Central Asian Survey Vol. 28, No.

2, June 2009, 99118

David and Goliath and Georgians in the Kremlin: a post-colonial perspective on conict in post-Soviet Georgia
Laurence Broers
Independent Scholar, London, UK This article presents a post-colonial perspective on post-Soviet conict in Georgia. Patterns of group classication and incorporation in the tsarist and Soviet eras are charted, to argue that Soviet Georgia was incorporated as a series of layered peripheries, differentiated not only by ethnic afliation with titular groups, but also by the mode of incorporation into the wider political unit of which they formed part. This produced contrasting articulations of the link between language, identity and power among Georgians, Abkhazians and Ossetians, mediating conicting reactions to the prospect of post-Soviet devolution. Finally, the nature of the post-Soviet sovereignty attained by Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia is considered. Keywords: elite incorporation; ethnic conict; secessionism; post-colonialism

Introduction The war waged between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia in August 2008 stands at the nexus of several distinct, but overlapping, narratives shaping understandings of politics in Eurasia. One of these narratives is geopolitical, dening the South Caucasus as the site of a new great game being played out by Russia and America, breathing new life into the residual instincts and reexes of the Cold War. Another narrative is rooted in the confrontation between democratic Georgia, home to the rst of the regions colour revolutions, and a newly resurgent Russia, exing authoritarian muscles powered by energy revenues. A third narrative ascribes particular problems with political modernization to the Caucasus as a region; much like the Balkans, this region is portrayed (and patronized) in this narrative as resolute in its refusal to cast aside ancient hatreds. These narratives intersect in various ways with the local narratives of Georgians and Ossetians, which situate the present conicts within an over-arching history of the relations between their national groups. Much of the ensuing commentary in the international media, not to mention the propaganda war waged off the battleeld, served to conate these narratives and the questions they point to. The conict in South Ossetia, and its related but distinct analogue in Abkhazia, was widely reframed in the Western media (and by some British politicians without much experience of the South Caucasus) as a struggle between a Georgian David and a Russian Goliath. This analysis resonates with yet another explanatory framework, one that focuses on the post-colonial nature of these conicts. This framework resonates strongly with narratives of these conicts long circulating in Georgia, asserting that these are in fact post-colonial wars waged by Russia on Georgia in revenge for Georgias self-determination as an independent, democratic and determinedly Atlanticist state. Although these conicts had already lingered for nearly two post-Soviet decades, the gathering storm of Russian Western relations in

Email: laurencebroers@btinternet.com

ISSN 0263-4937 print/ISSN 1465-3354 online # 2009 Central Asian Survey DOI: 10.1080/02634930903034096 http://www.informaworld.com

100 L. Broers Eurasia seemed for many to be the only way to understand them. Like trying to observe the pathologies of two mosquitoes from an aeroplane, however, viewed from the lofty heights of high geopolitics it is impossible to discern the local logics driving the conicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. With many of the protagonists also inveigling us into accepting selective and self-absolving portrayals, it is necessary to come closer when searching for an explanation. The purpose of this article is to dig beneath geopolitics in order to gain insights into the formative matrices of Georgias conicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The resort to geopolitics or to the colourful individuals of the day to explain these conicts does not provide a deeper understanding of their underlying structure, dynamics and causes. These conicts have endured over nearly two decades of signicant geopolitical change, and there is no reason to suppose that they will not continue to endure beyond current geopolitical congurations. They remain rmly rooted in local and regional circumstances and in the aspirations, reexes and fears of the communities involved. To observe more closely than the polarizing frames of geopolitics and democracy allow, this article explores the narrative framework that views the conicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia as outcomes of the decolonization of the South Caucasus in the 1990s. For if nationalists in the region have unquestioningly accepted the mantle of a post-colonial identity, scholars of post-Soviet politics have developed sophisticated tools for understanding the highly variable role of colonialism and its aftermath in post-Soviet conicts. Afnities between post-colonial and post-Soviet contexts have been charted by numerous scholars (Suny and Martin 2001, Beissinger and Young 2002). Lasting deep into the modern era, both Soviet Communism and European colonialism in Africa assumed a modernizing, state-led transformation of society. Both used state coercion to effect profound changes in economic relations, state society relations, indigenous systems of classication and stratication, and the incentive and mobility structures for colonized elites (Beissinger and Crawford 2002). However, with regard to the Soviet Union there is a signicant disjunction between scholarly and local understandings of empire. If during the rst post-Soviet decade the number of articles and books using the concepts of empire, imperialism and colonialism to analyse relations between the Soviet state and its constituent nations steadily increased, a scholarly consensus emerged that if the Soviet Union was a kind of empire, it was a very specic subcategory of the genre. The Soviet Union was, in fact, an empire of nations (Hirsch 2005) or an afrmative action empire (Martin 2001), a peculiar hybrid combining centralized imperial rule with aggressively promoted national cultures in the periphery. Far from emasculating indigenous cultures, the Soviet state hyper-processed them, then through ethno-federal institutions conferred titular status upon the resulting identities and encouraged their dissemination within eponymous territorial units. Post-Soviet elites, however, especially in the western reaches of the former Soviet Union, took the imperial nature of the Soviet Union as self-evident and actively embraced a postcolonial identity as an unequivocal corollary of independence. This embrace of a post-colonial identity presupposed action to reverse the consequences of colonial wrongdoing through the nal emancipation and promotion of formerly colonized nations. This dichotomy and tension between the impetus to decolonize post-Soviet nations, through the promotion of titular cultures, and an ethno-social terrain that does not correspond to traditional understandings of a colony lies at the heart of the analysis presented here. References to empire suffused commentary on the August war. The uninitiated onlooker might be confused as to whether it was Russian, Georgian or American imperial cravings that actually motivated the conict. This shows that it is necessary to be sensitive not only to the material impacts of Soviet rule, but also to the discursive practices which the experience of

Central Asian Survey 101 alien rule has engendered. Post-colonialism should therefore refer to both the material legacies of alien rule in its former dominion and to the set of attitudes, frames and discursive strategies for narrating inequalities in colonial relationships between key social, political and cultural actors. This denition must be extended to encompass strategies aimed at reifying certain authentic markers of identity drawn from the pre-colonial past, itself a construct shaped by colonial categories and conceptions of history. There is, at least, a third sense of post-colonialism which must be noted here, that of a set of critical tools for understanding the deep structures of societies emergent from a system of government that corresponds to a colonial one. While no single theory can or should be expected to explain conicts as seemingly overdetermined such as those in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in its focus on the relationships between history, social justice, ethnicity and sovereignty, a post-colonial approach can provide a more complex canvas against which to understand the motivations, assumptions and sensibilities of the protagonists. This article begins by briey reviewing antecedents in the tsarist era, before examining the modalities of incorporation into the Soviet state in the Georgian, Abkhazian and Ossetian cases. The consequences owing from these modalities are then considered in terms of their contribution to sustained conict in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Finally, the nature of the post-colonial sovereignty attained by Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia is briey considered. Tsarist precedents In the late eighteenth century the Russian Empire began the process of incorporating the various kingdoms and principalities formerly constituting the heartland of the medieval Georgian kingdom. By the late eighteenth century, the threat posed by growing Persian and Ottoman expansionism led King Erekle II of the eastern Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti to seek protection from co-religionist Russia. In 1783 the Treaty of Georgievsk, establishing Kartli-Kakheti as a Russian protectorate, was concluded. In 1801 Russia abrogated its obligations in the treaty to preserve Georgian dynastic autonomy and annexed Kartli-Kakheti directly as an integral part of the Russian Empire. The kingdom and the autocephaly of the Georgian Orthodox Church were abolished in 1801 and 1811 respectively. Other fragments of the medieval kingdom were incorporated over the following decades, culminating in Abkhazias incorporation in 1864. In 1877 up to 50,000 Muslim Abkhazians were expelled from Abkhazia by the Russian authorities, decimating the population of central Abkhazia.1 From the latter half of the nineteenth century, Russian ethnographers, geographers and missionaries produced a voluminous literature dedicated to the classication of the peoples and languages of the Caucasus. Race and religion were the primary criteria according to which the Russian Empire sorted its subjects. Since Russian ethnographers favoured fellow IndoEuropeans, race worked against the Georgians as a non-Indo-European group; however, religion and a social structure (feudalism) recognizable to Russians compensated, and Georgians were not categorized as inorodtsy, the pejorative term applied to Muslim and other non-Christian groups.2 Russian portrayals of cultural relations in Georgia reproduced indigenous narratives of Georgia as a Christian outpost, beleaguered by Muslim empires, but a civilizing inuence among smaller groups within the Caucasus. Russian rule thereby absorbed indigenous selfunderstandings at the Georgian cultural core and in so doing, extended them as ideological interpretations of inter-group relations in the periphery. By the second half of the nineteenth century conditions of opportunity allowed a generation of Georgian nobles to nd employment in the Caucasus administration. This led to a certain devaluation of Georgian culture and language, because without Russian, Georgian nobles could not enter the Russian administration. Georgian was both informally and formally devalued

