Eight Pieces of Empire (9 page)

“Under Brezhnev there was even cocoa in the stores, God damn it!” The taxi driver slapped his hand on the wheel of his Volga four-door. “Even fucking cocoa!” He laughed uncontrollably through his gold teeth, as if the very idea of cocoa sitting on a store shelf evoked wonder. “Look what they’ve done. Gorbachev and his cronies have destroyed a great country. Everyone feared us. Now I don’t think even Upper Volta is afraid of Russia.”

Gorby had still hung on as one by one every last one of the fifteen so-called titular republics that made up the USSR declared independence and sovereignty from the center outward: Armenia, Azerbaijan … Kazakhstan … Kyrgyzstan … and when Russia declared itself free and independent of the “Soyuz” (Union), Mikhail Gorbachev had effectively become a president without a country.

But when his nemesis, Boris Yeltsin, now president of the reborn Russian Federation, led the effort to cobble together a post-Soviet entity called the “Commonwealth of Independent States,” known by its clumsy-sounding acronym CIS (SNG in Russian), it was all over. Many Russians
still had no firm idea as to whether the USSR (SSSR in Russian) still formally existed. The hammer-and-sickle flag was still flying, after all.

“Can you tell what this SNG thing means?” asked the gold-toothed taxi driver as I got out of his car. “SSSR (USSR) sounded a hell of a lot better.” He slammed the door behind me.

While I scurried around town looking for supplies, Mikhail Gorbachev was spending his last day in power behind the massive red walls of the Kremlin. He’d been under a virtual news blackout about his fate, but not of the nefarious kind. None of the Soviet television networks was even documenting the last days of the empire, because none of them seemed to care. By contrast, some foreign networks spent days in the corridors of fading power, recording everything now that the once-feared foreigners had easy access to the nerve center of the erstwhile Evil Empire. The irony was not lost on Gorbachev’s closest aides.

“It’s shameful for us that only Western TV journalists hovered around him,” wrote Anatoly Chernayev in his account of Gorbachev’s final days in power.

While I was at the market “Christmas shopping” for bread and cheap sausage that morning, Gorbachev asked to have a telephone call arranged with US president George Herbert Walker Bush, during which Gorbachev informed Bush that he would be making a special televised address at seven p.m. Moscow time. He also told Bush that he had signed an order transferring control over the Soviet Union’s “nuclear briefcase”—the means to launch Soviet nuclear missiles—to the Russian Federation and its president, Boris Yeltsin. “As soon as I make my announcement, the order will come into effect,” he told Bush. “So you can peacefully celebrate Christmas and sleep without worry tonight,” Gorbachev added.

Bush is said to have waxed emotional about the close personal ties they had developed over the years; it is not known if Bush offered Gorby asylum.

Meanwhile, I had gone back to an apartment I shared with a friend, Sergei Lazaruk, who at the time was deputy dean of the prestigious Soviet State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) and trying to eke out a living on the equivalent of a hundred dollars a month. We had met earlier
that year, when I’d led a group of American film students to the USSR as their interpreter.

A sundry group of other Russian friends had also come over to watch the TV broadcast with us, including Mikhail Zhivilo, then a small-time currency speculator who used to change fifty bucks a time for me at the black market rate. Zhivilo, well dressed and soft spoken, had just started work at Moscow’s first commodities exchange. He talked about the unique economic opportunities amid the chaos and how the period would not be repeated in terms of its potential for making big profits. His optimism seemed absurd given the dire state of the Soviet (Russian) economy. He suggested I join him and his business partners in the precious metals business. I declined, and he openly laughed at my desire to pursue foreign correspondence. His laughter was well vindicated. Within years, Zhivilo was running one of Russia’s biggest aluminum plants. He made tens of millions before falling out with a regional kingpin governor and going into exile with his fortune. (Meanwhile, I am still working a day job, whereas I doubt Zhivilo feels much compunction to—beyond philanthropy.)

