Eight Pieces of Empire (14 page)

ON THE TENTH
day of the siege, the capital of Abkhazia fell to the Abkhaz, or was “liberated,” in the terminology they used. Shevardnadze escaped. The Georgians had patched up the wings of the plane I had seen, the plane whose fuel tanks had been shot full of holes. I wondered if the son of the man who had given me the apple had been on the same plane with the president, his body in one of those gleaming zinc coffins.

A FEW DAYS
after the fall of the city, cameraman Sergiy Karazy and I grabbed a plane from Tbilisi to the Russian city of Sochi. We made our
way down the Black Sea coast. We crossed the Psou River back into Abkhazia.

A Russian border guard whom I recognized greeted me. Trucks full of looted goods were pulling up to the border between Russia and Abkhazia. Some of the more absurd aspects of the war had unnerved the man.

“A couple of days ago a Polish guy tried to cross the border, saying he wanted to fight for ‘little Abkhazia.’ I asked him, ‘Can you tell the difference between a Georgian and an Abkhaz?’ He told me no. They let him through anyway.”

On the horizon, hundreds of trucks filled the roads. They were stacked high with war loot—carpets, furniture, appliances, somebody else’s bric-a-brac.

When we got to the capital, looting was in full swing. I walked up to a house where Abkhaz partisans were loading furniture into a truck. They were bickering about what to do with the spoils. I recognized one of the men immediately. He looked more erudite than the rest of the group, mostly rank-and-file fighters on a victory high. He identified himself as a member of the Abkhaz parliament. He acknowledged me, embarrassed. The fighters continued loading their war trophies into the truck unabated.

“What you see here is sad, but it is true,” he told me. “This is the way of war.” (And it was. There were elements of this on every side in all the post-Soviet wars I witnessed: Few passed up the chance of looting or “taking trophies” when given the opportunity.)

Behind a building near the sanatorium where we’d stayed, I saw two bodies, one of an old woman and another of a middle-aged man. They had been shot. Kerchiefs covered their faces.

A monkey stood on a bridge nearby, looking rather confused and evidently pondering his next destination. Monkeys are not native to Abkhazia. He was from a scientific research center full of hundreds of primates nearby. They had been used in medical experiments, and a few had actually been sent into space in the Soviet space program. Georgian troops stole many of them and turned them into pets. They elevated some to war mascot status, riding about in their tanks with the monkeys atop—like
slapstick commanders. Now primate conscription had ended, and the monkeys were relishing their newfound freedom.

LATER, I SAW
an Abkhaz journalist whom I recognized. He greeted me warmly. Behind us, the “Supreme Soviet” was charred. Some of those inside had resisted, and the Abkhaz and their allies had set it ablaze after dragging out those last Georgians who had stayed behind.

I asked about Aleksandr Berulava, the man who had given me Shevardnadze’s book to keep for him.

“Berulava?” the journalist asked wryly. “Berulava was executed.”

His death was likely a gruesome one. Both sides, especially during the waning days of the war, had, among other things, taken to chopping off ears from dead adversaries or plucking out eyes (often before they were killed).

I SAW THE
Preacher Man again. He smiled broadly. In his broken Russian, he shouted,
“Slava Bogu!”
several times. Literally, the term translates as “Glory to God.” But it is used as an interjection, rather than literally, something along the lines of “Thank God for that” or “luckily.”

The Preacher Man was oblivious to having misused his limited Russian syntax, however. Instead, he kept repeating the phrase.
“Slava Bogu! Slava Bogu!”
It lilted like a feather in the sultry, smoke-scented air.

The Abkhaz journalist turned to me and whispered, “What the hell does he mean by that,
“Slava Bogu!”
?

“He just means it,” I answered. “He just means it.”

We moved south out of the city on foot, in the direction of the airport. All along the horizon, houses were burning and being looted.

Though several days had passed, there were still packs of dogs running aimlessly along the road, searching for their abdicated owners. I swear I recognized some of them.

The War That Nobody Started had ended.

At least for now.

