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| Georgian troops near the town of Tskhinvalli |
(Socialist Worker) - According to the Western media, the Russian military's bloody
invasion of the former Soviet republic of Georgia is all about "Russian
imperialism" and the "Cold War" mentality of Vladimir Putin, the
Russian president-turned-prime minister and still the country's leading
political figure.
Certainly, Russia's aim to dominate Georgia--which fell under
Moscow's control in the late 18th century and was formally annexed in
1801--are imperial in nature. But it's revealing that after selling the
U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as exercises in
"promoting democracy," the corporate media is finally willing to
characterize a great power's expansionist military moves as
"imperialist."
What's missing from the mainstream account of the Russia-Georgia war
is the role of U.S. imperialism, which has sought to incorporate
Georgia into NATO as part of an arc of U.S. military outposts and
alliances stretching from the Middle East to Central Asia.
And while the Western press publishes accounts of civilians
terrorized by Russia's military, far less attention is given to the
vicious attack of the Georgian military--trained by the U.S.--on the
disputed South Ossetia region.
South Ossetia is claimed as Georgian territory, but has been ruled
since 1992 as a de facto independent satellite of Russia, following the
collapse of the old USSR. If the Russian military was welcomed in South
Ossetia and neighboring Abkhazia, it's because the Ossetians and
Abkhazians, who are not ethnic Georgians, are opposed to being ruled
from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
Just as the U.S. used the nationalist movement of Kosovar Albanians
to carve out a now-independent Kosovo as an outpost of NATO in the
Balkans, the Russians are backing the Ossetians' and Abkhazians' drive
for independence to weaken Georgia and pre-empt its entry into NATO.
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EVER SINCE Georgia emerged as an independent state, the U.S.--under
the administrations of Bush I, Bill Clinton and Bush II--has worked to
turn the country into a pro-Western enclave in the heart of the
volatile Caucasus region.
The aim has been both to safeguard the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil
pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean and ratchet up
political and military pressure on Russia's southern flank.
After backing the so-called Rose Revolution of 2003 to catapult
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili into power, the U.S. deepened
its military involvement in Georgia, sending advisers to train Georgian
troops training in the Pankisi Gorge bordering Chechnya, where Russian
troops were in the final stages of suppressing a nationalist insurgency.
What began as military cooperation in the name of the "war on
terror" soon became a close collaboration. Georgia sent 2,500 troops to
Iraq, the single biggest contingent in the occupying forces after the
U.S. and Britain.
After assimilating Moscow's former Eastern Europe satellites into
NATO, as well as the three Baltic states that were formerly part of the
USSR, the U.S. set its sights on adding Ukraine and Georgia as well.
The U.S also raised the stakes by installing missile defense systems in
Poland and the Czech Republic--a move supposedly to ward of threats
from Iran, but obviously aimed at Russia.
Russia has responded by pushing back. In Ukraine, a big industrial
country of 45 million people, Moscow has had to play a long game. After
the December 2004 "Orange Revolution" that forced an election rerun
which brought the pro-U.S President Viktor Yushchenko to power, Russia
was able to use bullying over supplies of oil and gas and reliably
pro-Moscow elements in the Ukrainian ruling class to limit that
country's tilt to the West.
But in Georgia, with just 4.6 million people in the largely
impoverished Caucasus region, Russia's methods have been rougher. In
2006, Georgia's arrest of alleged Russian military spies prompted
Moscow to impose an embargo on Georgian imports and other sanctions.
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IN THE corporate media, Russia's heavy-handed tactics represent an
unbroken line from the Tsars through the Russian Revolution to Putin.
In fact, the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought the right of
self-determination to the non-Russian peoples of the Tsar's empire.
Georgia became an independent state in 1918, putting itself under the
protection of first, Germany, and then, Britain.
In 1920, Georgian independence was recognized by Russia's Bolshevik
government. But the Georgian government, controlled by the reform
socialist Menshevik Party, aligned itself with the Western allies that
had backed the counterrevolutionary White armies. In 1921, a
Bolshevik-led uprising, backed up by invading Russian Red Army troops,
installed a pro-Soviet government.