102 L. Broers in comparison with Russian; while Russian tuition was compulsory across the empires schools, Georgian was no longer a required subject (Suny 1994, p. 128). Like their counterparts in Ukraine, some in the rst generation of co-opted Georgian nobles questioned the usefulness of their ancestral tongue.3 This orientation was tempered and reversed in the next generation of gentry nationalists (the tergdaleulni), who, although very much a product of the Russian intellectual climate in which they were educated, had assimilated a nationalist discourse and stigmatized cosmopolitanism, writing in vernacular Georgian. Language also came to be a central classifying criterion, with important consequences in a context of numerous vernacular speech communities with minimal or only ritualistic knowledge of Georgian. Populations speaking Abkhaz, Ossetian or the Georgian-related vernaculars were now deemed to be separate ethno-linguistic entities rather than estates marked as low cultures. In the late nineteenth century, sporadic attempts were made to establish Cyrillic-based alphabets for these languages as a tool for both proselytization (among groups with a Muslim component, such as the Abkhazians and Ossetians) and to facilitate Russication. Although the actual penetration of the new written languages was minimal by the end of Russian imperial rule, these initiatives resulted in Georgian losing its status as the primary ecclesiastical language in some areas to Church Slavonic. These trends were reversed during the brief period of Georgian independence between 1918 and 1921, when the Georgian social democratic government actively embraced nation-building policies. Georgian was made the compulsory language of state business and school instruction. The Georgian government also instituted a number of legal provisions entitling minorities to cultural or territorial autonomy. Three territorial units were provided for in the 1921 Constitution, in Abkhazia, Achara and the Muslim populated region of Zakatala. These provisions were never realized due to the brevity of Georgian independence.4 Nonetheless, the three years of independence were marked by a number of violent confrontations with communities now transformed into national minorities in a nationalizing Georgian state. In a striking parallel with postSoviet developments in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, conict ensued in part from the uncontrolled activities of the newly formed Georgian Peoples Guard. Although Abkhazia was granted autonomy according to the Georgian Constitution of 1921, there was considerable resistance to Georgian rule in the Abkhazian National Soviet, established in 1917. In late 1918 the Georgian government disbanded the Abkhazian National Soviet and arrested its leadership. These circumstances led to the welcoming by some of Soviet power in Abkhazia as a liberating force from Georgian domination. Finally, the suppression of peasant-based and Bolshevik-backed revolts in Ossetian-populated regions in north-central Georgia in 1919 1920 also took on ethnic undertones as these regions were subjected to the reprisals of the Georgian Peoples Guard. The conicts of the period provided fertile ground for nationalist readings of both Georgian oppression and the disloyalty of minorities in the post-Soviet context. Modes of incorporation into the Soviet state Several theorists of nationalist mobilization have highlighted the role of blocked mobility among peripheral elites in the genesis of nationalist movements. Gellner, for example, situates the germination of nationalism in what he calls entropy-resistant classications: attributes which have a marked tendency not to become, even with the passage of time since the initial establishment of an industrial society, evenly distributed throughout the entire society (Gellner 1983, p. 64). In his ctive example of Ruritanians barred from mobility through the wider Megalomanian state, Gellner suggested that Ruritanians faced a choice between assimilation into Megalomanian culture or the establishment of an independent Ruritania. Restricted mobility, associated with

Central Asian Survey 103 irremediable social or cultural attributes, in a modern society where development is predicated on social entropy is thus a key source of incentives to invest in a future separate from that society. Soviet rule was based on an advanced model of indirect rule, or what Graham Smith called federal colonialism (Smith 1998, p. 4). The free movement of local elites through their national institutions in designated homelands was a central premise of Soviet nationalities policy. However, this policy was exclusively devoted to the creation of national elites at the republican level and below; there were no formal prescriptions for the promotion of nonRussian elites into the central institutions of the Soviet state (Martin 2001, p. 179). Although efforts were made to standardize the degree of mobility of national elites to the Soviet centre, it remained variable across different groups, mediated by cultural proximity to the Russian cultural core, developmental disparities and stereotypes inherited from tsarist rule. David Laitin applied Gellners theory of nationalism to Soviet modes of incorporation to discern three key patterns, with important consequences in terms of the extent and motivation of assimilation (Laitin 1998). In one model, which Laitin termed the most-favoured-lord model, elites were accepted on an equal basis at the imperial core and were relatively unhindered in pursuing careers there. Therefore, these elites had strong incentives to assimilate into the metropolitan culture and identify culturally with the dominant group. Ukrainians are the exemplar of this pattern. In a second pattern, termed colonial by Laitin, elites were barred from the centre but permitted to pursue careers only as the co-opted mediators of central rule in the periphery, perhaps because of ethnic stereotyping or a numerical shortage of elites. Kazakhs are the exemplar of this model; generally excluded from all-Union structures, Kazakhs could nonetheless acquire considerable power within Kazakhstan. For them, however, the acquisition of Russian was purely instrumental, without the prospect of a wider-ranging cultural assimilation. In both most-favoured-lord and colonial patterns of incorporation, tensions between assimilados, those who invested in Russian as either a vehicle for assimilation or a passport to higher status, and nativists, promoting the indigenous culture, were a dening characteristic of the politics of devolution in the 1990s (Wilson 1997, Dave 2007). In a third pattern discerned by Laitin, titular elites dominated their own republican structures, but unlike those in colonial contexts retained a much higher degree of cultural integrity. These elites ceded some administrative control to the Soviet state, but essentially functioned as relatively autonomous national societies with relatively low reliance on the technical or cultural resources of the metropole. The Baltic republics exemplied this model. Never trusted to occupy inuential Soviet positions, they had experienced a prolonged period of independence, including industrialization and nation-building policies. Therefore, Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians had fewer motives to acquire Russian, and no substantial cosmopolitan constituency emerged within the titular Baltic nations. Laitins study did not feature any republics from the South Caucasus, yet, his model is invaluable in understanding how Soviet rule mediated interethnic relations and conict between Georgians and Abkhazians/Ossetians. Georgians The early Soviet regime was cautious in its treatment of Georgia, which had enjoyed brief independence under a nationalist banner and had neither a substantial working class nor a sizeable Bolshevik support base. Georgians played a prominent role in the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Republic (ZSFSR), founded in 1922, of which Tbilisi was the capital until its dissolution in 1936. The ZSFSRs dissolution replaced a Caucasus-wide institutional space for mobility with a more limited, yet for titular nationalities, preferential access to republican positions. Furthermore, the economic context in Georgia did not demand a substantial inux of either Slavic