BURIED FIVE TIMES: INSURGENTS IN FLAT BLACK NYLONS

E
duard Shevardnadze
(The Man Who Ended the Cold War) fled Abkhazia not in a boat or on a freezing mountain pass. He flew out in that same last, ravaged, jet-fuel-dripping plane we saw at the Sukhumi airport, its wings full of bullet holes. Workers had patched them with metal strips and scavenged up just enough fuel for a quick escape back into government-controlled territory.

Or what was left of it.

This latest insurrection was under way even before the War That Nobody Started ended. Georgia was entering its fourth war in less than two years of independence. From the empire’s crown jewel to failed state.

The protagonist was none other than Zviad Gamsakhurdia, elected president in 1990, but quickly having evoked the ire of many within months, including the artists-turned-warlords Kitovani and Ioseliani.

Proclaiming Gamsakhurdia an autocrat and demagogue, they felt the best way to unseat him was to lug large-caliber artillery pieces into the upper floors of the nearby Intourist hotel and fire them directly at the parliament from less than a hundred yards away.

It was an excessive use of firepower, to say the least—like going after ants with a sledgehammer—done more for the warlords’ warped sense of “Georgia as Vaudeville” effect (there were TV crews to show off for, after all) than for anything faintly resembling military logic. After a couple of weeks of blasting away, a once-elegant city center was reduced to a series of smoking holes and gutted neoclassical facades. They could
indeed boast, at least, of forcing Gamsakhurdia to flee—to Chechnya, where he found a fellow traveler in the rebel, rabidly anti-Kremlin leader there, Dzhokhar Dudayev.

That did not mean Gamsakhurdia had lost all backing, especially in the countryside or outside Tbilisi. To call them “supporters” would be an understatement. These were devotees, worshippers of a kind, and Gamsakhurdia was a near-deity for many of them.

The evocation of this allure seems simple enough on the surface: Zviad was the son of Georgia’s most famous twentieth-century writer, Konstantin Gamsakhurdia. While the Western reader may have never heard of such epics as
The Smile of Dionysus
, these works have deep resonance in the literature-obsessed Georgian soul. Konstantin’s bitter criticism of the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia and his exile to an island in the Arctic Ocean, where he came close to suicide before distracting his mind by translating Dante, reinforced his credentials.

Zviad was a linguist and ethnographer with an explosive temper and a penchant for rants against ethnic minorities like the Abkhaz. He once said that the Abkhaz should “leave Georgia and go back where they came from,” embracing a radical claim that the Abkhaz were originally mountain dwellers from outside Georgia who had gradually migrated to the Georgian Black Sea coast. “The Abkhaz nation doesn’t exist,” he yelled through a megaphone in front of the Georgian parliament during one rally in 1990. Today in Georgia such statements sound absurd. But in the supercharged ethnic frenzy of the Soviet collapse, they found resonance.

Aside from his nationalist creds—important at that time—Zviad’s ascension was bolstered by his taking over the mantle of Georgia’s leading anti-Soviet dissident. He was tossed, KGB-style, into a mental hospital for a spell, further boosting his own standing. Deeper reasons prevailed for the mystic adoration he inspired among his devotees. The surrealism surrounding his death helps illustrate some of them.

But Zviad in the autumn of 1993 was far from dead.

• • •

SHEVARDNADZE’S LOSS OF
Abkhazia gave him a chance to reclaim power. Wild throngs greeted Gamsakhurdia upon his return from exile to western Georgia, his power base. He proclaimed himself president again and, with a few hundred ragged troops, advanced toward the capital, most of the remnants of the government’s “army” having scattered or getting ready to.

Alas, he had barely unpacked his bags when Shevardnadze pulled a desperate move. The same man who accused the Russians of engineering his defeat in Abkhazia now invited those same Russian troops to intervene to save his own regime, even greeting them as they docked on the Black Sea coast. In exchange, the Man Who Won the Cold War signed Georgia up to the Russia-led Commonwealth of Independent States, Moscow’s pitiful effort to cobble some loose USSR fragments back together.

With the Russians pouring in and his insurgent forces vastly outnumbered, Zviad retreated for a last stand in the western Georgian town of Zugdidi. We prepared to scramble off to find him before the inevitable occurred: his capture, escape, or death.