Nevertheless, the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin advocated a
policy of reconciliation in Georgia. While gravely ill, Lenin launched
a struggle against Joseph Stalin--ironically, a Georgian himself--over
for Stalin's harsh policies in Georgia. As Lenin wrote:
[A]s far as the Georgian nation is concerned, we have a typical case in
which a genuinely proletarian attitude makes profound caution,
thoughtfulness and a readiness to compromise a matter of necessity for
us. The Georgian [Stalin] who is neglectful of this aspect of the
question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of
"nationalist-socialism" (whereas he himself is a real and true
"nationalist-socialist," and even a vulgar Great Russian bully),
violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity.
Stalin's consolidation of power after 1928 ushered in a
counterrevolution--and with it, a return of the oppression of national
minorities within a reconstituted empire.
Boundaries were drawn to divide and conquer different ethnic groups.
The Ossetians, whose language is related to Farsi, were split between
an autonomous area inside the Georgian Soviet Republic to the south,
and another within the boundaries of Russia to the north. The
Abkhazians, whose traditional lands were on the Black Sea, were also
granted an autonomous region within Georgia.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
STALIN'S PRISON-house of nations began to break up in the late 1980s
under pressure from popular movements. Some of the worst repression of
that period took place in Georgia, where, in 1989, Interior Ministry
troops attacked unarmed protestors with shovels and poison gas.
A Georgian nationalist and former political prisoner, Zviad
Gamsakhurdia, won election as head of state in 1990, even before the
fall of the USSR the following year, and became the first president of
post-Soviet Georgia in 1991.
Gamsakhurdia's nationalist movement opposed the autonomous status of
South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and efforts to assimilate them into the
newly independent Georgian state led to terrible wars in both regions,
complete with ethnic cleansing on all sides. Moscow intervened to back
the separatists and eventually sent "peacekeepers" to enforce the de
facto independence of both regions.
Amid this chaos and economic collapse, Gamsakhurdia was ousted in a
1992 coup led by Eduard Schevarnadze, the Stalinist boss of Georgia in
the 1970s, who had become a supposedly liberal foreign minister under
the reform administration of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
Schevarnadze initially enjoyed the backing of not only Russia but
the U.S., to which he had made numerous concessions. Yet in the course
of his 10 years in power, Schevarnadze increasingly tilted towards
Russia, which Georgia remained overwhelmingly dependent on economically.
Thus, the U.S. decided to back a different horse: Mikhail
Saakashvili, a young former minister in Schevarnadze's government, who
holds law degrees from Columbia and George Washington Universities and
worked at a high-powered New York law firm. When Schevarnadze refused
to recognize an opposition victory in Georgia's 2003 parliamentary
elections, Saakashvili's Rose Revolution, a series of mass protests,
ultimately forced Shevardnadze to step down.
Saakashvili went on to be elected president in 2004 and, following
snap elections, in January of this year. But the man portrayed by the
West as a gallant democrat standing up to Russian imperialism has been
highly controversial in power. In late 2007, opposition parties
criticized him for his endorsement of police attacks on peaceful
protests, and allegations of corruption dog his government.
What's more, Saakashvili has rehabilitated Gamsakhurdia and his
brand of nationalism--and in so doing, set his sights on the
re-conquest of South Ossetia. Apparently, he calculated that a
lightning-quick seizure of South Ossetia on August 6 would catch Russia
off-guard, and that NATO would one day guarantee a Georgian state that
included the breakaway regions.
It isn't clear whether the U.S.--or even the neoconservative faction
within the Bush administration--gave Saakashvili the green light to
attack South Ossetia. In any case, Saakashvili has miscalculated, as
his attack on South Ossetia has given Russia the pretext not only to
occupy South Ossetia, but also Abkhazia. Now, it appears Russia is out
to smash the Georgian military that the U.S. has tried to build up--and
reassert Moscow's power in its former empire.
Washington has misjudged the situation, too. For years, it could
take advantage of the collapse of the USSR to expand NATO to Russia's
western borders and developing military bases and alliances to its
south. Now, however, an oil-rich Russia has strengthened its military
and is prepared to draw a line against U.S. forays into the region.
For that reason, Russia's war in Georgia signals a new, dangerous
phase in world politics that is already dominated by endless war and
economic crisis.
(link to source)
