|
South Ossetia and the Remaking of
the Post-Soviet World
An Interview with Ronald Suny
By Khatchig Mouradian
 Ronald Grigor Suny is professor of social and political
history at the University of Michigan and professor emeritus
of political science and history at the University of
Chicago. He is the author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918:
Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution
(Princeton University Press, 1972); Armenia in the
Twentieth Century (Scholars Press, 1983); The Making
of the Georgian Nation (Indiana University Press, 1988,
1994); Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History
(Indiana University Press, 1993); The Revenge of the
Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 1993); and
The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor
States (Oxford University Press, 1998).
Suny is currently working on a two-volume biography of
Stalin for Oxford University Press, a co-edited volume on
the Armenian Genocide, a series of essays on empire and
nations, and studies of emotions and ethnic politics. He has
appeared numerous times on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, CBS
Evening News, CNN, and National Public Radio, and has
written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, the Nation, New Left Review, Dissent, and
other newspapers and journals.
In this interview, conducted by phone on Aug. 12, we talk
about the situation in the Caucasus after Georgia’s attack
on South Ossetia and Russia’s heavy-handed retaliation in
August 2008.
***
Khatchig Mouradian—Talk about how the mainstream
media in the U.S. is covering the conflict between Russia
and Georgia.
Ronald Suny—The mainstream media is completely off
the wall. It’s echoing the line of the president, the
government, and the presidential candidates. Also, in trying
to make sense of the conflict, the mainstream media is using
frames like “Russian imperialism” and “Russian aggression.”
These are old, cold-war era frames that they are reproducing
and the result is a complete misreading of the situation.
After various developments in early 1990’s and by
international agreement, Russia took up the role of
peacekeeper, separating the Georgians from the Abkhaz and
the Ossetians. It has kept its role relatively responsibly
and maintained peace in the area. Of course, it is correct
to say in some abstract way that Russia is not observing the
territorial integrity of Georgia or that Russia is attacking
a sovereign democratic country, but all this misses the
whole point that Russia has been involved in peacekeeping in
those areas for years.
This particular crisis began with [Georgian president
Mikhail] Saakashvilli. He launched a rocket attack against
Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. The attack came at
a very strategic point, when Bush and Putin were in Beijing
and [Russian president Dmitry] Medvedev was on a cruise on
the Volga. Important details such as these are left out of
many reports.
The mainstream media is talking about empire and
imperialism. But what Russia is practicing is, in fact,
hegemony. It wants to dominate its near abroad, just like
the U.S. wants to dominate Latin America—although the
Americans also seek global hegemony.
The Russians want to preserve the status quo. They want to
keep Abkhazia and South Ossetia in a kind of frozen conflict
situation. That works for them. They can irritate Tbilisi,
keep Georgia from integrating fully with the West, and try
to prevent it from entering NATO. For the Russians,
Georgia’s membership to the military alliance spells
disaster. Baltic countries, many Eastern European countries,
and Turkey are in NATO. If you add Georgia, the entire
western and southern borders Russia would be with NATO
member countries. This is unacceptable for a great power
like Russia.
K.M.—How do you explain Russia’s response to
Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia?
R.S.—In the last 15 years, Russia has suffered
humiliation after humiliation. The breakup of the Soviet
Union was not popular in Russia, except among some
liberals—and liberal in Russia means right-winger, traitor.
The U.S. had promised not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe
but has done it. In turn, the so-called “colored
revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan frightened
the Russians. They read these revolutions as Western
interference, artificial events conjured up by the West to
push forward anti-Russian elements like Saakashvili and [Ukranian
president Victor] Yushchenko. Then Kosovo gained
independence despite Moscow’s objections.
After this colossal sense of humiliation, of a loss of
power, [former Russian president and current Prime Minister]
Vladimir Putin comes along, oil prices shoot up, and the
Russians are making money, the country is growing, and they
begin to flex their muscles again. If you listen to the
Russian rhetoric now, it is about how after years of
humiliation, they are back and they are no longer going to
be pushed around.
K.M.—How far do you think Putin will go after this
show of force?
R.S.—I think the Russians made their point.
Confrontation is not their first choice. They have too much
going with the international community to want to go back
behind some kind of Iron Curtain. They don’t want to be
isolated.
K.M.—What do you think about the West’s response?
R.S.—I don’t think it’s an accident that [French
president Nicolas] Sarkozy, [German Chancellor Angela]
Merkel, and other European leaders and diplomats are
flocking to Moscow and trying to resolve this issue. The
Europeans see Russia as a part of Europe. And they are not
taking as hard a line as the Bush Administration.
I have to note that the Bush Administration was very
influenced by [vice president Dick] Cheney. The first
statement that President Bush made was not particularly
strong, but later, he and the government adopted the Cheney
line.
But the U.S. and NATO are powerless in this situation.
They’re obviously not going to go to war over South Ossetia.