Sergei was the only one who seemed interested in watching Gorby and the passing of the empire, to be announced live on TV. Then the clock struck seven p.m., and Gorbachev’s familiar image filled the screen. He began to speak.

Gorby expressed deep regret that it had proven impossible to save the Soviet Union. He opposed its dissolution. Upon assuming the mantle of power in 1985, he had had no alternative but to try to radically reform the system. “It was clear not all was well with our country.… I understood that to begin reforms of such a scale in a society like ours was extremely difficult and even dangerous. But even today, I’m convinced of the historic correctness of the democratic reforms that were begun in the spring of 1985.”

Gorbachev spoke for all of ten minutes—a historically short address. He concluded with the words “I wish you all the best.” Then he was off the air, and the Soviet Empire, which had endured for sixty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-five days, was no more—and few seemed
to immediately understand the significance of it all. Later, I learned a few more details about the aftermath: Immediately after his last address, Gorbachev turned to his final task: turning over the Soviet nuclear briefcase. Yet even this moment was tinged with absurdity. Boris Yeltsin, known for his tirades and unpredictability, had for unclear reasons taken offense at Gorbachev’s resignation speech. According to Gorbachev, Yeltsin refused to show up in the Kremlin to take over control of the “nuclear button,” as it is called in Russian. Gorbachev writes of the incident with bitterness. Yeltsin offered to meet “on neutral ground.” In the end, Gorbachev handed over the means to destroy the world many times over to Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov and several senior military officers.

Gorbachev went into a room with several aides who had stayed to the end.

They poured themselves a round of whiskey, bitter solace for the USSR and its last leader’s having already 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 Soviet
military, 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 most valued jewels in the empire’s battered crown.

The Abkhaz were, in fact, by the time of the empire’s breakup, just 17 percent or so of the population of that region—fewer than 100,000 souls. They blamed a deliberate policy of assimilation led by Stalin and his henchman Lavrenty Beria on their decline. Beria was also a Georgian—or, to be more precise, a Megrelian—a Georgian subethnos. The Georgians became 45 percent, the rest Abkhaz, Russians, Armenians, and a smattering of others. Tensions smoldered for years, the Abkhaz local parliament declared independence, and through a series of deadly miscues, the war was on.

And so it was with beautiful Sakartvelo—“the land of the Georgians”—in their own, very non-Russian language. Independence had arrived, and I was suddenly sent there to record the pathology of upheaval that would ensue.

NOBODY STARTED THIS WAR

N
obody started this war,”
stammered the woman manning the one phone in the Parliamentary Press Department of the Republic of Georgia. It was disingenuous, of course; somebody started it. Maybe she was just in denial. But she’s partially correct—the war’s commencement is anarchic, absurd, seemingly starting on a whim.

A paramilitary gang, the “National Guard,” gets permission to enter a few miles into autonomous Abkhazia and guard passenger trains, which are being raided and robbed at will. Georgia has agreed with the local Abkhaz authorities on guarding the trains. How will the National Guard accomplish this act of ensuring safety? With tanks, among other toys.
Tanks to guard passenger trains?
Tanks were not part of the deal. It is absurd, of course, the sight of the tanks evoking deep fears in Abkhazia, helping ignite the war. Not to mention the fact that they are worthless for guarding passenger trains.

Tengiz Kitovani is the potbellied leader of the National Guard. His mission supposedly has nothing to do with Abkhaz separatism; it’s to prevent a wave of recent kidnappings. No one told Kitovani to crack down on Abkhazia, they say. No one gave the National Guard permission to enter any which towns, just guard the railway. But someone took some potshots at Kitovani’s guys, and they fired back. Looting and excesses began. Alcohol and testosterone were also involved. Need I add that Tengiz Kitovani is a large-canvas painter by trade? Did I mention
that some Georgians accuse him of being a KGB agent sent in by the Russians to do a fifth-column job?