I lay awake the night before, thinking about the imprudence of trying to gain entrance to yet another besieged city. Wind and rain drummed against Tbilisi’s endless maze of galvanized zinc roofs, an electric heater inert at the foot of my bed. The device itself was a thin piece of wire wrapped around a ceramic cylinder; a death trap in a midnight stumble. Happily, a power outage had rendered the thing temporarily impotent, and me freezing.

Tbilisi had taken on the kind of atmosphere that often follows humiliating defeats: resigned apathy, mixed with an increasing sense of nihilism.

Violent young men lurked in the shadows, and you knew it.

In the morning I forced myself out of bed and headed toward our office on Rustaveli Avenue on the fifth floor of a building with a semipermanently broken elevator. There I met up with my cameraman, Sergiy, to figure out how to get to Zugdidi for Zviad’s last stand. There was such a plethora of great bad options. The main road was cut by skirmishes, and the rest of the roads were usually little more than neglected dirt tracks.

As we prepared to head out, a group of scruffy paramilitary-looking types (by now simply meaning men with guns) banged on the office door, mistaking it for someone else’s. They were headed for the “front” to do battle with the “Zviadists,” they explained.

One of the men eyed a cheap, poorly produced, and (as it turned out) inaccurate road map of Georgia that I’d taped up on the wall behind my desk.

“Where is Samtredia?” he demanded.

“Here,” I said, pointing to the town in western Georgia of that name. It was along the main highway, supposedly the epicenter of the new war.

“Gmadlobt,”
said the man, thanking me in Georgian, and turned to go.

“Just a second,” I said, ripping the fifty-cent piece of cartography off the wall and thrusting it at him. “Take it!”

If these “government forces” had no idea where Samtredia was, they were in far worse shape than we were but at least might recognize us before they shot, thanks to my map gift.

The boys left on their mission, and Sergiy and I soon followed them westward toward the Black Sea and the “front lines” (a loose designation at best) in our beat-up Russian Niva four-wheel drive. The road was full of potholes, meaning, by the standards of the time, in fairly good shape.

WE STOPPED FOR
a meal in the lone functioning canteen in Georgia’s second city, Kutaisi, the legendary capital of the ancient kingdom of Colchis. The eleventh-century Bagrati Cathedral, still in ruins 301 years after Ottoman conquerors blew it up in 1692 (talk about a slow repair job), brooded over the city from atop a cliff. Jason and the Argonauts, in their epic quest for the Golden Fleece, had Kutaisi as their final destination—King Aeëtes’ seat of power.

The canteen had no seats, so we stood while eating beef stew and large pieces of Georgian
tonis puri
, bread baked on the sides of an ancient kiln, washing it down with a quirky, unique-to-Georgia, antifreeze-colored, tarragon-flavored soft drink. At 6,400,000 and something, the
bill sounded steep for some slop and bread. But the currency at the time was the infamous interim Georgian “coupon,” looking like xeroxed Monopoly money and then trading on world currency markets at something like 2 million to the dollar. I’d never given a million anything as a tip. I did so, and my mood improved.

We continued west along the main road under a light rain. There was no point in continuing on the main highway through Samtredia. It had been “conquered” and “retaken” by first the “Zviadists” and then the “government” on almost a daily basis. One day, a few “government” troops would roll forward with a tank or two, stand around, and pull back when a few dozen Zviadists—those who hadn’t fled Shevardnadze’s Russian enemies-turned-allies—would roll in. The next day, the reverse would happen.

Rather than endure such theatrics, we chose a route marked yellow on our map, designating a secondary road, supposedly in reasonably good condition, that would bring us across the lines. Instead we found a wide, formerly asphalted rut leading through a forest.

Places of war need not be tormentingly depressing, although many, if not most, are. Yet in much of western Georgia, it was hard to believe any conflict was going on at all.

Streams of gentle autumn light poked through the lush subtropical foliage.

Palms whispered in the breeze.

In tiny villages, women in straw hats sold sunflower seeds wrapped in pages ripped out of discarded editions of Gogol.

Cows meandered amid tea plantations.

As we admired the landscape, three more scraggly, Kalashnikov-toting men (God knows fighting for whom) flagged down our car.

They were proud Zviadists, they explained, but on the run in the face of the Russian intervention.