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...If we are returning to cold war, the Berlin Crisis is the most useful
precedent. Stalin tested the West in Berlin 1948 much as Mr. Putin is
doing in Georgia today. Once again, in Georgia the daunting challenge
for America is to maintain and restore a fragile entity, to defend a
line, without going to war. Beleaguered Georgia will need American
resolve, ingenuity and daring equal to that of the Berlin Airlift if it
is to be restored.
Putin in the Shadow of the Red Czar
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/opinion/24sebag.html?ref=opinion&pagew
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By SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE
Published: August 24, 2008
AT the center of Gori, Georgia, where every window has been shattered
and Russian T-72 tanks patrol, the marble statue of the world's most
famous Georgian - Josef Stalin - stands gleamingly, almost
supernaturally unharmed.
As this vicious colonial war turns into an international battle over
spheres of influence, Stalin is Banquo at the feast, metaphorically
present in the palaces of the Kremlin, the burning houses in the
villages, the cabinets of Europe's eastern capitals.
Today, as far as Moscow is concerned, the Georgian cobbler's son and
Marxist fanatic has been laundered of any traces of Georgia and Marx. He
is now a Russian czar, the inspiration for the authoritarian,
nationalistc and imperial strains in today's capitalistic, pragmatic,
swaggering Russia. In this crisis, and in who knows how many future
ones, Stalin represents empire, prestige, victory.
When Vladimir Putin presented Russian teachers with their new textbook
last year, Stalin appeared as "the most successful Russian ruler of the
20th century" - Peter the Great-meets-Bismarck. Stalin, the book gushes,
expanded the empire further than any Romanov and created a Russian
nuclear superpower. And his killings were a tool of necessary, if
excessive, discipline. Recall that when America's World War II envoy to
Moscow, Averell Harriman, congratulated him on the Red Army's taking of
Berlin, Stalin fired back: "Yes, but Alexander I made it to Paris."
Stalin liked to sit over dinner in one of his Abkhazian villas on the
Black Sea, poring over maps: "Yes, we haven't done badly."
This was quite some leap for the Iosif Dzhugashvili, born in Gori in
1878. It is hard to describe how foreign Georgia is to Russia. It has
its own history as an ancient kingdom under a thousand-year dynasty, its
own literature and language as different from Russian as Cantonese is
from English.
During one of their earliest rows, Mr. Putin - now the prime minister,
but clearly a paramount leader - supposedly told President Mikheil
Saakashvili of Georgia, "Thanks for giving us Stalin." In other words,
in today's strange re-creation of Stalin, the imperial, victorious bits
are Russian; the nasty bits must be Georgian. (Oddly, both men, who
despise each other, have personal links to the Soviet dictator: Mr.
Putin's grandfather was his chef; Mr. Saakashvili's aristocratic
grandparents hid young Stalin from the czarist secret police.)
However valid some Russian grievances over Georgia may be (and some
truly are), however flawed our Western record may be (and it is flawed)
and however imperfect Georgian policies were (and they were impulsive),
the fact is that Russia wants to dismantle Georgia, a democratic state
that is worth saving for itself but also because it is the first domino
of the Near Abroad.
History offers no neat repetitions, but Russia's power gambit in the
Caucasus and challenge to the post-1991 order would be entirely familiar
to Stalin. After World War II, Stalin seemed at the height of his
prestige after years of revolution, terror and war - just as today Mr.
Putin's Russia seems muscular and resurgent after the humiliations of
the 1990s. Stalin had Eastern Europe; Mr. Putin has an imperium of oil
and gas. And they share the same confident swagger combined with a
feeling of seething resentment toward Western hypocritical sanctimony.
It isn't just a question of spheres of influence; it's about domination.
Stalin remarked that his armies would impose his political system on
Eastern Europe. Likewise, Moscow's Georgian invasion aims to remove
American-style democracy, replacing it with Russia's strain of managed
authoritarian politics. The Kremlin, then and now, is basically against
anything that we are for.
If we are returning to cold war, the Berlin Crisis is the most useful
precedent. Stalin tested the West in Berlin 1948 much as Mr. Putin is
doing in Georgia today. Once again, in Georgia the daunting challenge
for America is to maintain and restore a fragile entity, to defend a
line, without going to war. Beleaguered Georgia will need American
resolve, ingenuity and daring equal to that of the Berlin Airlift if it
is to be restored.
In the Caucasus, Stalin literally wrote the book on imperial-colonial
control: his "Marxism and the National Problem," commissioned by Lenin
in 1912. In it, Lenin and his Georgian henchman offered ersatz rights of
independence to the minority peoples of the czarist empire - which they
would, of course, never be permitted to exercise. The Soviet Union was
designed for Muscovite rule, not for division into independent
republics. Yet the latter is exactly what happened in 1991 - and the
Kremlin has never accepted it.
"Daddy used to be a Georgian," Stalin's son, Vasily, once said.
Actually, the dictator didn't truly become Russian; he remained Georgian
culturally. Yet he embraced the imperial mission of the Russian people.
He designed the Soviet Union using his knowledge of Caucasian ethnic
feuds to create republics within republics, including Ossetia and
Abkhazia, as Russia's Trojan horses, and they have outlived Stalin's
great project.
I've spent a great deal of time in the Caucasus since 1991, having met
with all three Georgian presidents, always analyzing the longstanding
Russian game of undermining and controlling Georgia by Stalinist means.
Russia's recent policy of encouraging rebel skirmishing in South Ossetia
and offering Russian passports to its citizens was a classic trap. As
colonial puppeteer and successful restorer of Russia as imperial
superpower, Mr. Putin is Stalin's consummate heir.
Stalin was equally expert in annexations justified as protecting ethnic
Russians - think eastern Poland, Bessarabia and the Baltics in 1939.
Today's rhetoric of protecting Russian citizens is both genuine and
Stalinist doublespeak: after all, some Ossetians have only been Russian
citizens for a few weeks. Ukraine, on the other hand, really is
half-Russian. Few in Kiev should be sleeping soundly.
While most know the young Stalin was a seminarian, few realize that he
was also a Georgian patriot, a published romantic poet. (Curiously, his
enemies deprecated him as Ossetian; in truth his father was of Ossetian
descent but the family was long since Georgianized.) Yet he found it
impossible to be both a Marxist internationalist and a Georgian
nationalist. In 1904, he was accused of heresy by top Bolsheviks and
made to humiliatingly renounce Georgian nationalism. Driven out of
Georgia for leading bloody bank robberies, he referred to it as a
"parochial swamp." In 1921, he engineered the Red Army's invasion and
annexation of the newly independent Georgia. His vengeance perhaps
continues.
Georgians mourned Stalin at his death. When Nikita Khrushchev denounced
him in 1956, Georgians rioted. Yet today Georgia has embraced
pro-Western democracy, while the Russian rehabilitation of Stalin is
best illustrated by those tanks parked protectively beside the white
marble temple around the humble birthplace of Iosif Dzhugashvili. This
is what Vladimir Putin meant in 2005 when he said that the fall of the
Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th
century. And what the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko meant when he warned,
"Double, triple the guard in front of this tomb, / Lest Stalin should
ever get out." Perhaps it's too late.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of "Young Stalin" and the
forthcoming novel "Sashenka."
A version of this article appeared in print on August 24, 2008, on page
WK11 of the New York edition.
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