Top Quotes: “The Caucasus: An Introduction” — Thomas de Waal

Introduction

“In the summer of 1989 I decided to drop out of college so I could see the world before the whole thing got blown to bits in a nuclear war. The threat of mutually assured destruction was so palpable in the late 1980s that it didn’t make sense to try to live an ordinary life. I certainly didn’t want to be stuck in a classroom taking a chemistry midterm when the bombs started falling, I bought a one-way ticket to Spain and left the United States in late September of 1989. Less than two months later, the Cold War ended. Just like that.

In the summer of 1990, as I backpacked through Eastern Europe, I remember the euphoria and the sense of endless possibility. Young people were especially jubilant that they would have free and prosperous futures, enjoying opportunities denied their parents and grandparents. In those heady months, many people still believed that the streets of New York and London were paved with gold, and that democracy and capitalism would usher in a new consumer Xanadu of unlimited Levi’s jeans and Cacharel perfumes. Later, as I began doing research in the region, I heard countless stories of suicides and desperate acts of self-harm committed in the few days before the wall fell on November 9, 1989. As they took stock of their lives, these men and women believed that their world would never change. Although there were growing protests across Eastern Europe, few expected the scale of the transformation to come. How could they have known that their world would be so different just a few days later? If they had hung on for forty-eight hours more, they could have lived out the rest of their lives in circumstances radically altered from those in which they felt so trapped. If only they could have believed that this particular present never extends infinitely into the future.”

“The United States in particular has discovered the South Caucasus. Over the last decade, a number of very senior figures in Washington have taken an interest in the region. In May 2005, President George W. Bush stood in Freedom Square in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and told Georgians, “Your courage is inspiring democratic reformers and sending a message across the world — freedom will be a future of each nation and every people on earth.” A year later, Senator John McCain was presented with a Georgian sword on his seventieth birthday and told Georgians, “You are America’s best friends.” Azerbaijan, the largest and wealthiest of the three countries of the region, drew a steady stream of high-level political and commercial visitors from the United States. In the U.S. Congress, a powerful Armenian lobby ensured that Armenia was for a while the largest per capita recipient of U.S. aid money of any country in the world — aid to Georgia would soon match that level.”

“The North and South Caucasus together have the greatest density of distinct languages anywhere on earth. The South Caucasus contains around ten main nationalities. Alongside the three main ethnic groups — the Azerbaijanis, Georgians, and Armenians — are Ossetians, Abkhaz, both Muslim and Yezidi Kurds, Talysh, and Lezgins. Most of them speak mutually unintelligible languages.

The main nationalities also contain linguistic diversity within themselves. If history had taken a different turn, some provinces might have ended up as their own nation-states. Mingrelians and Svans in Georgia speak their own languages, related to but distinct from Georgian. Karabakh Armenians speak a dialect that is hard to understand in Yerevan. North and South Ossetians speak markedly different dialects of Ossetian and are divided by the mountains, With ethnic diversity come strong traditions of particularism and local autonomy, Abkhazia, Ajaria, South Ossetia, Karabakh, and Nakhichevan were given an autonomous status under the Soviet Union that reflected older traditions of self-rule.

We inevitably end up calling the South Caucasus a “region,” but in many ways it isn’t one. Centrifugal forces are strong. The South Caucasus — or Transcaucasus — was first put together as a Russian colonial region in the early nineteenth century. The only historical attempt to make a single state, the Transcaucasian Federation, collapsed into three parts after just a month in May 1918. That breakdown created for the first time three entities called Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, which were then preserved under Soviet rule.”

“In 1913, what is now the Turkish city of Kars was a Russian frontier town — a Russian travel guide of that year recommends that visitors take a look at its new granite war memorial. In the years 1915–21, this borderland was the scene of horrific bloodshed, as most of its Armenian population was killed, along with members of many other communities, and Turkish, Russian, and Armenian armies fought over it. The border was eventually drawn between Turkey and the new Bolshevik republics of Armenia and Georgia under the Treaty of Kars in 1921. The treaty established that the port of Batumi would be part of Georgia and conclusively gave Eastern Anatolia, including the Armenians” holy mountain, Mount Ararat, to the new Turkish state. It thereby set the western frontier of the South Caucasus, which was further cemented by Soviet and Turkish border guards and the Cold War.”

“Is the South Caucasus in Europe or Asia? By one definition, proposed by the eighteenth-century German-Swedish geographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, the region is in Asia, and the border with Europe runs along the Kuma-Manych Depression, north of the Greater Caucasus range, Other geographers, a bit more tidily, have made the mountains of the Caucasus themselves the border between Europe and Asia. Nowadays, the consensus is to place Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in Europe and make the Turkish border and the river Araxes the Europe-Asia frontier. The strange result of this is that “Europe” in Armenia and Azerbaijan is directly due east of the “Asian” Turkish towns of Kars and Trabzon.

No definition is satisfactory because the South Caucasus has multiple identities. It is both European and Asian, with strong Middle Eastern influences as well. Politically the three countries, and Georgia in particular, look more towards Europe.”

“The Caucasus also has its own identity. Anthropologists identify its customs and traditions fairly easily, and they get more marked the closer to the mountains one gets. The Caucasian nationalities share similar wedding and funeral ceremonies, and all mark the fortieth day after the death of a loved one with strikingly similar rituals. The same elaborate rituals of hospitality and toasting are found across the region, even among Muslim Azerbaijanis. Foreign mediators between “warring” Armenians and Azerbaijanis or Georgians and Abkhaz have frequently seen how once the two sides sit down to dinner together, political differences are forgotten and convivial rituals of eating and drinking precisely observed.”

“All three South Caucasian countries make and drink both wine and cognac. Azerbaijan’s vineyards were ravaged by Mikhail Gorbachev’s antialcohol campaign, and the revival of Islam has restrained drinking habits since then.”

“Russia’s ban on Georgian wine was lifted in 2013. Disastrous in the short term, the embargo had an overwhelmingly positive long-term effect on Georgian wine-making. Production volumes dropped sharply, but quality improved radically. A series of new high-end wineries opened, many using the technique of making wine in a large ceramic jar known as a queuri. In 2016, Russia was again the major export destination of what was now a much more diversified and higher-quality industry.”

“Ethnic and religious differences have always existed but are much more accentuated by modern politica. A century ago, attitudes toward religion could be deeply pragmatic, In her memoir of early twentieth-century Abkhazia, Adile Abas-oglu writes, “Arriving in Mokva for the Muslim festivals I always laughed when I observed how people drink wine and vodka at them and some families cooked holiday dishes from pork.””

“The South Caucasus has a long tradition of decentralization which comes with the landscape. In Georgia, mountain people in Svaneti, Khevsureti, or Tusheti were barely linked to central rule from Tbilisi until the modern era. Azerbaijan, which also did not exist as a single political unit before the modern era, is also characterized by regional divides, Political regionalism, with local politicians having strong local power bases and distributing power and favor to people from the same region, is still alive in Azerbaijan, and even has a name: yerlizabliq. Under the last two presidents of Azerbaijan, father and son Heidar and Ilham Aliev, the ruling elite has been dominated by a so-called Nakhichevan clan, made up of people originating from the homeland of the Aliev family. To be a “Nakhichevani” does not mean that one has to live there — President Ilham Aliev has never done so — yet place of origin is still an important marker of identity.

The three main capital cities of the region have their own distinct histories. A century ago, neither Tbilisi (Tiflis), Baku, nor Yerevan had a majority population of Georgians, Azerbaijanis, or Armenians, respectively. Tbilisi can lay claim to being the capital of the Caucasus, but its Georgian character has been much more intermittent. For 500 years it was an Arab town, while the older city of Mtskheta was the old Georgian capital. Then, in the medieval period, the city was taken over by the Armenian merchant class. They were the biggest community in the nineteenth century and finally left en masse only in the 1960s. Baku became a cosmopolitan city with many different ethnic groups from the late nineteenth century. Russian became its lingua franca. Garry Kasparov, the Jewish-Armenian world chess champion, who was born in Baku but is unable to return there because of his Armenian roots, describes his nationality as “Bakuvian” (Bakinets in Russian). Baku only turned into a strongly Azerbaijani city with the end of the Soviet Union, the Nagorny Karabakh war, and the mass emigration of other national groups.”

“Up until the First World War, Yereven, the capital of Armenia, had a Persian flavor and a Muslim-majority population. Its major landmark was a blue-tiled mosque, and there was no big church. Von Haxthausen wrote, “In Tiflis, Burope and sin may be said to meet, and the town has a divided aspect, but Brivan is a purely Asiatic city: everything is Oriental, except a few newly built Russian houses, and occasionally Russian uniforms in the streets.” More Armenians lived in Tilis, Baka, Shusha, and Van. Yerevan became an Armenian city only after the mass flight of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire and of Azerbaijanis from eastem Armenia in 1915–18.”

“Red Kurdistan was abolished in 1929. In the 1930s, Kurds — identified as a “backward” and enemy group, with ethnic kin on the other side of Soviet frontiers. They were heavily assimilated as Azerbaijanis. In 1937, they were one of the first Soviet nationalities to be deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Tens of thousands died. The Kurdish language was banned. Although they were allowed to return home in the 1950s, Kurds virtually disappeared as an ethnic group in Azerbaijan.

No Kurds at all were listed in the 1979 census. The assimilation was part enforced, part willing. Kurds spoke the Azeri language, intermarried with Azerbaijanis, and practiced the same religion as them. Even the leading Kurdish historian of Azerbaijan, Shamil Askerov, listed himself as “Azerbaijani” on his passport. This meant that Muslim Kurds suffered the same fate as Azerbaijanis in the Nagomy Karabakh war. In 1992 and 1993 Armenian forces captured the regions of Lachin, Kelbajar, and Kubatly, which had formerly been “Red Kurdistan” and drove out the entire mixed Azerbaijani-Kurdish population. Shepherds who had summered there were forced to settle permanently on their winter grazing grounds.

Armenia’s own Yezidi Kurds stayed in Armenia, thanks to their distinct identity. Neither Christian nor Muslim but with their own ancient religious practices, they had mainly moved to Russian Armenia from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. By the Yezidis’ own estimates there are 30,000 to 40,000 of them still in Armenia, comprising about 3 percent of the population. They are mostly poor farmers or shepherds with limited political influence in Armenia. The Yezidis exist at one remove from other Kurds, and many even deny that they are related. Many have emigrated to Russia and this unique ethnic group is at risk of disappearing.”

“The tiny stone churches, decorated with carvings, scattered across the landscape are testimony to an ancient Christian civilization that is a defining feature of Armenia and Georgia. The two peoples take pride in having been the first nations to convert to Christianity in the early fourth century, just before Constantine took up the new faith for the Roman Empire. Today, the national churches have a central role in both Armenia and Georgia, and the Armenian catholicos and Georgian patriarch are national figures, afforded high respect.

Caucasian Christianity still bears strong marks of the pagan and Zoroastrian world that preceded it. The famous Armenian “cross-stones,” or khachkars, incorporate a fiery Zoroastrian sun-circle beneath the cross. Most Ossetians are nominally Christian, but many still take part in overtly pagan ceremonies. The village of Lykhny in Abkhazia contains a medieval church as well as a pre-Christian shrine where Abkhaz have held mass meetings twice in the twentieth century, in 1931 and 1989, at moments of national crisis.

Both Georgians and Armenians also have long traditions of accommodation with Islam. Historically, Armenians have fared well in the Iranian Empire, and the modern-day legacy of that is a good relationship between overwhelmingly Christian Armenia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

“For several centuries, Georgian kings and aristocrats converted to Islam and served as courtiers to the Iranian Safavid dynasty, while the feudal lords of the Jakeli family in Meskhia were Muslims who served the Ottoman sultans. These Georgian princes were probably Christian at home and Muslim in public. Deft changes of religious affiliation for political purposes are a recurring theme in the history of the Caucasus, the most recent instance of which occurred in Georgia and Armenia in the 1990s, when the entire Communist Party leadership was suddenly baptized as Christians overnight.

Bearing in mind these caveats, it is still accurate to say that Christianity is central to the identity of both the Armenians and Georgians. The Armenian king Trdat Ill was supposedly converted by Saint Gregory the Illuminator in either 301 or 314. Georgia became Christian in 327–32, when King Mirian III was converted by Saint Nino. Christianity’s grip was strengthened when both nations adopted their own alphabets in the late fourth century, enabling them to write religious texts in their own scripts. For both Armenians and Georgians, the church and the written language provided a source of continuity that kept collective identity alive under foreign rule.”

Azerbaijan

“Islam arrived in the Caucasus in the seventh century with Arab invaders who swept in along the Caspian Sea coast from the south. They entered the region north of the river Araxes in 639 and captured Tiflis in 645. The Caucasian Albanian kingdom fell. Jewish Khazars to the north and Christians to the west stopped the Arabs’ further advance, leaving the southeastern portion of the region, modern-day Azerbaijan, Islamic. For 500 years, Islam spread throughout Central Asia and along the Volga but not deeper into the South Caucasus. The Mongols of the Golden Horde led another wave of expansion in the thirteenth century, and a vast swathe of territory from western Siberia to Crimea, including much of the North Caucasus, became Islamic in their wake.

Thereafter, two Muslim powers, the Persian and Ottoman empires, dominated the region until the coming of the Russians in the early 1800s. The Christian character of Armenians and Georgians did not change much. Under the Iranian Safavids, Georgian monarchs and lords converted to Islam, often in rather nominal fashion, while the rest of society remained Christian. Early modern travelers to Tiflis under Iranian rule were surprised to see that there was not a single mosque in the city.

Azerbaijan was different, and Islam gradually became universal there. From 1501, when Shah Ismail I founded the Safavid dynasty of Iran, a kingdom that included Azerbaijan, the Shia faith began to dominate. This gave most Azerbaijani Turks a different religion from the Ottoman Turks and a distinct identity of their own. On the one hand, they had their ethnic and linguistic ties to other Turkic peoples. On the other, they had a religious bond with the Persian-speaking people of Iran, with whom they shared a strong clerical hierarchy and festivals.”

“In 1916, of almost two million Muslims registered in Azerbaijan, 62 percent were Shiite and 38 percent were Sunni. Indirectly, Sunni-Shiite strife helped forge a new national identity for Azerbaijan. Frustrated with petty clerical disputes, some Azerbaijanis turned to pan-Islamism, a movement for the unification of Muslim peoples, while others rejected religion altogether and took an interest in secular pan-Turkic ideas.

While Islam was less of a mobilizing force in Azerbaijan than it was in the North Caucasus to the north or Iran to the south, but it still defined a way of life for ordinary people. That way of life was strongly undermined by the Soviet Union. Under Soviet rules, all ties to Iran and the Middle East were cut, and mosques and Islamic schools were shut. What was left of the religious establishment was co-opted by the Communist authorities. Between 1928 and 1980, the number of functioning mosques in Azerbaijan fell from 1,400 to just sixteen. In that context, the Sunni-Shite schism began to lose any meaning. The Muslims who continued to worship shared use of the tiny handful of mosques that were open, although they still buried their dead in different cemeteries.

The new elite in independent Azerbaijan has allowed Islam to be revived but portrays the country as a secular state on the Turkish model. Fears are expressed about the influence of radical Sunnis from the North Caucasus and the Gulf and of Shites from Iran. In 2009, the authorities closed down a series of mosques on the grounds that they were harboring extremists. After decades of official atheism, members of the younger generation in Azerbaijan do show signs of being more Muslim than their Soviet-era parents. A survey of young people in 2007 organized by Baku’s FAR Center revealed the multiple influences of Europe, Russia, and Turkey as well as the Islamic world. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said they believed in God, with a quarter saying they would be happy to see Azerbaijan ruled by sharia law. Yet only 13 percent said they were actual practicing believers; belief still outstrips worship or the opportunity to worship.”

“For Azerbaijan and Iran, the big sleeping issue is Iran’s large population of ethnic Azerbaijanis in the north of the country, who may number as many as twenty-five million — or three times the number of Azerbaijanis in the Republic of Azerbaijan. So far, there has been no mass movement there for closer political ties.”

“Many more cultural threads have formed the weave that makes up contemporary Azerbaijan.

The name “Azerbaijan” has been traced back to Atropatenes, a Persian lord in the time of Alexander the Great, or, more poetically, to azer, the Persian word for fire, on the grounds that it describes the Zoroastrian fire-temples of the region. Until modern times, the word “Azerbaijan” was more often applied to the northern Turkic-populated part of Iran than to the modern-day state of Azerbaijan.”

“A sense of historical continuity is further fractured by the fact that the Azeri language has been written in three alphabets since the third decade of the twentieth century: the script was changed from Arabic to Roman in the 1920s, to Cyrillic in the 1930s, and back to Roman in the 1990s. That makes it very hard for even an educated Azerbaijani to read his or her recent history. In their identity, Azerbaijanis could be considered the polar opposite of the Armenians, who have maintained a cultural identity through an alphabet and literature that is constant in different lands all over the world. For Azerbaijanis, their land has remained the same, but the culture within it has been buffeted by constant change.

Azerbaijan’s strongest neighbor and ally is undoubtedly Turkey.”

“In the mid-nineteenth century, a new educated intelligentsia began to exchange ideas with pan-Turkic thinkers in other parts of the Russian Empire. They began articulating a modern Azerbaijani identity. In the 1880s, the magazine Käshkül proposed the use of the name “Azerbaijani Turks” instead of “Caucasian Muslims” for the first time. Within fewer than thirty years, the Republic of Azerbaijan had become the world’s first parliamentary democracy in an Islamic country. The Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan lost the independence but kept the sense of national identity.

Independence in 1991 again redefined Azerbaijani identity. For the first time, in contrast to the First Republic of 1918, Azerbaijan’s borders were internationally recognized. This helps explain why the map of the country has become a national symbol; it is printed on coins, for example. Simultaneously, Azerbaijani statehood has been wounded as a result of the Karabakh conflict with Armenians: one-seventh of its internationally recognized territory is under de facto Armenian control as a result of the conflict.”

Armenia

“There was no Armenian political state between the fall of the crusader kingdom of Cilicia in 1375 and the short-lived Armenian Republic of 1918. Instead, the heartland of historic Armenia, known as Western Armenia or Eastern Anatolia, came under the rule of others for centuries.

Living as subjects under various empires, Armenians kept a collective identity through the church, a strong literary tradition written in the thirty-eight-letter Armenian alphabet, and a tradition of yearning for a glorious past.”

“Without their own rulers, Armenians were scattered from Tiflis to Constantinople to Jerusalem. Later they could be found in Isfahan, Venice, or Calcutta. Then, in 1915 and after, the violent expulsion or death of almost all the Ottoman Armenians, in what is remembered as the Armenian Genocide, created an even greater worldwide diaspora, stretching from Beirut to Los Angeles. Roughly two-thirds of Armenians today live outside Armenia than within it — with most of them having roots in Anatolia and speaking a dialect of Western Armenian that is distinct from the language spoken in the Republic of Armenia.

Traditionally, the itinerant Armenians became wealthy merchants, bankers, and craftsmen, rather like the Jews, and the stereotype of the crafty mercantile Armenian has stuck. Armenians’ self-conscious pride in their history and resistance to assimilation has made them objects of admiration and resentment, depending on the observer. The Russian Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam was an admirer, writing of “Armenians’ fullness with life, their rude tenderness, their noble inclination to work, their inexplicable aversion to anything metaphysical and their splendid intimacy with the world of real things.””

“Feuds between pro- and anti-Soviet groups dominated the politics of the Armenian diaspora for much of the twentieth century, displacing even the crimes of Ottoman Turkey as the main political issue for the émigré community. During World War II several prominent Armenian revolutionaries — including General Dro Kanayan, defense minister of the 1918 Dashnak republic — fought with the Nazis with the goal of regaining Armenian independence; at the same time, prominent Soviet Armenian generals took senior positions in the Red Army. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, these intra-Armenian tensions calmed down somewhat. But the polarities between the Dashnak movement and its opponents mean that there are still two Armenian lobbying organizations in Washington and two distinct currents in the Armenian diaspora.

Currently, Armenia is a homogeneous state: 98 percent of the population are ethnic Armenians. The once large Azerbaijani population has gone, and the only noticeable minority, the Yezidi Kurds, have a very low profile in society. The tensions are therefore all intra-Armenian or between the new state and the diaspora — in October 2009, many diaspora Armenians, mostly descendants of Genocide survivors, found themselves in the awkward position of denouncing the Yerevan government for moving to normalize relations with Turkey.

Diaspora communities around the world have also unwittingly weakened the Armenian state by acting as a magnet for Armenians dissatisfied with life in the homeland. Since independence, the population of Armenia — 3.3 million in 1989–has dropped in real terms, as hundreds of thousands of people have left for Russia or the United States.”

Georgia, Part 2

“Georgia’s distinctive character comes from it being the most “Caucasian” of the three countries of the South Caucasus. Armenians and Azerbaijanis look outward to Iran and the Middle East and beyond and have one foot outside the South Caucasus — their culture and cuisine blends with that of the greater region around them. Georgia has always been a world of its own. Some of its cultural features, such as its beautiful polyphonic singing, have a good claim to being unique. The Georgians have never had a strong diaspora. In Soviet times Georgians were the least likely of the Soviet Union’s fifteen main “titular” nationalities — the ethnic groups after whom the USSR’s fifteen constituent union republics were named — to live outside their homeland. Very few Georgians live outside Georgia in the South Caucasus, while Georgia itself has large Armenian and Azerbaijani minorities.”

“Its strong east-west split, accentuated by a long divide between Persian and Ottoman spheres of influence, only began to end in the 1880s, when Russian engineers first built a railroad across the 3,000-foot Surami highlands in central Georgia, bridging the western and eastern halves of the region with a viable transport route for the first time.”

“The Georgian language, known to Georgians as kartuli, is the chief member of a distinct language family, written in a unique alphabet, and has been the main unifying force in Georgians’ expressions of national identity. Georgian is unrelated to any other languages, apart from its close relatives Mingrelian, Svan, and Laz — although some scholars have attempted to make the case that it is a distant cousin of that other lonely European language, Basque.”

“The beautiful curly alphabet, originally forty-one letters and now thirty-three, was devised in the fifth century and was the script used for religious texts for several centuries. The poet Shota Rustaveli and others made Georgian a great literary language in the twelfth century. According to the literary historian Donald Rayfield, at that time Georgian probably had the same number of speakers and readers as English did in Shakespearean England.”

