Category: Eastern Europe

Obama’s Foreign Policy Adviser Brzezinski about Obama

“Very different from most American politicians”

© Mandel Ngan/AFP Zbigniew Brzezinski: "I cannot imagine another country which could have elected someone as uniquely different as Barack Obama is."

He was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, a hawk in terms of foreign policy. In an interview with Stern magazine Zbigniew Brzezinski explains why President-elect Obama reminds him of John F. Kennedy, what he expects from the new administration’s foreign policy – and why the US will demand a greater European military commitment in Afghanistan

Dr. Brzezinksi, as one of Washington’s ultimate insiders you have witnessed many presidential elections. How did you experience Obama’s victory last Tuesday?

I was with friends, watching television. I had predicted his win. But when it actually really happened, it was exactly 11.01 p.m., I was very moved.

You? During your time as National Security Advisor, you were regarded to be one of the toughest politicians ever.

I saw the faces of so many citizens, black and white, reacting to their choice. And it just dramatized to me, that this was really a historically significant election. We might witness the birth of a 21st century America. In fact, this election could define America as the prototype of an eventual global society.

And why should this be America?

I cannot imagine another country, neither in Europe, neither in Asia, which could have elected someone as uniquely different as Barack Obama is. Barack Hussein Obama is accepted and cherished, really cherished, because he epitomizes the unique diversity of American society and shares the dominant values of that society.

Which are?

Racial equality, a basic commitment to democracy, a notion of elementary social justice. The notion that some people should not be allowed to be as poor as they are – and that some are not entitled be quite as rich as they think they can be.

Don’t you expect a little too much from a relatively inexperienced Senator from Illinois?

I met him last year, and he made the best impression on me of anyone since John F. Kennedy. He is better equipped in intellect and temperament for the highest office than anyone I can think of in recent memory. He is very different from most American politicians.

What makes him so unique?

A kind of intellectual self-confidence, which reflects real intelligence, not arrogance. A friendliness – but with a distance and a dignity. A little patrician, almost. And a calculating rationality. He does not wave the do-gooders flag. He is an idealist, but not an ideologue. He knows, that compromises will be needed.

Will Obama be the President of a superpower in decline?

No. That’s nonsense and often said with a lot of schadenfreude. The matter of fact is, that the era of American superpower stupidity is over, the time of self-isolation. Under President Bush, we acted arrogant, unilateralist and – worst of all – driven by fear. A culture of fear was cultivated by this administration, which replaced the Statue of Liberty as a symbol for America with Guantanamo. America has lost its confidence. This is one of the worst legacies of the Bush era. But that will come to an end now, very quickly.

Obama already claims the dawn of a new American leadership. How could he achieve this while the country faces the worst economical crisis since 70 years?

He will inherit a grim reality. But the painful financial crisis also teaches us an important lesson: without America the world is in trouble. If America is declining, the rest of the world is falling apart. And have no illusions: the German economy will not recover without an American recovery. America can recover without Germany. At the same time, we understand: we have to cooperate with the world in order to do well.

What will be the biggest foreign policy challenges for the new President?

Afghanistan is certainly one of them. There, for he time being, we would need to deploy more troops. But more soldiers are not the solution. The solution is a demilitarization of our engagement.

By negotiating with the Taliban, as Obama already indicated?

By negotiating wit the various groups of Taliban. We should be able to reach local and regional arrangements with them. If they would stop al-Qaeda activities, for example, we would locally disengage.

You are promoting a de facto withdrawal of Nato troops?

No. Nato has to continue our military activities in the meantime. And if we are serious about our alliance and about consultations, we have to be also serious about sharing burdens. You cannot have arrangements, where some soldiers risk their lives day and night and some soldiers cannot even go on patrols at night. That is not an alliance.

Will Obama expect more engagement from Europe, Germany?

The American people expect this. If the Europeans want to give us only nice advise, but expect us to do the heavy lifting – then don’t expect America necessarily to listen to these advises. Europeans will no longer have the alibi of Bush’s bad policy. But let’s be clear: there are no alibis for us any more, either. We will have to consult, share decisions and cooperate.

Russia’s President greeted Obama by announcing he would deploy short range missiles along the Baltic Sea.