104 L. Broers labour or expertise; the production base remained split between mostly light industry, agroindustrial and agricultural production, rather than large-scale heavy industry.5 Signicantly, Georgians were also classied as among the Western, advanced nationalities of the Soviet Union. In effect, a colonial phase in Georgias modernization, administered by Russians, was largely elided. These factors moderated the low propensity among Georgians to leave Georgia. Although the careers of Stalin and Shevardnadze attest to the fact that Georgians could, and did, reach the most inuential positions at the Soviet centre, overall, their degree of mobility to the Soviet centre was relatively low.6 Between 1924 and 1980, Georgians accounted for 19 candidate members of the Politburo, comparing favourably with other South Caucasian and most Central Asian republics, but far short of the inuence attained by Ukrainians (37 full members and 47 candidate members over the same period; Bahry 1987, Table 1.1). This pattern of relatively low incorporation of Georgians at the all-Union level contrasted with a pattern of titular saturation within Georgia. During the later Soviet decades Georgians enjoyed near-total control over the republics leading positions, including political leadership, technical and scientic elds and culture. For example, in 1981 Georgians accounted for nearly 78.6% of the Georgian Communist Party membership, compared to a 68.8% share of the population in 1979 (Narodnoe Khozyaistvo Gruzinskoy SSR 1922 1982 1982, p. 15). In higher education Georgians accounted for 89.4% of all students in higher education in the year 1989 1990, relative to a 70.1% share of the population (Kaiser 1996, p. 233). In the calculations of Grey Hodnett, the grand mean of titular occupancy of republican positions in Georgia between 1955 and 1972 was 97.2%, an astonishing statistic relative to the 66.8% share of the population held by Georgians in 1970 (Hodnett 1978, pp. 101 103, 108). Georgian control over republican structures is further attested by the observations made by visiting Western scholars in the Soviet period. For example, in the 1980s Robert Parsons observed that the higher one goes in the Georgian party hierarchy, the more Georgians one meets (Parsons 1982, p. 553). In a pattern surely anomalous for a colony, by the late 1980s Georgians administered a cohesive titular society with relatively little reliance on Russian expertise or language. This self-sufciency was reected rst in the increasing demographic ight of Russians from the republic compared to their counterparts elsewhere, and in the status of the Georgian language ` vis-a-vis Russian.7 Soviet census data shows that Georgian uency in Russian as a second language between 1970 (20.1%) and 1989 (31.8%) was comparatively low compared to other republics.8 Conversely, 22.5% of Russians in Georgia claimed uency in Georgian in 1989 (SRUSASIK 1991), showing a sharp divergence from the Central Asian pattern, where almost no Russians claimed uency in titular languages. Seventy years of Soviet rule had failed to result in the supplanting of the Georgian language, which remained central to the everyday interactions, symbolic literacy and occupational mobility of Georgians at all levels of society. To refer again to Laitins three models, the pattern of elite incorporation in Georgia approximates most closely to the integral pattern. Late Soviet Georgia was characterized by a low degree of ethnic Georgian mobility outside the republic contrasting with a very high degree of mobility within the republic. The ambitious sons (and to a lesser extent daughters) of Georgian enterprise directors, academics and party ofcials had to full their ambitions within the boundaries of their own republic, yet they could do so in their own language with little fear of competition from Russian settlers or technocrats. This was a key factor in the consolidation of an integral indigenous society with relatively little reliance on the metropolitan culture. Indeed, the depth and breadth of titular control over the institutions and resources of the republic make Georgia an outstanding success story of Soviet nationalities policy.

Central Asian Survey 105 Abkhazians and Ossetians Tsarist constructions of Abkhazian and Ossetian backwardness, in combination with the need to create written languages for these groups, provided the basis for their classication as Eastern, or backward nationalities in the Soviet Union. Both groups were also less urbanized and literate than larger neighbouring groups (Kaiser 1996, p. 201). However, as indigenes they were granted national autonomy as what is termed here as second-order titulars within (or in the case of Abkhazia until 1931 in association with) the Georgian republic as part of the ZSFSR until 1936, and after that time within the separate Georgian republic.9 In the 1920s several steps were taken to institutionalize Abkhaz as a national language, including the publication of Abkhaz language-primers for use in mother tongue education, the establishment of Abkhazmedium schooling and literary and newspaper publishing (Tarba 1976, pp. 55 68, Hewitt 1989, pp. 135 136). Similarly, the broader use of the Ossetian language also followed from the establishment of Soviet power (Gabaraev 1981). These gains led second-order titulars to look upon Soviet rule differently to groups possessing prior literary traditions and/or recent experience of independence. For second-order titulars no contradiction between a modern sense of statehood and Soviet rule existed; rather, these were co-extensive, as modern Abkhazian and Ossetian state-territorial units came into being through Soviet rule. Rather than the metropolitan culture, it was Georgian hegemony that presented the more immediate threat to second-order titulars. For Abkhazian and South Ossetian elites, Tbilisi was the lter through which Soviet rule was administered in the autonomies, an additional layer of authority perceived as inserting its own Georgian agenda into otherwise benevolent Soviet policies. For Ossetians, and from 1931 Abkhazians, directly accountable to the Georgian ` capital, the centre-periphery dynamic of the national republics vis-a-vis Moscow was replicated ` at the local level vis-a-vis Tbilisi. Opportunities for Abkhazians and Ossetians to pursue political careers at the Georgian centre would have provided incentives to acquire Georgian, in addition to Russian and their own national languages. Theoretically at least, Abkhazians and Ossetians could have adopted a Georgianized assimilado identity parallel to that of Russied titulars in Central Asia or Ukraine. The Georgian-Abkhazian/Ossetian relationship can therefore be seen as replicating the wider Russian/non-Russian relationship, particularly since Georgians dominated the Georgian centre. Late Soviet data on the national composition of the Georgian Communist Party at the levels of Tbilisi city and regions and towns of all-republican status, i.e. regions and towns outside of the autonomies, show consistent and increasing under-representation of Abkhazians and Ossetians relative to their demographic percentages of the population. In 1970 Abkhazians accounted for 1.7% of the population of Georgia, but for only 0.04% of the Tbilisi City Communist Party organization and ,0.01% of regional and town Communist Party organizations of allrepublican status (Toidze 1971). In the same year Ossetians accounted for 3.2% of the population, but only 2.1% of the Tbilisi City Communist Party organization and 1.6% of regional and town Communist Party organizations of all-republican status.10 While these gures also reect the geographic concentration of (and preferential mobility for) Abkhazians and Ossetians within their autonomous territories, they also indicate that, whatever the reason, conditions encouraging the dispersal of Abkhazians and Ossetians through the principal ruling organization of the republic did not develop. Even if ambitious Abkhazians and Ossetians sought to pursue careers at the Georgian core, they evidently did not do so; Abkhazians and Ossetians did not share political space with Georgians at the ruling centre of the republic. This factor was of paramount importance as Tbilisi made moves towards independence in the terminal Soviet period; without a stake in central government, Abkhazians and Ossetians had little incentive to pursue a common fate with Georgia.

106 L. Broers In 1985 Darrell Slider noted that the use of Georgian as the chief language of instruction and the relatively minor role of Russian symptoms of Georgian cultural cohesion at the republics leading institutes and universities presented a major obstacle to Abkhazian representation in higher education. By the late 1960s, over one-third of all Abkhazian university students were enrolled at universities and other institutes outside Georgia, compared to one in eight Georgians (Slider 1985, p. 55). Abkhazians and Ossetians thus had limited possibilities to pursue political and intellectual advancement in the Georgian capital, although this was more marked for Abkhazians than for Ossetians perhaps on account of smaller numbers, correspondingly smaller informal networks and lower capacity to compete with those of other ethnic groups. The theoretical payoff for second-order titular elites in subaltern positions was the right to act as monopoly mediators within their own territories. In principle at least, Soviet nationalities policy guaranteed these nationalities the benet of afrmative action within their designated territories. Here Ossetians and Abkhazians found themselves in different circumstances due to demographic differences, yet certain key trends are common to both. Demographic marginality made Abkhazians especially dependent on the enforcement of Soviet-style afrmative action in order to retain political control over their own homeland. In the context of large-scale Georgian settlement in Abkhazia in the late 1930s and 1940s, the overall trend was of a struggle to maintain proportional representation of the titular nationality against a steady increase in Georgian representation.11 Nevertheless, there were periods, particularly in the late 1950s and 1980s, when Abkhazians did enjoy the benets of the Soviet social contract through preferential access to political ofce in Abkhazia. In South Ossetia, Ossetians formed an overall demographic majority and were able to maintain a level of over-representation in party membership throughout the Soviet period. Nonetheless, Ossetian membership consistently declined, while Georgian membership increased. This pattern of restricted second-order titular mobility is strongly suggestive that with regard to the immediate political centre, Tbilisi, Abkhazian and Ossetian groups were, in David Laitins terms, incorporated according to a colonial logic. Their position within Georgia is analogous to that of Central Asian elites within the Soviet Union. Dened as backward with regard to the political core, Abkhazians and Ossetians did not occupy positions of inuence at the centre and their elite ambitions could only be realized within the limited eld of their native regions. This may only partially be attributable to Georgian inuence. Like the Central Asian nationalities, a further factor was undoubtedly one of supply; talented Abkhazians and Ossetians were directed immediately into local political and administrative cadres. As peripheral elites whose best option was to reap the rewards of mediating central rule in their regions, Abkhazians and Ossetians had strong incentives to learn the language of the centre. But unusually for elites of autonomous republics and regions (rather than union republics), the language of the centre was ambiguous; it could be Russian, the language of the wider state, or Georgian, the language of the immediately superordinate centre, Tbilisi.12 For both Abkhazians and Ossetians within their autonomous territories, a choice for Russian was clearly made. In 1989, admittedly under already highly politicized circumstances, 81.5% of Abkhazians in Abkhazia and 59.7% of Ossetians in South Ossetia claimed uency in Russian as a second language (SRUSASIK 1991, pp. 92 93, 128 129). These gures are an inexact quantication of a large-scale societal shift to Russian as the functional native language. Although Abkhazian and Ossetian respondents to the 1989 census undoubtedly understated their capacity to speak Georgian as a second language, the gures (1.6% and 13.8% respectively) reect an objective reality of the pre-eminence of Russian over Georgian in the autonomies. Ofcial statistics are also a poor guide to Abkhazians and Ossetians capacity in their mother tongues. The Abkhaz and Ossetian languages suffered from inconsistent language planning, being written in three different scripts over the Soviet period, played second ddle