“The different parts of Georgia only came together in the nineteenth century with Russian rule, the coming of the railways, and a generation of patriotic intellectuals keen to foster a new national consciousness.”

The Soviet Era

“After 1800, the region was absorbed into the Russian state and reshaped with a Russian character. Until recently, most people knew the whole region by its Russocentric name, Transcaucasia, and many outsiders mistook it for part of Russia. Russia unified Transcaucasia for the first time into a single entity through Russian-built institutions, currency, and railways, as well as making Russian the lingua franca.”

“The problem the Caucasus posed the imperial authorities was mainly one of remoteness and capacity. Even the far more powerful Soviet Union ended up deciding to delegate most of its power to local elites there. The much more limited tsarist administration always had to struggle to keep its grip on the region.”

“In the years 1828–30, up to 60,000 Armenians were encouraged to emigrate from Persia to newly Russian-held Armenia. Although these lands had a strong medieval Armenian heritage and the old ecclesiastical capital of Echmiadzin, prior to the Russian conquest only around a fifth of their inhabitants were estimated to be Armenians. The majority of the population were either “Tatars” or nomadic Muslim Kurds.”

“Political demonstrators adopt Rustaveli as a place of protest, because if they can occupy the avenue they will bring the city to a halt. The authorities know that too. In 1956 Soviet troops shot down demonstrators who had claimed the streets in anger at Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. In 1978 protestors marched along Rustaveli demanding equal status for the Georgian language. On the tragic night of April 9, 1989, protestors were asphyxiated and trampled to death by Soviet soldiers. Then, in December 1991, the street became the epicenter of the short civil war that culminated in the overthrow of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia. More than a hundred people died and the grand buildings on the eastern half of the avenue were gutted. It took a decade for Rustaveli to be fully rebuilt. In 2003, on a more euphoric note, crowds gathered there to stage Georgia’s bloodless “Rose Revolution.” Only four years later, in November 2007, the hero of that revolution, President Mikheil Saakashvili sent in riot police to break up a demonstration against his own rule, and Rustaveli was again filled with teargas and the sound of breaking glass.”

“The commercial exploitation of its oil wells in the 1870s changed it virtually overnight into the world’s foremost oil city.”

“In the early part of the new century, the new Armenian and Azerbaijani national movements inevitably collided. For centuries Armenians and Azerbaijanis had coexisted as neighbors in a patchwork quilt of towns and villages across the Transcaucasus. They spoke each other’s languages, traded freely, and had a shared culture with strong Persian influences. Yet mixed marriage was rare, and differences of religion, social status, and now national ideology caused divisions. These tensions were contained by Russian colonial rule, but when that rule weakened in 1905 and 1917 (and again in 1988) the geography of mixed ethnic cohabitation turned peaceful communities into places of violence.

The revolutionary year of 1905 saw the outbreak of what was called the “Armeno-Tatar War.” The bloodshed spread the entire length of the South Caucasus, from Baku in the east to Nakhich in the west. Up to 10,000 people were killed, and whole urban districts and villages were gutted.”

The Armenian Genocide

“The tsarist empire came to an end in the Caucasus not with mass repression but with a slow surrender of control. The relatively small colonial administration was simply unable to deal with a steady rise in political protest. The biggest challenge came from the previously most loyal nationality, the Georgians, whose social profile had changed strongly. The authority of the nobility had faded, and Georgia now contained all the ingredients for a revolutionary movement, with workers in Tiflis and Batum, radical peasantry, and what came to be known as the “third generation” of Marxist intellectuals. In 1903, the leading Georgian Marxist, Noe Zhordania, was confident enough to split from Lenin’s Bolsheviks and take his followers over to the Menshevik faction of the revolutionary party. In 1905, revolutionaries seized the railway and cut the Georgian provinces in two. In order to keep order in Tiflis, the elderly viceroy, said to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, tried and failed to impose martial law. Its authority in tatters, the tsarist regime authorized the first ever elections in the Russian Empire. In the voting in Georgia for Russia’s new assemblies, the First and Second Dumas of 1905 and 1906 (both of which were dissolved), the Mensheviks strongly outperformed the Bolsheviks and came out on top.

Russia’s grip on the Transcaucasus was further loosened when war broke out in Europe in 1914 and the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany against Russia, Britain, and France. The region was mostly unenthusiastic about the war.”

“The years 1915–21 were the bloodiest in the history of the Caucasus, and the scale of the killing puts into perspective the tragic but far less bloody conflicts of the 1990s. The fact that as many as 45,000 Muslim Laz and Ajarians were allegedly killed in 1915 in the Goruh River valley south of Batum in the campaign of Russian general Vladimir Lyakhov merits only a line in one history of the Caucasus. The deaths of one million or more Armenians in the same period dwarfs anything the region has experienced since.

The main theater of bloodshed was Eastern Anatolia, in what is now eastern Turkey. This area was the troubled borderland between the Russian and Ottoman empires, with a mixed Christian-Muslim population. It was an Armenian homeland — medieval churches and monuments testified to an ancient Armenian presence, and Armenians were still a large community in the six eastern provinces, although they were not a clear majority in any of them. It was also home to

Christian Pontic Greeks and Assyrians, Kurds, Laz, Ajarians, and also as many as 850,000 muhajirs — Muslims from the Balkans and North Caucasus who had been deported to the Ottoman Empire over the previous two generations. For the large Turkish population, Anatolia was an ancient Turkish heartland the Ottoman Empire could not afford to lose, especially after it lost its Balkan possessions in the wars of 1912–13. Yet the Armenians and Greeks increasingly looked to neighboring Russia as their Great Power protector. All the ingredients were in place, therefore, for both a struggle between the major powers and for local conflict. The last Ottoman sultan to wield serious power, Abdul Hamid I, said that the loss of these lands would be a deathblow to his empire and explicitly blamed the Armenians for it: “By taking away Greece and Rumania, Europe has cut off the feet of the Turkish state.”

“In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire began to disintegrate under the strain of economic failure, stalled reform, and nationalist agitation. Armenian peasants, who had lost their land and complained of oppressive administration, received promises of support from their Armenian brethren in the Russian Empire. Western supporters, such as British prime minister William Gladstone, complained to the sultan about the persecution of his Christian subjects. The Treaty of Berlin of 1878, dictated by the Western powers, all but broke up the empire and committed its government to protecting the Armenians, but on the ground the situation only got worse. Armenian revolutionary bands, known as fedayi, were formed. An Armenian rebellion in 1894 was crushed, triggering a series of massacres, ordered

by Sultan Abdul Hamid Il in 1895–96. According to one German observer, 88,000 Armenians were killed, and 546,000 were left destitute.”

“In 1908 the Young Turks deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid and brought in a brief era of constitutional government, with a multinational parliament. Then, after the Ottoman defeat in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the three most radical Young Turks, the “three Pashas” — interior minister Talat Pasha, minister of war Enver Pasha, and minister of the navy Cemal Pasha — gained power.

In 1914, these three took the Ottoman Empire into the First World War in alliance with Germany. Enver Pasha, who held extreme pan-Turkic beliefs, launched an invasion of the Caucasus that was designed to avenge past defeats and link up Turkish brethren from Azerbaijan to Central Asia (whether they wanted this or not). Enver met the Russian army, heavily supported by Armenians, in bitter wintry conditions at the railway terminus at Sarikamis, south of Kars, in January 1915, and suffered one of the worst defeats in military history. By one estimate, five-sixths of the Turkish Third Army — around 75,000 men — died. Among the Russians, 16,000 were killed or wounded; a further 12,000 were sickened, mostly from frostbite.

This defeat first inspired the Armenian rebels and then provoked a ferocious Turkish response in the town of Van. At the same time, the Young Turk government had launched what has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915. On April 24–a date Armenians now commemorate as Genocide Day — Talat Pasha ordered the arrest of several hundred leading Armenians in Constantinople, including many prominent intellectuals, such as Armenia’s most famous composer, Komitas. Many were executed.

Talat Pasha then gave orders for the mass deportation of the Armenians of Anatolia on the grounds that they were a threat to the survival of the Ottoman state. Ottoman troops and police gendarmes supervised the rounding up of Armenians and the confiscation of their property. Many men were killed on the spot; many women and children were forcibly converted to Islam; many more were deported on foot in death marches to the deserts of Syria. Anatolian Kurds killed, raped, and ravaged the convoys. In harrowing scenes, mothers gave up their children to Kurds or Bedouin rather than see them perish. At Der Zor in northwestern Syria, tens of thousands perished in open-air concentration camps; human bones and skulls are still reported to come to the surface there to this day. Between 150,000 and 300,000 Assyrian Christians suffered the same fate.

There are inevitably disputes about the numbers of dead. Drawing on church archives, Armenian historian Raymond Kevorkian calculates that there were 1.9 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire at the time the Genocide began. Already in 1918 there were estimations that one million of them had died. By 1922, it has been estimated, around 90 percent of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire, a group that had lived in these lands for many centuries, had been destroyed, deported, or forcibly converted to Islam. Donald Bloxham wrote, “Nowhere else during the First World War was the separatist nationalism of the few answered with the total destruction of the wider ethnic community from which the nationalists hailed.”

The deportations and killings of the Ottoman Armenians were the worst atrocity of World War I. The killings were widely reported at the time by journalists, whose reports were corroborated by European and American consuls and thousands of eyewitness testimonies. Some Ottoman officials responsible for particularly hideous massacres were prosecuted by the short-lived Allied administration that ruled Turkey after the end of the war. Why then is there still controversy about the issue? Debate continues in part because Armenians and their Russian backers exacted revenge on Muslims in Anatolia, creating an oral memory of atrocities that, although less extensive than the Genocide, left scars on the region. In 1919, for example, Kars Province was put under the administration of newly independent Armenia, to the despair of its Muslim inhabitants. American envoy General James Harbord, reported scenes of devastation caused by both sides:

Mutilation, violation, torture, and death have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages. Villages are in ruins, some having been destroyed when the Armenians fled or were deported; some during the Russian advance; some on the retreat of the Armenian irregulars and Russians after the fall of the Empire. Where the desperate character of the warfare with its reprisals of burning and destroying as one side and then the other advanced, has not destroyed the buildings, which are generally of abode, the wooden beams have been taken for fuel and the houses are ruined. In the territory untouched by war from which Armenians were deported the ruined villages are undoubtedly due to Turkish devilry, but where Armenians advanced and retired with the Russians their retaliatory cruelties unquestionably rivaled the Turks in their inhumanity.

Confusion also clings to the topic because from the 1920s it was half-forgotten for two generations. Surviving Armenians did not make it an issue of public politics until the 1960s, while the Republic of Turkey suppressed its recent history and the inconvenient fact that a new, largely homogeneous Turkish state had been founded at the expense of non-Turkish ethnic groups.

When the Armenian issue arose again in international politics in the 1960s and 1970s, it was complicated by two new factors. A campaign of terrorism conducted by two rival Armenian militant groups based in Lebanon resulted in the deaths of several dozen Turkish diplomats and many civilians. This associated Armenians internationally with terrorism, while in Turkey it reconstructed an image of Armenians, who had disappeared from public consciousness for fifty years, as a hostile security threat. In response to this a “denialist” Turkish historical literature was written for the first time. Simultaneously, Armenians themselves increasingly directed their efforts towards having the deportations labeled “genocide,” using the a term devised by Raphael Lemkin in the 1940s. Most scholars do use this term, but it has a heavy baggage and strong emotional associations with the Holocaust, thereby causing many Turks not just to reject the “genocide” term but to minimize the story of the Armenian massacres as a whole.

Since the first AKP government took office in 2002 in Turkey, much of Turkish society, if not the authorities themselves, has begun to look at the dark pages of the country’s history and acknowledge the crimes committed against the Armenians. Many progressive Kurdish politicians in particular have opened up on this issue and overseen the restoration of Armenian churches. A number of Turkish historians have enriched the scholarship of the period. A newly sophisticated analysis of what happened has explained — but not excused — the story of the Armenian Genocide by putting it in the context of World War I. Recent historians persuasively ascribe the massacres more to the radicalization of a group of desperate leaders within wartime than to an atavistic urge by Turks in general to eliminate Armenians. Ronald Suny has written, “Had there been no World War there would have been no genocide, not only because there would have been no ‘fog of war’ to cover up the events but because the radical sense of endangerment among Turks would not have been as acute.””

“After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in the October Revolution, the Russian army, while in possession of most of eastern Anatolia, simply dissolved on the ground. That left Eastern Anatolia and the Armenian and Georgian borderlands exposed to the Ottoman army as it prepared its next campaign.

It is worth emphasizing that in 1917, most of the Transcaucasian leaders did not want a break with Russia and said they would govern the region only until a new constitutional assembly was convened in Russia. They formed a new interim government, the Transcaucasian Commissariat, consisting of three Armenians, three Azerbaijanis, and three Georgians.”

“In March 1918, the Russian Bolshevik regime signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans and Ottomans, promising to cede to them large parts of Eastern Anatolia that had been under tsarist control, but the treaty was signed without consultation with the Caucasian countries themselves. The Transcaucasian parliamentary coalition, now called the Seim, faced the dilemma of how to survive the threat of the Ottoman Third Army, as Enver Pasha at the forefront again marched toward the Caucasus. First Erzerum and Ardahan were captured; then Batum fell on April 14.

On April 22, 1918, the Seim in Tiflis made a historic declaration, announcing the region’s separation from Russia and the formation of a new independent state, the Transcaucasian Federation. It was the only instance in history of a shared state for encompassing the entire South Caucasus, and it lasted only a month. The three main nationalities went into the project with completely different aims. The Armenians agreed to the move very reluctantly, afraid of an Ottoman conquest and not wishing formally to sever ties formally with Russia. The Azerbaijanis were enthusiastic about seceding from Russia and recapturing Baku with the help of the Turks. The Georgian leadership saw the declaration as an interim measure, and Zhordania himself abstained from voting on the resolution.

On April 25, 1918, Kars was abandoned, and the Ottoman army recovered it, after thirty years of Russian rule. At talks in Batum, the Ottomans demanded more territorial concessions from both the Georgians and the Armenians. The talks showed that the Transcaucasian Federation was untenable. The Azerbaijanis were happy to accept the Ottoman terms, while the Armenians said they amounted to destruction of their statehood. On May 21, the Ottoman army moved forward again and fought the battles of Sardarapat and Kara Kilise with the Armenians.

The Ottoman advance was staved off, and its army stopped twenty-five miles from Yerevan.

From the Georgian point of view, with one section of the new state supporting the Turkish advance and another part opposing it, the federation was now bankrupt. The Georgians had been negotiating secretly with Germany for an alliance that would guarantee their survival, and on May 26 they announced the formation of the new Georgian Democratic Republic. A new crimson, black, and white flag was raised in Tiflis alongside the red flag. The Georgians then signed a treaty of alliance with Germany, which gave the Germans the right to use its railways, occupy the port of Poti, and have a monopoly on mining the country’s mineral wealth.

Zhordania said the declaration of independence was an act of tragic historic necessity to defend Georgia from the Turkish threat. On May 28, both Azerbaijanis and Armenians then proclaimed independence, in the harshest possible circumstances. The Azerbaijani nationalists unveiled their new state in Tiflis, as Baku was still under Bolshevik control. They soon moved their new government to Ganja, transferring it to Baku only in September 1918, when the Baku Soviet fell. The declaration of an independent Armenia by Dashnak politicians in Tiflis was even more agonized. Independence effectively meant separation from the Armenian communities of Baku and Tiflis and the loss of Georgian economic and military support. The first Armenian statement on the matter on May 30 did not even mention the word “independence,” saying only: “The Armenian National Council declares itself to be the supreme and only administration for the Armenian provinces.”

The next issue was making terms with the Turks. Independent Georgia signed an agreement that the southern border of the new state would be established as defined by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The Armenians signed on to a deal that truncated what was left of their lands, giving the new republic a territory of only 4,500 square miles (12,000 square kilometers). That left them a state less than half the size of the present-day Republic of Armenia. (After the Turkish collapse in October 1918, a further 6,000 square miles were added.)”

“With the end of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire capitulated to the Allies under the Treaty of Mudros and agreed to withdraw all its troops from the Caucasus. The British now entered Azerbaijan and became the predominant foreign power in the Transcaucasus, overseeing all three governments and — importantly for them — the Baku-Batum pipeline.”

“Dashnak-ruled Armenia was the most miserable of the three new independent states. Most of its tsarist-era territory had been conquered by the Ottoman army in 1918, and there was perpetual conflict with Azerbaijan. Above all, there was the shadow of the massacres of Anatolia that had made Eastern Armenia home to 300,000 refugees, many of them starving. A Time correspondent called Aumenia in 1919 “the land of the stalking death.” In April 1920, Bechhofer traveled through a ruined country: “At all the stations on the line and in the surrounding villages, not a house remains whole, except, sometimes a solitary building, remarkable by contrast with the rest, where the Turkish commander himself was staying. The villages are masses of rubble; the stations wildernesses. Everywhere there is desolation, except where, among the ruins, new inhabitants are sheltering in misery.”

The reverse side of this was Armenia’s outburst of revenge toward its Muslim neighbors. General Andranik Toros Ozanian expelled tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis from Zangezur, where they had lived for centuries. Then, following the Ottoman collapse at the end of the First World War in October 1918, the Armenians were given possession of the former province of Kars. Colonel Rawlinson traveled through the region and sent a telegram to his superiors in Tiflis recommending that “in the interests of humanity the Armenians should not be left in independent command of the Moslem population, as, their troops being without discipline and not under effective control, atrocities were constantly being committed, for which we should with justice eventually be held to be morally responsible.”

The plight of Armenia attracted particular sympathy in the United States, which basically took over the job of feeding the population. Herbert Hoover, the future president, took charge of food relief operations as head of the American Relief Administration because, in his words, Armenia had “only a shadow of a government.” He wrote to President Wilson in June 1919 that 200,000 people had died of starvation, describing reports of the Armenian situation as “the most appalling that have yet developed out of [the| war.” Americans ran what was the largest orphanage in the world in the town of Alexandropol (now Gyumri) right up until the end of the 1920s. For a generation afterward, American children were told to remember “the starving Armenians” when they did not finish the food on their plates.”

“For the Bolsheviks, there was simply no question of leaving the southern Caucasus alone. There were many Caucasians in the Bolshevik movement, including Stalin, who dreamed of spreading the revolution to their homelands. There was also Russia’s traditional interest in the Caucasus as its southern flank and gateway to Asia and the Middle East.”

“The Bolsheviks initially announced that they were not threatening the independence of the Caucasian republics. When Baku fell, Lenin sent a telegram congratulating “the liberation of the laboring masses of the independent Azerbaijani republic.” On May 7 1920, his government recognized the independence of Menshevik Georgia in what was soon to look like a cynical maneuver. The Georgian Bolshevik Party was legalized, and prisoners were freed from jail. In an independent Georgia, representatives of Bolshevik Russia and the Western powers briefly coexisted.

Armenia’s borders continued to expand and contract dramatically. In the summer of 1920, Armenians were driven from the disputed territory of Nakhichevan, but this was also the high point of their ambitions in eastern Anatolia. On August 10, the Treaty of Sèvres was signed between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, effectively partitioning the empire. Independent Armenia was to be a major beneficiary, thanks to the lobbying of Woodrow Wilson, and with the treaty giving it a vast new state, comprising much of eastern Anatolia, including Trabzon on the Black Sea. However,

“Wilsonian Armenia” existed only on paper and had little relationship with the situation on the ground. The Ottoman government only had authority in a small area, and Kemal’s nationalist administration rejected the treaty and set itself the goal of ousting the Western allies from Turkish soil. In the autumn of 1920, Kemal launched a new offensive in Anatolia, again capturing Kars, and then Alexandropol (Gyumri), and threatening to overrun the whole of Armenia. The Armenians were forced to repudiate the Treaty of Sèvres and accept the loss of territory under the Treaty of Alexandropol on December 2.

At the same moment, the Bolshevik Eleventh Army crossed into Armenia and captured Yerevan on December 4, after only a brief show of resistance from the Dashnak government. Armenian independence was given up as the price of protection from the Turks, and the new Soviet Republic of Armenia was declared. The Dashnaks had one final stand in the spring of 1921; with the Red Army tied down in Georgia, they mounted a rebellion and briefly recaptured Yerevan, until the Bolsheviks again reestablished control. Then the Treaty of Moscow between Bolshevik Russia and Kemalist Turkey on March 21, 1921, finally drew the frontiers of present-day Armenia. The Armenians were forced to renounce claims to the town of Igdir, the old city of Ani, and Mount Ararat.

By New Year’s Day 1921, only independent Georgia remained free of the Bolsheviks. Georgia’s Western patrons had pulled out all their troops. They belatedly recognized Georgia’s de jure independence on January 27, 1921, but this was an empty gesture. The next day, Stalin wrote to Orjonikidze that an assault on Georgia should begin “after the treaty with England.” The British government was negotiating a treaty, eventually signed on March 16, that recognized Russian influence “with regard to countries which formed part of the former Russian Empire and have recently become independent” in return for promises not to incite “any of the peoples of Asia to actions hostile to British interests any more, especially in India and Afghanistan.”

By then, the Red Army had already entered Georgia and captured Tiflis, on February 25, after using an uprising in the Armenian-populated district of Borchalo as a pretext to intervene. The Red Army then conquered western Georgia and, with the support of many Abkhaz, Abkhazia. The terms of Menshevik capitulation were relatively mild and took into account the relative weakness of the Georgian Bolsheviks on the ground. Mensheviks were offered an amnesty, and many of them agreed to join the new regime. Menshevik troops continued to be paid and were allowed to keep their uniforms. Another key factor was the fate of Batum, the main port of the Caucasus, which was again threatened by the Turks. Georgian solidarity trumped ideological differences as the ousted Mensheviks helped the Bolsheviks to recover the city from a two-day Turkish occupation. On the same night that Batum was retaken, March 17–18, the Menshevik govemment, led by Zhordania, sailed into exile on an Italian ship.”