Yes, but I think we can relax.

Relax?

Russia is a country with enormous problems. Its leaders should know, that Russia cannot isolate itself from the world or base its foreign policy on the assertion that it is entitled to an imperialist sphere of influence. It is baffling to me, how unintelligent its leaders are. Self-isolation will be destructive for Russia, not for us.

Would you suggest relaxing also in regard to Iran and its nuclear ambitions?

We need a more realistic, a more flexible and sensible approach. We should negotiate; we might negotiate even without preconditions. A successful approach to Iran has to accommodate its security interests and ours. This new diplomatic approach could help bring Iran back into its traditional role of strategic cooperation with the United States in stabilizing the Gulf region. This would be a sensible path.

Interview: Katja Gloger

Source: www.stern.de, 14. November 2008

November 17, 2008
Russia Supports Kurdish Future

by Martin Zehr

November 11, 2008

In the latest Presidential election the U.S. has chosen to withdraw from Iraq. There will be an inevitable vacuum in the region. Many expect Turkey and Iran to become dominate in the region. Clearly, in a region that has depended on the U.S. to define the balance of powers for so many years, this is a possibility. Turkey has been pumped up over the years with U.S. military aid and supplies and looks to aggressively define its role. Syria as a Ba´athist power would be most likely to align with the militaristic Turkish regime.

Iran has social forces in the region but no real military power. Iran´s effort to acquire a nuclear weapon is clearly an attempt to address this. Should some power demonstrate a willingness to act decisively the influences of Hezbollah and Hamas on the ground could be eliminated in a week´s time. Iranian influence is based on its programs for dispossessed populations and military supplies to its sponsored militias. Iran´s performance in the Iran-Iraq war demonstrated that its military capabilities are limited. Iran may be able to influence the political landscape of Lebanon and Gaza, but it is unable to consolidate these gains territorially or economically. Militarily, Hamas and Hezbollah are engaged in a war for the Safavid Empire and its restoration. The Palestinian national question has been subordinated and redefined as an Islamic trust.

At issue is land power versus military power. Russia presents itself in this context as the dominating Asian power in the region. Economically, Turkey is dependent on Russia depends on Russia for 29 percent of its oil and 63 percent of its natural gas. Turkey´s bubble as a regional power is dependent on its alliance with the United States. Otherwise, it pops and becomes just one of several Islamist powers trying to configure a new caliphate capable of governing. Turkey´s secular status is based on its military rule and is decreasing as the Turkish military accommodates the Islamism of Justice and Development (AK). Russia has obviously faced a contentious Turkey in agricultural trade disputes, energy issues and in Turkey´s supplying Georgia with military equipment.

Last year Russia opened a consulate within the Kurdish Autonomous Region. The statement by Nechirvan Barzani Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government declared: “We in the Kurdistan Region believe in friendship and good relations with the international community, and have been trying hard to achieve this, especially with countries like Russia with whom we share a common history.” Russia´s economic and political role in the region is growing. Its recognition of the KRG and its work with the KRG on economic and political issues are significant.

Moving forward means learning to address old problems with new solutions. Turkey remains a threat poised on the border of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region. Russia is a power that has recognized the Kurdish nation. IntelliBriefs website reports: “Russia has made significant strategic forays in the Middle East especially in countries which were known to be strong military allies of the United States. Today it has both a political and strategic foothold in the Middle East.”

Russia has not been oblivious to Turkish actions on the border of northern Iraq in its plans against the Kurdish peoples and nation. In 2007, Leonid Ivashov, president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences in Moscow, elaborated that such an invasion would create a “hotspot” for Russia close to its borders. He predicted that such a Turkish invasion would create “instability, risks and challenges that would be very hard to deal with.” The Russian parliament passed an appeal in 2007 to the Turkish government calling on it to show “wisdom and restraint,” and warning about possible negative consequences of a cross-border military campaign.

In the meantime, in October the Turkish Parliament passed 511-18 an extension authorizing Turkish troops to invade Iraq. As indicated in my article “Turkish Troops Enforce Baghdad´s Violation of the Kirkuk Referendum” such an action is simply a means of enforcing what Baghdad is not capable of enforcing itself, the refusal to implement Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution. It is clear that Russia is a more significant power in the region and has a much longer historical role in the region than the United States. As the United States relinquishes its influence in the region there will be new decisions to be made. One thing is assured: Turkish antipathy towards the Kurdish nation and peoples has shown no indications of changing.

