HARPER MAGAZINE
By Peter Savodnik

In August 2006, I took a bus from Tbilisi to the city of Gori, a little more than an hour northwest of the Georgian capital. At the bus station before I left, I bought from an old woman some bottled water, a very small apple, and two rolls filled with nuts and a white powdery cheese. The station was really a sprawling car-repair shop circumscribed by an outdoor bazaar.

There was a huddle of dusty broken-down buses that hadn’t been driven in many years; Soviet-era Ladas and Volgas propped up on columns of bricks; kiosks manned by fat men hawking dried fruit, sunglasses, pirated DVDs, baked goods, sausage links, and pornographic magazines; dogs of indiscernible ownership; small children; children on bicycles; and hordes of long-distance cabbies leaning against the hoods of their cars, mostly Volgas or Opels or Volkswagens, smoking cigarettes and waiting to drive someone to Batumi, on the Black Sea, or Ninotsminda, near the Armenian border, or Vladikavkaz, in Russia.

I had been in Tbilisi for a week, and I had visited the galleries, museums, and squares on Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s main artery, and climbed the ancient steps to St. Nicholas Church and the Nari kala Fortress, and dined at a first-rate café known for its spicy rice-and-mutton soup, or kharcho, around the corner from the old Sephard ic temple. That morning, I’d decided it was time to venture outside the capital. I went to Gori for the same reason most foreigners go there: It was the birthplace of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhu gashvili, or Josef Stalin.

Roughly 50,000 people lived in Gori that summer, and the bus was scheduled to make several stops around the city. When we arrived at my stop, the bus driver stood up and declared: “Stalin here!” I alone arose—I was wedged into a window seat toward the back—and trundled up to the front and stepped outside, into a quiet dusty stretch of yellowed apartment buildings with pine trees festooned around.

The house where Stalin spent the first four years of his life, 1879 to 1883, is exactly the kind of pathetic wood-brick structure from which one might expect a world-historical tyrant to emerge. Three steps lead up to a wooden deck. The walls are white. The rooms are tiny. Surrounding the house is a large, rectangular, marble-and- concrete structure with rectangular columns, ornate capitals, and hammers and sickles etched into what looks like a plastic casing that serves as a ceiling forty or fifty feet up. The Soviets, when they erected this shrine to the Father of All Fathers in 1936, must have wanted to convey two opposing but interwoven tropes: the ordinariness and simplicity of Stalin’s beginnings, and the extraordinary, even spiritual, force of this place, where the workers’ paradise is said to have been born.

Today, viewed through a post-Soviet prism, the little house enveloped by the monstrous beige shell looks absurd. It’s not just that this is a shrine to a discredited faith, or that Stalin holds a top place in the pantheon of history’s bloodiest dictators. Either of these uncomfortable facts could be explained away or compartmentalized if the little house had been transformed into a piece of history, something to be studied. But that is not what the Stalin house is. The Stalin house, like so many statues to the cosmonauts, poets, and sundry heroes of the revolution scattered across the former Soviet Union, is simply woven into the tapestry of Gori. No academic distance separates it from its surroundings. There is a plaque stating that here lived young Iosif Vissarionovich, but no ticket dispenser, no turnstile, no velvet rope. Nothing sets this place apart; it feels too close.

This sense of historical flattening is only exacerbated by a history museum that sits directly behind the house, on the top floor of a stately building with high ceilings, thick walls, and heavy drapes. One imagines Stalin himself admiring the space, strolling past the display of photographs, maps, and personal effects with a vague smile on his face, nodding approvingly at the gravity, the bigness of everything. There is one obvious omission from the museum: namely, any serious discussion of the labor camps and killing fields that were known collectively as the Gulag and that left 20 million to 40 million Soviet citizens dead and that ultimately defined Stalinist Russia. When I asked an usher if there was any space reserved for the Gulag—I assumed I’d missed something—she pointed to a panel with a map of the camps where Stalin had been imprisoned. “He suffered at the hands of the tsar’s police,” she said, “but they couldn’t destroy him.” This sort of airbrushing would have been expected in Soviet times. But in 2006? Granted, Stalin was Georgian, and Gori was his hometown, but Georgia had embraced its independence in the early Nineties and displayed little of the Soviet nostalgia now in vogue among Russians. Yet here was the clearest and crudest manifestation of that nostalgia. The most important aspect of the maniac-despot—his murderous paranoia and all its terrible consequences—had been buried, camouflaged. The leviathan, far from being portrayed in opposition to his subjects, at war with them, remained their father-protector.

