2004 Article Puts Georgia/Russia Set-To Into Perspective
"Editor’s Note, August 12, 2008: With tensions between Georgia and Russia having reached the point of armed conflict in recent days, we call your attention to a 2004 Smithsonian article by Jeffrey Tayler explaining how the republic’s troubled history sets the stage for future discord and a possible new Cold War.
"From the sooty maw of an unlit tunnel at RikotiPass, where the jagged massifs of the Great Caucasus and Lesser Caucasus mountains come together, we drove out into flurrying snow and whirling fog, heading west. The decayed asphalt wound down toward the verdant Kolkhida Lowland and the port of Poti, on the Black Sea. About 100 miles behind us was Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, and its tense roadside checkpoints—grime-streaked booths of cracked glass and dented steel, concrete barriers at which hulking men in black uniforms, Kalashnikovs dangling from their shoulders, peered into car windows looking for guns and explosives.
"We soon reached the lowland and its crumbling shacks and derelict factories—the towns of Zestaponi, Samtredia and Senaki. Bony cattle and mud-splattered pigs poked around trash heaps; a few people wearing threadbare coats and patched boots traipsed down slushy walkways. My driver, a gray-bearded ethnic Armenian in his 40s named Gari Stepanyan, saw me looking at the remains of an old cement plant.
“'When independence came, people tore up these factories, ripping out all the equipment to sell for scrap,' he said in Russian of the nation’s emergence in 1991 from the dissolving Soviet Union. Since then, corruption, economic chaos, civil war and rule by racketeers have contributed to Georgia’s disintegration. I drove this same road in 1985, and had pleasant memories of it. Now, in December 2003, I searched the ruins and recognized nothing."
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