November 16, 2008
Moscow’s Moves in Georgia Open Door for Pan-Turkist Projects in North Caucasus

Paul Goble

Tallinn, November 14 – By recognizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Moscow has opened the door for an expansion of pan-Turkist activity in the North Caucasus, thus falling into a trap set by Western countries when they recognized Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia and setting the stage for a new “parade of sovereignties” in the North Caucasus.
And consequently, however much the Russian moves in Georgia corresponded to Russia’s national interests in the short term, commentator Igor Bokov argues in an essay posted online this week, they could prove fatal to Russian control of the broader region unless Moscow takes preventive measures (www.apn.ru/publications/article20992.htm).
In recent months, many analysts have focused on the growing activism of Circassian groups in the North Caucasus not only because of their support for the independence of Abkhazia and opposition to the Sochi Olympics but also because of the large and influential Circassian diasporas in Turkey and Jordan.
Much less attention has been given to the Turkic language groups in the region, which include the Karachay, Balkars, Nogays and Kumyks, but because of their location near Russia’s southern border and the activities of Turks abroad, they may prove even more important in the political development of the Caucasus in the coming months, the Moscow researcher argues.
Like many Russian analysts, Bokov discusses these trends in terms of what he sees as a broader effort by the West to promote the disintegration of multi-national states like the Russian Federation in order to strengthen the power of capitalist economics by weakening any alternative political arrangements.
But despite that, his article represents an intriguing contribution to the understanding of the Caucasus not only because of what he writes about two major Turkic groups in the North Caucasus but also because of what he says about the “unofficial” efforts by Turkey and other countries to reach out to them.
The Turkic-speaking Balkars, who form 10 percent of the population of Kabardino-Balkaria, have nonetheless formed a Council of Elders of the Balkar People and demanded that the constitution of that republic be amended to give them equal representation in the parliament to the much larger Kabardinian (Circassian) and Russian communities.
If that does not happen by January 31, 2009, this group says, the Council of Elders has declared, then it will proclaim the independence of Balkaria, an action that would undermine not only all the other multi-national republics in the North Caucasus but create a new hotspot for Moscow there.
What makes this movement intriguing, Bokov says, is not just the small size of the Balkar community but the fact that most of the leaders of the Balkar Council of Elders are militia officers who were fired after Arsen Kanokov became president of the republic and who seek to return to power and a new element in their ideology.
For the first time ever, the Balkars are saying “we are not simply a minority, there are 500 million of us” – “the first time in history of Russia or at least post-Soviet Russia,” the Moscow analyst says, when an openly “pan-Turkist” ideological agenda was articulated in the region with such vigor.
The situation in neighboring Karachayevo-Cherkessia represents another Turkic challenge, Bokov suggests. There, “the Turkic ethnos, the Karachay, is the dominant one, and the Cherkess [Circassians] the minority. But again the Turkic group is advancing its interests by ignoring the practice of giving the second most powerful position in the republic to a Cherkess.
Bokov argues that Turkey and other countries interested in weakening Russia. While Ankara carefully avoids public support of such groups lest it offend the Europeans or stimulate its own Kurdish minority, various groups in Turkey are increasingly active because “what is impossible at the official level is completely permissible at others.”
He points to groups like TIKA, the Turkish Agency for Cooperation and Development, Turksoy, an organization involved in cultural ties with Turkic peoples abroad, and Tusam, an information-analytic center supported by the metal workers union, as being especially active in this regard.
But he suggests that pan-Turkist ideas are being pushed not only by Turkey but by various Western countries and by both Georgia and Ukraine, who have an obvious interest in weakening Moscow’s influence and power in the region. And he concludes by arguing that Moscow must be prepared to counter all these groups.

http://windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2008/11/window-on-eurasia-moscows-moves-in.html

November 15, 2008
Mustafa Jemilev Observes His 65th Birthday

The recognized leader of Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Jemilev observed his 65th
birthday yesterday.

