Russians aiming for resurgence in Georgia

WASHINGTON — In the summer of 1998, I was reporting from Georgia, the Caucasus state now dominating the news as Russian troops pour over and into it. The president, Eduard Shevardnadze, was reminiscing about the most recent Russian assassination attempt against him.

It had been that February, when his armored Mercedes was partly blown up in Tbilisi. He laughed when he recalled how the cunning Russian foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, once a “friend” of his in the transformation of the Soviet Union, made an astonishing public remark soon afterward. While reviewing Russian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia and looking at a rocket-propelled grenade, Primakov playfully asked his troops, “Would that be powerful enough to blow up an armored Mercedes?”

“I met Primakov afterward,” Shevardnadze said to me then, dramatically arching his eyebrows as he often did for emphasis. “He said that he had meant only his own car, that he wanted to know if IT would resist. So I suggested to him, ‘Why don’t we change cars then?’”

No surprise

In short, it was really no surprise when Russian troops poured across the border into Georgia last week. The conflict has been brewing for a long time, and this is not merely some struggle for power or wealth but a profound struggle for culture, for history, for positioning in the post-Cold War world and for the future of Russian/American and European relations.

The Russians, as they had before, used two Russian-affiliated enclaves within Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, as an excuse for invasion, but in truth they had nothing to do with it. Rather, what we were seeing was Vladimir Putin, now acting as prime minister, attempting to begin undoing the historic events of 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved and Georgia and many other of the former republics of the U.S.S.R. became independent in what became known as the “color revolutions.”

Part of the reason for the dispute has been Moscow’s historic tendency, as the great diplomat George F. Kennan once wrote, to have at its borders “only enemies or vassals.” Part of it is that Moscow never forgave Shevardnadze for breaking with his pal of the reformist 1980s, Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, and leading Georgia to enthusiastic pro-Western independence.

But what the Russians really never forgave — and the major reason behind this dangerous invasion — was Shevardnadze’s idea of a “Eurasian Corridor.”

This idea, in effect, meant that legendary Georgia, home of Josef Stalin and also of a special historic Christian people, would be “relocated” away from Moscow’s subjugation.

As Shevardnadze told me in one of our interviews, he saw a physical and metaphysical Eurasian Corridor that would unite Central Asia, through the Caucasus, with Europe. In practice, it would make Georgia pivotal in transforming Russia’s historic north/south control of these southern regions into a new east/west flow of ideas and products between free nations.

“The states of Eurasia are acquiring a real independence and are becoming a reliable link in the new world order,” he told me.

But the biggest question of all was, and is, oil, for Georgia now hosts its own pipelines to Western Europe, most prominently the Baku/Ceyhan (from Baku, through Georgia to Turkey, operated by British Petroleum), as an alternative to Moscow’s pipelines.

‘Petrostate’

As respected American scholar on Russia Marshall Goldman has written, Vladimir Putin has established Russia as a “petrostate” that intends to have total control over energy from Central Asia to the West. If Georgia collapses in turmoil, professor Goldman argued persuasively in The New York Times, investors will not put up the money for other pipelines or means of delivery from the Caspian Sea to the West.

Events such as this Russian invasion and bombing of Georgia always serve to reveal — often suddenly and dramatically — what has really been going on behind the walls and in the corridors of power, and this one certainly does.

Universal Press Syndicate