Central Asian Survey 107 to Russian in terms of the number of hours dedicated to their tuition13 and were used sparingly as languages of publication.14 Echoing the status of English among Indian intellectuals, Russian is more deeply embedded in the Abkhazian national intelligentsia than Abkhaz, and notions of modern Abkhazian prose or Abkhazian literature equally denote Russian and Abkhaz-language works. Outside of rural contexts, Abkhaz and Ossetian were restricted to the more limited roles of intimacy, folklore and an occasional signier of solidarity. Reecting comparable outcomes of colonial incorporation, Abkhazia is currently experiencing conict between nativists and assimilados over the desired revival of the Abkhaz language similar to debates in Kazakhstan in the 1990s (Clogg 2008, pp. 315 316). Modes of incorporation, lines of fragmentation This examination of the modes of incorporation of Georgian, Abkhazian and Ossetian elites ` respectively, vis-a-vis their immediately superordinate political centres, reveals a pattern of layered peripheries in Soviet Georgia. These layered peripheries were heterogeneous, not only in terms of their identication with titular ethnic groups, but also in terms of their mode of incorporation. The effect of the incorporation variable in differentiating social mobility between Georgians and Abkhazians/Ossetians, and on their cultural orientations and cultural integrity, produced a fundamental bifurcation in Soviet Georgian society. In contrast to the pattern of predominantly Russian-speaking and ethnically diverse capital cities and more titular-oriented rural hinterlands, characteristic especially of Central Asian republics, the most cosmopolitan regions in Georgia were to be found in the peripheral autonomies, in Abkhazia and, to a lesser extent, South Ossetia. For the Abkhazian and Ossetian elites in these regions the low degree of incorporation into Georgian society resulted in a high degree of separation from Georgian culture.15 These ndings suggest that a fourth category, composite incorporation, may be added to Laitins typology of modes of elite incorporation amongst the Soviet national republics to describe the Georgian case. This legacy points to a Georgian inection of the characteristic struggle in post-colonial states between nationalists favouring linguistic indigenization and former elites favouring the retention of the colonial language. Rather than being enacted as an intra-group struggle between nativists and assimilados as Taras Kuzio suggests in the Ukrainian case, or between nationalists and bureaucrats as Laitin has elsewhere explored in the African context, this division in Georgia intersected with separate ethnic identities (Laitin 1992, Kuzio 2002).16 The nativist/ assimilado struggle in post-Soviet Georgia was overlaid by, and inseparable from, inter-ethnic (as opposed to intra-ethnic) politics, allowing it to form the basis for rival projects of political sovereignty rooted in contrasting experiences of colonialism. A thesis of composite incorporation can provide insights into the formative matrix of the Georgian Abkhazian and Georgian Ossetian conicts. It shows how the modes of incorporation pregured the subsequent lines of fragmentation, not on account of any inevitable cultural enmity, but on account of the real life aspirations and frustrations of the bearers of permanent, ascribed ethnic identities in Soviet Georgia. Despite seven decades of Soviet rule, Georgians experienced a Georgian-speaking modernity, without cultural or institutional dependence on the wider Soviet state. In contrast, Abkhazians and Ossetians could only access the modernity offered by Soviet rule through the mediation of the advanced cultures of others, namely Russian or Georgian. Abkhazians and Ossetians found themselves in a quintessential colonial bind. Beneciaries of a benevolent paternalism, yet prevented from assimilation, they could access modernity only through the mediation of another culture supplanting their own. Composite incorporation also conditioned the terms in which the Georgian nationalist movement expressed itself. The qualities of xity, immutability and historical transcendence

108 L. Broers attributed to ethnicity in Soviet thought and practice contributed much to the prevalence of ethnic over civic paradigms of nationhood in post-Soviet nationalisms. However, if such conceptions of nationhood in Ukraine or Kazakhstan, for example, were constrained by substantial constituencies of Russied titulars or economically signicant ethnic Russian technical elites, this was not the case in Georgia. Indeed, the very plausibility of the ethnic discourse espoused by President Zviad Gamsakhurdia was rooted in the relatively undiluted nature of Georgian ethnic markers (especially language) across the titular population. At the same time, Georgian nationalist discourse could not lay claim to a central tenet of post-colonial legitimacy that sovereignty would deliver social justice to a disenfranchised majority. For example, in a context where social and political mobility has been associated with a Francophone identity, arguments invoking social justice have been an important boost to identity claims in promoting Arabization in Algeria (Gafati 2002). Yet, far from a situation where indigenes have been isolated from government, in Georgia social and political mobility were already correlated with Georgian ethnicity to the point of saturation. Therefore, the drive for Georgianization could not enlist a social justice agenda. On the contrary, the promotion of Georgian could be (and from the perspective of minorities, was) perceived as the formal institutionalization of the inequalities salient in majority-minority relations in the late Soviet period. It is precisely the ways in which Soviet Georgia did not correspond to the prole of a colony that explains the weakness of social justice claims for the promotion of Georgian, and the consequent reliance on historical and identity claims which could not be shared. This disjunction between the reality of ethnic Georgian hegemony and the emotional demand for decolonization reveals a fraudulent afnity between post-Soviet and post-colonial frames, at least in the Georgian case. Showing the strain: protest and nationalism in the late Soviet period Despite the contrasting degrees of institutional completeness and cultural integrity among Georgians, Abkhazians and Ossetians, all groups shared a common colonial subconscious (Gafati 2002, p. 43). This subconsciousness was rooted to varying extents in concrete events and changes in status, and manifested itself in recurrent protests addressed at Moscow, which typically opted for appeasement. This conditioned a conict resolution mechanism between Georgians and Abkhazians that was dependent on external intervention. Relations between Georgians and Ossetians were far less fraught during the late Soviet period. For Georgians the experience of national modernity was, nonetheless, an incomplete one tempered by perennial fears of assimilation. Soviet rule in Georgia was punctuated by occasional, but recurrent, Georgian protests. In 1924 underground Georgian resistance organized an armed insurrection against the nascent Bolshevik authorities in Georgia, which was quickly and ruthlessly suppressed.17 In 1956, silence from the ofcial media at the anniversary of Stalins death in March, together with Khrushchevs recent vilication of the cult of personality, saw mass protests in Tbilisi and other Georgian cities ending in violent suppression. In the 1970s, a dissident movement coalesced in Georgia, establishing a human rights watch committee in 1977 recording violations of the 1975 Helsinki accords. Beyond human rights violations, dissidents also inserted a nationalist agenda into their activities, campaigning against russication, the neglect of Georgian national monuments and enforced atheism. Proposals in 1978 to divest the national languages of the three Caucasian republics of their ofcial status were met with mass protest in Tbilisi for the retention of this status for Georgian. In response, First Secretary Eduard Shevardnadze elected for tactical accommodation and Georgians status was left intact.18 However, this did not assuage fears of linguistic assimilation. Concern over Georgians failure to play the role of a lingua franca in the republic and Russians