Born in Crimea on 13 November 1943, he was only six months old when his
family and the rest of the Crimean Tatar population were deported by Soviet
authorities in May 1944. His family lived in a special settlement camp in
Uzbekistan until 1956, when tight restrictions were relaxed. At the age of
18, he and several of his activist friends established the Union of Young
Crimean Tatars. His first arrest came in 1966, when he was sentenced for
refusing to serve in the Soviet Army.

A well-known Soviet dissident, He spent almost one fourth of his life in
Soviet prisons and labor camps. He is also remembered for staging the
longest hunger strike in the history of human rights movement. The hunger
strike, which lasted for 303 days (but he survived due to forced feeding),
drew world’s attention to the predicament of Crimean Tatars.

In 1986, as Jemilev was completing his sixth prison term in a hard-labor
camp, he was charged and tried for anti-Soviet activities once again. During
the summit held by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, however, the
American President asked for the release of five political prisoners as part
of the negotiations. Jemilev was one of those prisoners and he was released
with the condition that he refrain from any political activity.

In May 1989, he was elected to head the Crimean Tatar National Movement.
That year he returned to Crimea with his family, a move that would be
followed by the eventual return of 250,000 Tatars to their homeland. He is
currently serving as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament (Kyiv) and as
Chairman of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis (Simferopol) .

Jemilev received the Nansen Medal, awarded by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees for his persistent efforts and commitment to
defend the rights of Crimean Tatars to repatriate. The Crimean Tatar
leadership has always sought to solve conflicts by non-violent means. In an
interview Jemilev gave shortly after receiving the Nansen Medal in October
1998, he stated that “when violent means are used innocent people die, and
no just cause can justify the taking of innocent lives.”

We extend our birthday greetings to Mustafa Jemilev and our best wishes for
a long, healthy and successful life.

Inci Bowman, Ph.D.
International Committee for Crimea
Washington, DC

November 15, 2008
CAUCASUS UPDATE, November 10, 2008

Note from the Editor-in-Chief, Nasimi Aghayev

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States last week was welcomed around the world as an end to the unpopular Bush presidency and the chance to rebuild America ’s standing in the world. Expectations are, of course, going to be disappointed, both domestically and internationally. For all the significance of a US president with a Kenyan heritage and a Muslim middle name, President Obama will still have to face tough and unpopular decisions in the world.

On November 5, the day after election day, Moscow announced that it would deploy a number of short-range missiles in Kaliningrad , the Russian exclave between Lithuania and Poland , as a means to ‘neutralise – if necessary – the planned US missile defence system in eastern Europe. The decision was announced by President Dimitri Medvedev in his first state of the nation address, and was a clear warning that the Kremlin will not be appeased by a mere change of occupant in the White House.

Is it viable to expect a significant shift in policy towards Russia and the Caucasus once Obama is inaugurated? It is unlikely. Much has been made of John McCain’s hard-line policy approach to dealing with Moscow , and Obama’s relative inexperience in the area, and it is true that domestic opinion in the region tended to favour McCain, especially in states nervous about Russian adventurism such as Georgia and Ukraine . But in reality the room for maneuver will not allow a radical departure from the Bush administration, for both a general reason and a number of specific ones. The exception might seem to be Nagorno-Karabakh.

The general reason is that, for all the talk after the Georgian war of a new (albeit ‘19^th-century’) geopolitical order in Eurasia, the relationship with Russia is not the incoming administration’s top priority. The economy is a far more pressing concern. And even within the sphere of foreign affairs, negotiations with European and Chinese leaders on the world financial crisis will take up a lot more time than Russia and the Caucasus . Much will of course depend on President Obama’s personnel selection, in particular the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs, but for a while at least we are likely to see policy towards Eurasia as a secondary concern.

The specific reasons vary, but boil down to the fact that there is only so much that the US can do without breaking its prior commitments or undertaking a major volte-face on its whole foreign policy front which Mr Obama has neither the experience nor the desire (despite his commitment to multilateralism) to countenance. Firstly, the missile defence shield. By November 7, Mr. Obama had spoken to Lech Kaczynski, the Polish President, affirming his commitment to the project, which includes interceptor missiles based in Poland . A telephone call whilst President-elect, of course, does not equate to a policy whilst President. But it is nonetheless difficult to imagine Mr. Obama withdrawing from the missile shield project during his tenure, although it may be modified to make it less unpalatable to the Kremlin.