“The mirage of Caucasian independence vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. In a sense, the three countries had not so much had independence as a forced decoupling from Russia; when the renewed Russian state decided to come back, it eventually got its way. What remained within the region was a vague collective memory of injustice, civil war, and stifled statehood. Even after 1991, the new post-Soviet national leaders — many of them Communist Party officials who had jumped ship at the right moment — mostly only paid lip-service to their forebears of 1918. Redjeb Jordania, the son of the leader of Georgia’s first independent state, wrote that he returned to Tbilisi in 1990 to find “ignorance and indifference” about the republic his father had led. The younger Jordania attributed this in part to antagonism towards a state that had been both socialist and secular. In 2004, Georgia’s new government further rejected the link by replacing the flag and national anthem of the First Republic that had been adopted at independence. In all three countries, it transpired, the new elites were far more marked by the Soviet experience than by the only dimly remembered experience of the first republics.”

The Soviet Caucasus

“In the spring of 1921, the Bolsheviks were masters of the Caucasus. Their takeover of the region was different in many ways from the Russian conquest in the nineteenth century. Many of the leading Bolsheviks, beginning with Stalin himself, were also Caucasians. They overcame strong resistance from the defenders of the national governments but also had support from workers, peasants, and small national groups. They themselves called their conquest a liberation from the captivity of oppressive nationalist bourgeois regimes and from “Great Power Russian chauvinism.”

It is tempting but misleading to see the seventy-year Soviet experiment as just a second Russian imperial project. Ultimate power resided in Moscow and Russia played the role of big brother, but the Soviet Union was complex and contradictory. The Soviet state modernized, terrorized, and Russified the Caucasus but also gave it new kinds of nationalism. It also went through radically different phases, from the Bolshevik would-be utopia of international class liberation to the Stalinist authoritarian state of the 1930s to the corrupt, Brezhnev-era multinational state. Modernization meant both the destruction of old traditions and emancipation for women and technological progress. Policy toward the nationalities veered from the implementation of a liberal “affirmative action empire,” which gave new opportunities to non-Russian nations, to genocide. While some small ethnic groups benefited hugely from “nativization” programs, others were subjected to deportation and mass terror.

One constant feature of Bolshevik-Soviet rule was that the borders of the Transcaucasus were closed and the outside world shut out. This helped form a new kind of Soviet Caucasian identity. As an example, a wide gulf opened up between the ordinary Azerbaijanis who lived in Soviet Azerbaijan on the one hand and those who lived on the far side of the Araxes River in Iran on the other. In 1920, these people led very similar existences in terms of family life, religious practice, and culture. By the time the Soviet Union ended in 1991, Iranian Azerbaijanis had kept most of those cultural practices, while Soviet Azerbaijanis had been entirely altered by the Soviet experiment. Millions of Azerbaijanis had served in the Soviet armed forces, learned to drink vodka, studied in universities or technical colleges, or worked in Russia — and had never set foot inside a working mosque. Standards of health care and literacy were undoubtedly higher in Soviet Azerbaijan, and women had far greater opportunities, but Soviet Azerbaijanis also lacked basic political and cultural freedoms.”

“The eventual compromise was a Transcaucasian Federation that would have a unified economic structure but still maintain within it 3 distinct republics.”

“The Transcaucasian Federation was set up in March 1922. The Georgian Bolsheviks were resentful, and in an unprecedented show of defiance, they resigned en masse in October 1922. Two months later, the Soviet Union was created, with the new Transcaucasian Federation, or ZSFSR, as one of its constituent parts. The dispute between Lenin and Stalin and their supporters was both political and personal. On the political level it was about the nature of the new Soviet state, about the “national question” in other words, what distinct rights the different nationalities of the new state should have — and about the best way to reorganize the Transcaucasus. The dying Lenin accused the Georgian Stalin and Orjonikidze of being “Great Russian chauvinists” and ignoring and ignoring national sentiments in the Caucasus. On the personal level, the clash was the first phase in the so-called Georgian Affair, in which the dying Lenin, worried about what the quarrel told him about Stalin’s character, tried to block Stalin’s approval as his successor but failed.”

“The Transcaucasian Federation took on mainly economic functions. Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan survived as separate Soviet republics with their own governments, parliaments, party structures, and universities. The result was that the national elites remained in charge and a residual sense of nationhood was maintained. An Azerbaijani, Nariman Narimanov, was made leader of Bolshevik Azerbaijan in 1921, for example, in contrast to the Baku commune of 1918, which had been multinational and led by an Armenian. At the same time, moves were made to empower the region’s small indigenous nationalities, such as the Abkhaz and Ossetians, who had mostly welcomed the Bolsheviks. The Abkhaz were initially given their own Soviet republic, associated with Georgia by treaty, and then had their status downgraded to that of “autonomous republic” in 1931. The Muslim Ajarians had their own autonomous republic, and the South Ossetians their own “autonomous region.” Armenia, the most homogeneous of the three republics, did not have any autonomous territories. In Azerbaijan, the borders of the new Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region were drawn to give it a 94 percent Armenian majority. The exclave of Nakhichevan, which did not share a border with the rest of Azerbaijan but had a clear Azerbaijani majority, was made into an autonomous republic.

There has been much scholarly debate about the impact of the Bolsheviks’ decision to devise an “ethnofederal system” for the Soviet Union, which created autonomous territories on ethnic principles. In the Caucasus, scholars have observed, this preserved national divisions, which eventually fractured the Soviet state and turned into armed conflicts. It could be argued, how ever, that the Caucasus set the blueprint for the Soviet Union, not the other way around. In other words, the fragile situation in the Caucasus in 1921, still broken by numerous interethnic conflicts, may have caused the Bolsheviks to invent the ethnofederal system under duress.

It was also a Caucasian, Stalin, who presided over this complex construction once it had been created. His approach was both ruthless and pragmatic. The primary aim appears to have been to build a system that would survive the shocks of both internal and external threats. National interests were balanced out and could eventually be eliminated. Small nationalities would be modernized, with Russia the engine pulling them into the future.”

“Once Soviet power had been consolidated in the Caucasus, Stain’s all-controlling instincts began to emerge. Despite the promises he had made to respect the “independence” of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, he abolished their independent institutions and slowly crushed all dissent. Armenia’s Dashnak and Azerbaijan’s Musavat parties were both dissolved in 1923. Resistance was strongest in Georgia. The new regime abolished the Menshevik Party and redistributed land much more radically.

In response came an uprising in western Georgia in August 1924, which the Bolsheviks extinguished and used as an excuse for mass repression: as many as 4,000 people were killed, and thousands more were sent into exile in the far north of Russia. “Only with the language of revolutionary, merciless power can one talk to the pitiful cowardly Mensheviks,” declared a leading Georgian Bolshevik in the pitiless language of the new era.

The repression was done in the name of modernization. Despite the brutality of the new regime, the 1920s was an era of nation-building and economic reconstruction in the Caucasus. In Armenia and Azerbaijan in particular, there was a message that new nations were being built out of the chaos of the past. In Azerbaiian, high hopes were invested in the idea of a new, progressive Muslim republic. Mosques were closed and women ordered to tear off their veils.”

“The late 1920s were the heyday of what Terry Martin calls the “affirmative action empire,” with the implementation of the new ideology of korenizatsia (literally “rooting,” or “nativization”) and the sponsoring of programs to modernize and assist the non-Russian Soviet nationalities. The Azeri, Abkhaz, Ossetian, and Lezgin written languages were all given a new Roman alphabet. Large numbers of people received an education for the first time in their native languages. The Communists declared that in the first ten years of Soviet rule in Georgia, half a million people had been taught to read and write. In 1940, Armenia claimed that the entire adult population was literate for the first time.”

“Beginning with the korenizatsia program, the Soviet authorities actually defined and strengthened national identities. As Ronald Suny put it in 1993, “rather than a melting pot, the Soviet Union became an incubator of new nations.” The tsarist empire had categorized its people by religion, mother tongue, social class, and regional location. The Bolsheviks held that ‘ “nationality” was a useful transitional phase between the backward culture of small ethnic groups and an advanced state of socialism. But the national identities persisted, and the transnational socialist future never came. As Martin writes, “in order to implement affirmative action programs, monitor their success, delineate national territories, assign children to programs, the Soviet state constantly asked its citizens for their nationality.” So to be “Ossetian” or “Azerbaijani” acquired real meaning for the first time, and this category became a formal badge of identity when it was written into the first Soviet internal passports in 1932.

There was a hierarchy of nations. Two of the three main nationalities of the Transcaucasus, the Armenians and Georgians, were classified as “advanced” Western nationalities, alongside Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, and Germans, while Azerbaijanis fell into the category of nations in formation, requiring developmental aid. In practice this meant that, as in tsarist Russia, Armenians and Georgians could advance more quickly up the Soviet career ladder. Two Karabakh Armenians from village backgrounds were cases in point. One, Levon Mirzoyan, served as head of the Communist Party first in Azerbaijan and then in Kazakhstan; the other, Suren Sadunts, served as first Party secretary in Tajikistan in 1935–36. Both were shot in Stalin’s purges. It would have been impossible for a Kazakh or an Azerbaijani to be given an equivalent post in Armenia or Georgia.”

“Beria began to integrate the Transcaucasus into the rest of the Soviet economy with a policy of industrialization, and he promoted its attractions as the “Soviet South,” a place of exotic produce and vacation resorts where the Soviet worker could relax. In an era when Soviet leaders were obsessed with America, they promoted the subtropical Transcaucasus as the new “Soviet Florida.”

Politically speaking, it was no Florida. Beria exerted total control and from 1936 unleashed the local version of Stalin’s Great Terror. Most of the old Georgian Bolsheviks were killed — among the many victims were Budu Mdviani, the recipient of Lenin’s last letter, and Abel Enukidze, the godfather of Stalin’s first wife. More Georgian Mensheviks probably died in their beds than did Georgian Bolsheviks. Beria either personally killed or forced into suicide the Armenian party chief, Agahasi Khanjian. He poisoned Nestor Lakoba, the party chief of Abkhazia. Fear was spread with the help of secret policemen, who committed hideous tortures in Tbilisi’s Ortachala Prison. Whole families were arrested. In her moving memoir of the Stalin era, Adile Abbas-oglu, an Abkhaz woman who married the brother-in-law of Lakoba, tells how Beria systematically arrested all of Lakoba’s extended family as “enemies of the people” and had most of them killed. She herself endured ten years of prison and exile but managed to survive. So, for a while, did Lakoba’s young son Rauf, but Beria was meticulous. According to one version, Rauf reached the age of eighteen in prison and wrote to Beria on the outbreak of war in 1941, asking to be sent to the front; he was executed instead. Yet Beria had known Rauf as a child, once giving him a book by Jules Verne as a birthday present.”

“The most sinister side of the change was that some nationalities were deemed to be unworthy of membership in the new Soviet family. As early as 1923, the new regime had built high security, fourteen-mile-deep “frontier zones” along the new Soviet borders. But certain national groups living near the borders were still suspected of harboring sympathies for foreign powers. This was the official justification for a program of mass deportations between 1938 and 1949. Stalin and Beria organized the deportation of almost all ethnic groups with a Turkic connection, among them Crimean Tatars; North Caucasian Karachais, Balkars, and Kalmyks from the Caspian Sea; and Georgia’s Meskhetian Turks. In the Caucasus, they also deported Kurds, Armenian Hemshins, Chechens, Ingush, and Pontic Greeks. The execution of this policy virtually amounted to genocide. Soviet secret police troops closed off an entire region, rounded up hundreds of thousands of people — women and children as well as men, Red Army soldiers included — evicted them from their homes, crammed them into disease-ridden cattle-trucks, and sent them into permanent exile in Kazakhstan or Siberia. Their homelands were abolished, their cemeteries dug up, and their cultures erased from the official record. As many as a quarter of the deportees died en route or never returned.

Most of the deportees were permitted to return home in the 1950s by Nikita Khrushchev.”

“Bilingualism was much lower than might have been expected after fifty years of Soviet rule. In 1970, only 56 percent of people in Tbilisi and 63 percent in Yerevan claimed fluency in Russian as well as their native languages. Nor were ethnic Russians themselves prominent in local society. After 1970, the absolute number of ethnic Russians in the Transcaucasus began to fall, and by 1989 they constituted only 1.5 percent, 5.6 percent, and 7.4 percent of the populations of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, respectively. As a result, the rights of ethnic Russians did not become an issue in the post-Soviet South Caucasus as they did in the Baltic states or Kazakhstan.

The overall effect of the diminished Russian presence was that by the 1960s, while the Soviet Union had imposed a façade of uniformity, this masked great regional differences. For many Russians, the image of the Transcaucasus was that of an unthreatening, exotic area of their common Soviet state, a holiday destination or a repository of quaint traditions. A series of comic Russian films, such as Caucasian Captive Girl, poked gentle fun at Caucasian accents and customs. Georgians had a reputation for owning large cars and being good boyfriends for daughters. But in the Transcaucasus itself, very different processes were afoot — and generally in local languages that Russians could not under- stand. The locals were taking control, and their attitudes toward Russians shaded into contempt.

All of this hollowed out the Soviet state from within. An increasingly independent political elite operated within an economy that enriched it in the short term but was parasitical and eventually unworkable. Essentially, the Soviet state in the Transcaucasus continued functioning thanks to inertia, subsidies from the center, and a Russian-led security apparatus. But once Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia stopped being the margins and wanted to become centers themselves, they found that many of the essential attributes of statehood were missing. Worse, many of the qualities that made the Soviet Caucasus a relatively dynamic place — entrepreneurialism, tax evasion, creative resistance to authority — would only undermine the efforts of these republics to become new independent states.”

The Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict

“In 1992, after the Soviet Union had been dissolved, the Karabakh dispute turned into an interstate conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. By the time a ceasefire was declared in 1994, the Armenians had won a victory on the battlefield, 20,000 people had been killed, and more than a million people had lost their homes.

The story of the Karabakh conflict is still largely the story of modern Armenia and Azerbaijan. More than twenty years on, as of this writing, the conflict is still unresolved and the center of a big international security tangle. Nagorny Karabakh itself, the highland region at the center of the quarrel, is under full Armenian control and has declared itself an independent republic, although its independence is recognized by no one, not even Armenia. Armenian forces also wholly or partially control seven districts of Azerbaijan around the enclave full of ruined towns and villages, in what they call a “security zone.” Branching out from the official Armenia-Azerbaijan border, a ceasefire line runs like a scar for more than 100 miles across the South Caucasus through what is still the internationally recognized territory of Azerbaijan, with heavily equipped armies in trenches on either side. The socioeconomic costs of this conflict have been huge. Armenia’s two main borders remain closed. The exclave of Nakhichevan is cut off from the rest of Azerbaijan.”

“More than a million Armenians and Azerbaijanis were displaced by the upheavals of 1988–94. Together with the refugees from Georgia’s conflicts, this has made for 1.4 million displaced people out of an official population of about 16 million people in the South Caucasus, or almost 9% of the total.”

“Nagorny Karabakh is on the eastern side of the mountainous watershed that defines present-day Armenia. It has served as the summer pastures for the Muslim shepherds who spend the winters in the plains below. For a long time the territory probably had a Muslim-majority population in the summer, when the Muslim shepherds were in the high pastures, and a settled Christian majority in the winter, when the shepherds were in the plains.”

“As every other foreign power had, the Bolsheviks wavered between the competing claims of the two communities. Meeting in Tbilisi over the course of two days in July 1921, the leading Bolsheviks, headed by Stalin, leaned towards the Armenian claim on one day but the next day ruled in favor of Soviet Azerbaijan. Two years later, the new Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region was founded, with its borders drawn so as to give it a population that was 94 percent Armenian. The capital of the new region was made the new town of Stepanakert, named after the Armenian Bolshevik Stepan Shaumian and built around the old village of Khankendi.

The 1921 decision of the Caucasus Bureau is a touchstone in the historical debate over the Karabakh issue. Armenians say that Stalin “gave” Karabakh to the Azerbaijanis, while Azerbaijanis maintain that the decision merely recognized a preexisting reality. From the Bolsheviks’ standpoint in 1921, it was a logical decision. Consolidating Soviet Azerbaijan at that time was a much bigger priority than satisfying weak and devastated Armenia, and their new ally Kemalist Turkey also supported the Azerbaijani claims. As good Marxists, the Bolsheviks also saw an economic rationale in placing Nagorny Karabakh within Azerbaijan. The move has been called a case of imperialist divide-and-rule politics, but in making Azerbaijan a single economic unit in which farmers could move their flocks between the plains and highlands of Karabakh without crossing a republican border, the Bolsheviks were actually more interested in what could be called “combine and rule.” Moreover, there was no passable road at the time between Armenia and Nagorny Karabakh.

Having placed Nagory Karabakh within Azerbaijan, the Bolsheviks drew the boundaries of the new autonomous region in 1923 to give it an overwhelmingly Armenian population. Only one pocket of territory with a large Azerbaijani population, the semiruined city of Shusha, remained. In the long term, this was an arrangement with a strong structural flaw, in that it made Nagorny Karabakh a place of uncertain allegiances — an Armenian province within the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan but not far from the Republic of Armenia. Moreover, the map was drawn such that the borders of the new region came close to but did not touch Armenia. In between lay the Lachin region of Azerbaijan (initially known as Red Kurdistan). This eventually had a crucial bearing on the geography of the conflict, as the Karabakh Armenians did everything they could to build a land bridge with Armenia.

In Soviet times, Nagorny Karabakh turned into a backwater. Rumblings of Armenian discontent were audible only to those listening very carefully. In 1945, 1965, and 1977 there were petitions for the region to be united with Soviet Armenia. The local Armenans complained that they had no Armenian-language television and that their church monuments were being allowed to fall into disrepair. The province was relatively poorer than Soviet Armenia but not much worse off than most of Azerbaijan. Its demographic balance slowly changed in favor of Azerbaijanis: in 1926, there were 117,000 Armenians and 13,000 Azerbaijanis; by 1979, the two groups numbered 123,000 and 37,000, respectively. Azerbaijanis settled in new towns and villages, while many Armenians emigrated in search of a better life. Many Karabakh Armenians, unable to get on the career ladder in Azerbaijan, ended up studying in Moscow or Yerevan. A long-term effect of this was that they came to feel more of an allegiance to the Soviet Union as a whole and less loyalty to Soviet Azerbaijan.”

“When Nagorny Karabakh became the Soviet Union’s first dissident region in February 1988, it took almost everybody by surprise. Within the space of a week, the Karabakh Armenians broke a series of Soviet taboos, staging public rallies, strikes, and effectively a public vote of no confidence in Moscow. Many Azerbaijanis have seen a high-level conspiracy in this. They argue that a remote province such as Karabakh could only have risen up and challenged the status quo on the critical issue of national borders after receiving strong positive signals from the top. This speaks to Azerbaijani fears about the power of the Armenian lobby — and Gorbachev did indeed have two Armenian advisors. Yet the fact that Gorbachev decisively rejected the Karabakhis’ demand suggests that there was no conspiracy, but only a tangle of misunderstandings and mixed messages, with the Karabakh Armenians and their Armenian lobbyists believing they had more support in Moscow than they actually did.

On February 20, 1988, after a series of petitions had been presented in Moscow, Armenian deputies in the local soviet voted to ask the central authorities to facilitate the transfer of the region to Soviet Armenia. Azerbaijani deputies refused to vote. The Politburo immediately rejected the request and said the soviet’s actions “contradict the interests of the working people in Soviet Azerbaijan and Armenia and damage interethnic relations.” The local soviet’s bold resolution had repercussions for the whole Soviet Union. Soviets, the basic building blocks of the USSR’s system of government, had nominal power but were in practice supposed to be rubber-stamping bodies. Once the Karabakh Soviet challenged that consensus and dusted off Lenin’s concept of “all power to the soviets,” the system faced paralysis. It was the first shot in a “war of laws” between Soviet institutions.”

“Dissatisfied with Moscow’s handling of the national issue, Armenians and Azerbaijanis were burning their party cards and openly defying the central authorities. Karabakh also exposed the weakness of the interconnected Soviet command economy. One of the first strikes in the Soviet Union in almost seventy years, at an electronic parts factory in the Karabakhi capital, Stepanakert, slowed or halted production in sixty-five radio and television factories across the Soviet Union. As soon as the rigid, authoritarian Soviet system was challenged in a serious manner, it suddenly looked very brittle.

The dispute unleashed huge pent-up nationalist passions. Two young Azerbaijanis were killed when a protest march toward Nagorny Karabakh was stopped by police. In Yerevan, once the Karabakh issue had broken to the surface, it awakened a sleeping giant of Armenian national sentiment, or hai dat. Every day greater and greater crowds attended rallies in Opera Square in which protestors chanted the three syllables “Gha-ra-bagh!” On February 25, more than a million people — more than a quarter of the population of the entire republic — turned out. One of the organizers described Opera Square as a “magnetic field.” Ordinary people felt they had a cause they could put their hearts into.

Communist Party officials were heckled or listened to in silence, and a new political force, the “Karabakh Committee,” gained authority instead. Although their initial demands were rejected, Armenians felt a surge of confidence. Soon, the members of the Karabakh Committee, such as Yerevan intellectual Levon Ter-Petrosian, began to raise other political issues besides Karabakh.

There was far less unanimity in Azerbaijan as to the right way forward. Was it right to reaffirm loyalty to Moscow as the guarantor of Azerbaijan’s integrity? Or was it better to fight the Armenians in their own game? Azerbaijan, which was much more ethnically and socially diverse than Armenia, was divided. Azerbaijanis were also resentful that Moscow intellectuals, including Andrei Sakharov, virtually unanimously backed the Armenians. For years, Azerbaijanis were far less effective in getting their message across on the Karabakh issue than the much better organized Armenians.

Azerbaijan was then hit by a cataclysm when the worst inter-ethnic violence in the peacetime Soviet Union for almost seventy years occurred in the town of Sumgait. In February 1988, as tensions rose over Karabakh, hundreds of ethnic Azerbaijanis left southern Armenia for Azerbaijan, complaining that they had been forced out or beaten up. The party leader in Baku moved them on to Sumgait, an overcrowded workers’ town on the Caspian Sea. Rallies were held denouncing Armenians. On the evening of February 28, an angry crowd marched through the center of the town and began attacking ethnic Armenians in their homes. An orgy of mob violence was unleashed: apartments were burned and ransacked, and ordinary Armenians were attacked, raped, and murdered. It was twenty-four hours before Soviet troops retook the center of the town, which had come to resemble a war zone.

