FINDING OUT WHO’S TO BLAME FOR THIS WAR
Alexei Pankin
The Moscow Times
12 August 2008
Since Friday, I have been trying to figure out who is at fault for
what is happening in South Ossetia. State television claims that
the blame lies with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his
supporters in the West. However, I have long ago stopped believing
state television reports, even when their statements seem to be true.
>From morning until evening, Ekho Moskvy radio has been airing
political commentaries describing the consequences of this outbreak
of hostilities in Georgia. But they have not provided an answer to
the one question that most interests me, "Who started this war?"
The television antenna at my dacha, where I spent the weekend, has
been picking up Euronews much better lately, and there I heard the
following "objective" information: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and
President Dmitry Medvedev accuse Georgia of carrying out genocide in
South Ossetia, while Saakashvili blames Russian aggression.
Heart-rending images of the violence filled the screen, with "no
comment" as the only explanation.
On Sunday, I received a long-awaited guest at my dacha, Dmitry
Furman, a leading expert on former Soviet republics, including the
Caucasus. But he had barely stepped through the gate when he said:
"Don’t ask me what’s going on. I don’t understand a thing."
Soon after, the news editor for one of Russia’s comparatively
independent television channels came to visit. She was speaking on
her cell phone as she entered the dacha, emotionally explaining that,
"Our Olympic Games correspondent, for whom we paid big money for
accreditation, transportation and housing, is complaining that he
has nothing to do in Beijing and that we should send him to South
Ossetia." The whole time we were barbecuing and eating shashlik,
she was on the phone trying to work out how her journalists could
report on the conflict without interrupting Olympic coverage.
That left me with little choice but to become philosophical regarding
my question of who was the first to attack Tskhinvali? It occurred to
me that we buried one of Josef Stalin’s greatest opponents, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, last week, but the tensions that Stalin stirred up were
continuing to exert their influence. It was Stalin who laid down the
illogical borders between the Soviet republics. He did so based on
the belief that they were so unnatural that nobody would ever dream of
trying to tamper with them, understanding what terrible consequences
would result.
History has shown that Stalin was overly optimistic. Having lost
their fear of Mikhail Gorbachev’s democratic Kremlin, nationalist
democrats in Soviet republics like Russia, Armenia, Moldova and
Georgia began behaving as if the borders that Stalin drew between
peoples were actually "historical borders" between states, leading
to much bloodshed. After those conflicts and the terrible slaughter
in the former Yugoslavia, we hoped that nothing similar would happen
in the 21st century. However, the bloodshed has been repeated, and
the conflict began on 08-08-08, the day the Chinese considered lucky
enough to open the Olympic Games.
I am not a Russian patriot, although I try to force myself to love
the country of which I am a citizen. I was, and still am, a citizen
of the Soviet Union, a country without internal borders and where
friends of different ethnicities and I were united in our hatred of
totalitarianism and in the belief that political freedom would give
us the opportunity to live in harmony. I have never contested the
right of the various Soviet peoples to establish their own states.
But I strongly dislike all those little Napoleons — whether they
are named Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, former Georgian President
Zviad Gamsakhurdia or Saakashvili — who instead of freeing their
citizens from the Stalinist Soviet Union have created mini-empires
within illogically imposed borders and played out their delusions of
grandeur using the blood of their own people.