Secondly, Georgia . Mr Obama criticized Russia ’s invasion of the country in August and called Russia ’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia “deeply troubling”. He has warned Moscow that a failure to abide by the ceasefire will lead to difficulties in its attempts to gain membership to the World Trade Organisation, as well as dialogue frameworks such as the NATO-Russia Council. So far, so orthodox. He has expressed support for Georgia and Ukraine in their NATO aspirations, and declared in September that Tbilisi was ready for a Membership Action Plan, although it will be interesting to see how far he is willing to push it. He may be less willing to antagonize European leaders by insisting on this explosive issue than President Bush (or indeed Mr. McCain), especially if he has been cooperating closely with them over the financial crisis.

Thirdly, Nagorno-Karabakh. The clearest sign of a presumed change here could be Mr. Obama’s relationship with the huge Armenian diaspora in the United States : during his election campaign he welcomed their support and promised to find a resolution to the Karabakh conflict that is based upon “principles of democracy and self determination”. He has also expressed strong support for formally recognizing the so-called “Armenian genocide” of 1915, a notoriously controversial issue, and has stated that he will seek an end to the Turkish and Azerbaijani blockades of Armenia (imposed on Armenia by the latter after the Armenian forces occupied the territories of Azerbaijan in 1992-1993). Vice President-elect Joe Biden is also known for his strong support of Yerevan . However,it is now to be watched how far Obama as a president will be able to go to keep his promises in this regard.

On the ground, Turkey ’s recent moves to thaw relations with Armenia will be looked on favorably by the Obama White House, which must try and keep the momentum going. However, if Obama’s administration chooses to lean on Armenia , it could prove detrimental to the détente process currently taking place in the Caucasus ( Turkey has already warned Obama of breaking off the rapprochement process with Armenia in case if the US recognizes the “Armenian genocide”) and grant Russia a perfect opportunity to gather disaffected players to itself. In particular, in case of obvious US support for Armenia, Baku could find the warm relationship it has fostered with the Bush Administration cooling somewhat and find that its interests are better served by Moscow. Russia has already started taking important steps in that direction making use of the “lame-duck situation” in Washington . By holding a trilateral meeting of presidents of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan last week in Moscow as a result of which a declaration on the Nagorno-Karabakh peace process (first time since the cease-fire agreement of 1994) was signed by the presidents, Russia, frequently accused of wishing the continuation of frozen conflicts in the region, has intended to send a signal of its “good will” in the Caucasus, thus aiming on the one hand to rectify its damaged image after its invasion of Georgia, and on the other hand to have an upper hand in case of an ultimate settlement of the conflict. It is noteworthy that the only international mediator in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict – the OSCE Minsk Group (including beyond Russia , US and France as well), paralyzed after the Georgia war, was totally excluded from the above-mentioned meeting. Russia ’s attempts to pose itself as a mediator being capable to produce “tangible results” (e.g. the above-said declaration) cannot but cause great suspicions and concerns in Washington .

If Moscow exploits the opportunity further and begins to push for a resolution which emphasizes territorial integrity above all others (as unlikely as this may be), and if President Obama keeps his above-mentioned promises, we could begin to see a serious alteration of the Baku-Washington relationship which could potentially introduce significant changes to the present geopolitical order in the region. So if the new administration wants to avoid heightened tensions, it must try to balance regional interests and avoid alienating key players as the Bush Administration has repeatedly done. President Obama must attempt to find a solution to the problem that satisfies Turkey , accommodates Azerbaijan and Armenia , and circumscribes Russia .

We should not expect a new era under Obama. The Russian bear is not about to abandon its suspicion of the American eagle just because of a new face, and the feeling is mutual. The Georgian conflict was a significant rupture in relations and has created a potential for the emergence of a new geopolitical situation in the region. Despite his pre-electoral calls for a Russia policy based on “cooperation instead of confrontation”, Obama will have to continue the US support for the pro-American government in Tbilisi , no matter how much Saakashvili might have bothered him. It is obvious that if Georgia is gone, it will not last much till the region will be gone as well.