Central Asian Survey 109 dominance in technical and scientic elds formed a staple component of intellectual discourse throughout the 1980s (Fuller 1988). These fears expressed the dichotomy between the experience of national development and enforced membership of a larger state; despite the widening and deepening of the Georgian language community through Soviet institutionalization, this expansion was perceived as conditional. From the late 1980s, the language debate was framed by Georgian nationalists in terms of a triangular dynamic between Georgian, the legitimate language of the emergent Georgian nation, Russian as the illegitimate marker of tsarist and Soviet imperialism, and minority languages construed as an inauthentic colonial overlay of an eternally Georgian cultural space. Georgian nationalist discourse assumes the autochthony of the Georgian nation as the sole ethnic basis for the formation of a Georgian national state. In this view, Georgian is the language of the Georgian nation and the symbol of this nations unity, the repository of indigenous historical traditions of high culture and statehood, the embodiment of the Georgian Orthodox tradition since the fourth century AD, and the vehicle of Georgias own democratic value system rooted in the mediaeval Georgian kingdom.19 More extreme, messianic visions, including those of former president Zviad Gamsakhurdia, see nothing less than the key to the redemption of mankind locked in the Georgian language.20 The corollary of these views is the portrayal of Russian as the language of colonialism and Georgias subjugation, the denial of Georgian identity, the expression of an Eastern despotism suffocating Georgian aspirations for membership of Europe, and the instrument of articial ethnic conict aimed at the annexation of territory by an expansionist state identied with the ethnic Russian nation. A second corollary is the portrayal of minority languages as historically recent additions to the Georgian space.21 This view derives plausibility from the wide inuence in the Soviet Georgian academe and media of doctrines of autochthony, according to which only the Georgian ethnic group is autochthonous to the territory of contemporary Georgia. Although they were the subject of debate even among Georgian scholars and were never completely accepted, these doctrines had been an important source of conict between Georgian and Abkhazian intellectuals since the 1950s (Coppieters 2002). Never formally repudiated by the Soviet Georgian authorities, the thesis of minorities settler status assumed wide popularity in the late 1980s in a welter of polemical articles in the Georgian press. While Georgians identied Moscow as their imperial metropole, Abkhazians (and to less overt extent Ossetians) unequivocally identied Tbilisi as theirs. In 1931 Abkhazias political status was changed from associate status with the Georgian republic, then still a part of the ZSFSR, to that of an autonomous republic under formal Georgian jurisdiction. The legal nuances of this change are complex, and arguments can be brought to support both Abkhazian and Georgian claims on the legitimacy or otherwise of this change.22 In Abkhazia there is an unquestioned view of it as an illegal annexation of Abkhazia by Georgians in the Kremlin. This was followed in 1936 by the renaming of Sukhum as Sukhumi, that is, with the characteristic Georgian noun ending i. In 1939 a Migration Authority was established in the Georgian Communist Party tasked with the expansion of the population of Abkhazia (Sagaria, Achuba and Pachulia 1992). This was framed in terms of mise en valeur arguments for the exploitation of the regions resources, which further entailed the removal of the right of exploitation of the regions natural resources from local to republican and Soviet jurisdiction. In ethnic terms, resettlement resulted in a rapid increase in the regions Georgian population; between 1939 and 1959 the Georgian population of Abkhazia increased by 66,000 (p. 11). Abkhazias perceived demotion was soon followed by changes in the cultural eld that clearly denoted a subaltern relationship with Tbilisi. In 1938 script reform was enacted across the Soviet Union, replacing earlier Latin scripts for recently devised alphabets with Cyrillic. This reform heralded the curtailing of the early Soviet Leninist line of maximal cultural

110 L. Broers differentiation, and its replacement by the Stalinist line of favouring Russian as the Soviet Unions dominant nationality. In March 1938 Russian was made compulsory in all nonRussian schools. To conform with other recently devised alphabets, Cyrillicization should have been the fate of the Latin-based Abkhaz and Ossetian scripts devised in the 1920s. Rather than Cyrillic, however, these scripts were Georgianized. This was a highly exceptional example of the imposition of a national rather than Cyrillic script on minority languages in the Soviet Union. At the same time, Georgian was made compulsory in all schools in the republic. The shift presaged the closure of Abkhaz and Ossetian native language schools between 1944 and 1952 and the curtailing of radio broadcasting and publishing in these languages. At the beginning of the post-Stalinist period in 1953, language planning policy in Abkhazia and South Ossetia rejoined the broader state orientation and Abkhaz and Ossetian were belatedly Cyrillicized. In Abkhazia, the 1931 demotion, the ensuing closure of Abkhazian institutions, and the effects of composite incorporation served as grounds for recurrent protests in 1931, 1957, 1965, 1967, 1978 and, nally, 1989. The Abkhazian protest of 1978 was rewarded with a wide range of conciliatory measures, including the transformation of the Sukhumi Pedagogical Institute into the Abkhazian State University, quotas for Abkhazians in Georgian universities and a rise in the prole of the Abkhaz language in broadcast and print media (Gogokhia and Kuprava 1982, Slider 1985, pp. 61 64). The policy of appeasement, leading to the disproportionately favourable representation of Abkhazians in Abkhazias party structures by the late 1980s, established Moscows role as Abkhazias protector against Georgian encroachment. Challenges to Moscows authority in the wake of perestroika thus followed these substantial Abkhazian gains earlier in the decade. Following a dramatic deterioration in relations with Tbilisi in 1989, South Ossetia lost its status as an autonomous region altogether in 1990, when it was abolished by the Georgian Supreme Soviet. Countering the nationalist discourse emanating from Tbilisi, Abkhazian and Ossetian nationalist discourses invert the categories and assumptions of the majority discourse to assert their own autochthony as the basis for secessionist campaigns.23 In this view, Georgian is the language of the enemy, the expression of intolerance and Stalinist repression, the vehicle of Georgias own imperial designs on Abkhazia and South Ossetia and a provincial language of no global signicance. Since the 19921993 war Georgian is also the language of a potential fth column in Abkhazia in the form of the Georgian population remaining in Abkhazias southernmost Gal/i district.24 By contrast Russian is construed as the symbol of internationalism (rather than the ethnic Russian nation) and tolerance of minority identities, the vehicle of a world culture, the language of modernity and sophistication, and of protection against Georgian expansion. Georgian, Abkhazian and South Ossetian discourses of identity, elaborated in the crucible of conict during the late 1980s and early 1990s, remain encoded with self/other dichotomies rooted in the ongoing conguration of cultures as imperial or colonized respectively. Political debates are thus framed by a series of mutually exclusive and reductive claims to identity that obscure the pluralisms of the past. Contrary to popular narratives current in Georgia, for example, no political party or group in tsarist Georgia prior to 1918 advocated independence from the Russian Empire. The exclusive focus on the nationalist tradition in modern Georgian history hides the alternative traditions championed by Georgian liberals, Georgians participating in the Russian populist movement and above all the Georgian Marxist tradition. Rather than a national liberationist movement, it was a local variant of Marxism, Georgian Social Democracy, that expressed mass aspirations for a post-imperial and national modernity in Georgia in the early twentieth century. Similarly, although the narratives of post-Soviet Abkhazian historiography fail to reect it, the Georgian population constituted a plurality from the outset of Soviet rule in Abkhazia, while the reduction of the Abkhazian share of the population of

Central Asian Survey 111 Abkhazia over the Soviet period is also attributable to the expansion of the Russian and Armenian, not only Georgian, populations.25 These facts provide some insights into the ways in which the history of group relations in Georgia are oversimplied and misrepresented. Sovereignty and its shadows Although understood as the rightful destiny of colonized nations, the advent of sovereignty, be it de jure or de facto, has not eased the colonial subconscious in Georgia, Abkhazia or South Ossetia. No one questions the right of former colonies to sovereignty. The understanding of the Soviet Union as an empire, an understanding becoming far more widely accepted since the Soviet collapse, indeed requires us to see sovereignty as the legitimate endgame for its constituent parts. Yet, in the South Caucasus both victors and losers in the wars of the 1990s have had to live with a tainted sovereignty, failing to quench post-colonial desires for completeness, entitlement and recognition. In the Georgian case, sovereignty is marred by the consequences of military defeat in the early 1990s. Most obviously, sovereignty is territorially incomplete; the very outline of Georgia on a map and weather reports of conditions in Sukhum/i and Tskhinval/i are daily reminders of the loss of control over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Georgias status as a severely traumatized post-war society has constrained nationalist agendas. In the light of defeat in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, territorial fragmentation, civil war and the spectre of irredentism in outlying regions, the urgency of decolonization receded in the face of securing even a minimum degree of coherence, permitting the continued existence of the Georgian state. State weakness, in part the legacy of military defeat, has therefore inhibited the exercise of real sovereignty. Although state capacities markedly increased since Mikheil Saakashvilis accession to power, the resumption of hostilities in August 2008 and Russias punitive destruction of objects far outside the conict zone have again seriously weakened the Georgian state. Culturally, since independence Georgian has so far failed to take on the role of lingua franca among the republics nationalities. The 2002 census showed that signicant numbers of nonGeorgians still lacked the prociency in Georgian that would allow them to participate in the mainstream of Georgian society (Broers 2008, pp. 278 279). Although the census did indicate raised levels of Georgian across all groups compared with 1989, it also showed raised levels of Russian prociency across virtually all groups, including the Georgians at 33.7%. Language legislation aimed at entrenching the use of Georgian in all ofcial domains has not been implemented, because the Georgian state has lacked the capacity to implement language programmes of the type enacted in Estonia or Latvia. Beyond capacity issues, however, despite its noble history the Georgian language has come up against an obstacle confronted by many a post-colonial language before it: marginality as a cultural medium. The ubiquity of English language signage, extending even to the uniforms of state customs and police ofcials, testies to a subconscious devaluation of the Georgian language. Georgians continue to rely on Russian in technical elds as well as the core medium of the popular culture market in Georgia. Russian cable TV is widely esteemed for its entertainment value and many foreign lms were, until legislation adopted shortly after the August war, received in Russian. In some regions, especially those populated by non-Georgians, Russian national schools continue to be respected as the distillation of a superior and tested pedagogical tradition, explaining their undiminished popularity in some regions despite the absence of ethnic Russians. As in the Soviet period, the republic as a whole is integrated as a cultural continuum only by the use of Russian. Claims for the promotion of Georgian cannot easily be articulated by reference to social justice values, while the current institutional climate fails to provide incentives for the acquisition of Georgian. Minorities have yet to see spaces open to them in the political, social

