Georgia in the Shadow of the KGB

I happened to be reading Steve LeVine's The Oil and the Glory this week, just as the Russia/Georgia war flared up. LeVine's subtitle is The Pursuit of Empire and the Fortune on the Caspian Sea. It's mostly about the last quarter of the 20th Century. It's mainly about the resources claimed by Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, but there are passing references to Georgia, including a brief but pointed discussion of the efforts to put an oil pipeline there. LeVine offers some useful context on the long history of relations between Russia and Georgia. Georgia, he says,

occupied a special place in Russian imperial culture. It was the spectacular playland of the czarist and Soviet aristocracies, who cherished its gorgeous Black Sea beaches and sanatoria, its famous Borjomi water, and itds vineyards, the source of the wrold's first cultured grapes. Georgia was a feast, with exceedingly varied and artfully served vegetarian, lamb, and pork dishes; the country's drinking ritusals were weidely copied, reigned over by a toastmaster called a tamada. (219-20)

It was Edward Shevardnadze, a Georgian, who collaborated with Mikhail Gorbachev in the enteprise of unraveling the old Soviet Union. After the collapse, he returned to take up the presidency in his natal state, bringing with him a seemingly illitable amount of street cred with world leaders.

Per LeVine, the Georgians understood that they faced an urgent challenge: how to define themselves as independent against their much larger neighbor. LeVine credidts a Geoergian civil servant, one Gogi Tsomaya, with hitting upon the idea of an oil pipeline. Although Georgia itself has virtually no oil, its location positioned it uniquely well as a transmission ground. Such a project, Tsomaya is quoted as thinking, made "Georgia interesting to the West." And then LeVine offers this telling anecdote:

Shevardnadze sat in silence for a moment and then shouted, "Get out of here! Do you want the Russiasns to blow me up?" The men scurried back to [another] office, where the phone was ringing. It was Shevardnadze.

"You know what? You keep exploring the issue," said he Georgian leader. "Whenever I need it, we will have it."

His advisers were not certian whether Shevardnadze had actually lost his temper for a moment or was trying to confuse an eavesdropping KGB. (221-2)

Afterthought: Taken as a whole, LeVine's book is a first-class piece of reporting, but it suffers the curse of good journalism--timing. In retrospect, LeVine's Caspian oil race was a brief wrinkle in eternity, between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new assertion of Russian power. No matter what the result of this week's fracas, it is unlikely that an ounce of oil (or natural gas) will move an inch in Central without a Russian say-so.