In the Caucasus , as elsewhere, it looks as if President Obama will have to start lowering expectations.

www.cria-online.org

November 11, 2008
Mountain megalomaniacs

Norman Stone

Published 06 November 2008

Between Russia and the Middle East, the Caucasus is one of the world’s most diverse regions – and as recent fighting in South Ossetia and Abkhazia showed, still boiling with ethnic tensions. Norman Stone reviews a history which makes sense of this complexity

The surrender of the Circassian leader Sheikh Shamil to the tsarist forces in 1859

The Ghost of Freedom: a History of the Caucasus

Charles King

OUP, 219pp, £17.99

A Georgian professor came to my (Turkish) university a few years ago and said: “People who live in mountains are stupid.” You probably hear such things often enough in the Caucasus, but it is not the sort of remark that you expect professors to pass. However, there is maybe something in it, a point made by the crazy loyalism of the Jacobite Highlanders of the Forty-Five, or for that matter of the Navarrese Carlists: brave and romantic, certainly, with their own codes of honour, but not very bright.

A French sociologist, André Siegfried, developed this theme a century ago, because he had noticed that voting patterns depended on altitude; in the valleys, people got on with normal lives, but, the further up you went, the less this was true. The diet was very poor, the economy was sheep-stealing or smuggling, resentment simmered against the valley settlers, and religion of a wild sort reigned. The Caucasus also fits Siegfried’s pattern, with the difference that, the further uphill you went, the more weird languages you hit on. In Charles King’s words, “the north-east harbours the Nakh languages . . . as well as a mixed bag of disparate languages that includes Avar, Dargin and Lezgin”.

He has missed out the Tats, who are mountain Jews, and he has mercifully missed out a great deal else, because the whole region is a kaleidoscope, and the ancient history is very complicated, with an Iberia and an Albania in shadowy existence; the Ossetians, of whom the world recently heard so much, are apparently what is left of the Alans, one of the barbarian tribes that swept through the later Roman Empire (and ended up in North Africa).

Charles King’s great virtue is that he is a very proficient simplifier and misser-out; he writes well, and can read the languages that matter (for some reason, quite a number of the important sources are in German; Germans were especially interested in the Caucasus, and in 1918 even had plans to shift U-boats overland to the Caspian). All the important themes are here, with some interesting additions.

King concentrates on the modern history of the Caucasus, roughly from 1700, when Russia began to take over the overlordship from Persia and the Ottoman Empire. In 1801, she annexed much of Georgia. This was relatively easy, since it is a very divided country (and the language – so difficult that even Robert Conquest, writing his biography of Stalin, found it impossible – itself sub-divides). It was also Christian, the nobility on the whole glad to come to terms with the tsar, and it could easily be reached from the sea, whereas other parts of the Caucasus, given the very mountainous and forested terrain, were much more difficult. The various Muslim natives of the northern Caucasus were then generally known as “Circassians” (the present-day Chechens are related) and they put up an extraordinary resistance to Russian penetration.

Cossacks came in, as the 19th century went ahead, and a line of forts was established; but a ferocious tribal-religious resistance grew up, under a legendary figure, Sheikh Shamil. Combining mystical-religious inspiration with an extraordinary astuteness as to guerrilla tactics, Shamil kept the Russians pinned down for a whole generation. (King’s bibliography is very solid and useful, but he might have mentioned a classic book about this, Sabres of Paradise, by Lesley Blanch, who went on to write The Wilder Shores of Love about the erotic Orient.)

In the event, the Russians “solved” the problem of the Circassians by mass-deportation. About 1,250,000 of them were forced out, and King is very good at describing their fate, as a third of the deportees died of disease or starvation or massacre, and the rest scattered over the Near and Middle East. Settling in eastern Anatolia, they encountered the Armenians, and bitter conflict resulted. A generation later much the same fate occurred to the Armenians of eastern Turkey. King quite rightly makes the parallel.

