The Georgian-Russian Conflict: More Than Barbed Wire

This is the first of a two-part series dealing with the core issues underlying the Georgian Russian War of 2008, most notably ethnic Russian populations abandoned beyond the borders of the old Soviet Union. This part, entitled “More Than Barbed Wire,” deals with the history leading up to the collapse, the impact of lost borders and the isolation of Russian enclaves outside Moscow’s control. Part 2, entitled “NATO Goes Global,” will deal with Russification under Stalin, the current status quo of these “frozen conflict zones,” and the role of NATO (under the Bush administration) in contributing to the Georgian-Russian conflict.

The Impact of Population Transfers in the Post-Soviet World

Perhaps the biggest question to come out of the great Georgian-Russian War of 2008 was the one nobody bothered to ask: What were all these Russians doing in Georgia to begin with?  The U.S. State Department (under President Bush) might have asked themselves the same question, if not blinded by the rather zealous recruiting campaign underway for potential NATO partners, most occupying real estate literally in Russia’s backyard.  Lost in this sort of retro-cold war pimping strategy (one that should have run out of gas during the Reagan administration) were three very important points, especially if you happen to be Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a well-educated cold warrior with solid intelligence credentials.  He is also highly invested in the next chapter of Soviet/Russian history, one that will help decide the future course of The Great Game. They are:  1) borders; 2) displaced Russian nationals; and, of course, 3) America’s seemingly endless infatuation with the NATO franchise.

More Than Barbed Wire Here

Secure borders have been a flash point in Russian history all the way back to the Mongol invasions of the 11th century.  Feudalism was an ineffective force because the Mongol armies could easily manipulate the existing fears and suspicions of the various city-states, implementing a “divide and conquer” strategy as it moved across the continent.  Not until Russians united under a common cause were they finally able to drive the Mongols beyond the Ural Mountains.  This notion of a central authority (hence, security) has been thematic of Russian history (much like China’s) in generating policies driven by the need to consolidate an empire that experienced constant expansion until the end of the Tsarist period in 1917. Unlike the other great European powers–England and France, Russia practiced “internal” colonialism, confining most of its activities to the contiguous land mass of its birth – Eurasia.  External colonialism was abandoned in the 19^th century, culminated by the sale of Alaska and the withdrawal of its small colonies on the Oregon and California coasts. Russia managing Russia in a hostile world was a fulltime job.

Russia has continued to seek security by creating a confederacy of groups and tribes under one flag, a process of “russification” that has occupied the nation for most of its history, particularly in the modern age.  Russia’s borders are not only some of the longest in the world, but also the most complex in terms of the ethnic, religious and political diversification that make up a mélange of secular and ideological beliefs along what are largely geographic, not political divisions. Russia’s neighbors have always faced a double-edged relationship because Russia is both a perceived threat and concurrently a tenacious guardian of all that it shelters. What fuels this apparent paradox is Russia’s own fears about its ability to defend its territory from outside aggressors.  In the past two centuries, those threats have primarily come from the West, not only in the case of the French under Napoleon, but also from both the German/Austro-Hungarian alliance of World War I and later Hitler’s Third Reich.  The Axis defeat in World War II merely traded a vanquished threat for a potentially stronger one as a weary Western Europe quickly consolidated under the military umbrella of NATO (1949) and the economic might of the United States.  The first round of the Nuremberg trials coincided with the opening salvo of what became known as the Cold War.  Aside from stark differences in political philosophy between East and West, the perception of what constituted a national security policy also played out on polar grounds.  The United States had the technological edge, the economic advantage, and suffered no loss of infrastructure as a result of the war.  The Soviet Union had at least 22 million dead, split about equally between its military and civilian populations, including three million POWs that died in captivity.  Most of its European theatre was in ruins and another western army was sidling up to its doorstep.  Stalin was having none of it.  He would keep Eastern Europe and the scattered regions making up his southern flank.  The next war would be settled in Czechoslovakia or Poland – not at the gates of Moscow.

However, these new lands came with a lot of baggage, particularly in the case of countries and territories like Romania, Georgia, and particularly Ukraine.  The Bolshevik Revolution (which forced the Russians to withdraw from World War I) was hardly settled when Hitler turned his guns on Moscow.  Many captured soldiers quickly switched sides, as in the case of Ukraine forming its own Waffen SS Combat Division, later reformed as the Ukrainian 1st Division.  They actually preferred killing Russians to Germans, though they couldn’t be classified as allied with the German cause, for when sent to fight French or other Allied forces, they chose to flee or simply desert.  The German Waffen SS also deployed a Muslim division from the provinces of the Eurasian steppes.  And Romania, under Antonescu was of course fascist, the fourth peg in the Tripartite. The importance in this distinction is that many of these soon to be repatriated (re-seized) satellites of the post-World War II Soviet Union had far more serious issues with Moscow than Berlin.  Stalin’s sack of trophies from the German capitulation was offset by the demographic nightmare making up the contents. Having new lands was one thing, but holding on them was another topic entirely.