On August 7, 2008, two years after my visit to Gori, Georgia launched an attack on South Ossetia, a Georgian province that declared its independence in 1991. There had been numerous violent clashes between the two sides since then, but the only country that signaled any support for an independent South Ossetia was Russia, which borders the province to the north; the majority of South Ossetia’s residents are of Russian, rather than Georgian, ancestry. Russian authorities say their support, which blossomed into formal recognition following the outbreak of hostilities, was aimed at preserving the peace in the Caucasus. The likelier reason was that Russia wanted to absorb the province and destabilize the government in Tbilisi. The Kremlin has employed a similar policy (which entails expelling or marginalizing ethnic groups that are not loyal to Moscow, arming local militias, and issuing residents Russian passports) to good effect in Abkhazia, another breakaway Georgian province, and in Transdniestr, the easternmost sliver of Moldova. In all three cases the goal has been the same: to expand Moscow’s hegemony at the expense of the government of a sovereign state.

In the months preceding Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia, there were many skirmishes, all of which were almost certainly orchestrated or approved by the Russians with the hope of provoking Georgia to act. Georgian officials, including President Mikheil Saakashvili, knew this; as did the Europeans, as did the Americans, who repeatedly urged Saakashvili, who is known to have a bit of a temper, to keep his powder dry. But on August 7, after weeks of short exchanges of mortars and gunfire, Georgia began a sustained artillery attack on the Ossetian capital of Tskhinvadi.11. Saakashvili claimed this attack was in response to Ossetian shelling of Georgian villages. But international observers, quoted by the New York Times in November, strongly dispute that this shelling ever occurred. Early the following day, Russia, now armed with a casus belli, responded with a devastating counterstrike, not only occupying South Ossetia but invading Georgia proper. The Russians made Gori, about a twenty-minute drive from the South Ossetian border, their base of operations.

One wonders what the Russian soldiers must have thought as they milled around the little Stalin house or, in Gori’s main square several hundred yards away, the towering Stalin statue, to my knowledge the only one of its kind still standing in the former Soviet Union. Did they know the meaning of this little scratch of a town, its place in the political-historical firmament? They should have. The sense of entitlement many Russians feel when it comes to Georgia—the strut and arrogance of the invading army, marching with impunity through the hometown of Stalin—requires, in some sense, Stalin. But what now? Once the invading army inevitably receded, what would happen to this place? Would a rebuilt Georgia be the same country it had been a few weeks earlier? What new geographic, and geopolitical, role might it inhabit?

With these questions in mind, I telephoned President Saakashvili to discuss the conflict and its many repercussions. It took a week to make the call happen. First I called a friend in New York, who called someone in Tbilisi, who knew someone who knew someone who was a senior adviser to the president, who, it turned out, was eager to speak with Western reporters and dispel the myths, as the president sees them, that Russia had been disseminating since hostilities broke out. Early one Sunday afternoon, I received a phone call in my New York apartment from a woman who works in the presidential administration in Tbilisi. She said I should call back in thirty-five minutes to speak with the president. I did this, and the operator patched me through immediately. When Saakash vili picked up, he sounded subdued. It was just before 10 p.m. in Georgia, the president was in his office, and Russian troops were stationed about a half hour’s drive from where he was sitting.

Saakashvili, who speaks good English, received a law degree as an Edmund S. Muskie Fellow at Columbia University in 1995 and pursued further study at George Washington University the following year. When he ascended to power in late 2003, replacing former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in what is often called the Rose Revolution, he was hailed in Washington as a new kind of long-hoped-for post-Soviet leader: the democratic-minded Westernizer. In his self-conception, Saakashvili is a sort of anti-Stalin, not simply a reformer but the embodiment of a new epoch. Imbued with a deep moral conviction, a belief that Georgia must renounce wholeheartedly the past and insert itself into the Western fold, he sounds determined to reconstitute—almost metabolically—Georgia’s political identity. Indeed, when he gets lost in one of his anti-Kremlin rants, one suspects that a part of Saakashvili is also ranting against elements in his own society that retain a fondness, even a nostalgia, for an empire and a vozhd, or leader, to provide clarity and purpose and an escape from freedom.
With Russia occupying large swaths of his country, including the Black Sea port of Poti and key transport routes, the Westernizer was challenging the West to live up to its ideals. “If the West cannot support its values in a country like Georgia, where can it?” Saakashvili asked me. He argued that Georgia is in dire need of a “Marshall Plan” to rejuvenate its economy, and of more military support. “I think some people in the West justify their inaction by saying, ‘Who started it first?’ All of them know that Russia was preparing for months or years. It’s like saying Dubcˇek”—the Czech reformist leader during the Prague Spring—“provoked the Soviet Union.”