In the tense situation in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Sumgait pogroms caused a sudden and irreparable meltdown in ethnic relations. The region had rediscovered the mob violence of 1905. The death toll in Sumgait was thirty-two, twenty-six Armenians and six Azerbaijanis, the latter probably rioters killed by Soviet troops. Hundreds more, including many soldiers, were injured. Almost all of the 14,000 Armenians of Sumgait chose to flee the city. The temperature in Armenia shot up as Armenians denounced what they called a new genocide.”

“After the Sumgait pogroms, Armenia and Azerbaijan were set on a collision course, which the Soviet leadership failed to halt. An officially sanctioned exchange of populations began that altered centuries of coexistence. Tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis left Armenia for Azerbaijan under duress, and tens of thousands of Armenians went the other way. In most cases the deportations were peaceful, but many people were beaten and intimidated, and deaths were reported. Azerbaijan sprang into political life with the holding of mass demonstrations in Baku’s vast Lenin Square.

On December 7, 1988, a massive earthquake in northern Armenia virtually destroyed the town of Spitak and caused devastation over a wide area. Around 25,000 people were killed. The disaster drew sympathy from all over the world and changed Armenia overnight, bringing international organizations and diaspora groups into the homeland. Gorbachev broke off a visit to the United Nations in New York to visit the earthquake zone and made what was his only trip to the Transcaucasus during his entire tenure as Soviet leader.”

“As refugees had moved back and forth and violence had flared. Baku had just about managed to keep its status as a haven of multiethnic tolerance. Tens of thousands of ethnic Armenians were still living there in 1989. They now became the next victims of extreme nationalism, targeted by Popular Front activists and Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia. Events reached a head at the turn of the year in 1990. On January 13, anti-Armenian pogroms broke out in Baku. As in Sumgait, there were appalling scenes of savagery, and many Armenians were rescued by their neighbors.

More than ninety people died. Many thousands survived because of an evacuation operation that took frightened, freezing refugees in ferries across the Caspian Sea. Within a couple of days, Baku’s long Armenian history had been abruptly ended.

This was only the first chapter of Baku’s “Black January.” The Popular Front had effectively won control of the streets, and the local Communist Party was powerless. The Politburo decided to send in the army. Shortly after midnight on January 20, tanks rolled into the city, followed by troops. A new tragedy unfolded. Civilians were shot at, and cars crushed. Some militants returned fire, and the city became a battle zone. At least 130 citizens of Baku and 21 soldiers were killed. The army’s intervention was a moment of mass trauma for Azerbaijan and the worst single act of bloodshed of Gorbachev’s perestroika era. Although the Soviet authorities won back physical control of Baku, they basically lost Azerbaijan in the process. Thousands of people publicly burned their Communist Party cards amid scenes of mass mourning.”

“Following Black January, the year 1990 saw Moscow cast off its mediating role. The Soviet leadership intervened much more directly to support Azerbaijan, while Armenia was by now a leading rebel in the Soviet system. This rebel status helped Azerbaijan in the short term but worked in Armenia’s favor in the long run. Later that year, Armenia became the first republic in the Soviet Union to elect a non-Communist government when it chose Levon Ter-Petrosian as speaker of the Supreme Soviet and de facto leader of the republic. The new authorities began both to build new institutions and to equip Armenian insurgents in Karabakh for an armed struggle. Polyanichko was handed the authority to take charge of Nagorny Karabakh and defeat the Armenian insurgency, with the support of Azerbaijani special police units and Soviet troops. In the summer of 1991, they waged a mini-civil war (it came to be known by its Soviet code name, Operation Ring) against the Armenian guerrillas in which the main victims were ordinary Armenian villagers.

The Soviet Azerbaijani strategy was beginning to squeeze the Armenians, but it was spectacularly derailed by the failed coup d’état in Moscow in August 1991. Polyanichko was discredited by being close to the coup plotters and forced to leave Azerbaijan. The Armenians were better able to exploit the power vacuum than the Azerbaijanis. They had been gearing up for independence for three years, while Azerbaijan had not built any new institutions. Azerbaijan rather mechanically declared independence on August 30, 1991, but the same leadership, led by party boss Mutalibov, stayed in charge. Mutalibov was elected independent Azerbaijan’s first president in a ballot in which he was the only candidate on September 8. Armenia was a few days behind, but much better prepared. On September 21, it held a referendum on independence that it had been planning for months; the vote was overwhelmingly in favor. On October 16, Ter-Petrosian was elected Armenia’s first president.

The independence of Armenia and Azerbaijan — soon to be recognized internationally — made Nagorny Karabakh the subject of an interstate dispute. It was de jure part of Azerbaijan but mostly under Armenian control. This posed a challenge to the Yerevan government: newly independent Armenia did not want to be accused of wanting to annex part of newly independent Azerbaijan. This was one reason that in September 1991 the Armenians of Nagorny Karabakh — officially numbering just 140,000 people — declared independence as a new state separate from Azerbaijan. Armenia did not recognize the independence of Karabakh but unofficially more or less controlled the region’s government and armed forces. To this day, the two territories, one recognized and one unrecognized, continue to operate in a strangely choreographed tandem.

In November 1991, the new Azerbaijani parliament, containing many opposition deputies, voted to abolish the autonomous status of Nagorny Karabakh altogether and make it an ordinary province of Azerbaijan. They also voted to rename Stepanakert Khankendi. The Karabakh Armenians responded by holding a referendum on independence on December 10–boycotted by the Azerbaijani population — with 99 percent of voters casting their ballots in favor. In this black-and-white world of contradictory realities, war was all but inevitable when the Soviet Union was formally dissolved on December 31, 1991.”

“All the wars of the South Caucasus are case studies of the strange phenomenon whereby neighbors who have coexisted peacefully for years end up fighting one another. Karabakh is a striking example. One village named Tug in the south of Karabakh had been home to people of both communities, with only a small stream dividing them. At first, the Armenians and Azerbaijanis of Tug said that the dispute would not affect them; then they retreated to their own half of the village, with some families being broken up; finally, in 1991, the Azerbaijanis were driven out by force.

The problem can be described as “mutual insecurity.” In tsarist times, pogroms had broken out when the regime had weakened. In Soviet times, order had been maintained by a central “policeman,” but when that law enforcer withdrew, the two national groups turned to their own armed men to protect them. Then in 1991 the Soviet armed forces collapsed into indiscipline, arming both sides and providing hundreds of “guns for hire.” This helped elevate a low-intensity conflict into an all-out war fought with tanks and artillery.

Another answer to the puzzle of neighbors fighting one another is that generally it was not they who actually started the conflict. Many Armenians and Azerbaijanis, like the people of Tug, did their best to resist the slide toward war. In the spring of 1991, the revolutionary California-born Armenian warrior Monte Melkonian was sent on a commission down Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan to prepare villages for impending conflict. He got frustrated as villagers asked him and other would-be defenders to leave, saying they did not want to fight their Azerbaijani neighbors.

Moreover, although ordinary Armenians and Azerbaijanis lived side by side, the views of their intellectual elites were sharply different. In 1988, nationalist intellectuals played a negative role by disseminating narratives of hate. The Armenian writer Zori Balayan wrote that the Azerbaijanis were “Turks” who had no history of their own. The Azerbaijani historian Ziya Buniatov wrote an inflammatory pamphlet suggesting that the Armenians themselves had been behind the killing of Armenians in Sumgait.

After the intellectuals came the men of violence. As the Soviet security apparatus withered, the initiative was handed to people who have been called “entrepreneurs of violence.” They were people who were often marginal figures in society but willing or able to fight. Violence became self-fueling. In the later war in Abkhazia, much of the most brutal fighting would be done by people from outside Abkhazia itself — North Caucasians on the Abkhaz side, incoming Georgian paramilitaries on the Georgian side.”

“There were three main reasons for the eventual Armenian victory: the Armenians were a more effective fighting force, the Azerbaijanis were more disunited and disorganized, and the Armenians benefited more from erratic Russian assistance.”

“The first phase of the conflict in 1992 was a chaotic scramble to capture pockets of territory inside Nagorny Karabakh, which resulted in its worst massacre. The Azerbaijanis tried to smash Stepanakert into submission with Grad missiles, causing mass casualties as hundreds of civilians sheltered in cold, dark basements. The Armenians bombarded Shusha, but less effectively. For the Armenians, the strategic objective was to break Stepanakert out of isolation and capture the only airfield near the Azerbaijani village of Khojali. On the night of February 25–26, the Armenians began their attack on Khojali, assisted by the remnants of the Soviet tank regiment. About 3,000 people were living in Khojali. The village’s road access had been cut off for four months, and it was only defended by about 160 lightly armed men. Early in the morning, both civilians and fighters fled through the town’s one remaining exit down a valley ankle-deep in snow. Outside the village of Nakhichevanik, they were met by a wall of gunfire from Armenian fighters. Wave after wave of fleeing men, women, and children were cut down. The official Azerbaijani parliamentary investigation into the killings later concluded that 485 people had died. Even taking into account that this included Azerbaijani militiamen returning fire and some people who died of cold in the woods, this still made it by far the worst atrocity of the Karabakh war.

For several days, the Khojali killings were barely reported on in Azerbaijan as the Mutalibov government tried to suppress what had happened. Slowly, however, word got out, and when a film of the aftermath, revealing a hillside littered with bodies, was shown in the Azerbaijani parliament, the anger was so intense that President Mutalibov was forced to resign. Thousands of men volunteered to fight. Over the years, Khojali has become a touchstone for Azerbaijanis’ record of their suffering. Its anniversary has been marked as a day of mourning, and pictures of the dead bodies of Khojali are posted on websites and even shown in schools.

On the other side, the killings at Khojalu (as they called the village) blotted the Armenians’ reputation as the victims in the conflict. Many Armenians still deny that their soldiers killed civilians at Khojali, despite plenty of supporting evidence. Human Rights Watch monitors published eyewitness accounts of survivors, while the Moscow human rights group Memorial concluded, “In carrying out the military operation to seize the town of Khojali mass violence against the population of this town took place… The mass killing of peaceful civilians in the ‘free corridor’ zone and adjoining territories cannot be justified under any circumstances.” Melkonian fumed at the “indiscipline” of the Arabo and Aramo paramilitary units in Khojali. Karabakh Armenian commander Serzh Sargsyan — later president of Armenia — subsequently said that reports of Armenian savagery had been exaggerated but that killings had been carried out by survivors of the pogroms in Baku and Sumgait. He said Khojali also showed the Azerbaijani side that Armenians would not be intimidated. But if intimidation was a motive for Khojali, it only led to more savagery: the Azerbaijani side committed its own smaller massacre at the village of Maragha in April, after which the bodies of at least forty-three Armenian villagers were discovered and buried.”

“Lachin, the Azerbaijani town linking Armenia and Karabakh, was abandoned and captured by the Armenians. With the “Lachin corridor” open, volunteers, arms, and supplies flowed into Karabakh. After the war, this road was upgraded with money from the Armenian diaspora to become the best-quality road in the South Caucasus, while Armenian settlers began to move into Lachin. Lachin remains one of the most problematic issues in the Karabakh dispute. For Azerbaijanis, it is a fully Azerbaijani region that cannot be subject to compromise; for Armenians, it is a “road of life” that cannot be relinquished.”

“The Azerbaijanis’ military gains melted away in early 1993 as internal divisions undermined them. The vast Kelbajar district, north of Lachin and situated between Armenia and Karabakh, was left undefended. In April 1993, the Armenians attacked and captured it within a few days. Hundreds of civilians, many of them Azerbaijani Kurds, perished while fleeing over the mountains. The occupation of Kelbajar, an entire region of Azerbaijan outside Nagorny Karabakh, drew a stern international response. The Turkish government had been sending cargoes of European wheat to Armenia by rail across their common border in what it was hoped would be a prelude to a normalization of relations between the two states. After the Kelbajar operation, the Turks closed the border in solidarity with Azerbaijan.”

“During the four months of confusion after one president lost office and before another gained it, Azerbaijan lost a huge swath of territory to the Armenians east and south of Nagorny Karabakh. This was effectively when the war was lost. The towns of Aghdam, Fizuli, Jebrail, and Kubatly were abandoned along with their surrounding regions. Civilians stayed behind longer than soldiers, who did not know who their leaders were. It was less a case of systematic expulsion of people than of people fleeing ahead of an enemy advance. Casualties were light, and the towns and villages were captured virtually intact — only later would they be looted and stripped by Armenian military entrepreneurs. One jaundiced Armenian observer called the operations “military tourism.”

The human effect of this was that around 350,000 Azerbaijani civilians fled the Armenian advance in improvised refugee caravans that ended up in makeshift camps. It was one of the biggest refugee exoduses Europe had seen since the Second World War. Even if the official figure of one million refugees or IPs was an exaggeration, a more accurate number of about 750,000 displaced (about 190,000 from Soviet Armenia and at least 550,000 from Karabakh and its surrounding territories) was still staggeringly high for such a small country, amounting to about one-tenth of the total population.

For years, the displaced people lived in awful conditions, in schools, sanatoria, and tent camps in some of the bleakest and hottest parts of central Azerbaijan. Some even lived in rusting train carriages. There were accusations that the Azerbaijani government was deliberately letting them live in these conditions in order to drum up sympathy from the outside world — and that corrupt officials were pocketing aid money intended for the refugees. Gradually they were rehoused, with the last camps being shut down in 2007. Even so, the IDPs are still a marginal group in Azerbaijani society, facing problems in finding education and jobs and having almost no political representation, despite their large numbers.”

“During the war itself, the mediation effort of the Minsk Group was poorly coordinated, and Russian and Western diplomats began to act in rivalry with one another. Russia’s envoy, Vladimir Kazimirov, increasingly acted on his own and mediated the ceasefire agreement of May 1994 almost single-handedly. The Minsk Group also suffered from a lack of resources. The Balkans peace processes had benefited from a much stronger mediation effort and the promise of peacekeepers to back them up. By contrast, no full-fledged Western peacekeepers were sent to any of the Caucasian conflict zones. Unlike the United Nations, the CSCE had no experience of peacekeeping and no funds for it. The Budapest summit of December 1994 (at which the CSCE turned into the OSCE) devoted much of its time to fixing this problem. It approved a mandate for the organization’s first ever peacekeeping force to be deployed when an overall political agreement was reached.

The black-and-white positions both sides had taken since 1988 persisted in even stronger form into the postwar negotiations. Both of the new states of Armenia and Azerbaijan had been built around the Karabakh issue, so any compromise on it looked like the betrayal of a sacred cause. Unlike any other issue in Armenia or Azerbaijan, Karabakh has what the Armenian scholar Alexander Iskandarian calls “frozen potential,” the ability to bring tens or even hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets in support of a sacred cause. Very few people believe in making concessions to the other side. In February 2009, an opinion poll in Azerbaijan found that 70 percent of respondents opposed any kind of compromise. Only 0.1 percent of those questioned supported the option of independence for Nagorny Karabakh, and only 0.9 percent the idea of the highest possible autonomy. On the Armenian side, views are exactly the opposite, with polls suggesting that barely 1 percent of the population favors an option that puts Karabakh under Azerbaijani sovereignty.

These mutually contradictory positions have made for constant wrangling over the format of negotiations. The Azerbaijani side sees the Karabakh dispute as a land grab of Azerbaijani territory by Armenia and therefore insists that the Karabakh Armenians are not genuine actors in themselves — if the Karabakh Armenians are to be represented, they argue, it should be as one of two communities from the province, standing in opposition to Karabakh’s Azerbaijanis. Armenians assert that the dispute stems from the Karabakh Armenians’ desire to decide their own future and break away from Azerbaijan and that they should therefore take the lead in talks with Baku, with the government in Yerevan playing the role of interested bystander. The Baku-Yerevan approach eventually became the established one, and since 1997, the Karabakh Armenians have not been formally represented at talks, even though their territory is at the heart of the dispute. The Azerbaijanis of Karabakh are even more forgotten players, having neither their lands or an elected government nor any status in the negotiations. The absence of the Karabakhis has certainly undermined trust in the peace process.

Victory in the conflict was a bittersweet experience for the Armenian side. Armenia emerged from the end of the war formally victorious but in a parlous economic state. A series of winters with closed borders had reduced Armenia to premodern conditions with almost no electricity. The trees of Yerevan were chopped down for firewood, and citizens lived by candlelight and kerosene stoves.”

“Azerbaijan’s veteran leader Aliev preferred not to experiment with democracy and began to build a strong semiauthoritarian state to replace the fragile but pluralistic country he had inherited. Aliev faced down two attempted coup d’états and rid himself of a string of potential rivals. The country’s nascent democratic institutions were brought under suffocating control. While slowly and methodically consolidating his power at home, Aliev worked to balance his country’s foreign interests as well by signing a contract with international companies to develop Caspian Sea oil fields. When the first “early oil” began flowing, Azerbaijan began to feel a new confidence that it could use its growing economic power to match Armenia.”

“The deadlock revealed a recurring vicious circle in the peace process: the semiauthoritarian leaders are reluctant to open up the issue of compromise over Karabakh to wider debate inside their societies; the societies remain stuck with black-and-white views on the conflict, hoping for a full victory; without a wider constituency pressing for change, the presidents have no mandate for peace in their negotiations.

The mediators had tried to hurry the presidents at Key West for the simple reason that Aliev was getting older and sicker. In April 1999, he underwent heart surgery at the age of seventy-five, making everyone acutely aware that the whole of the Azerbaijani state depended on a man with uncertain health. In the summer of 2003, a few months before the next scheduled presidential elections, Aliev fell terminally ill. He died in December 2003, having barely managed to hand on power to his inexperienced son Ilham. Ilham Aliev was elected president in a controversial election in October, during which police broke up opposition protests by force.”

“On April 2, 2016, fighting broke out on the Line of Contact dividing Armenian and Azerbaijani forces east of Nagorny Karabakh. Over four days of warfare worse than anything the region had seen since the 1994 ceasefire agreement, up to 200 people died, including several civilians. The Azerbaijani army recaptured two small pockets of territory, but the psychological boost for Baku was more important than the physical one: Azerbaijan was able to proclaim a military success for the first time in more than two decades, reversing long-held feelings of humiliation. Russia negotiated a ceasefire, although nothing was signed on paper.

The fighting reflected many realities, first of all the disturbing fact that the longest-running dispute in the former Soviet Union was nearer to war than to peace. In the more than twenty years following the ceasefire, the conflict zone had become heavily militarized and extremely dangerous, while the only thing keeping the peace remained the modest mechanisms devised in the 1990s to halt the low-tech fighting of that era. There were no peacekeepers, and the truce on the 160-mile-long “Line of Contact” was monitored by just six observers from the OSCE. The Azerbaijani government in particular had used oil revenues for several years to spend up to $4 billion annually on its military budget and acquire modern equipment. In the mid-1990s the ceasefire line. had been a quiet network of trenches across which conscript soldiers would occasionally take potshots at one another and sometimes meet to exchange cigarettes in no-man’s land. By 2016 it had become the most militarized zone in Europe. The two sides used battle tanks, helicopters, and heavy artillery.”

“Some of the most bellicose voices were those of younger people. This should perhaps not be surprising considering that, unlike their Soviet-era parents, most members of the younger generation had never met an Armenian or an Azerbaijani in the flesh and derived their views of the other side in the conflict from patriotic media. In Azerbaijan there were spontaneous demonstrations in support of the fighting. On both sides there were reports of young people volunteering to go to the front.”

“Veteran Azerbaijani author Akram Aylisli was vilified after he published a novel in 2012 entitled Stone Dreams, which touched on the theme of Armenian-Azerbaijani friendship in the twentieth century and portrayed Armenians in a positive light. Aylisli was stripped of literary awards; his wife and son lost their jobs. Protestors demonstrated outside his house with placards reading “Shame!,” “Armenian,” and “Why did you sell your soul to the enemy?” The episode came at the start of a broader crackdown on Azerbaijani civil society that targeted several individuals who had been involved in peaceful dialogue initiatives with Armenians.“

“Public Armenian rhetoric is less aggressive on the Karabakh question, but it does not have to be, given that the Armenians were the victors on the ground in the war of the 1990s. In their own way, however, the Armenians hold just as tough a line, especially on the issue of the seven Azerbaijani territories around Karabakh that they control, either wholly or partially. The captured territories were ordinary regions of Azerbaijan before the war began and home to more than half a million people, almost none of them Armenian. When the Armenians captured these lands, they initially called them a “security zone” or “buffer zone” — lands to be handed back to Azerbaijani control in return for a good deal on the sovereignty of Nagorny Karabakh itself. That is still the official Armenian position. However, in recent years, public Armenian discourse has termed these lands “occupied territories,” and in news broadcasts, weather forecasts, and maps, the distinction between Armenia, Karabakh, and the occupied territories has become increasingly blurred. Although few people live there, new roads have been built across them.”

“Decreasing international attention has left the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan as the chief conductors of the negotiating process. The leaders know the problem intimately and know how the nonresolution of the conflict holds back their two countries from development and prosperity. They occasionally make public remarks that hint at the serious discussions they have had with one another behind closed doors. Yet almost all their public rhetoric both reflects and shapes the public narrative of “no surrender” the other side.

In that sense the leaders are trapped in a vicious circle, created in part by their own stance. The first political priority for them is staying in power. The ongoing Karabakh conflict is a useful short-term instrument in sticking to that goal: opposition forces can be kept off balance by appeals to patriotism, and democratization is held in check by nationalist rhetoric.

Yet even if the short-term political goal is achieved, this hard-line stance limits the leaders’ ability to make compromises with the other side and build a constituency for peace. It thus perpetuates the risk of war and precludes the chance of either side building a better future for its nation-state. The leaders are trapped in a situation they have helped create.”

“Both Armenians and Azerbaijanis are apprehensive that their lives will be put at risk if any missteps are made in meeting the other side halfway. That is a problem that only the big powers, with their ability to deploy peacekeepers and to guarantee an internationally binding agreement, are able to enforce, if they can muster the interest to care again about this half-forgotten conflict in the hills of the Caucasus.”