112 L. Broers and economic life of the Georgian state. Therefore, it is not surprising that they counter the normative stance on learning Georgian emanating from the state with arguments questioning the relevance of the state language. For Abkhazia and South Ossetia sovereignty has remained, until Russias recognition on 26 August 2008 at least, unrecognized. Theirs is a shadow sovereignty, inhabiting the margins of international politics and replicating Soviet-era syndromes of Russia-oriented cultural and institutional dependence. Unilaterally recognized sovereignty, depending on how the situation unfolds, presents the prospect of sovereignty-as-dependency, an oxymoron quite in keeping with the history of dysfunctional forms of political authority in the South Caucasus. While South Ossetia, without an alternative economic base to Russian subsidies or a cohesive civil society capable of standing up to the state, may acquiesce in a de facto absorption into Russia, this prospect is a genuine concern for many in Abkhazia. Without alternative partners to lend meaning to the capacity to enter into international relations, Abkhazia may be consigned to an encroaching marriage of necessity with its one-time imperial subjugator. The sovereignty of Abkhazia is also ethically compromised in the eyes of the wider international community because a substantial segment of its population has been expelled. Although ` such a stricture would logically also apply to the de jure states of Azerbaijan and Armenia vis-avis their former Armenian and Azeri minorities respectively, the notion that the de facto states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are illegitimate because of this factor is strongly embedded in the discourse about their right to exist. During the August war the de facto South Ossetian authorities engaged in the deliberate targeting and expulsion of Georgians still living in the region. Although this fell short of the total ethnic cleansing of South Ossetias ethnic Georgian community (not all Georgian villages were targeted, principally those associated with the pro-Tbilisi alternative government of Dmitri Sanakoev) human rights organizations have attested to the organized and systematic nature of these crimes (Amnesty International 2008, Human Rights Watch 2009). Abkhazia is further confronted with the dilemma of a substantial Georgian population within its boundaries. Its southernmost Gal/i district is populated by a contested and uctuating population of Georgian returnees, claimed to be between 40,000 and 65,000.26 The existence of such a demographically signicant Georgian minority (approximately 19% of the population), not to mention the question of the return of over 200,000 Georgians displaced from Abkhazia in 1992 1993, poses numerous dilemmas for the de facto Abkhazian state. There has been considerable reluctance to countenance the active political incorporation or full enjoyment of cultural rights of this community, yet the Abkhazian authorities cannot deny residents the right to speak their native tongue, or be educated in it, if they are to adhere to the democratic ideals they aspire to (Clogg 2008, p. 316). Although there is reluctance to allow for Georgian-medium teaching and the use of the Georgian curriculum as potential conduits for Georgian nationalist ideology to seep into Abkhazia, only 10 Georgian schools operated in the lower Gal/i district in the year 2005/2006. However, teaching in Gal/i town is conducted in Russian with textbooks brought from Moscow via Sukhum/i. There are no Georgians represented in the Abkhazian executive; two Georgians represent the Gal/i community in the 35-member Abkhazian Parliament (p. 314). In terms of everyday interactions the Georgian community is more isolated than any other in Abkhazia, and rarely mixes with members of other communities. The exclusion of the Gal/i Georgian community from broader social and political life in Abkhazia, and the expulsion and destruction of the overwhelming majority of the Georgian community in South Ossetia, reect the resilience of the colonial subconscious. Given the opportunity, victims can easily become perpetrators engaging in acts of revenge, perpetuating the cycle of mutual recrimination. Unfortunately, the Russian-Georgian war has strongly reafrmed rhetorical reexes among all groups to portray themselves as victims of aggression by a greater

Central Asian Survey 113 power. Ultimately these reexes emphasize what Thomas de Waal has called hate narratives in the context of the Armenian Azerbaijani conict (de Waal 2003). For all parties these narratives run diametrically counter to the nobler aspirations of sovereignty for the construction of inclusive, rights-driven and democratic polities. Unless they are somehow addressed, sovereignty in the South Caucasus will remain a project realized in spite of a signicant other, rather than the realization of a genuinely emancipated post-colonial future. Conclusions Whether we like it or not, the August war and its aftermath have recongured the conicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia as post-colonial wars between Georgia and Russia. For most Georgians this is, at last, recognition by the outside world of the elephant in the room. Yet, the examination of the impact of Soviet rule in Georgia presented here suggests caution in deploying a traditional post-colonial framework to explain the conicts. While Soviet Georgia was a periphery in a larger state ruled by a distant metropole, it was a layered periphery in which the different layers were not only rendered the property of distinct ethnic groups, but were differently articulated to the wider state structures of which they formed part. This situation resulted in correspondingly differentiated articulations of the links between culture, identity and power among different groups their institutional completeness. These differences motivated powerful clashes over the prospect of devolution. It is difcult to recognize in the late Soviet ethnic Georgian community traits characteristically associated with the experience of colonization: substantial assimilation, a subaltern ` relationship vis-a-vis a settler population or foreign technical elite, isolation from positions of power and control and the export of economic resources for the benet of the centre. Conditioned by their mode of incorporation into the Soviet state, Georgians were one of the least Russied and most culturally vibrant of the Soviet Unions nationalities, had steadily consolidated control over their republics resources and saturated positions of political and economic inuence. In this context decolonization could only mean the nal banishment of minorities to the social, economic and political margins of the republic. The Georgian nationalist movement was not constrained by a Russian settler population or an internal constituency of assimilados. These structural conditions were compounded by the events of 9 April 1989, when Soviet Interior Ministry troops in Tbilisi attacked crowds protesting against Abkhazian secessionism, which resulted in numerous fatalities. This led to minorities being identied as proxies of the colonial power and becoming the principal targets of nationalist mobilization in Georgia. South Ossetians, and especially Abkhazians, in the later Soviet era displayed attributes more typically associated with colonization: substantial assimilation into more inuential cultures and dependence on those cultures for basic social goods such as education; rivalry with settler communities (Georgians in Abkhazia), and sharply restricted access to positions of power and inuence outside designated areas (and at times even within them). However, it is an enduring paradox that while it is Russian culture on which most Abkhazians and Ossetians depend for mediation with the outside world, they identify Georgia as their colonizing other. Is this a just attribution of blame for the undoubtedly traumatic history of demographic decline, cultural deracination and, since the early 1990s, excommunication from the international community? Indeed, aspects of the Abkhazian and South Ossetian relationship with Tbilisi during some periods assumed the character of subaltern peripheries subjected to enforced cultural, cadre and migration policies. Yet, these policies had their analogues (and worse) in countless other cases in the Soviet Union. They were part of the repertoire of practices deployed by a totalitarian regime to enforce a particular political and cultural vision. It is the tragedy of