Since the beginning of his presidency, this has been a standard Saakashvili narrative: that Russia, in Soviet fashion, gravely threatens its neighbors and former satellite states, and that it is only Saakashvili, in the mold of Alexander Dubcˇek in 1968 or Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy in 1956, who is bravely defying Moscow. Referring to the current conflict, Saakashvili said, “This is exactly what has been done before the Second World War in Europe—Stalin toward Finland in 1939. And then Czechoslovakia in 1968. It’s a combination of Stalin’s and Brezhnev’s tactics in their most brutal forms.” There was an air of exasperation in his voice, a frustration that Western leaders failed to see matters as he did, with obvious, morally instructive parallels between then and now.

“We warned people,” Saakashvili said. “But it was such an uncomfortable truth, some people thought it was our wild imagination. Now what happened on the ground surpasses any imagination.” He continued: “Look at how Putin acted in the Caucasus with the invasion of Chechnya. The more brutal he was, the more subdued the Caucasus became. Then Yukos and Khodorkovsky”—the Russian oil giant’s former CEO, a wealthy oligarch whose arrest Putin ordered in a 2003 dispute. “Now no other businessman is going to speak up against Putin. Then the most daring journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was killed. Now it was time to slaughter an independent country because no one in the neighborhood will challenge Russia. And, of course, Georgia was considered a symbol of another way of doing things—democracy versus autocracy in Russia. So it was a very distinct pattern of behavior, a very distinct pattern of going through things. This is the question the Europeans should be thinking about: Who will be the next victim of this aggression?”

After such a dire portrayal of his foe, Saakashvili then pivoted to emphasize how easily the West could aid him. Russia, he stressed, was no longer the Soviet menace it had once been. The problem was only that some European leaders (whom he declined to name) believed it was, and it is this confusion—about the nature and extent of Russian power, and what can be done to counter it—that posed the real threat to the West.22. Presumably, Saakashvili had in mind Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Berlusconi, who is close with Putin, and Merkel, who is said to have a strong distaste for Saakashvili, have pressed for a more measured response to the Russian incursion. According to this somewhat convoluted line of reasoning, Western leaders, far from exercising a cautious realpolitik, as they did during the Cold War, simply fail to understand their own strength relative to Russia, having been blinded by their fear of a resurgent and bellicose Kremlin. “This Russia is not as scary as Germany back then or Stalin’s Soviet Union, but [the Europeans] don’t think so,” Saakashvili said. “I don’t think that Russia has enough force to change [the balance of] world power.”

And yet, in Saakashvili’s view, Russia imagines itself to be more powerful than it really is—a fantasy fueled by Western timidity. “I think that Russia has more arrogance than ever in the past. You have a leadership in Russia that is so euphoric about oil income and money, so euphoric that they can put fuel back into its Soviet tanks. They are irrational in their rage and behavior. The West, China, everybody, they don’t want trouble, but, well, it looks like these guys in Moscow thrive on trouble. Not having trouble makes them very bored, or they feel very insecure without this sort of thing. They are so insecure they always want to run—but they are short- distance runners.” I asked him what he meant by this, and he replied, “The Soviet Union had lots of soft-power appeal, in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, Asia. Russia has lost all of this. All that Russia has left now is brute force.”

The critical question facing America and Western Europe is: How far will they go to defend Georgia? Specifically, they must decide whether to allow Georgia into NATO—which would mean, per Article Five of the alliance’s treaty, that a future attack on Georgia like the one it recently suffered would be regarded by member states as an attack on their own territory, thereby almost certainly igniting a war between Russia and the West. “This is a big question,” Saakashvili said. “It’s a moral issue for NATO. It’s no longer about Georgia. It’s about whether NATO wants to stand up for its values or succumb to these pressures.”

Throughout our half-hour conversation, Saakashvili attempted to thread a perilously thin needle, casting Russia as imperial and revanchist but not so imperial or revanchist that, should Georgia be protected (whatever that might entail) from Russian aggression, the West would have anything to fear. It was a delicate balancing act, undertaken by a man for whom delicacy does not come naturally. Saakashvili is universally described as gregarious and passionate, always confident he is on the right course. Charles Ebinger, a professor at Georgetown who also works for the Brookings Institution, recalled having Saakashvili in one of his classes in the mid-Nineties. “He was an excellent student, very brash,” Ebinger said. “He told me and the other professor who taught the course that he was going to be president of Georgia one day.” As F. Stephen Larrabee of the Rand Corporation put it, “There was always a feeling in the State Department about Saakashvili that he was an attractive guy, on the one hand, but that he was an impetuous guy.” This impetuousness has often led Saakashvili to take undemo cratic steps in the name of democracy, most notably when he ordered a violent crackdown on demonstrators last November and temporarily shut down independent media. (To his credit, Saakashvili called an early presidential election for January 2008 and won with 53 percent of the vote, beating his closest rival, a wine magnate, by 28 points.) Larrabee, who served on the National Security Council during the Carter Administration and lived in Georgia from 2002 to 2006 while doing research, said: “There’s the expression, ‘He’s a package,’ and he’s a package. He had his good sides, wanted to Westernize the country, and he had his more negative side, which was that he was emotional, impetuous, tended to be reckless, didn’t always think through things, leaped before he looked, the kind of person that you could never be sure what he was going to do, even if his basic political instincts were in the right direction. So he could be his own worst enemy.”