Georgia’s Conflicts: Abkhazia and South Ossetia

“On March 18, 1989, the Abkhaz convened a “People’s Forum” in the village of Lykhny at which about 30,000 people called for Abkhazia to be separated from Soviet Georgia, given the status of a full Soviet republic, and placed under special rule from Moscow.

The meeting unleashed a wave of counterprotests by Georgians led by two former dissidents, Merab Kostava and Zviad Gamsakh urdia. They denounced not only the Abkhaz for wanting to break up Georgia but also “colonialist” Moscow for being behind the Abkhaz initiative.”

“Gamsakhurdia and Kostava held rallies in Abkhazia in the spring of 1989 and then moved their protests to Tbilisi, where a crowd of several thousand camped out on Rustaveli Avenue for several days. By the second day, there were more shouts of “Down with Russian imperialism!” than anti-Abkhaz slogans. On the night of April 8–9, the Soviet army garrison in Tbilisi intervened and broke up the rally with spades and teargas. One teenage girl was beaten to death, and eighteen others died, almost all women, trampled in a stampede and unable to breathe because of the gas. The killings shocked the whole of the Soviet Union. The Politburo dispatched Shevardnadze to Tbilisi to try to calm passions and ensured that the party leaders were sacked, but a flame of anger had been lit. The moral credit was now all on the side of the nationalist opposition, and Georgians saw loyalty to Moscow as complicity in murder. Five months later, an opinion poll recorded that 89 percent of Georgians wanted independence, an even higher level of support than among Estonians.

Georgia began to hurtle toward secession from the Soviet Union. The Communist Party leadership, which had lost credibility after the killings, vied with the opposition to assert its patriotic credentials. In November, Georgia’s Supreme Soviet voted to condemn the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia in 1921 as an illegal act of annexation. New elections were called. Ahead of time, Gamsakhurdia campaigned for a new electoral law that banned parties that were not represented throughout Georgia from standing in the polls. It was a transparent device to exclude minorities such as Abkhaz, Ossetians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis from gaining seats in the new parliament.”

“In October 1990, Gamsakhurdia’s Round Table bloc won a resounding victory in elections to Georgia’s reconstituted legislature, the Supreme Soviet, and he was elected speaker of the new parliament. He then rolled out a stream of resolutions and legislation aimed at dismantling Soviet power and building a new Georgian national state. The Supreme Soviet unilaterally abolished South Ossetia’s autonomous status. It recalled Georgian young men from serving in the Soviet army and established a National Guard — effectively a new Georgian army. Then, on the second anniversary of the bloodshed on Rustaveli Avenue, April 9, 1991, Gamsakhurdia declared full independence from the Soviet Union. The text of the declaration made no mention of Abkhaz or Ossetians, saying: “The territory of the sovereign Republic of Georgia is united and indivisible.”

In May, Gamsakhurdia was elected president of Georgia with 86.5 percent of the vote, but the country was already in a state of collapse. Despite predicting that Georgia would become a “second Switzerland” within years, he did nothing to reform the economy. Georgia descended from being one of the Soviet Union’s most prosperous republics into dire poverty; its gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by 73 percent between 1991 and 1994. Gamsakhurdia showed no interest in democratic institutions and appointed “prefects” to run Georgia’s regions. A new opposition quickly mobilized. The language of political debate was abusive and threatening — a problem that persists, in a milder form, in Georgian political life today. Gamsakhurdia denounced his opponents as “enemies of Georgia” and “agents of the Kremlin.” Opposition leader Gia Chanturia called Gamsakhurdia a “fascist” “KGB agent.” Chanturia was arrested and jailed along with several dozen other political prisoners.

In August 1991, Gamsakhurdia provoked more controversy by failing to condemn the coup plot in Moscow against Gorbachev, describing it as the internal affair of another country. Shortly afterward, he declared a state of emergency, but he quickly faced armed rebellion from the leader of the National Guard he had created, the former sculptor Tengiz Kitovani, allied with his disaffected prime minister, Tengiz Sigua. The third leader, loseliani, joined them after being sprung from jail. This triumvirate moved to overthrow Gamsakhurdia in December 1991, probably with the aid of Soviet troops. Gamsakhurdia retreated to a bunker in the parliament building as heavy fighting raged through central Tbilisi. When Gamsakhurdia finally fled the country on January 6, 1992, at least 113 people had been killed, and the center of the city had been gutted. The ousted president fled and eventually settled in exile in Chechnya in the North Caucasus. His supporters, the Zviadists, fought a low-level war of resistance in western Georgia in which the Mkhedrioni ravaged the region. Gamsakhurdia himself died in 1993 on an ill-fated return mission to his home region of Georgia.

The outbreak of ethnic nationalism Georgia suffered in 1989–91 was so extreme it resembled a collective national fever. In Europe around this time, probably only Serbia experienced something similar. All Georgia’s minorities, not just Abkhaz and Ossetians but also Armenians and Azeris, complained of discrimination. It is important to stress that Gamsakhurdia did not seize power but was elected president in May 1991 with a strong public endorsement. Very few people were able to stand against the current.”

“When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Menshevik government in Georgia in 1921, they promised to respect the rights of Georgia’s minorities, and in 1922 the South Ossetian Autonomous Region was created. Ossetians moved in large numbers to the town they called Tskhinval and Georgians called Tskhinvali. In Soviet times, the region was a relatively poor province of Georgia but blessed with rich farmland. Tbilisi was much closer than Vladikavkaz, and South and North Ossetia were linked by road for the first time only in 1985, when the two-mile-long Roki Tunnel was built through the mountains.

Ossetians were a relatively small minority in Soviet Georgia. Around 65,000 lived in South Ossetia, about two-thirds of the total population. A further 100,000 Ossetians who lived in other parts of Georgia were especially well integrated; according to census data, they spoke the Georgian language more fluently than any other minority. In South Ossetia itself, Georgian and Ossetian villages were mixed up, and many people were trilingual in Ossetian, Georgian, and Russian. According to one estimate, about half the families in the region were of mixed nationality. The war of 1991–92 painfully divided many families.

All this suggests that the South Ossetians could have reached a compromise with any reasonable government in Tbilisi. Small in number, strongly intermixed with the Georgians, and linked to their North Ossetian kin by only one road through the Roki Tunnel, they had no incentive for conflict. Even after the 1991–92 war, intercommunal relations were not irreparably damaged. Many Georgians fled the town of Tskhinvali, but — unlike in Abkhazia — most Georgian villages in South Ossetia stayed untouched, and their inhabitants carried on living there.

However, Gamsakhurdia’s rhetoric appeared to threaten the Ossetians’ very existence in Georgia. He described them (and other minorities) as stumrebi, or “guests,” suggesting they were living in Georgia on the sufferance of their Georgian hosts. He said that mixed marriages threatened the survival of the Georgian nation. Gamsakhurdia’s prejudices were widely supported, and — as in the Armenian-Azerbaijani dispute — members of the intelligentsia often displayed more ethnic prejudice than easygoing villagers in South Ossetia itself.”

“On November 16, 1989, the South Ossetians proclaimed their region an autonomous republic (in other words, one step higher than their current status, on a level with Abkhazia), but the Tbilisi authorities rejected the declaration. One week later, on November 23–Giorgoba, or Saint George’s Day, and a useful day to mobilize Georgians into action — more than 20,000 Georgians descended on Tskhinvali in a convoy of cars and buses. They were halted by an improvised group of South Ossetians who formed a human chain and put up barricades. Three days of violence followed in which at least six people were killed and dozens wounded.

In 1990, some younger Georgian nationalist leaders argued that confrontation with South Ossetia was a distraction from efforts to achieve the main goal of independence from Moscow. But Gamsakhurdia continued to inflame the situation, saying, “If [Ossetians] do not wish to live peacefully with us, then let them leave Georgia.” On September 20, the South Ossetians declared the creation of a new South Ossetian Soviet Democratic Republic separate from Georgia. On December 11, Georgia’s new parliament, led by Gamsakhurdia, voted to abolish South Ossetia’s autonomous status altogether, “taking into account the fact the South Ossetian Autonomous Region was formed in 1922 against the will of the native Georgian population living in this region and damaging the interests of the whole of Georgia.” The next day, the parliament declared a state of emergency in the newly renamed “Tskhinvali and Java Regions.” Fighting immediately broke out. There was no mechanism for political negotiation: the South Ossetian local leader, Torez Kulumbegov, went for talks in Tbilisi but was arrested and imprisoned.”

“In terms of lives lost, the 1991–92 war in South Ossetia was one of the less bloody post-Soviet conflicts.Perhaps 1,000 people died. It was barely noticed by the international media. But at the time it was the worst internal conflict in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and devastating for a region with a population of fewer than 100,000 people. For years afterward, the physical scars of the fighting were visible in South Ossetia, and the playground of School №5 in Tskhinvali, where many of the Ossetians killed in the fighting were hastily buried, became an informal shrine to the dead. The repercussions of war were also felt by 100,000 Ossetians in other parts of Georgia who were sacked from their jobs or forced to sell their houses for token prices if they chose to flee to North Ossetia.”

“In early 1991, the first contours had were drawn of a geography of conflict that would recur in 2004 and 2008. South Ossetia is a mixed patchwork of Georgian and Ossetian settlements. Tskhinvali was under Ossetian control but under siege from Georgians on high ground around the town. Three of the four roads leading into Tskhinvali were under Georgian control. The fourth road out of the town passed north through a group of four Georgian villages in the Liakhvi River valley, which in their turn were surrounded by Ossetians. In this tangle of conflict, roadblocks were set up and hostages taken.

On April 29, the appetite for violence was dulled by a powerful earthquake that shook the northwestern Java region of South Ossetia and the Georgian region of Racha. It killed 200 people and destroyed nine-tenths of the houses in Java. Fighting resumed again in the autumn of 1991. The Georgians cut off gas and electricity from Tskhinvali, leaving its citizens in desperate conditions in the middle of winter. The Ossetians cut the Georgian villages off from the rest of Georgia.”

“After the war Ludvig Chibirov, the former dean of the region’s pedagogical institute, emerged as South Ossetia’s nominal leader and was later elected its first “president.” He held talks with Shevardnadze in 1997 and 1998. At the later meeting in the Georgian town of Borjomi, the two men provisionally agreed on most parts of a deal that gave South Ossetia high autonomous status within a Georgian state. Neither man was in a hurry to complete the deal, and there was a strong economic disincentive to change the status quo, as many senior officials on both sides were using South Ossetia’s twilight status to make money. However, Chibirov lost the election in 2001, and by then President Vladimir Putin was in the Kremlin and Russian policy was changing.

After 1992, South Ossetia almost vanished as a political issue for most Georgians. Although the territory remained as a de facto separate political entity, its border with the rest of Georgia was open, and ordinary people traveled freely across it. Underresourced and badly damaged, South Ossetia became the major channel for untaxed and smuggled goods flowing in and out of the South Caucasus. These goods ranged from fruits and vegetables to tobacco and vodka to weapons, and, in one recorded instance, to plutonium. The trade was a key factor in bringing the two communities together after the conflict, and no “confidence-building measures” were required for them to interact with one another.

But the black economy was also an incentive for powerful players to see ensure that the conflict remained unresolved and for millions of dollars of untaxed revenue to be earned.”

“Abkhazia differs from the other two conflict zones of the Caucasus, Nagorny Karabakh and South Ossetia, in being much larger — its prewar population was half a million — and wealthier. The prime cause of all the conflicts in the Caucasus has been the insecurity of small ethnic groups vis-à-vis one another. Here another key element was a scramble for the resources of a small Black Sea paradise — in which, it should be said, top Soviet leaders took the most valuable prizes while ordinary people picked up the scraps. Abkhazia was extremely mixed ethnically. At least five ethnic groups intermingled there, and many of them spoke each other’s languages. More than a quarter of the marriages in urban Abkhazia in the 1970s were of mixed ethnicity, one of the highest rates within the Soviet Union. This was an inbuilt deterrent against conflict. In 1989, the Abkhaz themselves were only 18 percent of the population. The Georgians — most of them Mingrelians — were the other prominent ethnic group, comprising around 45 percent of the population.”

“Abkhazia was made a principality inside the Russian Empire in 1810, but resistance to Russian rule, aided by the Ottomans, continued for much of the nineteenth century, while many Georgians adapted well to Russian rule. The Abkhaz supported their ethnic cousins, the Circassian tribes to the north and east, in their war against tsarist armies. As late as 1852, the Russian general Grigory Filipson complained, “In a word, we occupy Abkhazia but we do not rule it. “

In May 1864, the tsarist empire’s conquest of the Circassians finally ended, and a victory parade was held on the Black Sea coast just north of Abkhazia, called Krasnaya Polyana (“Red Glade”) by the Russians. The principality of Abkhazia was abolished and the area renamed the Sukhum Military District. The Russians systematically punished all the defeated peoples by deporting hundreds of thousands of Circassians, including the Abkhaz and Ubykh, to the Ottoman Empire. This horrific act of ethnic punishment predated the Armenian genocide by fifty years but is far less known. Tens of thousands died of hunger and disease as they were transported in rickety ships across the sea. The Black Sea coast, once densely inhabited by different Circassian tribes, was left depopulated. These so-called muhajirs became a large diaspora across the Ottoman Empire, in Turkey, Jordan, and Syria in particular. Ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014, Circassians complained that it was insensitive to their ancestors to hold the games at Krasnaya Polyana on the 150th anniversary of the deportations.

In August 1866, the Abkhaz again rebelled and were subjected to deportation. The British diplomat William Palgrave visited the territory in 1867 and wrote, “After entire submission and granted pardon, the remnants of the old Abkhasian nation — first their chiefs and then the people — have at last, in time of full peace and quiet, been driven from the mountains and coast where Greek, Roman, Persian and Turkish domination had left them unmolested for more than two thousand years.” After another rebellion during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, the Russian authorities pronounced the Abkhaz “guilty people” and prohibited them from living in the main towns of Abkhazia or along the coast. This second-class status was lifted only in 1907.”

“Abkhazia’s status in the early Soviet era was ambiguous and was interpreted differently by different players. With the conquest of Menshevik Georgia by the Red Army in 1921, it existed for ten months as a de facto independent Bolshevik republic. In 1922, the Abkhaz Bolsheviks then agreed to make Abkhazia a “treaty republic” within the Transcaucasus Federation, with substantial powers of autonomy. From 1921 to 1936, Abkhazia was led by the popular Bolshevik leader Nestor Lakoba, who preserved for it a large degree of self-rule. He exploited Abkhazia’s status as a holiday destination for the Russian elite and did his old comrade Stalin a favor by providing a home for the sick Leon Trotsky in the crucial early months of 1924 when Stalin made his bid in Moscow to succeed Lenin.

In 1931, Abkhazia had its status downgraded to that of an autonomous republic within Georgia but enjoyed five more years of relative calm. Then Stalin and Beria acted to crush both Lakoba and what remained of Abkhazia’s autonomy. In December 1936, Beria invited Lakoba to dinner with his family in Tbilisi and then to a premiere at the opera. Poisoned at one of these locations, Lakoba died the same night. He was given a massive funeral in Sukhum, but Stalin, ominously, did not send condolences. Shortly afterward, Lakoba’s body was exhumed, he was denounced posthumously as an enemy of the people, and most of his family were arrested and executed.

Beria then imposed a policy of enforced Georgianization on Abkhazia. Abkhaz officials were replaced or shot. Most of the top party posts were given to Georgians, and a new wave of immigration began, with thousands of ethnic Mingrelians and Svans being given new houses in Abkhazia. By 1939, the portion of ethnic Abkhaz in Abkhazia had dropped to 18 percent. Place-names were given Georgian endings, with Sukhum henceforth being called Sukhumi. The Abkhaz language was transcribed into a new Georgian alphabet, and teaching in Abkhaz was suppressed.”

“The cataclysms of the First World War triggered the final expulsion of the Pontic Greeks from their homeland. Under the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Greece and Turkey agreed to exchange almost their entire Christian and Muslim populations. More than a million Orthodox Christians left former Ottoman Turkey. The old Christian civilization of the Pontus was extinguished. Thousands of Pontic Greeks also fled to the Soviet Union.

Abkhazia was a natural refuge for them. Many were merchants or tobacco-growers, skills they could easily transfer to their new location. In Sukhum at the turn of the twentieth century, around a third of the population was already Greek, and eight of the twelve churches were Greek Orthodox. In 1912 the businessman loachim Aloizi built Sukhum’s theater and adjoining Grand Hotel, complete with garage, casino, and cinema. The Villa Aloizi, an Arabian- Nights-style fantasy of towers and turrets, is still standing. In the early 1930s, the USSR was home to around a quarter of a million “Greeks” along the Black Sea coast and in Georgia. In Abkhazia they were briefly allowed to teach in their own language and publish their own newspaper, Kokkinos Kapnas (The Red Tobacco-Planter). But later in the decade, Stalin labeled them enemy “stateless cosmopolitans,” linked to Greece, a hostile power.

During World War Il, first the Greek schools and newspapers were closed, and then tens of thousands of Greeks were deported to Kazakhstan. In June 1949 Stalin and Beria had most of the remaining Pontic Greeks of the Caucasus deported. In five days, more than 27,000 Pontic Greeks, including 10,000 children, were dispatched from Abkhazia to the steppes of Kazakhstan. In multiethnic Abkhazia, some non-Greek spouses pleaded to go into exile with their husbands or wives; others escaped deportation because they came from mixed families. “The town felt completely empty,” said Nikolai loannidi, who managed to stay behind with his German mother. Later, as Abkhazia’s chief archivist and historian of its Greeks, loannidi studied the files. “I tried to find a single traitor or spy, but there was nothing!” he said. In 1956 the Pontic Greeks were rehabilitated by Khrushchev, but only around a quarter of the deportees came home to Abkhazia. The community went into decline, and in the 1980s many emigrated to Greece.”

“War began in Abkhazia on August 14, 1992, when the head of the Georgian National Guard, Tengiz Kitovani, marched on Sukhumi. Kitovani justified his intervention as a mission to rescue Georgian officials supposedly being held by Zviadist rebels in Gali, the southernmost district of Abkhazia, and to reopen the railway line. Early on that day, a several-thousand-strong battalion of the Georgian National Guard headed by Kitovani moved into Abkhazia but then marched straight to Sukhumi. Georgian soldiers seized government buildings and began looting the city and burning public buildings. Kitovani announced on television that he had dissolved the Abkhaz parliament and dismissed Ardzinba. The Abkhaz leadership hastily withdrew to the town of Gudauta ten miles north. A day later — confirming that this was a planned operation — another Georgian force landed in the seaside town of Gagra in the north of Abkhazia, hemming in the Abkhaz leadership on two sides.

The operation may well have been a personal initiative by Kitovani to claim glory and loot Abkhazia. The key question at the start of the war was whether the head of the State Council, Shevardnadze, had authorized it. Objectively speaking, the last thing the Georgian leader needed shortly after the war in South Ossetia ended was a new war in Abkhazia. Some of Shevardnadze’s critics, however, see the fact that Georgia had been admitted to the United Nations on July 31, just two weeks earlier, as proof that he was waiting for international recognition in order to move to suppress the Abkhaz.”

“Kitovani’s brutal intervention achieved the exact opposite of what had been intended. His ragtag force of national guardsmen was too wild and disorganized either to win a military victory or to gain the sympathy of the non-Georgian population of Abkhazia. Their rampage made young Abkhaz men go north to the other side of the Gumista River to join the makeshift resistance.

The war lasted fifteen months, with several lulls and ceasefires.”

“On July 27, 1993, Moscow negotiated a ceasefire. The two armies withdrew most of their heavy weaponry from in and around Sukhumi. The key player was Russian defense minister Pavel Grachev. Grachev must have given his blessing to Russian military support for the Abkhaz, but he was also a friend of Kitovani. He overtly used the conflict to seek to insert a Russian military presence in both Abkhazia and Georgia as a whole. He pressed to have two Russian military divisions accepted as a peacekeeping force, but the Georgians resisted, in a move that may have sealed their fate. Shevardnadze’s position was further weakened by a new rebellion in western Georgia by supporters of ousted president Gamsakhurdia. The rebels took three towns in Mingrelia and the city of Poti.

On September 16, the Abkhaz broke the ceasefire, alleging that the Georgians had not been complying with it. They launched an all-out attack, after apparently being given their artillery back by the Russians. Shevardnadze, who had lost most of his heavy weapons to the ceasefire agreement, personally commanded the defense of Sukhumi from a deadly bombardment. The Abkhaz landed a small force south of Sukhumi and held the coastal road. Three Georgian planes flying in to bolster the defense of the city were shot down by missiles fired from gunboats in the Black Sea, with the deaths of more than 100 people on board.

Georgian defenses were overwhelmed, and Sukhumi fell on September 27. Incoming fighters killed most of the members of the Georgian government who had stayed on in the parliament building. Three days later, Abkhaz forces had reached the river Inguri and the boundary with western Georgia, taking control of the whole republic, except for the mountainous Upper Kodori Gorge.”

“In Sukhumi, the victorious side carried out an orgy of looting, with the North Caucasian volunteers being especially feared as they claimed their rewards in the captured city. The Abkhaz commanders tried to impose a curfew and sacked their own interior minister to spare their own republic the worst of the ravages. “We do not want to stay here, but we have a right to our trophies,” a North Caucasian warrior named Zhena told Reuters reporter Lawrence Sheets. A Georgian told Sheets, “Every day soldiers come to the apartment saying that they are looking for weapons and snipers. They threaten to rape my daughter.”

Not just ethnic Georgians but others, such as ethnic Greeks, said they feared for their lives in a territory overwhelmed by lawless violence. This was the situation in which almost the entire Georgian population of Abkhazia fled. With the road south blocked to them, thousands fled over the mountains into western Georgia in desperate conditions of hunger and cold. In late October, one journalist described harrowing scenes of “refugees who had been stranded for weeks, lashed by rain and snow, sleeping fifty to a house or camping out in rickety Soviet-era cars.” There are accounts that the misery of the refugees was compounded by their own side, with many refugees in the lowlands turned back by Georgian troops and others in the mountains robbed by local vans. Of a prewar population of around 240,000 in Abkhazia, only a few thousand Georgians remained.”

“The Abkhaz won a victory at a heavy price. The war claimed around 8,000 lives. The city of Sukhumi was devastated by the final round of fighting, and its old center, around the massive Soviet-era parliament building, which went up in flames only when the Abkhaz captured the city, was still a maze of ruins two decades later.