114 L. Broers Georgian Abkhazian relations that the most visible perpetrators and ostensible beneciaries of these policies were ethnically Georgian. But this fact does not render such acts the ineluctable outow of some Georgian mindset, character or proclivity. They are the manifestations of a regime of power, which todays actors have a choice to reject or repeat. These considerations reect an important reality. Post-colonialism, dened as a set of critical tools for deconstructing and understanding the regimes of power which have actually ruled in the region, has not taken root in South Caucasus. This is an important obstacle preventing an objective and consensual appraisal across different communities of what the Soviet regime was, and therefore of the meaning of the Soviet past. Having identied the Soviet state with a broader historical narrative of ethnic Russian domination, rather than a structure for the exercise of power, it is impossible for Georgia to examine its historical relationship to that structure in ways compatible with minority narratives. Similarly, the location of empire in the Georgian nation rather than the Soviet state has led the de facto authorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia to enact policies echoing those imposed on their communities in the 1930s 1940s. By identifying policies of ethnic repression enacted against their communities in the past with specic ethnic cultures (or their proxies), regimes in Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia have bound themselves to perpetuating such policies, in a cycle in which all actors are both victim and perpetrator. Empire and colonization remain central organizing metaphors in the nation and statebuilding projects in Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These metaphors serve to construct a subaltern relationship with signicant ethnic others, and to justify policies, strategies and acts perceived as remedying this relationship. Consciously and subconsciously, they also reinforce teleological paradigms of linearity and singularity, structuring narratives of national identity. These paradigms occlude both traditions of pluralism and the contingency of events in the past; in so doing they construe contemporary diversity as the inauthentic residue of empire and give the illusion of a pristine ethnic past that never existed. It is the colonial subconscious that is the unhappiest of legacies bequeathed by the Soviet Union, for it is a silent, subliminal inheritance loath to conscious exposure. While a post-colonial perspective still has a vital function to play as a set of critical tools for understanding the past (and what was the past was not), we must therefore also be wary of post-colonialism as a set of material, discursive and emotional strategies fuelling further cycles of conict in Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Professor Stephen Jones and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes
1. This was the second, larger wave of departure following the earlier, partially forced migration of 18641867. For a detailed examination of the sources on the historical demography of Abkhazia, see Muller (1999). 2. Russian colonial texts indeed reproduced key constructs of Georgian history as the Georgians themselves understood it. The Society for the Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in the Caucasus observed in 1910 that Georgia on more than one occasion was subject to the deep trauma of attack by Muslim enemies and could not therefore devote attention to the support of Orthodoxy among the newly converted (Platonov 1910, pp. 10 11). 3. In 1860 a prominent Georgian, Niko Nikoladze, explicitly addressed this theme in article entitled Do we need the Georgian language? (Suny 1994, p. 128). 4. In the context of subsequent GeorgianAbkhazian relations it is important to note the fact that national autonomy in Abkhazia was realized as a project of Soviet ethno-federalism a contingent outcome of

Central Asian Survey 115

the Soviet annexation of Georgia in 1921 rather than Georgian constitutionalism. How Georgian Abkhazian relations might have developed in a Georgian state that retained its independence is one of the imponderables of history. In some sectors, such as intensive tea and citrus production and Georgias dependence on subsidized energy imports, the Georgian economy was a characteristically colonial economy. The unusually high share of agricultural production, and consequently of employment in agriculture contributed to the continued prominence of informal market production and therefore private income. For a more detailed and statistically informed exposition of the argument presented here, see Broers 2004, Ch.3. In 1959 Russians accounted for 10.1% of the population of Georgia. By 1989 this had dwindled to 6.3%. For example, the corresponding gures for Kazakhstan were 41.6% in 1970, and 62.8% in 1989, and for Ukraine, 35.8% in 1970 and 59.5% in 1989. Georgias gures more closely approximate Estonias, at 27.5% in 1970 and 33.6% in 1989. This data is derived from Kaiser 1996, Table 6.8. Strictly speaking Ossetians, as residents of an autonomous oblast (region) rather than republic, were one rung lower down the Soviet ethnofederal hierarchy than the Abkhazians, making them third order titulars with a narrower range of national rights. For the purposes of the cultural patterns explored here, however, it is useful to see the Abkhazians and Ossetians as belonging to the same category of second-order titular. The latter gure had fallen from 5.7% in 1923 (Toidze 1971). For documentary evidence of Georgian settlement in Abkhazia in this period, see Sagariya et al. (1992). This was unusual because the vast majority of autonomous republics were located in the RSFSR, rendering the issue of competition between Russian and the union republican language irrelevant. Data on language repertoires in the autonomous republic of Karakalpakistan in Uzbekistan also indicate that Russian was preferred over Uzbek. Some 20% of Karakalpaks claimed knowledge of Russian in 1989, compared to 6% claiming knowledge of Uzbek (Tishkov 1997, p. 91). An important exception in Georgia is the Ossetian population living outside of the autonomy, which demonstrated a relatively high degree of Georgian knowledge (54% in total). The creation of an Abkhazian State University (AGU) in 1978 did not signicantly change this situation; only within the Abkhaz Philology and Education faculties was a majority of lectures given in Abkhaz; the bulk of tuition for Abkhazian students was carried out in Russian. The establishment of the AGU is a clear example of the paradox of second-order titular demands. It satised Abkhazian national demands by providing an indigenous location for a more prestigious education in Russian. Between 1928 and 1970 some 1235 book and brochure titles were published in the Abkhaz language, while 3475 were published in Ossetian. These gures provide a compelling contrast even to other contexts where Russication was widespread: Kazakh (19,149 titles), Kyrgyz (11,511 titles), Moldavian (12,560 titles). The reach and prestige of Abkhaz and Ossetian improved to some extent following their introduction as broadcasting media in the late 1970s, yet the demand for these languages was not signicant. For example, after peaking in the early to mid-1980s, the number of ction titles published in both languages actually fell towards the end of the decade; only Ossetian, supported by a larger market comprising Ossetians in both the Georgian republic and the North Ossetian autonomous republic, recovered. These gures are taken from Vsesoyuznaya Knizhnaya Palata (1971, pp. 1113) and Goskomstat (1989, p. 381). This highlights the peculiar legacy for Abkhazians and Ossetians in Georgia, as compared to the Central Asian elites who shared similar structural and cultural features. For Central Asian elites, colonial incorporation did not lead to investment in a separate future, but continued dependence on the culture and networks of the Soviet state. At one layer of remove from the central Soviet state, however, for Abkhazians and South Ossetians there were compelling incentives to invest in a pseudo-separatist future separate from Georgia but integrated into a Soviet or Russian-dominated political and cultural space. Laitin delineates a salient post-colonial conict over language enacted between nationalist leaders and civil servants: The former have equated a rationalized indigenous language with national independence; the latter have equated European languages with precision, order and economic advance (p. 105). The revolt was largely restricted to rural areas and, with the exception of the traditional Georgian social democratic stronghold in Guria, failed to elicit the support of the broad mass of the Georgian population (Suny 1994, pp. 222 225).

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

116 L. Broers
18. Nonetheless, Shevardnadze reiterated what the correct relationship between Georgian and Russian should be some three years later: Special attention is reserved for Russian, the language of international communication. The question may be put thus: together with their native language, each inhabitant of the republic must have a perfect knowledge of Russian the language of the brotherhood of Soviet peoples, of October, of Lenin (Shevardnadze 1981, p. 59). 19. Rejecting an earlier consensus that the Georgian language was rst written down in the fourth century AD, post-Soviet Georgian scholars have traced what they claim is an unbroken tradition of Georgian as state language since the reign of King Parnavaz in the third century BC (Kurdiani 1998, Topchishvili 1998). 20. See Gamsakhurdias essay keba da dideba kartulisa enisa [Praise and Glory of the Georgian Language], an exegesis of the eponymous text written in the tenth century in Gamsakhurdia (1991). 21. Thornike Gordadze (2001) has explored the attendant construction of minorities as guests on Georgian soil. 22. Abkhazians claim that the proclamation of a Soviet Socialist Republic of Abkhazia in March 1921 after Tbilisis fall to the Bolsheviks secures their right to separate legal status from Georgia. Georgians point to a treaty relationship agreed between Abkhazia and Georgia in December 1921 as evidence to the contrary. Abkhazia was not mentioned in the Constitution of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (ZSFSR), entering the Republic as part of Georgia. Article 5 of the Abkhazian Constitution of 1925 dened Abkhazia as a sovereign state realizing its state-power on its territory independently from any other power. However, Article 4 recognized that Abkhazia was united on the basis of a special union-treaty with the Georgian SSR. This constitution was revised in 1926 to make it compatible with the Georgian constitution of 1925. In a comparative perspective Abkhazia is far from unique in demotion down the federal hierarchy in the Soviet Union. For an Abkhazian view, see Lakoba (1999, pp. 94 96); for a Georgian view, see Menteshashvili (1998, pp. 1074). 23. For an exposition of a theory of Abkhazian autochthony in Abkhazia, see Shamba and Neproshin (2003), Chapter 3. 24. This population is made up of Mingrelians, a Georgian sub-ethnic group speaking the Mingrelian language, an unwritten vernacular closely related, but not mutually intelligible, with Georgian. The issue of Mingrelian identity is highly controversial, and shows that if Georgians evaded large-scale assimilation into Russian, assimilatory patterns and gradations of identity are not absent from Georgian national identity. Unfortunately, space does not allow exploration of this question here, but this issue is explored at length in Broers (2004), Chapter 7. 25. Abkhazians, Georgians and Russians accounted for 27.8%, 33.6% and 6.2% of Abkhazias population in 1926 respectively. The corresponding gures in 1989 were 17.8%, 45.7% and 14.3%. 26. According to a 2003 census conducted in Abkhazia, Georgians accounted for 19% of a total population of 214,016. For an informed discussion of population gures in Abkhazia, see Clogg (2008), pp. 307 308.