In the Russian-Georgian conflict, Saakash vili sees a deep cultural gulch: a backward-looking empire, filled with vassals and serfs and boyars, pitted against a fledgling democracy in the Western tradition. When I asked about the root causes of the fighting, he said, “I think the main thing is that it’s really values-based. It’s not personal—I never had any fight or public insults with Rus sian leaders. I think it’s purely values-based. Georgia is a small country which is democratic, with double-digit growth for several years. We are at least a hundred times less corrupt than Russia, and, you know, suddenly, they realize that you have this country here that is successful, and the last thing they want is a continuation of our success, with more and more foreign investments, more construction and energy routes from Central Asia to Europe.”

It is ironic, and also typical of the absurdity of post-Soviet politics, that one of Saakash vili’s literary heroes is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. When the dissident novelist died in August, two days before hostilities broke out between Russia and Georgia, Saakashvili contacted Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Natalia. “I wrote a letter . . . to say that he helped my country become independent,” Saakashvili said. This is true in that Solzhenitsyn brought attention to the calamity of Stalinism and helped galvanize the pro-democracy movement. But it ignores the fact that Solzhenitsyn was also a champion of the imperial Russia embodied by Vladimir Putin; indeed, Putin attended Solzhenitsyn’s funeral in Moscow, which included an honor guard and a Russian tricolor. Saakashvili obviously was trying to market himself to the West, to embrace the pro-democracy mantle by wrapping himself in the vintage anti- Communist cloak. But this oversight (if that is a strong enough word) also underscored just how interwoven these two peoples are. Far from being culturally and historically at odds, as Saakashvili contends, Russia and Georgia are cut from very much the same cloth. “I love Russian literature,” said Saakash vili, who, being a Georgian, knows Russian and has read extensively the great Russian novelists and poets. “I love Tolstoy. I love Bulgakov. I can recite you hundreds of Russian poems. I can do it better than Putin.”

As for his all-time favorite novel, it is perhaps not a coincidence that Saakashvili and Senator John McCain, who has himself been accused of a certain impetuousness, share a pick: Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which is, if nothing else, about the power of our ideals and the honor, the sense of purpose, we derive from fighting for those ideals no matter the cost.
Today, seventeen years after the Soviet implosion and the nearly bloodless conclusion of the Cold War, the United States faces the very distinct risk of a new Cold War–style conflict with Russia. The underlying dynamics that precipitated this past summerwar—South Ossetia’s uncertain political status, Russia’s uncertain political identity, growing energy demands in Europe and especially China, and, of course, the personal animosity that persists between Saakashvili and Putin—remain in force, even as one important factor has changed: Washington has aggressively ramped up its support for Saakashvili. This became clear during the presidential campaign, when John McCain, and then Barack Obama, issued strong, unequivocal statements on behalf of Georgia’s effort to roll back the Russians. In our interview, Saakashvili stressed that both men were good friends. He said he had no preference when it came to the November election. Voters may have forgotten, against the background of McCain’s ceaseless saber-rattling against Russia, that after the August conflict it was Senator Joe Biden, now the VP-elect, whom Saakashvili specifically asked to come to Georgia (and who complied). “It’s really a hard choice for me,” Saakashvili said of the race. “Right now, you have both camps that are really, really supportive.”

This is a dangerous place for the United States to be. Irrespective of whether Georgia is admitted to NATO, a war pitting Russian troops against the U.S.-backed Georgian military (including, possibly, U.S. military advisers) would severely strain relations between NATO members, set back U.S.-Russian relations for years, solidify Russian control of oil and gas supplies to Europe, and embolden Russian hardliners who want Moscow to step up political and military cooperation with Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, thereby resurrecting the old imperial strategies. Worse yet, it is hard to imagine the United States mustering the same political will to fight as Russia. Recall the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the Soviet Union ultimately conceded, albeit tacitly, that Cuba was within the U.S. sphere of influence. A war over Georgia, from Russia’s perspective, is not a war over another country that happens to border Russia but a war over what many Russians, and certainly Vladimir Putin, regard as a part of Russia. This thinking is ubiquitous in Russia and indeed predates the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia. The famous and ancient Georgian Military Highway, connecting Tbilisi and Vladikavkaz, in the Russian territory of North Ossetia, has been celebrated and mythologized by writers from Pushkin to Lermontov to Tolstoy.