The Russian government was more interested in exerting pressure on Georgia than in lending support to the Abkhaz. Moscow gave support to Shevardnadze in defeating the Zviadist rebels, and Gamsakhurdia himself died in December 1993, apparently having committed suicide on a failed mission to fight in western Georgia. But Shevardnadze was forced to accept humiliating terms: he was made to join the Commonwealth of Independent States on October 9, 1993; to agree to the renewal of leases on Russian military bases; and to accept Moscow’s nominee as defense minister.”

“Life in the postwar years was miserable for the Georgians who had fled Abkhazia. Tens of thousands of IDPs were given only the most rudimentary assistance by the Georgian government. Many felt like”double strangers,” having fled Abkhazia to live in parts of Georgia they found quite alien. They occupied sanatoriums, schools, and hotels; as of this writing, the majority have found permanent homes, but many are still there. For more than a decade, Tbilisi’s main tall Soviet-era hotel, the Iveria, was home to hundreds of refugees, its windows a web of clotheslines. In 2005, Georgia still officially had 245,000 IPs, more than 232,000 from Abkhazia and more than 12,000 from South Ossetia, comprising around 5 percent of the population. The new conflict of 2008 added almost 40,000 more.

Life was only marginally better for the remaining population in Abkhazia itself. The sanctions regime meant there was virtually no international aid and travel was difficult. Crime was rampant. Politically, the most difficult test for the Abkhaz was how they could make a legitimate claim to the republic when they had been a minority community before the war. Georgian critics have consistently argued that because less than half of a prewar population of 525,000 in Abkhazia remains, these people do not have a moral claim to represent an entity named Abkhazia. An “Abkhaz government in exile” of ethnic Georgians was set up in Tbilisi, asserting the Georgian version of reality, complete with minor municipal posts for a virtual Sukhumi.”

“What really changed the situation was the change of administration in Russia the following year. Vladimir Putin came to power and gradually instituted policies to punish Georgia, end Abkhazia’s isolation, and change the balance of power in the conflict.”

Oil

“Oil was first exploited commercially in the mid-nineteenth century. The industry took off in 1871, when the Russian government allowed in private enterprise and the first wells were drilled. Two of the Swedish Nobel brothers, Robert and Ludwig, invested in the new industry and by the end of the decade had the biggest refinery in Baku and were shipping barrels of oil across the Caspian Sea to the Russian port of Astrakhan in the world’s first oil tanker, the Zoroaster. By the 1880s, oil fields such as Balakhany had sprouted hundreds of brick wells extracting the oil from the ground, and Baku’s new northern industrial suburb was nicknamed the Black Town because of the clouds of dark oil smoke hanging over it from 200 refineries. In one generation, Baku turned from a forgotten desert citadel into a modern metropolis. The population skyrocketed from 14,000 in 1863 to 206,000 forty years later. “Baku is greater than any other oil city in the world. If oil is king, Baku is its throne,” wrote the British author J. D. Henry in 1905. You could become a millionaire literally overnight if an “oil gusher” appeared on your land. One man who got lucky was Haji Zeynalabdin Tagiev, the illiterate son of a shoemaker, who turned into one of Baku’s richest and most famous businessmen and benefactors after a gusher appeared on his land. Tagiev was unusual in being a native Azeri. Most of the businessmen were European, Russian, or Armenian. Tensions between the Armenian bourgeoisie and Azeri workers were an underlying cause of the brutal “Tatar-Armenian” war in Baku in 1905 in which hundreds were killed and thousands of oil wells destroyed.”

“In the years 1914–21, oil wealth was a major factor in the international scramble for the Caucasus. In World War I, German commander Erich von Ludendorff saw Azerbaijani oil and its route via Georgia as a key motivation to intervene in the South Caucasus. At the end of the war, the British took control of Baku, and in 1919 British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour identified its oil as Britain’s major priority in the region. He said, “I should say we are not going to spend all our money and men in civilizing a few people who do not want to be civilized. We will protect Batum, Baku, the railway between them and the pipe-line.” When the British had gone, the oil-starved Bolsheviks made Baku their first target in the Transcaucasus. Having captured the city in April 1920, Trotsky declared that the new oil resources would win the Civil War for the Reds and would be “our hope for restoring the economy, for ensuring that old men and women and children do not die of cold in Moscow.”

Baku remained a major oil-producing center in the early Soviet era. In 1941 the city was vital to Stalin’s war effort against Germany and produced around three-quarters of the Soviet Union’s oil. When Hitler’s Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Germans again identified Baku oil as a vital asset. In August 1942, the Germans occupied the western side of the North Caucasus and pop planned a push south to Azerbaijan. Saying, “Unless we get the Baku oil, the war is lost,” Hitler diverted divisions away from the battle for Stalingrad toward the Caucasus. That summer, Hitler’s staff famously had a cake made for him that had the shape of the Caspian Sea in the middle. Film footage shows a delighted Hitler taking a slice of the cake, which had the letters B-A-K-U written on it in white icing and chocolate made to look like oil spooned over it.

The debacle at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43 meant that Germany never invaded the South Caucasus, but even the threat of attack was a death sentence for the Baku oil industry. Stalin, who knew the Baku oil fields from his revolutionary days of in 1905, had the oil wells shut down so they would not fall into German hands. Almost the entire Azerbaijani oil industry and its experts were transferred to the oil wells of the Volga and the Urals. After the war, Russia’s oil fields received the major part of Soviet investment, and Azerbaijan suffered. The on-inland fields had dried up, and in order to reach the trickier offshore fields, a small town named Oily Rocks was built thirty miles out in the sea reached across a causeway built on sunken ships. Cramped and polluted, Oily Rocks eked out what could still be drilled of Azerbai jan’s oil within the capacity of Soviet technology. But increasingly, the existing expertise was not up to the challenge. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Azerbaijan was producing only 3 percent of its oil output.”

“In July 2006, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, linking the Caspian and Black seas, was inaugurated at its final point, the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. The presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, the three countries along the route, were there to celebrate what Lord Browne, head of British Petroleum (BP), the company operating the pipeline, called “the first great engineering project of the 21st century.” The first tanker had already left Ceyhan a month before, carrying 600,000 barrels of Azerbaijani oil to Western markets.

The opening of the BTC pipeline was the culmination of the second act of the story of Azerbaijan’s role as a major world energy producer. It could never be as dramatic as the first act, but it emphatically put Azerbaijan back on the world energy map for the first time in a century. At just under 1,100 miles (1,768 km) long, the BTC pipeline was the second-longest oil pipeline in the world, after Russia’s Druzbha pipeline, and cost almost $4 billion to build. Its completion was a great political as well as technical achievement. The construction of a major export route from the Caspian gave Western markets an important new source of energy from a new area of the world. At the same time, it transformed a small, fragile country of eight million people into a medium-level world oil producer. Once the pipeline started pumping at full capacity, Azerbaijan stood to receive revenues of around $20 billion — and initially even more than that as oil prices hit record highs. From 2006–8, Azerbaijan’s budget revenues went up by around a third every year, making it the fastest-growing economy in the world.

In 1991, newly independent Azerbaijan was fighting the Karabakh war with the Armenians and its economy was collapsing; the new country’s GDP fell by 60 percent in the period 1992–95. So the government saw the revival of the oil industry as a strategic imperative. It was free to call on Western expertise for the first time in two generations.”

“Getting the Russians on board was also of key importance. Russia had the capacity to be a wrecker and was already trying to play a card that could jeopardize the new contract altogether. The issue was legal ambiguity about the status of the Caspian, which until very recently had been jointly shared by the Soviet Union and Iran — was it an inland sea or in fact a lake whose resources should be divided equally, with Russia being entitled to an equal share of all the spoils? If it was not a sea, there was no “Azerbaijani sector” in the Caspian Sea at all, and the ACG fields were not Azerbaijan’s to sign away. Russian officials made threatening noises that the offshore production was operating illegally, but they backed off after being overruled by then Russian prime minister and former energy boss Viktor Chernomyrdin. In 2001, Iran used the issue as a pretext to send a navy boat to threaten two Azerbaijani survey vessels with BP experts on board on an inspection trip in the sea. In 2018 the five nations of the Caspian announced that they had finally reached a deal on its legal status, but the challenge of how to divide up its oil — and gas — fields still looked daunting.”

“Over the next few years, Azerbaijani-Russian relations improved on several levels, the importance of the GUAM project faded, and the Azerbaijani government made it clear that, unlike Georgia, it had no ambition to join NATO. In August 2013, a year after his return to a third term as president, Putin made his highest-profile visit to Azerbaijan, arriving in Baku, accompanied by six senior ministers. Russia promised new weapons sales to Azerbaijan and discussed energy cooperation. The visit was a conspicuous signal to the country that Russia could be relied on to support Aliev’s leader’s reelection for a third term, in contrast to Western concerns about the country’s deviation from democratic standards. This did not mean that Baku had abandoned its cooperation with the West on energy and security issues. Rather, it was a sign that Azerbaijan wanted a self-sufficient, diversified foreign policy, that balanced multiple interests.”

“In February 2015 Azerbaijan’s oil boom came to an end with a bump. With oil output already declining, the world oil price fell and the National Bank of Azerbaijan was forced abruptly to devalue the national currency, the manat. Two years on, the manat had suffered one of the steepest devaluations of any world currency: on January 1, 2015, one Azerbaijani manat was worth $1.28; in the New Year of 2017 it would buy only 55 cents. The effects of devaluation were felt nationwide in the form of closing banks and defaulted loans on apartment purchases, and higher food prices that caused demonstrations in small towns. There is no prospect of a new goose with a golden egg — no new Azerbaijani oil fields have been discovered since 1994. But the Azerbaijani government hopes that it is in a period of transition that it can navigate until about 2020, when it can live well again off another essential commodity, natural gas. In the meantime, its new economic model has come under intense strain.

For almost a decade after the BTC pipeline was inaugurated in 2005, Azerbaijan was a nation with newfound confidence. For three years in succession, 2005, 2006, and 2007, the country had the fastest economic growth rate in the world. Its GDP grew spectacularly from $1.3 billion in 1994 to $75.2 billion in 2014, when it began contracting again. The new wealth put Azerbaijan on the map, as the government opened dozens of new embassies around the world, funded new lobbying campaigns, and won a nonpermanent seat on the UN Security Council in 2011. The state oil company SOCAR, once a junior partner to its Western counterparts, became a big player in its own right. It became one of the largest investors in Turkey, saying it had invested $18 billion in the country, and came to own two-thirds of Greece’s gas grid.

Some of the revenues were spent well — for example, to upgrade the country’s aging infrastructure or to fund scholarship schemes abroad for Azerbaijani students. An oil fund, the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan, or SOF AZ, was founded as a “rainy day fund” to enable the government to weather fluctuations in oil revenues. But many billions were spent on what could only be called vanity projects.

Azerbaijan’s economy showed classic symptoms of “Dutch Disease,” the condition whereby heavy reliance on the export of one product — usually oil or gas — weakens the rest of the economy. In 2014, just 10 percent of Azerbaijan’s exports, earning only $1.4 billion, came from the non-energy sector. Moreover, oil and gas are notoriously poor at creating employment, supplying only around 1.5 percent of the jobs in the economy. BP, for example, despite its huge operations in Azerbaijan, had only 2,700 Azerbaijani employees in 2014.”

“This restrictive oligarchic system has created more than financial problems. It has also stifled opportunities for a whole professional class that might have been expected to flourish in Azerbaijan’s oil boom. Specifically, the system has alienated young, well-educated Azerbaijani professionals who have studied in the West, often on government grants, and who should be the next generation in its energy industry. Many of these people face the dilemma of whether to stay abroad or use their talents at home. An increasingly intolerant political climate and the arrest of many young activists espousing democracy, such as Rasul Jafarov and Anar Mammadli, sends a chilling message to those who would try to build a career in Azerbaijan. As Caspian energy expert Laurent Ruseckas points out, “If things don’t change, Azerbaijan may well produce a future generation of technology entrepreneurs who will make their fortunes and generate employment in the United States, in the United Kingdom, in Turkey, or wherever else, rather than in their native land.””

Georgia, Part 3

“In the West, there was a widespread perception that Georgia was the most progressive post-Soviet country outside the Baltic states. The face of reform was Zurab Zhvania, a former leader of the Georgian Green Party, who became speaker of parliament in 1995 at the age of only thirty-one. Thoughtful and intelligent, if rather portly and slow for someone his age, Zhvania impressed Western interlocutors with his ideas expressed in fluent English and was talked about as a potential successor to Shevardnadze. In 1996–2000, Zhvania and a team of “young reformers” helped give Georgia double-digit economic growth rates.

But this positive picture was very superficial. Georgia remained a weak state captive to powerful political factions. Its basic services were chronically underfunded, with a paltry 1 percent of GDP, or less than $20 million, being spent on state health care. There were so many vested interests holding back reform of the power sector that the country suffered from chronic electricity blackouts. Shevardnadze’s feat of breaking the grip of Georgia’s warlords was achieved at the cost of Faustian power-sharing deals with businessmen and local governors.”

“Calls for Tbilisi to regain authority grew louder after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, when Russia depicted Chechnya as a front in the “war on terror.” In May 2002 Shevardnadze turned a public relations disaster into a success by inviting U.S. troops onto Georgian soil for the first time as part of a project entitled the Georgia Train and Equip Program. The 150–200 American soldiers involved in the program trained Georgian troops in a support role for a police “anticriminal operation” in the Pankisi Gorge. Within a few months, the gorge was free of armed Chechens — most of them actually moved on themselves after being tipped off — but the U.S. troops stayed on.”

“In 2002, there was already a distinct end-of-regime mood in Georgia. Zurab Zhvania, the former leader of the “young reformers,” had resigned as speaker of parliament and formed his own opposition party, but he was not especially liked by the wider public. Among a crowd of opposition politicians, one of Zhvania’s own protégés emerged as the new star. Mikheil Saakashvili, universally known as “Misha” even to those who did not know him, had studied in Kiev, in Strasbourg, and at Columbia University in New York. Tall, charismatic, multilingual, and married to a Dutch wife, he seemed to represent a new post-Communist generation in Georgia. He was appointed justice minister at the age of just thirty-two and got the attention of the public with such actions as riding the Tbilisi metro to work. A year later, he resigned in dramatic fashion, accusing government colleagues of corruption, and set up an opposition party, the National Movement. In November 2002, Saakashvili won election as chairman of Tbilisi’s municipal assembly and used the position as a showcase to enact popular reforms.

Georgia’s parliamentary elections in the autumn of 2003 were seen as a dress rehearsal for the presidential vote slated for 2005, when Shevardnadze was due to step down. Georgia’s chaotic pluralism gave space for lively political debate. The pro-opposition television channel Rustavi-2 broadcast freely despite one clumsy attempt to shut it down. Georgian nongovernmental organizations also benefited from Western aid programs. A new youth movement was formed named Kmara (“Enough”). Kmara’s activists cleverly stoked people’s dissatisfaction with the status quo by painting their one-word message “Kmara” on walls, street signs, and fences across the whole country.

As the elections approached, Shevardnadze lost some key allies. In June 2003, Nino Burjanadze, whom opinion polls gave the most positive rating of any public figure in Georgia, resigned her post as speaker of parliament and joined up with Zurab Zhvania. Their new movement, “Burjanadze-Democrats,’ allied her calm demeanor with Zhvania’s political acumen. However, the charismatic Saakashvili ran the most successful election campaign.

The elections of semidemocratic Georgia came under much closer international scrutiny than those of other post-Soviet countries. At the end of a chaotic polling day on November 2, Rustavi-2 broadcast the results of a big exit poll and the dramatic news that Saakashvili’s National Movement had won first place, with an estimated 26 percent of the vote. The Central Electoral Commission then began to release its own official results, putting the progovernment party in first place. The impression of falsification was obvious. From November 5, diverse antigovernment groups began to hold protest rallies in central Tbilisi. The opposition was divided on tactics, but Shevardnadze refused to compromise and kept its factions united. Then, on November 14, suspiciously late, the Ajaria region released its voting returns, giving the official Revival Party almost 100 percent of the vote there. This manifest theft of votes threatened to give the leader of Ajaria a central role in the new parliament and strengthened the determination of the opposition in Tbilisi.

From this point, momentum shifted behind the crowds on Rustaveli Avenue. Saakashvili was the popular favorite and was lent gravitas by being one member in a triple leadership along with Zhvania and Burjanadze. The protestors waved the red-and-white flag of Saakashvili’s National Movement and red roses, which they had adopted as a symbol of resistance. Rustavi-2 provided around-the-clock coverage. The protests were well organized and peaceful and reminded foreign journalists of the democracy movements that had swept aside Communist regimes in eastern Europe in 1989.”

“On November 22, Shevardnadze tried to legitimize the elections by convening the new parliament in its building in central Tbilisi, just yards from the opposition demonstrations. As he began a rambling speech, Saakashvili led a crowd in a march against parliament. Police cordons simply parted and let the protestors through. Saakashvili dramatically swept into the parliamentary chamber, clutching a single red rose and shouting, “Gadadeki. gadadeki!” (“Resign, resign!”) Shevardnadze stopped reading his speech and was hustled from the chamber by his bodyguards. Saakashvili strode onto the podium, theatrically finishing the cup of tea that Shevardnadze had been drinking, and declared the new parliament invalid. Shevardnadze retired to his residence and tried to declare a state of emergency.

The next day was November 23, Saint George’s Day. Russia’s Georgian-born foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, a former protégé of Shevardnadze, flew in to mediate. He surprised the crowds on Rustaveli Avenue by giving them an impromptu speech and then went to see Shevardnadze. Ivanov’s plan, it later transpired, had been for Shevardnadze to stay on for several months but to agree to early presidential elections; the Russians may have hoped that they could thereby influence the choice of the next leader. However, after Ivanov had left Tbilisi, Shevardnadze received Zhvania and Saakashvili for a short meeting and told them he had changed his mind. The two men emerged looking slightly shell-shocked and told journalists that Shevardnadze had announced his resignation with immediate effect.

The Rose Revolution briefly electrified the world. It was a rare example of popular democracy in action and a compelling spectacle pulled off with Georgian flair. Georgia’s bloodless revolution was also the first of three so-called Color Revolutions that removed presidents in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.”

“At the beginning of 2004, the three leaders of the Rose Revolution masked their differences and rode a wave of domestic and international goodwill. Within a few months, Saakashvili had been elected president virtually unopposed, with 96 percent of the vote. Zhvania was appointed prime minister, and Burjanadze was again made speaker of parliament.”

“Saakashvili’s speech summed up his coming presidency in a nutshell. It displayed his usual flair for public relations and theatrical presentation and was full of bold promises that would be all but impossible to realize. The new president also made it clear that his priority was more to build a strong state than to forge democratic institutions, a point many Western observers missed.”

“Saakashvili set himself the goal of strengthening the Georgian state. Within a month of becoming president, he had pushed radical constitutional amendments through parliament that turned Georgia from a semiparliamentary republic into a strongly presidential one. The changes stripped parliament — and therefore also Nino Burjanadze — of many of its powers and gave the president the right to appoint most key state officials. Saakashvili then appointed new regional governors and began to impose government control over television stations. In his bid to remodel the entire state, he even had the flag of his own National Movement, a medieval banner with five red crosses on a white background, made into the national flag. Saakashvili also kept to his promise to crack down on corruption. He radically cut and reformed both the regular and traffic police so that bribe-taking became virtually impossible. Former ministers and businessmen accused of enriching themselves under the old regime were detained, often with television cameras filming the arrest. They were put into pretrial detention and forced to pay “bail” or “fines” of millions of dollars directly into the state treasury. Associates of Shevardnadze’s son-in-law Gia Jokhtaberidze paid up a staggering $15.5 million. The arrests were wildly popular and enriched the state treasury but fell a long way short of the rule of law.

The biggest achievement of Saakashvili and his first prime minister, Zhvania, was the transformation of the economy. The customs service and tax police were overhauled, tax rates were simplified, red tape was slashed, and companies were forced to declare their incomes. The result was that in July 2006 the president was able to claim that the state budget had increased from $350 million to $3 billion. This in turn funded the construction of new roads, hospitals, and schools. Wages and pensions went up. Foreign investment also shot up, aided by a public relations campaign waged by the president himself. Saakashvili traveled incessantly, presenting the story of Georgia’s Rose Revolution and its successes to foreign audiences. He brilliantly courted the Western media, winning positive profiles that portrayed Georgia as a democratic success story.

Saakashvili’s other big success was to oust the corrupt regime of Abashidze in Ajaria. Saakashvili ignored warnings about the danger of bloodshed and gave an ultimatum to Abashidze to step down, sponsoring street demonstrations against him. On May 6, Abashidze buckled under pressure and fled to Russia. There was great relief and rejoicing in Batumi, although this was tempered with dismay a month later when Saakashvili trimmed the powers of Ajaria’s autonomous government and parliament, reducing them to a more or less decorative status.”

“In 2008, Georgia went to war with Russia with a forty-year-old president, thirty-six-year-old prime minister, thirty-one-year-old foreign minister, and twenty-nine-year-old defense minister.

All these tendencies took a turn for the worse in February 2005, with the tragic death of Zurab Zhvania, Saakashvili’s prime minister, wisest advisor, and rival. Zhvania died of apparent poisoning from a faulty gas heater at the apartment of a friend. Many people suspected foul play, and many questions about his death are still unanswered, although an official Georgian investigation conducted jointly with the FBI concluded that it was probably an accident. The death of Zhvania at the age of only forty-one robbed Georgia of its most level-headed. politician and of a calm counter-balance to the impulsive Saakashvili.”

“Relations with Russia were an immediate priority for the new Georgian president. It is easy to forget now, but for six months after the Rose Revolution there was optimism that Georgian-Russian relations were improving. The day after Shevardnadze’s resignation, President Putin said he hoped the change in leadership would “restore the tradition of friendship” between the two countries. Saakashvili, in his first press conference after the Rose Revolution, told a Russian journalist in Russian: “For us the main strategic priority is to build normal relations with all countries and first of all Russia. Shevardnadze didn’t have good or bad relations with Russia, he had abnormal relations with Russia.” Georgia’s integration into Europe, Saakashvili went on to say, should take place “together with Russia.”“

“On the first day of his presidency, Saakashvili said he intended to achieve the “restoration of Georgia’s territorial integrity” by the end of his first term. In his speech at the tomb of David the Builder, he said he hoped to hold his next inauguration ceremony in Sukhumi in Abkhazia. After the drift of the Shevardnadze years, it was a clear statement of his intent to shake up the status quo.

