Russo-Georgian conflict not simple

By MELISSA T. SMITH

The Vindicator’s inclusion of statements by Mikhail Gorbachev and Mikheil Saakashvili in last Friday’s Vindicator prompted me to share my own personal observations of Russo-Georgian relations for the benefit of readers whose historical-cultural memories may need refreshing and supplementation.

As a student of Soviet-Russian culture for nearly 40 years, with over 30 trips to and nearly five years’ living experience in the former Soviet Union, including a trip for Youngstown residents in 1988 that took in the Soviet Republic capital cities of Moscow, Leningrad (now and again St. Petersburg, Russia after the breakup of the USSR in 1991), Riga (Latvia), Kiev (Ukraine), and Tbilisi (Georgia) during the height of the Gorbachev era, I do not envy the politicians who sit in judgment and have become the “deciders” in how to handle the current conflict. My one hope is that a bit of introspection about issues of rhetoric versus action, as well as genuine reflection on issues of social and cultural diversity, will inform the judgment of all concerned. While Russia’s increasing authoritarian and militaristic impulse concerns me deeply, I am equally aware that the issues run far deeper.

Russia throughout its 1000-year history has been torn between European and Asiatic visions of itself, which gained philosophical status in the classic 19th-century debate between “Slavophiles” and “Westernizers”. At the time this debate was framed, the Russian tsarist empire was mired in battles to annex the Caucasus region, which encompasses the republics of Georgia, Armenia (Christian nations), Azerbaijan (a predominantly Muslim state), as well as the Ossetian, Chechen, and Abkhazian peoples that continue to assert their rights as distinct sovereign cultures. We Americans, convinced of the supreme values of democracy and progress, are ill equipped to deal with the cyclical resurgence of national/ethnic patterns and regional tensions that plagues other lands.

Your publication notes that Saakashvili is the current president of Georgia, and that Gorbachev was the last president of the Soviet Union and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. I have not encountered in any recent coverage of current happenings certain recent historical events that color my own memory: On April 9, 1989, a peaceful demonstration in the Georgian capital Tbilisi ended in a massacre in which several people were killed by Soviet troops. Gorbachev vastly underestimated ethnic rivalries within his own country, and the dissolution of the Soviet empire was to great extent his failure to foresee the power of forces seething below the surface of Soviet internationalism. My Russian friends became disillusioned with Gorbachev long before us Westerners, and the foreigners have often observed tendency of our government to take sides in international conflicts on the one of the wrong sides that is least in a position to solve the problem at hand.

Glasnost, perestroika

A main architect of Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika was his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze. Shevardnadze returned to his native Georgia in 1992, after the failed coup attempt that deposed Gorbachev, brought Boris Yeltsin to power, and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze was Saakashvili’s immediate predecessor in the post of President of Georgia.

Another personal memory that the current situation evokes: I also recall how, when I was serving as the assistant to the resident director of the Council of International Educational Exchange (CIEE) in 1979-80, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That was in December 1979 and the U.S.A., in retaliation, boycotted the Olympics which were held that summer (1980) in Moscow. I had left Leningrad on Jan. 2, 1980, and found out about the invasion only the next day, when newspapers conjectured about the cancellation of cultural exchanges. CIEE conducted its program as usual; several students withdrew, of course, in anticipation of increased pressures that would affect their experience; my own grandmother told me “you can go back there, of course; but you never know when you might be hit by a stray bullet.” I decided to take my chances that no bullets fired in Afghanistan would strike me on the streets of Leningrad and, when the administrators from the Russian side met us at the airport in Leningrad and learned that some students had feared coming, they expressed surprise. The story they had heard was that the Americans and the Chinese had invaded Afghanistan and the Soviets had extended “brotherly assistance” to Afghanistan, which was at that time a socialist state.

I hesitate to repeat the platitude that we learn from history that we don’t learn from history. My experiences in Soviet Russia of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s confirmed my choice of a career in academics rather than diplomacy. And I’m here.

In recent political history, we can observe many alliances that turn to their opposites. I need only mention that among our ally in the Afghanistan of the 1980s was Osama Bin Laden.

As a professor of language, literature, and culture at YSU, I can afford to make over generalized historical analogies. I urge us never to forget, however, that our political decisions, shaped by personal experience, always impact on the lives of individuals, and that living our individual lives with dignity and integrity is the best we can hope for.

X Melissa T. Smith is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and director of Women’s Studies at Youngstown State University.