Nor is the danger confined to Georgia. The Crimea, in southern Ukraine, is similarly problematic. Russia maintains its Black Sea fleet at the port city of Sevastopol, as the Soviet Union once did, and as the tsars did before it. The Ukrainians have said they want Russia out by 2017, and, in fact, Russia has announced plans to relocate the scores of attack submarines, destroyers, frigates, and minesweepers docked there to Novorossiysk, in Russia, in 2012. But what if that doesn’t happen? What if—as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has recently hinted—the Russians try to extend their stay? The parallels with Georgia are unmistakable and ominous. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, like Saakashvili, was backed by the United States in a popular movement (the 2004 Orange Revolution) against the wishes of the Kremlin; the Crimea, like South Ossetia, is filled with people who identify much more closely with Russia (or the former Soviet Union) than they do with Ukraine. If Moscow chooses not to leave, will Kiev stand up to it? When Ukraine asks for American help, how will America react? And what about territorial disputes in Moldova? Or the constant friction, bordering on open hostility, between Russia and the Baltic states? Even Belarus, which has been ruled by strongman Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, is now making overtures to the West. What will Russia do if Minsk says it wants to join the EU or expand diplomatic relations with Washington? What will Washington do?

Saakashvili has often portrayed Georgian admission to NATO as the defining moral question of our time, as if the Western security blanket, once tugged snugly over his nation, would somehow end for good the old imperial patterns of the region and inaugurate a period of stability and respect for national sovereignty. There is something to be said for this. The unending war of words between, say, Estonia and Russia has remained a war of words in large measure, one imagines, because Estonia belongs to NATO. But Saakashvili is perhaps not taking into account how the addition of new member states alters, not just strategically but psychologically and even ontologically, the alliance’s constitution. Recent flare-ups within the alliance—surrounding anti-missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, a Soviet war memorial in Estonia, and, of course, the Russian-Georgian war—point to the widening gulf, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, between “old” and “new” Europe. There is no doubt that old (or Western) Europe has very little appetite for an expanded defense burden. But that is exactly what Europe would inherit, by way of Article Five, should Georgia join the alliance. Once upon a time, when there was a Soviet Union with a Red Army and a huge nuclear arsenal, no one doubted the alliance would hold together. But today, a vastly weakened Russia, by forging bilateral energy agreements with European countries, has far more power to manipulate individual member states—precisely because it is weakened. Russia, having been stripped of its power to frighten the West into a unified alliance, has acquired a new power to pry that alliance apart.

All of which is to say that NATO, should it welcome Saakashvili, may not survive a second attack on Georgia. Charles Ebinger, the Brookings scholar, notes that NATO member states would have been sharply divided about what to do had Georgia already belonged to the alliance when Russia invaded last summer. “Let’s assume that they had been admitted to NATO,” Ebinger said. “Do we really believe that NATO would have come to their defense? I personally do not believe there’s any stomach for a military confrontation with Russia.” Saakashvili, no doubt, would counter that Russia would never have struck had Georgia already been safely ensconced in the Western fold. But as a strategy for the future, such an arrangement would be, to say the least, a gamble.

Certainly, Russia is well aware that by attacking Georgia it aggravated significant, long-standing tensions within NATO. The question is whether those rifts, in the event of another war, would open so wide as to swallow the alliance, or whether NATO would be able to suppress its internal divisions in the name of some greater good. The question is whether NATO believes Georgia, and especially a Georgia governed by Mikheil Saakash vili, is worth defending.

Central to this debate is how Georgia imagines itself and what it aspires to be. That Britain, France, or Germany has misgivings about bringing Georgia into the Western alliance signals an uncertainty about not only their own capacities and inclinations but Georgia’s, too. Saakash vili, one suspects, is aware of as much. He has been to Gori, has seen that statue of Stalin standing in the town square. He can’t help but be sensitive to the many forces and ideologies vying for his country’s future. The Georgian president has articulated a new political identity for his people. By playing the role of the anti- Stalin, he has sought to transcend Stalin. Whether he is capable of that quantum migration—and whether he can negotiate the pitfalls and provocations that his giant revanchist neighbor to the north will inevitably foist on him—is very much in doubt.

URL: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/01/0082338