Georgia’s two breakaway territories were still both poor and isolated: Abkhazia labored under an economic sanctions regime, and South Ossetia lived on agriculture and smuggled goods. But after Putin became Russia’s president in 2000, Moscow began quietly to exploit the situation in both regions. The first sign of a new policy came at the end of the year when Russia introduced visas for Georgians but exempted residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The following year, Moscow offered residents of the two territories Russian passports instead of their useless Soviet passports. The Abkhaz and Ossetians were naturally delighted to seize a chance to break out of international isolation — the Georgian government had insisted they needed to apply for Georgian passports in order to travel.”

“This was the environment Saakashvili inherited in 2004. Although the problems he faced were deep-seated, the new Georgian president had a number of advantages. He was a politician from a younger generation that had not been involved in the war, he had a strong public mandate, and he had the hope of forging better relations with Putin than his predecessor had maintained. There was also weariness among the populations in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia that could be exploited by a leader in Tbilisi, so long as he was prepared to be diplomatic and patient.

There were important differences between Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Crudely put, Russia had much more at stake in Abkhazia because of its location and resources. Russians also had a strong emotional attachment to Abkhazia from Soviet times.”

“The quarrel between Moscow and Tbilisi had taken a turn for the worse. In March 2006, in what looked like an act of spite, Russia officially banned the import of Georgian wine and mineral water on the grounds that it did not meet health standards — but exempted wine from Abkhazia from the ban. In September, a full-blown crisis erupted. In an apparent act of retaliation, the Georgian government announced it had caught four Russian military spies. President Putin denounced the detention as “state terrorism” and “hostage-taking.” Five days later, the men were paraded in front of the media and handed over to international diplomats to be repatriated to Moscow. The Russian response was savage. On October 3, Russia suspended all rail, road, sea, and postal links to Georgia and stopped issuing entry visas to Georgian citizens. Hundreds of ethnic Georgians alleged to be illegal immigrants were summarily deported from Russia. The quarrel showed Russia reverting to its worst bullying instincts, while the Georgians could not resist provoking Russian dignity. Perceived honor and pride took precedence over strategic interests. Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament, tellingly let slip the phrase, “We won’t forgive those who spit at us.”

The countdown to war can be dated to the end of 2006. Russia closed its army bases in Georgia two years ahead of schedule in what may have been a pragmatic decision or a calculation that it did not want Russian soldiers to be potential hostages in Georgia if fighting were to break out. Saakashvili came up with a new strategy to take over South Ossetia. He persuaded a former Ossetian prime minister and defense minister, Dmitry Sanakoyev, to run in a Georgian-administered election to be the alternative “president” of South Ossetia. Sanakoyev was later made head of a pro-Georgian “interim administration” and was presented as a progressive alternative to the main South Ossetian leader Kokoity. The “Sanakoyev project” might have been more successful, and he might slowly have won the trust of Ossetians disaffected with Kokoity, if the environment had been peaceful. But in an environment of looming confrontation, many people on the other side identified him as Tbilisi’s stooge or as an outright traitor. Moreover, Georgian leaders were in a hurry. They invited Sanakoyev to meetings with diplomats in Tbilisi and even in Brussels, making clear he was their man. They engaged in a series of bizarre publicity stunts, building an amusement park in one of Sanakoyev’s villages and inviting those who joined the pro-Georgian leader to free holidays on the Black Sea. Musicians claiming to be the 1970s pop group Boney M (famous for the song “Ra Ra Raputin”) were invited to perform in the small Georgian village of Tamarasheni in the heart of South Ossetia. In a mirror of the Kokoity-Sanakoyev split, other members of the band claimed that the musicians were not the real Boney M but imposters.

It was especially risky to install Sanakoyev in Kurta, one of the Georgian villages in the heart of South Ossetia just five miles north of Tskhinvali. This put the two rival governments right next door to one another. South Ossetia turned into a closely intertwined tangle of alternative administrations for its Georgian and Ossetian communities, using different roads and water supplies. Russia built a gas pipeline from the north to connect with Tskhinvali. Confidence-building projects faded. A smart new lime green railway terminus built with European Union money stood in Tskhinvali, but with no railway line to connect it anywhere, it proved a memorial to the failure of European goodwill initiatives.

In 2007, all parties in the conflicts felt increased pressure to act. Although many commentators still misleadingly called the disputes “frozen conflicts,” they were in fact melting fast. Two international issues began to affect the situation. One was the proposed further expansion of NATO. Georgia (as well as Ukraine) was hoping to be awarded a Membership Action Plan, the first formal step toward membership of NATO. It received strong support for its ambitions in Washington and from central and Eastern European countries, although France and Germany in particular were much cooler — and Georgia was still a long way from meeting NATO’s entry criteria. Russian officials said the NATO question was a “red-line” issue for them, saying Georgia’s aspirations were a direct threat to their security and citing the opposition of Abkhaz and Ossetians as their main argument. The second issue was Kosovo’s drive for independence as talks with the Serbian government on its final status broke down. Western governments insisted that the internationally recognized secession of Kosovo without the consent of Serbia was “not a precedent.” But people on the ground in the Caucasus disagreed, and this in itself was enough to change the rules of the game. As Kosovo won international backing for seeking independence, the leaders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (and Nagorny Karabakh) declared they could accept nothing less than that for their own peoples.

Saakashvili still insisted that he wanted to resolve the conflicts by the end of his first term in January 2009. He sent menacing signals on how he might do this by vastly increasing his military budget. In June 2007, Georgian defense spending doubled almost overnight to $575 million. The Georgian leadership argued that it was building an army from scratch and needed to professionalize the military to take part in peacekeeping operations in Iraq. But Abkhaz and Ossetians said that this looked like rearmament for war and was proof that they needed to rely on Russian support.

Within Georgia, Saakashvili’s popularity had fallen. The economic benefits of the new reforms had been spread unevenly, and the government’s clean image suffered as senior officials were accused of corruption. In the fall of 2007, a diverse group of opposition politicians who had in common only their rejection of the Saakashvili government held the biggest street demonstrations since the Rose Revolution. On November 7, riot police in black balaclavas were sent in to shut them down. They used teargas, truncheons, and water cannon and chased the opposition activists through the streets. Dozens of people were hurt. The police then moved on to the headquarters of the opposition television station, Imedi. They pulled it off the air mid-broadcast and smashed or disabled its equipment. Saakashvili declared a state of emergency.

The violence drew international condemnation and badly tarnished Saakashvili’s reputation.”

“At the NATO summit in Bucharest on April 2–4 Georgia and Ukraine were not offered Membership Action Plans, but the summit’s final communiqué backed their eventual membership. It said, “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” The Russian authorities duly took their next step, announcing they were authorizing direct governmental relations with Abkhazia and South Ossetia Earlier, Russia had withdrawn from its sanctions regime on Abkhazia.

Both sides were edging toward confrontation.”

“There were plenty of warning signs throughout 2008 that war might break out. How was it allowed to happen? Part of the answer is that concerned outsiders picked the wrong conflict zone. They concentrated most of their efforts on Abkhazia — where arguably their diplomacy was effective — but fighting eventually broke out in South Ossetia.”

“The war that reshaped the South Caucasus in August 2008 lasted only five days. Although the conflict ended in a Russian show of aggression and a painful Georgian defeat, the first of those days was dominated by Georgian nationalist euphoria.”

“At 11:35 Georgian time on the night of August 7, the first explosions were heard over Tskhinvali as Georgian artillery fired smoke-bombs. At 11:50, the army opened up a full-scale artillery assault, and Grad missiles rained down across Tskhinvali. Georgian television showed pictures of rockets flying through the night.”

“At around four o’clock in the afternoon of August 8, the first Russian tanks entered Tskhinvali, having entered South Ossetia that morning. The small Russian peacekeeping contingent had reported at least twelve dead. Fighting raged over the city for two days. The Georgians hung on, at one point managing to halt a Russian army column and wounding the commander of the Fifty-eighth Army, Anatoly Khrulyov. Overall, Tbilisi had committed around 9,000 troops to the operation, but by the afternoon of August 10, they were exhausted and outnumbered. They retreated, now pursued by Russian forces. Georgian reservists were called up but did not fight, while the country’s most effective fighting unit, the First Battalion, based in Iraq, was flown back to Georgia on August 11 but did not engage in combat.

The Russians now moved the war into Georgia proper. A Russian bombing campaign had begun on the morning of August 8. Airfields and military bases were hit across the country. The next day, there was carnage in the town of Gori. A British journalist saw Russian aircraft, apparently aiming for a military barracks, miss their target. Just one of their bombs struck the base. At least two others fell into a compound of long, low-slung apartment blocks, five of which were quickly reduced to blackened shells. A third hit a small secondary school, which crumbled to the ground in a pile of rubble and twisted girders. From the gutted buildings, survivors began to emerge, some hobbling, others bleeding from shrapnel and flying glass, and all covered in a cloak of soot and dust. Then they brought out the dead. In front of a row of garages, a corpse, covered in a chalk-like film, lay on the ground.25 Georgians said that sixty people died in these air raids, which continued for four days.

The world was taken by surprise by the events, partly because the start of the conflict coincided with the start of the Olympic Games in Beijing, attended by President Bush, Prime Minister Putin, and other world leaders. The initial Western reaction was shaped by the fact that the only television images of the violence were of the bombing of Gori, not of Tskhinvali; this set the tone for much of the Western media coverage of the war, which told the “Russia invades South Ossetia” half of the story and not the “Georgia attacks South Ossetia” half. Western leaders did not explicitly condemn the Georgian attack and were strong in their condemnation of the Russian bombings. The UN Security Council met at Russia’s request but failed three times to pass a resolution, because Western countries objected to Russian wording condemning Georgia’s use of force.”

“From August 8, the Abkhaz and Russians opened a second front in the west, aimed at the Upper Kodori Gorge region of Abkhazia. After three days of bombing, Georgian forces and most of the local population — around 3,000 Georgian Svans-fled. The Abkhaz and the Russians took this strategically situated territory virtually without a fight. Russian forces then crossed the border of Abkhazia into western Georgia, destroyed the military base at Senaki, and occupied Georgia’s main port, Poti, wrecking its harbor and infrastructure. They blew up the Grakali railroad bridge in central Georgia, effectively cutting the country in two. It was a campaign of humiliation aimed not just at Georgia but at Georgia’s main ally, the United States. Few people were killed, but the invading forces demonstrated their power to rampage through the country at will and took especial delight in destroying any U.S.-built military infrastructure. Later, in Sukhumi, the Abkhaz government exhibited hundreds of U.S.-made weapons they said they had found in the Kodori Gorge.

Russian forces halted south of Gori on the road to Tbilisi — to have gone farther was no doubt tempting to Russian generals but risked a real battle with the hardcore of Georgia’s armed forces and a much bigger confrontation with its Western friends. Moscow’s victory was real enough. Tbilisi had filled up with visiting Western dignitaries expressing solidarity with the Georgians, but the West made it clear it would not intervene militarily. It fell to French president Nicolas Sarkozy to fly to Moscow on August 12 and negotiate a six-point truce very much on Russia’s terms. It stipulated that each side should withdraw to the positions it had held before the conflict — a point Russia subsequently did not honor. “International discussions” were convened on the disputed territories, but without a clear agenda. A crucial passage of the plan on “additional security measures” was vaguely worded and was interpreted by Moscow as a cover for it to hold onto a buffer zone outside both Abkhazia and South Ossetia for almost two months until an EU monitoring mission arrived in October. The truce effectively left the Russians in de facto control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and reinforced the dividing lines between Tbilisi and the two breakaway entities.”

“The August 2008 conflict in Georgia was a disaster not only for those who suffered directly in it but for the whole of the Caucasus. The effects of the “five-day war” will be felt for years to come.

The final casualty figures were lower than first suggested but still substantial. Around 850 people lost their lives, and several thousand were wounded. Around half the dead were Georgian and Ossetian civilians; the rest were soldiers. About 138,000 people also fled their homes, of whom 100,000 were able to return over the next two months. That left just under 40,000 Georgian refugees still displaced several years later. Many of their villages in South Ossetia had been burned to the ground. The effort to re-house them was more professional than in the 1990s, but their chances of returning home look very remote.”

“The war did catastrophic damage to the overall development of the region. The Georgian economy was badly hit. Not only was infrastructure damaged, but foreign investment fell sharply. The conflict also hurt Georgia’s South Caucasian neighbors. The blowing up of the Grakali railroad bridge in central Georgia cost Armenia an estimated half a billion dollars as imports from the Black Sea were halted for a week. Azerbaijan’s energy pipelines through Georgia were shut down, losing Azerbaijan huge amounts of revenue.”

“If there was a belief that the Russians would hesitate to intervene, that could explain why Saakashvili was tempted to launch a lightning operation to take Tskhinvali. Having captured the city by force, he could present Russia and the world with a fait accompli and offer to negotiate a new deal on South Ossetia from a position of strength. He would have triumphantly fulfilled his pledge to voters to return South Ossetia to Georgian sovereignty. On the evening of August 8, Saakashvili was asked by the BBC if he would pull his forces out of Tskhinvali and replied rhetorically, “Pull forces from out of the Georgian territory?” He went on, “This is Georgian territory and we need to have immediate ceasefire; I am willing to have international mediation; I am willing to have international separation of forces; we have to establish a normal regime under international supervision.”

Saakashvili almost certainly had an exaggerated belief in American support. American officials were very firm in private with their Georgian counterparts that they would not support them in any kind of military action, but their public stance sent a less stern message that fed the illusions of the Georgian hawks. For example, in Tbilisi on July 10, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, having delivered a severe warning in private, warmly endorsed Saakashvili in public, beginning her comments with a strong statement of support for Georgian territorial integrity. One U.S. official told the New York Times four days after war began, “The Georgians figured it was better to ask forgiveness later, but not ask for permission first. It was a decision on their part. They knew we would say ‘no.’””

“The Russian buildup in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia after the NATO summit in April was consistent with their effort to step up their covert annexation of both territories so as to keep their strategic foothold in the South Caucasus and weaken the Saakashvili government. It is quite likely that in South Ossetia they had plans to remove the pro-Georgian administration of Dmitry Sanakoyev from the Georgian villages north of Tskhinvali. That would have rid the South Ossetian government of what it saw as its main irritant and humiliated President Saakashvili as Georgians fled from Sanakoyev’s villages. If this was the case, the Russians simply “got lucky” on August 7–8–after being caught by surprise for a few hours, they were able to execute a much more ambitious operation to oust the Georgian presence entirely from both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, rampage through Georgia proper, and humiliate Saakashvili and his Western backers.”

Azerbaijan, Part 3

“A poll by the Caucasus Research and Resources Center in 2013 found that 64 percent of the population had “no basic knowledge of” or were beginners in the Russian language. (In Georgia, the corresponding level of ignorance of Russian in 2018 was much lower, at 33 percent, while in Armenia, which maintains a close alliance with Russia, it was 19 percent.) Young educated people may speak better English than Russian. Many ordinary folk are monolingual.

Russia now competes for influence in Azerbaijan with the EU, Iran, Turkey, and — increasingly — China, which is one of the three top investors in all three South Caucasus countries. The much-delayed opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway in October 2017 not only linked Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey by rail but gave China a new rail route to Europe, bypassing Russia.”

“Azerbaijan took an authoritarian turn and turned into something more akin to a Central Asian-style dictatorship than the politically pluralist country it had briefly resembled in 1992 or had been during the First Republic of 1918. In 2009, President Ilham Aliev held a referendum to amend the constitution and change presidential term limits, enabling him to run for a third term in 2013. He did so and was duly elected, getting a predictably massive 84.5 percent of the vote. In 2018, he won a fourth term, now extended to seven years, facing virtually no opposition.

Beginning in 2013, the ruling regime cracked down on dissenting and opposition voices. It began by jailing Ilgar Mammadov, leader of the pro-Western opposition Republican Alternative (REAL) Party, who had been planning to run in the presidential elections. (Mammadov was released in August 2018 after several rulings by the European Court of Human Rights opposing his detention.) Later, more than a dozen pro-Western civil society leaders, human rights activists, and journalists were arrested and imprisoned on dubious charges. These included human rights defender Leyla Yunus; her husband, historian Arif Yunus; lawyer Intigam Aliyev; journalist Khadija Ismail; and youth activist Rasul Jafarov. (All four were later released, but other less-known activists were subsequently arrested.) At the same time, Western organizations, including the National Democratic Institute, the Peace Corps, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), Radio Liberty, and Oxfam, were shut down or forced to leave the country.

Azerbaijani relations with the West were limited to energy and security cooperation. At the same time there was a new rapprochement with Russia, ahead of the October 2013 presidential vote. Two months before the Azerbaijani election President Vladimir Putin visited Baku, accompanied by senior officials. A large part of Russia’s Caspian Flotilla conspicuously followed him and was docked in the bay of Baku for the duration of his stay.

Why the lurch toward dictatorship in a country that was stronger and wealthier than ever before, whose elite should have felt eminently secure? Because, it seems, the Azerbaijani elite does not feel secure. President Ilham Aliev and members of his ruling circle reportedly said in private conversations that they feared the popular revolts of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Maidan in Ukraine in 2013–14. As in Russia, Western pro-democracy organizations were seen as dangerous agents of “regime change.” A close relationship with Putin’s Russia (along with an increasingly authoritarian Turkey), rather than the West, provided a strong insurance policy against any revolt.

To consolidate power, the constitutional referendum of 2016 not only extended the presidential term to seven years but also created the institution of the vice presidency, with First Lady Mehriban Alieva becoming first vice president. This cemented the status of her family, the Pashaevs, as Azerbaijan’s de facto first family, with an unmatched political influence and wealth. The Pasha Holdings company, whose CEO is first cousin of the first lady, owns hotels, ski resorts, banks, and insurance, travel, and construction companies.

Throughout the South Caucasus, informal centers of power are more important than public institutions. In Azerbaijan, informal “neo-patrimonial” power is everything. Jobs, resources, and favors are bestowed through personal connections, flowing down from one or more patrons to a network of clients below. Public office means little. From 1996 to 2018, for example, Azerbaijan had a prime minister, Artur Rasizade, who had no political influence, who was unknown outside the country, and whose departure barely merited any commentary.

Real power lay elsewhere. The minister of emergencies Kamaladdin Heydarov-owner of, among other things, the Gabala football club — and the minister of taxes Fazil Mammadov had far greater wealth and influence than one would expect for such minor political positions and even had their own rudimentary private armies. In the phrase of Audrey Altstadt, the best historian of modern Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliev is the “keystone” of this system. He is the indispensable central figure, who holds things together and is the arbiter of disputes — but one also gets the sense that he is crushed by the weight of the system.”

“In 2015 Azerbaijan’s system tottered. Oil prices fell, and the hasty devaluation of Azerbaijan’s currency, the manat, badly hurt the urban middle classes of Baku and brought “boom-town Baku” to a lurching halt. Even worse effects of the crash were felt out in the provinces. The divide between the prosperous capital city and the struggling provinces is a miserable feature that all three countries of the South Caucasus have in common, and one the casual visitor who only sees the capitals can easily miss.

In Azerbaijan, the contrast between wealthy Baku and the rest of the country is striking. Even Azerbaijan’s rather sleepy second city Ganja (formerly Kirovabad and Elizavetpol) looks like a miserable poor cousin in comparison to the capital.

Small Azerbaijani towns in the era of Ilham Aliev typically have the same look. They have a newly built highway, an “Olympic Center” for public sports activities, and a smart statue of Heidar Aliev in a well-tended park, where local citizens can revere the deceased father of the nation. Real economic life is limited, however.

Hidden unemployment and underemployment is the curse of the South Caucasus, especially in the provinces — even though official unemployment levels are quite low. At the height of the oil boom in 2013, the Caucasus Barometer — the annual survey of the polling organization CRRC — found 60 percent of Azerbaijani respondents reporting that they had no job and more than half reporting a monthly income of less than $250. Across the region, villages are half empty, with those of working age having left for Russia or Turkey as guest workers and older people staying behind.

In the years of plenty, these towns and villages were sustained by remittances from the departed guest workers. But the falling oil price also hit Russia hard, and many Azerbaijanis working there came home, inflicting a double blow on the economy. In January 2016, a string of street demonstrations flared up in a dozen locations across Azerbaijan. The protests died away after the government promised to reverse some price rises. Video footage on social media showed that many of the protestors were returnees from Russia sporting leather jackets and speaking Russian.

The regime had regained a more stable footing by 2018, thanks to a higher oil price. The opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway and the new contract extending the life of the ACG oil fields promise more stability. Yet the government still has limited capacity to spend its way out of trouble. The 2016 protests revealed an inescapable truth to the Azerbaijani elite: most of the country’s society looks very different from them. In 2018, most of the Azerbaijani public is young; around 40 percent of the population is under twenty-five years of age. They are poor, with the vast majority earning less than $400 a month. They are also more religious. According to a Pew Forum survey in 2012, more than 96 percent of Azerbaijanis say they are Muslim, both Shia and Sunni, and 70 percent of those who identify as believers say they pray more than once a day.

A secular elite still holds sway in Baku. A visitor to the capital of this Muslim country might wonder where all the Muslims are. On the streets of Baku, you never hear the call to prayer. President Aliev did go on pilgrimage to Mecca in 2015, but the lavish lifestyle he and his family enjoy and their fashionable Western outfits don’t speak very loudly of a religious commitment. Outside the center of Baku, a different picture takes shape. The extreme corruption of the regime as well as its close relationship with Israel have fueled the antagonism of pious Muslims toward the country’s leaders.

Shias are still the majority, representing around two-thirds of the country’s Muslims. In the south of the country near the Iranian border, and especially among the Talysh minority, who speak a language related to Farsi, the Iranian influence is strong; in this region, Iran funds mosques and medressahs. Sunnis, many of them in the north, near Russia’s turbulent region of Dagestan, are gaining in number. One positive aspect of Azerbaijan, however, is that the country has so far not suffered from the Shia-Sunni antagonism and violence that has torn apart Iraq and Syria. This is mainly because Shia-Sunni differences were blurred under Communist rule, so many Azerbaijanis do not strongly identify as belonging to one faith or the other.