References
Amnesty International, 2008. Civilians in the line of re: the Georgian Russian conict. London: AI Index, EUR 04/005/2008. Bahry, D., 1987. Outside Moscow. New York: Columbia University Press. Beissinger, M. and Young, C., 2002. Convergence to crisis: pre-independence state legacies and postindependence state breakdown in Africa and Eurasia. In: M. Beissinger and C. Young, eds. Beyond state crisis? Post-colonial Africa and post-Soviet Eurasia in comparative perspective. Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1950. Broers, L., 2004. Containing the nation, building the state: coping with nationalism, minorities and conict in post-Soviet Georgia, Unpublished thesis. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Broers, L., 2008. Filling the void: ethnic politics and nationalities policy in post-conict Georgia. Nationalities Papers, 36 (2), 275304. Clogg, R., 2008. The politics of identity in post-Soviet Abkhazia: managing diversity and unresolved conict. Nationalities Papers, 36 (2), 305329. Coppieters, B., 2002. In defence of the homeland: intellectuals and the GeorgianAbkhazian conict. In: B. Coppieters and M. Huysseune, eds. Secession, history and the social sciences. VUB Brussels University Press, 89116. Dave, B., 2007. Kazakhstan. Language, ethnicity, power. London: Routledge.

Central Asian Survey 117

de Waal, T., 2003. Black garden. Armenia and Azerbaijan through peace and war. New York University Press. Fuller, E., 1988. Draft State program on Georgian language published. Radio Liberty Research Bulletin, 12, December, 14. Gabaraev, N., 1981. Izuchenie osetinskogo yazyka za gody Sovetskoy vlasti. In: B. Tekhov, ed. Yuzhnaya Osetiya v Period Stroitelstva Sotsializma (k 60-letiyu ustanovleniya sovetskoy vlasti v Gruzii). Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 111123. Gafati, H., 2002. The monotheism of the other: language and de/construction of national identity in postcolonial Algeria. In: A-E. Berger, ed. Algeria in others languages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1943. Gamsakhurdia, Z., 1991. keba da dideba kartulisa enisa [Praise and glory of the Georgian language]. In: Z. Gamsakhurdia, ed. tserilebi, esseebi [Letters, essays]. Tbilisi: khelovneba, 345. Gellner, E., 1983. Nations and nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gogokhia, D.V. and Kuprava, A.E., 1982. Vklad trudyashchikhsya Abkhazskoy ASSR v razvitie ekonomiki i kultury Sovetskoy Gruzii (19711982 gg.). Tbilisi: Metsniereba. Gordadze, T., 2001. La Georgie et ses hotes ingrate. Critique Internationale, 10, January. 161176. Goskomstat (Gosudarstvennyi Komitet po Statistike), 1989. Narodnoe Obrazovanie i Kultura v SSSR. Moscow: Finansy i Statistika. Hewitt, G., 1989. Aspects of language planning in Georgia (Georgian and Abkhaz). In: M. Kirkwood, ed. Language planning in the Soviet Union. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 123144. Hirsch, F., 2005. Empire of nations. Ethnographic knowledge and the making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hodnett, G., 1978. Leadership in the Soviet national republics. Oakville, Ont: Mosaic Press. Human Rights Watch, 2009. Up in ames: humanitarian law violations in the conict over South Ossetia, Available from: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/01/22/ames Kaiser, R., 1996. The geography of nationalism in Russia and the USSR. Princeton University Press. Kurdiani, M., 1998. enisa da eris urtiertmimartebis problemisatvis [Towards the problem on the relationship between language and nation]. in: kartveluri memkvidreoba II kutaisuri saubrebi simpoziumis masalebi. Kutaisi: Dialectology Research Centre of the Akaki Tsereteli State University, 264268. Kuzio, T., 2002. History, memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space. Nationalities Papers, 30 (2), 241264. Laitin, D., 1992. Language repertoires and state construction in Africa. Cambridge University Press. Laitin, D., 1998. Identity in formation. The Russian-speaking populations in the near abroad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lakoba, S., 1999. History: 19171989. In: G. Hewitt, ed. The Abkhazians. Richmond, London: Curzon. Martin, T., 2001. The afrmative action empire. Nations and nationalism in the Soviet Union, 19231939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Menteshashvili, A., 1998. Istoricheskie predposylki sovremennogo separatizma v Gruzii. Tbilisi. Muller, D., 1999. Demography: ethno-demographic history, 1886 1989. In: G. Hewitt, ed. The Abkhazians. Richmond, London: Curzon, 218239. Narodnoe Khozyaistvo Gruzinskoy SSR 19221982, 1982. Tbilisi: Sabchota Sakartvelo. Parsons, R., 1982. National integration in Soviet Georgia. Soviet Studies, 34 (4), 547569. Platonov, A., 1910. Obzor deyatelnosti Obshchestva Vozstanovleniya Pravoslavnago Khristianstva na Kavkaze za 18601910 gg. Tiis. Sagariya, B., Achugba, T., and Pachuliya, V.M., 1992. Abkhaziya: dokumenty svidetelstvuyut 19371953. Sukhum: Alashara. Shamba, T.M. and Yu Neproshin, A., 2003. Abkhaziya. Pravovye osnovy gosudarstvennosti i suvereniteta. Moscow: Russian State University of Trade and Economy. Shevardnadze, E., 1981. Shestidesyatilie pobedy Sovetskoy Vlasti v Gruzii i Obrazovaniya Kommunisticheskoy Partii Gruzii. Tbilisi: Sabchota Sakartvelo. Slider, D., 1985. Crisis and response in Soviet nationality policy: the case of Abkhazia. Central Asian Survey, 4 (4), 5168. Smith, G., 1998. Post-colonialism and borderland identities. In: G. Smith, V. Law, A. Wilson, A. Bohr and E. Allworth, eds. Nation-building in the post-Soviet borderlands. Cambridge University Press, 120. SRUSASIK (sakartvelos respublikis uzenaes sabchostan arsebuli sotsialur-ekonomikuri inpormatsiis komiteti), 1991. sakartvelos mosakhleobis erovnuli shemadgenloba. statistikuri krebuli [The national composition of Georgias population. Statistical handbook]. Tbilisi.

118 L. Broers
Suny, R.G., 1994. The making of the Georgian nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Suny, R.G. and Martin, T., eds., 2001. A state of nations. Empire and nation-making in the age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford University Press. Tarba, B., 1976. Russkiy Yazyk v Razvitie Kultury i Prosveshcheniya Abkhazov. Sukhumi: Alashara. Tishkov, V., 1997. Ethnicity, nationalism and conict in and after the Soviet Union. The mind aame. London: SAGE. Toidze, L., ed., 1971. Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Gruzii v Tsifrakh. Tbilisi: Georgian Communist Party Central Committee Institute for the History of the Party. Topchishvili, R., 1998. kartveli eris etnikuri istoriisatvis. [Towards the ethnic history of the Georgian nation], kartveluri memkvidreoba II kutaisuri saubrebi simpoziumis masalebi [Georgian Heritage II. Kutaisi Discussions, Symposium Materials]. Kutaisi: Dialectology Research Centre of the Akaki Tsereteli State University, 110123. Vsesoyuznaya Knizhnaya Palata, 1971. Pechat v SSSR v Gody Pyatiletok. Moscow: Kniga. Wilson, A., 1997. A minority faith: Ukrainian nationalism in the 1990s. Cambridge University Press.