Shamil was at long last captured, but the Russians treated him well, and part of his family faded into the tsarist aristocracy. This is incidentally a dimension of matters that King could have explored: the relations of Russia and Islam. He has a good chapter about the image of the Caucasus in Russian literature (Lermontov and Tolstoy especially) but both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky were fascinated by Islam, and the Russians, whether tsarist or communist (and even nowadays) were quite adept at dealing with Muslims. The Tatars have turned into rather a plus: Nureyev and Baryshnikov, whose names mean “light” and “peace” in Turkish, being a case in point.

In fact, as the 19th century went ahead, the Caucasus was opened up, and many of the Muslims became loyal subjects of the tsar. Tiflis, the Georgian capital (why must we use these wretched “Tbilisis” and “Vilniuses” for places so well marked on the historic map?), was the seat of a viceroyalty that stretched from Kars in eastern Anatolia to the Caspian, and the railways, or the military roads, snaked ahead. Oil was struck on the Caspian side, and Baku, the capital of today’s Azerbaijan, grew up as a boom town, much of the architecture rather distinguished in late- Victorian style. One of the great mansions has been spectacularly restored as a historical museum.

To this day, the solid architecture of Kars, now in eastern Turkey, is impressive, and though the town went through a very bad period, when the Cold War was going on, it is doing much better now, as the oil pipeline to Baku pumps away, and the old railway links are restored. Even now, despite the gruesome climate, the inhabitants of Kars are notably sharper and better-educated than those of Trabzon or Erzurum, which remained under Ottoman rule. According to Orhan Pamuk’s novel on the town, Snow, its theatre was very good, but if you needed Islamic female costumes you had to send off to Erzurum, which was (and is: the calls to prayer are frequent and deafening) very provincial-pious. In its way, Kars shows in miniature that pre-1914 period which is the great might-have-been of Russian history: 1914 aborted a period of growing prosperity even, if you like, a bourgeois revolution. The revolution of 1917 finished all of that.

There was a pathetic episode, as the three nations of Transcaucasia – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – established a shadowy independence, even though the peoples of each were (and to some extent still are) intermingled. Baku and Tiflis had large Armenian populations, and Yerevan, the territory of today’s Armenia, was roughly half Muslim, whether Azeri or Kurdish. “Ethnic cleansing” then went ahead, the Armenians especially becoming megalomaniac, and even, as a first act on independence at Christmas 1918, invading Georgia. To this day, much of the Armenian diaspora seems never to have forgiven the west for failing to support their cause: hence these strange and persistent demands for the tragedy to be recognised as genocide. Perhaps it was, but as King shows, Armenians were not the only victims – not by any means – and it is rather to the credit of the Circassians’ (and others’) descendants that they are not demanding similar recognition of genocide from Congress or the Assemblée Nationale or Cardiff City Council or the Edinburgh City Fathers etc.

Sovietisation of the Caucasus then happened, and it was the communists’ turn to find out just how difficult the national question was going to be: eventually, it destroyed them. Communism had a very strong appeal to begin with when it came to the national question: who, looking at the Caucasus (as with Yugoslavia) would not be desperate for anything that would stop the rise of vicious tinpot nationalism? Many stout communists, beginning with Stalin himself, came from the Caucasus, and Stalin in the end had recourse to deportation (of the Chechens and many, many other peoples) as the only solution. That created the counter-hatreds that have made post-Soviet life so difficult. The Armenians repeated their fantasy of 1918 and invaded a neighbour – Azerbaijan – in pursuit of a fantasy. They victoriously set their standards afluttering over Karabakh, with much swelling of diaspora bosoms. The effort, and the isolation it brought them, caused nothing but economic trouble to what was already a poor, land-locked little place, and the original population, three million, is now, from emigration, below two: independence, in other words, having done more damage than ever the Turks did. The Georgians had an 18th-century ruler who described himself as “The Most High King, by the Will of Our Lord King of Kings of the Abkhaz, Kartvelians, Kakhetians and Armenians and Master of All the East and the West”: more megalomania with a contemporary ring, in other words. Charles King has written a very instructive and interesting book about it all.

Norman Stone’s most recent book is “World War One: a Short History”, now available as a Penguin paperback (£7.99)

Source: www.newstatesman.com, 06 November 2008

November 9, 2008