And so it went for the next forty years.  The nuclear card negated any potential for conventional warfare in Western Europe, as neither side could afford to win or lose under such surreal conditions.  An advantage by either belligerent could easily trigger an escalation to the nuclear option, one that promised to take the dispute global and for the most part, annihilate the human race.  Still, the Stalin mentality prevailed through the ensuing years and subsequent changes in leadership, holding Eastern Europe and a good portion of Eurasia as geopolitical hostages in a rivalry forced to play out on other fields–  Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia. These were the proxied “hot” wars of the Cold War.  The paramount symbol of this struggle was the Berlin Wall, perhaps the most symbolic border of the 20th century and perhaps the most pernicious.  It was not just concrete and barbed wire – it marked the very thin line between an edgy status quo and the new acronym of the cynics:  MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction).

The Berlin Wall ultimately became a new symbol with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.  The new (old) state of Russia emerged from the deconstruction of the old Union, though it was forced to do so without the luxury of borders.  The real borders were on the outskirts of the buffer states, Russia’s true perimeter a porous delineation on some cartographers chart.  The loss of central authority, the denationalization of all services and financial systems, command and control of the military, and control of commodities entering or leaving the country occurred virtually overnight.  As far away as Hungary or Czechoslovakia, Russian border guards simply walked off the job.  The second most powerful country in the world was left with little or no communication, all its doors unlocked and an internal struggle for not only control of the country, but also the nuclear arsenal as well.  The anxiety generated in this vacuum could only be compared to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the only time in the atomic age where the Nuclear Clock theoretically showed one second to midnight. [In reality, the crisis proceeded too rapidly to alter the clock.]

Fortunately, a degree of sanity did manage to prevail in most sectors, necessary in light of the greater stakes on the table, that being the risk to all humanity inherent by the instability of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, part of which was no longer in their direct control.  A preemptive strike by the United States was on the table – one option of many if Russia’s divided leadership could not contain the threat posed by the disruption in command and control of its nuclear assets.  Sound absurd?  By the fall of 1993 Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s beleaguered president, was literally engaged in a tank battle on the front lawn of Moscow’s White House (Parliament building) against the Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi for control of the government and military.  Of the old Soviet Union’s 27,000 nuclear weapons, approximately a third were outside of Russia, including bomber-based weapons in the Ukraine that were not under Moscow’s central command.  The US concern was that Ukraine might launch on Moscow.

Violent nationalism erupted on many other fronts, but was tempered by the presence of Soviet Army groups stranded in the respective countries.  However, the grudging acknowledgment of new frontiers meant that millions of Soviet (Russian) nationals were, in effect, trapped behind indifferent or openly hostile lines.  General Alexander Lebed’s 14th  Soviet Army was trapped in Moldova, a de facto warlord in a dispute between the Russian enclave on the east bank of the Dniester River (Transnistria for these purposes) and Romanian nationalists pushing for the reunification of the Moldavian SSR with Romania proper.  Lebed had no authority to stay and no ability to go home.  His one obligation was to protect the Russian populace – though he had no clear license to even carry that order out.  The 14th Army sat as a wedge between the two antagonists in a somewhat neutral stance.  When violence broke out following Transnistria’s declaration of independence in 1990, the 14th Army intervened, opening fire on the nationalist forces.  That caused an abrupt end to hostilities as neither side cared to go toe to toe with a well-equipped Soviet army group. This same scenario was repeated throughout the old empire with a variety of results, both positive and negative.

Russia did attempt to resurrect a Union through what was termed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), though the effort was not particularly successful. The yoke had been lifted and most of the mules wanted to go their own way.  Repercussions continued for a number of years surrounding the formation of these independent states and former nations, and altercations provoked by the nature of the agenda:  The nationalist issue, the need for revenge platform, secular differences, various border disputes, the Balkan implosion, irreconcilable differences  (the Czech Republic & Slovakia), resources, nuclear arsenals, who owns what navy – endless stuff.  What wasn’t resolved was the fact that millions of Russian nationals were left behind in places like South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Georgia), Transnistria (Moldova), Nagorno-Karadakh (Armenia), and the Crimean peninsula in the Ukraine.  These composed the core of what is known as “the commonwealth of unrecognized states,” the unfinished agenda of the post-Cold War era.  Trouble is that Vladimir Putin has his own idea on how to close this chapter, and it doesn’t include the abandonment of what he considers a part of the “new Russia.”