case of two wrongs not making a right. I would be amazed if the 2003 elections had not been rigged. You might as well expect the Atlantic not to be wet. But in that particular case, international observers (who often fail to spot the most gross manipulation, or alternatively are completely ignored by the world media when they do) noted that bad things had happened, and were given major publicity for their charges. Kaboom. Supporters of opposition parties burst into the new session of the dubious parliament clutching roses in their hands (who supplied the roses and the idea?), shouted down President Eduard Shevardnadze and chased him from the building.

Then it was ‘people power’ all over again (see ‘Orange Revolution’, etc), big crowds in city squares, slavishly and flatteringly reported by the world’s media, until Shevardnadze resigned. Lo, in new elections, the candidate of the Rose Revolutionaries, Mikheil Saakashvili, won a huge majority. And, would you believe, he promised to fight corruption (who doesn’t)? and establish democracy, etc., etc. By 2007 things had gone sour, and the police treated anti-government demonstrators quite brutally, and placed limits on freedom of the press (though the Western media were pretty uninterested). Mr Saakashvili also managed to pick a fight with Vladimir Putin, in which the Western media and many Western politicians accepted the simple view of Brave Georgia versus vicious, bullying Russia.

Now, entirely mysteriously if you rely for the Western media on your information, Mr Saakashvili has lost a parliamentary election (whereupon he received lavish Western media praise for …. accepting the outcome!) . Actually, he has not been popular for some time, and his ratings took a deep dive a few weeks ago when horrible videos emerged of the maltreatment of prisoners in a Tbilisi jail. One rather graphically shows warders raping a prisoner with a broomstick. It’s on the web somewhere. Don’t watch it, or the accompanying film of prisoners whimpering and shouting with pain as warders beat them up.

But mightn’t such matters attract more attention than, or as much attention as, or even slightly less attention than the trial of three silly women for staging a blasphemous protest in a Moscow cathedral? No, not really. You’d need to be interested to know, and no stars of stage and screen have protested as far as I know. The ‘West’ is not interested in Russia’s oppression because it is oppression, but because it is Russian oppression. Georgia is part of an absurd American attempt to create client states on Russia’s borders, an attempt which will end in tears, as Russia will always be interested in Georgia, whereas America’s interest will fade with time, because it is so far away. It is also paradoxical, as it involves reliable American backing for the appalling hereditary despotism in Azerbaijan, next door to Georgia.

Georgia is therefore officially one of the good countries, where a mob putsch is reclassified as a romantic revolution and we don’t take much notice of prison rape, police brutality or attempts at censorship. Just thought I’d mention it, in the unending struggle to promote dissident thought.