I’ve just come back from a trip through the Republic of Georgia, giving a series of lectures at universities there and meeting with people in various policy institutes and government offices. For me, a trip through Georgia is a trip down memory lane. I first visited Georgia twenty years ago when it was still part of the Soviet Union as part of an extended roadtrip across Europe. Taking advantage of various tax-advantaged programs, I’d leased a Renault in Paris for six months, and spent the time driving across the continent as what Russia’s esteemed President Putin calls the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century began its sweep across the crumbling Soviet empire.
On my first night in Tiblisi, I was walking around this underpass near my hotel to get a sense of the lay of the land when I was accosted by three very young and very drunk men wearing Soviet military uniforms. Between my rudimentary Russian and their poor command of a smattering of western languages, it took a while to establish basic communication, but I finally figured out what was on their minds. They had been forced to take up commissions in the Soviet military, and they wanted out. They had written up a petition which they wanted me to take to the Secretary General of the United Nations stating their case. I don’t know how successful I was in explaining to them just how useless the United Nations would be to people in their plight, but I came away from that underpass with the belief that the Soviet Union was breaking up. I figured that when uniformed military officers are discontented enough to want out, and confident enough that discipline and authority had broken down enough to share this news with foreign journalists, even presenting documents with their names and ranks, the Soviet system was clearly on the way out.
In the intervening twenty years, a lot had changed in Tiblisi. There is a disco in the underpass where the Soviet lieutenants stopped me. The Intourist hotel where I stayed was used for years as refugee housing for ethnic Georgians expelled from the breakaway province of Abkhazia in the northeast of the country. Then it was gut-renovated and is now a very nice Radisson hotel. The refugees now live in camps outside the city.
In western Europe that spring was the 50th anniversary of another geopolitical catastrophe: Hitler’s blitzkrieg across the Low Countries and northern France. In the Grande Place at Brussels I saw what the end of history looked like; the tavern where Marx and Engels once wrangled over the drafts of the Communist Manifesto had been turned into an upscale yuppie restaurant, and the storefront used as a recruiting center for the SS Charlemagne brigade had been turned into a Godiva chocolate boutique. No communism, no fascism in the utopia of the future; just shopping and eating out.
Things got more ominous as I traveled southeastward through the still-dissolving Warsaw Pact and into the Balkans. In Yugoslavia (younger readers can go here to find out what the heck I’m talking about), you had to listen to the radio every morning to find out what highways to avoid due to sniper fire as the various ethnic groups of that once flourishing country girded up their loins to start massacring their neighbors. I was stuck for two days in southern Macedonia as the Greek customs guards–displaying the same patriotism and long-term thinking that brought Greece into its present conditions of misery and crisis–went on strike. There was a respite in Turkey; the roads were in good shape, the people were friendly, nobody wanted a bribe.
Then I crossed what was then the Soviet-Turkish frontier twelve miles from Batumi, and I started a crash course in the realities of life under communism that still influences my worldview today. As a radical teenager growing up in the midst of the anti-Vietnam War movement I had always figured that since the government was lying to us about so much in Indochina, maybe they were lying about communism as well. The Pol Pot genocide? That, the radical leaders of the young boomer generation told us, was a natural and regrettable consequence of America’s interference in Cambodia. We had destabilized Cambodia; naturally, there was a genocide now — and it was really our fault, much more than the communists’. And it was probably overreported anyway, and at least some of the people killed had probably done some bad things. And episodes like that could simply not be compared to the moral horror that was Nazism. I had my doubts, but they said it with great conviction. And Richard Nixon really was a bad guy. Why shouldn’t the genocide also be his fault? As a kid, I really, really wanted the world to make sense.
By the time I reached the Soviet border, a lot of that early left-wing soft sympathy for communism had fallen away. Driving through the wasted urban landscapes of central and eastern Europe, it was hard to avoid noticing that the evil capitalist pigs were actually much nicer to the environment than the enlightened and idealistic socialist workers had managed to be. The filth of late-communist Poland was hard to take; I stood outside Krakow one day in a beautiful field by the side of the road, with a fresh breeze blowing through the grass. I took a deep breath and nearly choked; it was like standing directly behind the exhaust pipe of a big, dirty bus. The air in that part of Poland was so polluted that kids used to have to go down to the salt mines, hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface, to get something approaching fresh air.
The poverty was also hard to miss. The farther east you went, the less there was in the stores. People were worse-dressed; the lines for the buses and trams were longer, somehow more discouraged looking. Romania was an unspeakable disaster: environmentally, socially, economically, architecturally, morally. With kids begging for chewing gum, and the police begging for cigarettes, with food that tasted more like canned dog food than anything else we serve in the west, the place was close to uninhabitable. The hatred and prejudice against the gypsies, the violent racist tirades against evil Magyars and evil Russians and evil Jews: it was hard to believe that a country could go so wrong.
Georgia, in some ways, was a relief. Even in the Soviet times, people ate better here than in Romania. The land is too fertile, the climate too benign — and the people too devious and pleasure-loving — for the full effects of Soviet rule to come through. I wouldn’t see the worst of the Soviet system, and acquire the deep loathing of communism I’ve had ever since, until I got to rural Russia and the sorry landscapes of southern Ukraine and the blighted, Mordoresque shores of the Sea of Azov, watching scrawny kids pulling questionable fishes from the polluted waters while their toothless grandmothers squatted sadly by the road. Still, it was in Georgia that I first began to feel how destructive seventy years of communist rule could be.
You could see a bit of it at the border. The Soviet hold had already begun to loosen; Georgians were traveling across the border to Turkey, stocking up on the consumer goods that communism had somehow failed to provide, and bringing them back to sell at home. In the large shed on the Soviet side of the frontier, the border guards made the traders open their suitcases on tables, and the customs guards walked around like shoppers at a bazaar, picking out the most desirable pieces for themselves. There was nothing hidden or sneaky about it: organized theft was the basis of Soviet life in the last, decadent days of Mr. Putin’s utopia.
As I got a chance to meet Georgian writers and students over the next couple of weeks, I learned how the police, organized crime and the Communist Party had essentially fused into a single system. The huge dachas of the leadership on the Black Sea coast contrasted with the miserable hovels of the peasants on the road to Tiblisi. The facade of ethnic friendship among the fraternal peoples of the Soviet Union contrasted with feverish, paranoid hatreds festering just under the surface. As in Yugoslavia, I got to know people who were nerving themselves up to massacre their neighbors and drive innocent people out of their homes. I saw how the worst nationalistic paranoias and chauvinisms raged unchecked under Soviet rule — while in the capitalist west most Europeans had left that murderous claptrap behind long ago. Communism, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now, is not the opposite of fascism: it is fascism’s blood-brother, its complementary twin. The two live together in a vicious symbiotic relationship; scratch a Red and you’ll find a Brown. Better yet, scratch either one deeply enough and you will find a Black: someone so caught up in the will to power that crimes and atrocities don’t even count anymore.
Anyway, traveling through Georgia is a memorable experience. Refugee camps, bombed out bridges from the 2008 war with Russia, tensions between the president and a fractured but contentious opposition, seething and even murderous ethnic hostilities bubbling just below the surface and a history of settling political disputes on the streets rather than through legal and political institutions all make for interesting sightseeing, and better conversation, and hopefully interesting blogging.
Communism is not the only force that haunts Georgia. Ethnic nationalism, religious conflict, resource wars: in a very small space Georgia is one of those unlucky countries that have it all. Over the next few posts I’ll be writing about Georgia, the fate of small nations, and some of the big unsolved political questions that have killed millions of people in the last 150 years and which are still not settled today.