Government repression of both Shias and Sunnis and a zero-tolerance policy toward those who sport beards or wear headscarves are fostering radicalism.”

Conclusion

“The unresolved Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh rarely flares into levels of violence that make international headlines, but it casts a great shadow over the Caucasus. More than any other single factor, the conflict has held back the forward development of the region. It pits two of the three countries in perpetual confrontation with one another, poisons politics, hurts economies, and diverts billions from public services into military spending. For Azerbaijan it means that one-seventh of its de jure territory is under the control of foreign forces. Armenia’s two longest borders, with Azerbaijan and Turkey, are closed; its trade routes east and west are blocked; and it must rely on a military alliance with Russia to feel secure.

In the 1990s the trenches that form the Line of Contact outside Nagorny Karabakh were relatively quiet and manned by lightly armed conscripts. The trenches have barely moved since then. The international presence is still limited to a small number of unarmed observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who make inspection visits to the frontline twice a month.

Since then, however, the conflict zone has turned one of the most dangerous patches of geography in the world, a fearsome militarized zone bristling with heavy weapons. There are 20,000 soldiers on each side of the line. Both armies now possess heavy artillery and long-range missiles. The Azerbaijanis, the losing side in the conflict of the 1990s, have spent billions on armaments to secure military superiority, buying fearsome weapons such as Russian-made attack helicopters, Sukhoi fighter planes, and Israeli “suicide drones,” which were used with deadly effect in the fighting of April 2016. Instead of rifle fire, the two sides routinely break the ceasefire, both along the Line of Contact and along the length of the international border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with long-range snipers and mortars. In July 2017, a two-year-old Azerbaijani girl and her grandmother were killed in the village of Alkhanly by an Armenian artillery shell.

Armenian-controlled territory begins on the other side of no-man’s land, a zone that has become a jungle of thistles. Although the world recognizes Aghdam and other towns as being the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan, the city has lain empty and ruined, and has been run by Armenians since it was captured in 1993.”

“Of the big cities of the Caucasus, the Armenian capital Yerevan seems most unchanged since the breakup of the USSR in 1991. The city center still has the look of the Soviet 1950s, with monumental buildings in pink and purple, constructed from the local volcanic stone known as tuff. It is not a flashy city. This bolsters the perception of Armenia as the most serene, stable, and unchanging of the three countries of the South Caucasus — or, as others would say, the most isolated and stagnating of them. Ethnic homogeneity — 98 percent of the population is ethnic Armenian — and two closed borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey also seem to make for predictability. In early 2018, an unchanging elite and the continuation of the same leadership in power promised more of the same, with at best some modest economic improvements. Yerevan was apparently the city where nothing changed.

In April 2018, the people of Yerevan overthrew that stereotype. The biggest crowds Armenia had seen since the Karabakh demonstrations of early 1988 brought the city to a standstill. A few weeks earlier, Nikol Pashinian, an opposition member of parliament, had begun a protest march across the country with just a few dozen supporters. Slowly his peaceful protest caught the imagination of the Armenian public, who were sullenly unhappy with the status quo but did not believe they had a voice to say so.

Pashinian had picked the moment at which Armenia’s ruling regime was at its weakest. On April 9, on the completion of Serzh Sargsyan’s second and final term as president of the country, a new constitution came into effect. The position of president was downgraded to a mostly ceremonial post, as in Germany or Italy. Armen Sarkissian (no relation to his predecessor, bearing the same surname but spelled differently), a respected diplomat, scholar, and businessman, was inaugurated as president. Serzh Sargsyan made a sideways move to become prime minister, a position now endowed with the same powers as that of a British head of government, in control of the economy, foreign policy, and security. So everything changed, but everything stayed the same. Sargsyan kept the country’s top job — and even the same offices he had occupied for the past ten years.”

“When he reached Yerevan on April 13, Pashinian’s demonstrations grew. Public opinion in the modern South Caucasus is not a monolith but a wave. Most of the population supports its rulers — and confirms this in elections and opinion polls — out of a mixture of inertia, instinctive loyalty, the influence of state media, pressure exerted by bosses, and the threat of repression. But once the public sees change is coming, the ruling regime can quickly be swept away. In Armenia, Pashinian’s protest movement to “Reject Serzh” (merjinserjin, a phrase that in Armenian rhymes) became that wave. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Armenians began to join.”

“The activists preached nonviolence and told the police through megaphones that they were their friends. They were also careful to make the demonstration all about Armenian domestic politics, not geopolitics. Protesters did not hold EU flags, as in Ukraine, or carry anti-Russian placards. Everyone carried the Armenian tricolor flag and made the demonstration a carnival of patriotism, peaceful protest, and mockery of the government.

The mass carnival put Sargsyan in a dilemma. He could give orders to try to suppress the protests by force, but that would mean mass bloodshed, or he could negotiate. At a brief televised meeting with Pashinian, Sargsyan said that he would not accept an ultimatum to resign and walked out of the room. But his popular legitimacy had crumbled. On April 23, he announced his resignation with the extraordinary words, “Nikol Pashinian was right, I was wrong.” His allies in the Republican Party took a little longer to capitulate. After another day of national protest again paralyzed the country, on May 8 parliament agreed to appoint Pashinian as head of a new interim government.

The outgoing leader, Sargsyan, was not so much an autocrat as the CEO of a conglomerate, an elite network that had taken over the country and had representatives in every Armenian town and village. So the street protests were about much more than him. The conglomerate was centered around the Republican Party, which dominated parliament and all local municipalities in elections it was always assured to win. This core group, Armenia’s business-political elite, owned or ran most of the country’s most lucrative businesses and had every reason to resist longer than its leader. These men owned kitschy fake Roman villas, drove Hummers or Bentleys, and were reviled by the public. One of the most notorious was Samvel Aleksanian (nicknamed “Lifik Samo” after the Russian word for bra — his father had a bra shop in Soviet times), who ran a chain of supermarkets and controlled the import of sugar and butter into the country.

Another, former army commander Manvel Grigorian, ran the cathedral town of Echmiadzin as his personal fiefdom. There were gasps when Grigorian was arrested. Television footage of his country house showed a private arsenal of guns, rifles, and ammunition and a garage full of Hummer and Range Rover cars. More shocking to the public were an ambulance donated to the army and stockpiled donations of food and first-aid kits sent by schoolchildren during the fighting of April 2016, along with their handwritten notes. The authorities said that Grigorian had used the food donations to feed tigers and bears at his private zoo.

Discoveries like these outraged the overwhelming majority of Armenians, who felt themselves the victims of economic inequality. Average incomes in Armenia were a few hundred dollars a month and had not risen appreciatively in a decade. Remittances from guest workers in Russia still contributed to around a fifth of national revenues. Economic underperformance also continued to cause disastrous emigration rates. The International Organization for Migration estimated that 23.7 percent of all Armenian-born citizens lived outside the country in 2015. In total, about half a million fewer people lived in Armenia in 2018 than did during the late Soviet era three decades earlier.”

“Armenia’s “Velvet Revolution” had its own Armenian peculiarities. Why did Sargsyan, the strongman of the Karabakh conflict and boss of Armenia’s security structures, choose to surrender after a decade in power rather than crack down? His decision seems to have stemmed partly from a feeling of patriotism and an understanding that he would not face a vendetta. Moreover, national solidarity — the fear that Azerbaijan might use a moment of national weakness to launch an offensive on the Karabakh front — told him that a violent suppression of the protests might risk the security of the country.

Twenty years younger than Sargsyan, Pashinian, who turned forty-three in June 2018, represented a new generation and a different outlook. He won the support of the crowds with charismatic speeches and a demonstrably modest demeanor. As a parliamentarian, he lived with his wife and four children in the kind of ordinary three-room apartment that most of his fellow protestors inhabited. Throughout his walk across Armenia and the protests, as his beard lengthened, the opposition leader wore the same camouflage T-shirt and a cap bearing the slogan “Dukhov” (meaning roughly “Resist” or “Courage”). All this marked him and his team — mostly even younger than he was — as men and women who bore almost no imprint of the Soviet Union.”

“Every post-independence Armenian government has declared a foreign policy based on “complementarity” or “multipolarity” — in other words, partnership with many states, and not just Russia.”

“A few years before it had all been so different. Armenia and Turkey were on the verge of a historical agreement. In October 2009, the foreign ministers of Armenia and Turkey signed two protocols in Zurich on restoring diplomatic relations and reopening their closed land border; it only remained for the agreements to be ratified by the countries’ parliaments. The Swiss government had hosted confidential talks between the two sides. Then Turkish president Abdullah Gül made an extraordinary visit to Yerevan in October 2008 to watch an Armenia-Turkey international football match. Gül was the first ever Turkish leader to visit Armenia. He spent only six hours in Yerevan — the engines of his plane did not stop running — but the symbolic importance of his visit was hard to overstate.

The visit coincided with a thaw in Turkey in which the urban middle classes and historians began to examine the blank pages of their history in the early twentieth century: the expulsion of Greeks, the persecution of Kurds, and — most painfully — the destruction and deportation of almost the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Books were written, conferences held at Turkish universities, and untold stories revealed. The hidden histories of the descendants of Armenians left behind in 1915 and adopted by Kurdish and Turkish families, either by force or through kindness, were told at last. The Kurdish municipalities of eastern Turkey went the furthest. In the city of Diyarbakir, the old Armenian church was reopened and restored, and the local government offered an apology to the Armenians. It was a favorable moment for confronting taboos.

For Turkey, the Zurich agreement of 2009 promised to draw a line under the Armenian issue and its international repercussions — if Azerbaijan could be persuaded to swallow it. For Armenia, the economic benefit of opening the border, restoring the closed railway line, and linking Armenia to Europe via Turkey was clear. At a stroke, Armenia’s international isolation would end. The document was designed to sidestep both the Karabakh and the Genocide issues. Armenia would have to accept its international border with Turkey as established by the Treaty of Kars in 1921 to be permanent, but this was a fait accompli as far as the world was concerned.

But the protocols were never ratified. Vocal Armenian diasporans objected to the proposed formation of a vaguely worded “subcommission on the historical dimension” to be staffed by Armenian, Turkish, and international historians. This was the Turkish government’s attempt to insert into the process its right to debate the genocide issue — if only to defend itself against nationalist claims that it had sold out. Many Armenians considered that even this vague formulation amounted to a betrayal of their history. President Sargsyan was not deterred, but it certainly dampened his willingness to lobby actively for the rapprochement in public.

The Armenian-Turkish rapprochement would undoubtedly have succeeded, however, had it not been for Azerbaijan’s opposition. The documents signed in Zurich did not explicitly mention the Karabakh conflict — the reason Turkey had closed the border in the first place in 1993. There was a tacit understanding that progress on Armenia-Turkey relations would shift the biggest historical boulder weighing down Armenia and galvanize international efforts to resolve the conflict with Azerbaijan. As the International Crisis Group argued, “An open border could help break Armenian perceptions of encirclement by hostile Turkic peoples, making them less adamant about retaining the territories around Nagorno-Karabakh as security guarantees.” Baku did not see it that way, however, and Azerbaijani officials lobbied hard in Ankara against the protocols, even threatening to renegotiate Azerbaijan’s gas sales to Turkey.

In the end, Turkey’s most powerful politician, then prime minister Erdogan, called for Armenia to withdraw from occupied territories in Azerbaijan the day after the Zurich ceremony. The process stalled, the protocols were not ratified, and Armenian-Turkish relations became even worse than before.”

“The country has become both more open to the world and more conservative. Religious piety, support for “family values,” and anti-Muslim sentiment have increased — and so has a culture of tolerance toward lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-trans- gender (LGBT) rights and minorities in the capital.

These two worlds collided on the night of May 11, 2018. Hundreds of riot police with machine guns raided Café Gallery and Bassiani, two popular Tbilisi nightclubs, dragging young people off the dance floors and into detention. The ostensible reason was a crackdown on drug dealers, but none were arrested. Instead it appeared to be an act of intimidation against young people with an alternative lifestyle. The next day thousands of young people staged a rave in broad daylight to protest police brutality. Inevitably, they held it on the stage of all Georgian protests of the previous three decades, Rustaveli Avenue. A group of far-right activists held a counter-rally, with the police in between. The interior minister issued an unprecedented apology for the police raids. A few days later, another march was held by conservative Georgians carrying icons and singing hymns to celebrate a “day of sanctity and strength of the family.”

The immediate issue was harsh legislation that criminalized the possession of even the tiniest amount of drugs. This snared hundreds of young people and kept Georgia’s prison population unreasonably high — the fourth highest in Europe per capita. It also exposed the wide cultural gap between different Georgians as the country opened up to the world. A tension between “open Georgia” and “closed Georgia” has run through the country’s entire post-independence history.”

“In 2012, Saakashvili, who had opened Georgia up to the world in an unprecedented way a few years before, was displaying ever greater illiberal and authoritarian tendencies. The draconian justice system meant that less than 1 percent of the accused were acquitted in a Georgian court, and the prisons were full. The tax police harassed businessmen who refused to contribute to government infrastructure projects. Public officials gave interviews surreptitiously, fearful of surveillance by the powerful interior minister Van Merabashvili.”

“In 2011, with a year until the next elections in Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili appeared to have weathered the postwar crisis that had left him tarnished both at home and abroad. His party still dominated parliament, the main television channels gave him un-critical coverage, and the opposition was weak.

Saakashvili’s second presidential term was due to end in 2013. He had the constitution changed to establish a system in which the prime minister and parliament had greater powers and the president’s authority was downgraded — as Armenia was to do a few years later. The expectation was that Saakashvili would seek the prime minister’s post and stay in power. But, as in Armenia in 2018, the plan did not go according to script.

Unexpectedly, a new opposition figure emerged whom it was much harder to crush. Bidzina Ivanishvili was Georgia’s richest man, having made his money in Russia in the 1990s.”

“In October 2011, Ivanishvili made his move, declaring that the Saakashvili government was discredited and he was ready to head the opposition. In an interview, he called contemporary Georgia “a façade economy, façade everything, just a Potemkin village.” He gave his new movement the name Georgian Dream, the title of a song by his rapper son.

Even Ivanishvili may have been surprised by how quickly almost the whole Georgian opposition hitched itself to his bandwagon, from the pro-Western liberals of the Republican Party and former ambassador to the United Nations Irakli Alasania to the conservatives of Industry Will Save Georgia. Now they had a sponsor and protector. The authorities reacted swiftly and clumsily, stripping Ivanishvili and his wife of their Georgian citizenship on dubious grounds, a move that only won him more public sympathy, including from Patriarch Ilya Il, the head of Georgia’s Orthodox Church.

The election, nominally one for parliament, turned into a contest between two very different big personalities whom Georgians called by their first names: Misha and Bidzina. It was free but not fair. Saakashvili’s United National Movement dominated media coverage and controlled municipal administrations. The president had developed a passion for architectural projects, from the new towers of Batumi to a modern glass bridge across the River Kura in Tbilisi, and made this building spree one of the central themes of his campaign. Accompanied rather bizarrely by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, Saakashvili opened a shiny new airport for the city of Kutaisi the week before election day.

Saakashvili also tried to make the election about Russia, repeatedly accusing Ivanishvili of being an agent of Moscow. (Ivanishvili had made his money in Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s. That certainly proved that he had been a successful operator in a rough, criminalized environment, but not that he had any ties to the Putin administration. When he went into Georgian politics, Ivanishvili undertook the task of selling his remaining assets in Russia.)

Ivanishvili gained momentum by focusing on a basic bread-and-butter domestic agenda. He drew support from two entirely different social groups. In rural areas, unemployment was high, as the United National Movement, applying its libertarian economic principles, had invested very little in agriculture. These rural voters were enthusiastic about Georgian Dream’s promises of job creation and higher spending on social benefits. In the capital, the urban professionals who had supported the Rose Revolution now felt choked by the encroachment of one-party rule, the power of the police, and the lack of freedom of speech. They also backed Georgian Dream in large numbers.

On the evening of September 18, 2012, a scandal broke that turned the tide against Saakashvili. Video footage was released and shown on two small opposition television channels of horrific abuse of prisoners in Tbilisi’s Gldani Prison. Prisoners were shown being mocked, physically abused, and, in one case, apparently sexually abused with a broom. The videos unleashed a wave of protest, mainly led by young people. For many it was highly personal: Georgia’s prisons were so full that everyone, it seemed, knew a current or former inmate. Despite sackings and apologies, Saakashvili’s government could not shake off the accusation that the abuse was institutionalized and a result of its proudly proclaimed zero-tolerance policy on crime.

On October 1, Saakashvili’s team still thought he had won, but the opinion polls got it wrong. Georgian Dream captured 55 perent of the vote and 85 of the 150 seats in parliament. Tbilisi delivered the most emphatic blow to Saakashvili, with two-thirds of voters backing Georgian Dream. Saakashvili proved his demoratic credentials by conceding defeat with some gracious words.”

“More than a quarter of a century after the end of the USSR, two territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, were still officially recognized as part of independent Georgia but had lived outside control by Tbilisi all that time.

On August 26, 2008, two weeks after the end of fighting in Georgia, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev sprang a surprise by declaring that

Russia was formally recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He announced that Russia was defending them from Georgian “genocide.” Russia’s recognition paradoxically closed off Abkhazia and South Ossetia even further from the outside world. The two were now client statelets of Moscow, which stationed approximately 7,000 troops on their territory. South Ossetia, as far as most of the world was concerned, disappeared behind barbed wire. Its economy sank, as apart from farming it now basically served the Russian military base, and many voted with their feet, pushing the population down to as low as 30,000, one-third of the level it had been in the late Soviet era. Most of the remaining Georgians were displaced, and several of their villages were bulldozed and left in ruins. The many Ossetians and Georgians who had shared families because of mixed marriages were now separated by an increasingly hard border.

It was an absurdity that with such a tiny population South Ossetia should be alleged to be a sovereign country while North Ossetia, with a population of 600,000, remained an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation. The absurdity was no secret to most South Ossetians themselves, and in 2015 their leader, Leonid Tibilov, called for a referendum on unification with Russia, only to be politely ignored by the Kremlin. For Moscow, South Ossetia was important only as a geopolitical pawn and a thorn in the side of Tbilisi.

Abkhazia was a different proposition. The roots of the conflict with Georgia went deeper, and the aspirations of the Abkhaz to build their own state were more serious.”

“Russian recognition in 2008 improved the lives of ordinary Abkhaz materially. Thanks to a big influx of Russian money, Abkhazia began to look more like a normal state and less like a postwar disaster zone.”

“The new euphoria of Abkhaz-Russian relations slowly faded. The joke was heard that “we used to have independence, now we have recognition.” Russian budgetary assistance declined — especially after 2014, when the bill for annexing Crimea landed in Moscow and the value of the ruble fell. The Abkhaz historian Stanislav Lakoba clashed with Russians over textbooks white-washing Russia’s imperial history in the region. Tourist numbers from Russia surged in the first years but declined somewhat thereafter — reportedly many had come back once out of curiosity or nostalgia for Soviet-era holidays but had been disappointed by the quality of service. In 2014, the Abkhaz hoped to benefit from the Winter Olympics in Sochi just across the border and even see their airport reopen — but nothing happened.

Domestic politics in Abkhazia also became more turbulent. Politics had always been contested — within the constraints that ethnic Abkhaz dominated public life and held almost all official posts, even though the Armenian community was almost as large in numbers. Russian recognition had given the Abkhaz the luxury to fight one another, former de facto foreign minister Sergei Shamba observed: “After the war of 2008, the main external issue (the conflict with Georgia] was resolved. Our internal fights intensified because the external threat had receded.””

“The ancient stone towers of Svaneti, in the highest mountains of Georgia east of Abkhazia, are at least 1,000 years old. Ushguli, a group of four villages, calls itself the highest settlement in Europe to be inhabited year-round. Around seventy families still live there, surrounded by majestic peaks and amid reminders of a much more glorious past in the shape of around 200 stone towers. It is a small miracle that the Svans, who still speak their own language related to but quite distinct from Georgian, have survived in these harsh conditions and through multiple different political regimes into the modern era.”

“Foreign visitors are awestruck by these landscapes, still far less developed than the alpine zones of western Europe. The World Wildlife Fund has named the wider Caucasus region — stretching into Russia and Turkey — one of thirty-five “biodiversity hotspots” on the planet, with over 1,650 indigenous plants and animals in nine climate zones. To name but three examples of this biodiversity: the mountains of Georgia and Azerbaijan contain more species of oak than western Europe, as they survived the last Ice Age; a few mountain leopards still prowl the highlands of Armenia; and less than 200 “goitered gazelles” are to be found on the borders of Azerbaijan and Georgia.”

“This biodiversity is threatened by illegal logging in Armenia’s forests, industrial pollution of Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea coast, and a legal but ominous program to build a network of dams supplying hydroelectric power in the mountainous areas of Georgia, such as Svaneti. In 2018, one branch of the Georgian government — the Roads Department — announced plans to build a new road between the mountain regions of Khevsureti and Tusheti that would cross two protected areas and a “Strict Nature Reserve” despite the objections of locals, environmentalists, and many inside the government. A villager named Levan told one reporter, “I sometimes work as a tour guide. The tourists tell me please take me away from the road.””

“Several noncommercial internationally backed projects are making a difference. The Caucasus Nature Fund raises funds to protect eighteen national parks in all three South Caucasus countries, fund park wardens, and deter poachers. In Svaneti and in Dilijan in Armenia, another group has started on an even more ambitious project it is calling the Transcaucasian Trail. The plan is to make a 3,000-kilometer hiking trail along and between the Greater and Lesser Caucasus ranges, connecting twelve national parks. Representatives of the Transcaucasian Trail spent a lot of time talking to local communities on the route about their needs and wishes. They started in two areas, using summer camps of international volunteers to build the trails. In the summer of 2018 it was possible to hike for ten days in the mountains of Svaneti or five days in the hills and forests of Dilijan. Part of the charm of these projects is that they anticipate a day when borders will matter less or even disappear and the South Caucasus will function as a proper region once again.”