They don’t have much maneuverability. Saakashvili started
this, but it’s the Russians that took it up and have
improved their position.
The only thing that Saakashvili and the West can try to do
now is discredit Russia. They’re going to play that card, of
course. They’re going to make Russia look like the
aggressor. And, of course, the Russians play into this
image. They brutalize. Why did they bomb the Georgian city
of Gori? They wanted to punish the Georgians. They wanted to
teach them a lesson. And I think they have. I predict that
Saakashvili’s days in power are numbered. What was he
thinking? He’s a very impetuous leader. People in Georgia
are afraid of him because they never know what to expect. He
gambled and he lost this gamble. When you don’t win a war
that you initiate—as the Israeli leaders have learned in
Lebanon, and the U.S has learned in Iraq—then you pay for
it.
K.M.—What has changed in the equation after the war
between Georgia and Russia?
R.S.—Small as it seems to be, the tiny little place
that few have ever heard of—South Ossetia—in fact has
changed the nature of the post-Soviet world. Now countries
have learned not to muck around with the Russians. They have
always been a hard country to bargain with. Now they’re
saying: if you push us hard enough, we’ll also use military
power. That’s a new dimension.
K.M.—Talk about the situation in South Ossetia and
Abkhazia before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
R.S.—In Soviet times, South Ossetia was an autonomous
district and Abkhazia was an autonomous Soviet republic.
They had this official autonomy, but in fact they were
dominated completely by Georgia, particularly during the
Stalin period, when [Stalin’s secret police boss Lavrenty]
Beria was close to Stalin. Much resentment developed. There
was a kind of Georgianization that took place in those
regions.
When the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, a very radical
nationalist, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was elected president in
Georgia. He declared “Georgia for the Georgians.” They were
going to have an ethno-national republic, and the other
peoples, who were 30 percent of the population (hundreds of
thousands of Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Muslim Georgians, and,
of course, Abkhazians and Ossetians), did not figure in
their vision. The Abkhazians and Ossetians rebelled and,
with Russian help, declared their autonomy and drove the
Georgians out. There are hundreds of thousands of Georgian
refugees from those areas now in Georgia. Roughly around
1993-94, around the time the Russians were negotiating the
armistice in Nagorno-Karabagh between Armenia and
Azerbaijan, they also negotiated a similar armistice in
Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The Ossetians and Abkhazians want to be in Russia or
independent. Russia never wanted to annex them and bring
them fully to Russia because of the international law of
territorial integrity. Russia’s position is that you can’t
alter borders without mutual agreement. (In other words,
they are against the independence of Kosovo for good reason,
because that would then justify Chechnya’s revolt). The
Russians have held that principle, but when the U.S. backed
Kosovo’s independence, Putin remarked that if Kosovo can do
it, why not Abkhazia and South Ossetia as well?
Unlike Karabagh, where Armenians were an overwhelming
majority—they were about 76 percent in 1989 when the
conflict broke—in Abkhazia, the Abkhaz were only 17 percent
of the population and Georgians were something like 43
percent. (By the way, according to most accounts, the
Armenians may be the largest ethnic group in Abkhazia
today).
K.M.—In your book The Making of the Georgian
Nation, you say, “If there is any conclusion to be
derived from such a study of the longue duree of a small
nation, it might be that a nation is never fully ‘made.’ It
is always in the process of being made.” How do you think
the current conflict will affect the making of the Georgian
nation?
R.S.—In their own discourse, the Georgians blame
everything on foreigners, the Russians, or minorities. They
don’t recognize their own responsibility for their own fate.
Basically, in some ways, the Georgian state committed
suicide by this fierce policy both towards Russia and its
own minorities. The Georgians had to make a choice: do they
try to regain and solidify, consolidate Georgian national
territory with a hard militaristic confrontational policy
that is essentially anti-Russian, pro-West? Or do they try
to negotiate, grant concessions, offer high degrees of
autonomy to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and also try a more
cooperative approach towards Russia? Georgia has alternated
between these choices. The problem is, they don’t get much
from the cooperative approach and they get frustrated with
that.
Saakashvili has taken a harder line. He’s figuring, “I can
put Russia in a very difficult position. I can use the West
and maybe that kind of pressure will both force Russia to
come to some kind of agreement with me and also help me get
into NATO.” That was his gamble.
K.M.—Georgia’s neighbor, Azerbaijan, welcomed
Tbilisi’s move to regain control of South Ossetia and
signaled the possibility of a similar action against its own
breakaway republic of Nagorno-Karabagh. Do you think
Azerbaijani officials will act on their war talk?
R.S.—Russia’s actions are changing things. Had
Saakashvili succeeded, then Azerbaijan would have been more
encouraged to try to do something in Karabakh on its own. If
I were Azerbaijan, I’d be very wary. The events in Georgia
have shaken things up. Russia is once again the major player
in the South Caucasus, and it considers Armenia to be its
closest ally in the region.
|
|
 |
