Free Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets Page B

become an afterthought. Gorbachev recalls:
There were no other procedures for seeing off the president of the USSR, as is the accepted norm in civilized countries. Although many years of close, comradely relations connected me with most of them, not one of the presidents of the sovereign states—the former Soviet republics of the USSR—considered it necessary to come to Moscow in those [final] days, or even to call me.
    Within forty-five minutes of his resignation speech, sentries lowered the proud red hammer and sickle from the Kremlin and replaced it with the Russian red, white, and blue tricolor.
    My friend Sergei Lazaruk, in despair, suggested we go into the center of Moscow for some drinks. In the streets around Red Square, life went on as usual, oblivious to the empire’s passing. People were strolling around, what few cafés that were open were packed, and one would not have known that 300 million people had just become citizens of different countries.
    But the quiet bordering on indifference about the demise of the“Common House” that had been the USSR masked a churning fury beneath the surface. The genie of independence was out of the bottle, and the roller-coaster ride of “parading sovereignties” and extreme nationalism had just begun.
    One of the first places to blow was at first glance one of the least likely—the wine- and song-filled and (now former-Soviet) Republic of Georgia, which just happened to be Stalin’s homeland.

Last Georgian volunteer units head to front lines, days before Sukhumi is taken over by Abkhaz, September 1993.

 
    M y boss from Reuters TV says: “Pack your bags and get to Georgia.” It is August 1992, and I’ve been working in Moscow in the eight months since the USSR’s disintegration. There’s another war on there, this time in Abkhazia [Georgia]. I’d been to Georgia twice, most recently earlier that year after a two-week civil war reduced the heart of the capital to a smoking ruin. I’d only covered one war, a few months earlier (and even then for only a few days) in the former Soviet republic of Moldova. For some reason this made me a kind of war specialist to my boss, or at least foolhardy enough to embark on this latest Georgian “adventure.”
    The two-hour flight from Moscow south to the Caucasus Mountains reflects the now-dead empire’s geographical complexity. Flat fields of wheat punctuated by birch forests give way to bursting rivers and rolling hills. Just an hour or so out of Moscow, our plane starts to pass over lands conquered by the Cossacks in the eighteenth century, the traditional homelands of dozens of indigenous peoples—Ossetians, Ingush, Kabardins, and Chechens, to name a few.… Then rise the Caucasus Mountains, snowcapped, knife-sharp granite fingers sticking up out of the blue. Georgia comes into view.
    Georgia seemed an unlikely backdrop for failed-state status. The Soviet Union’s richest corner—Black Sea beaches, snow-covered mountain peaks, subtropical sunshine nurturing mandarin and tea groves and vineyards—it had a reputation for producing painters, ballerinas, and poets, bacchanalia and boundless hospitality. “Get rid of the Russians and we’ll live off our wine and cognac!” was a typical common refrain.
    Yet in another way it was indeed a very likely place for trouble. It was a mix of the majority Georgians, “autonomous” republics, and corners dominated by ethnic minorities. And, given its bountiful attributes, Georgia was naturally coveted—home to resorts owned by the Sovietmilitary, political, and cultural elite. What’s more, Georgia had been part of the Russian Empire far longer than the effective birth of the Soviet Empire in 1917. Georgia had entered Russia as a protectorate in the late 1700s, as its rulers of the time saw it as a chance to avert another threat from Persians, Turks, or Muslim raiders from the North Caucasus—it even shared Orthodox Christianity with the Russians. Georgia and Abkhazia, the