The War Diaries

Stalin as a young revolutionary.

Gori, Georgia- Profile portrait of Stalin as a young Bolshevik after his arrest in the Stalin museum. This photo hangs in a museum that has not been updated since it opened thirty years ago at the twilight of the Brezhnev era. It is the B-side to the photo on the cover of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin. There has been a rather sizable reported uptick in revisionist pro-Stalin sentiment in Russia as of late and the BBC is reporting that this may create a small crack in Moscow’s otherwise unrepentant leadership

Does it get much more twisted kitsch than this? Stalin having a smoke and chilling with Mao.

Tbilisi, Georgia- I had a meeting here with the Deputy Counter Terrorism Chief from the Ministry of Internal Affairs relevant to some book research I’m doing here. My contact there showed me the cornered end of the hallway where the MIA maintains and odd but fascinating display of their accomplishments related to combatting terrorism. They even had the dud grenade that was thrown toward George Walker Bush on his visit to Tbilisi.

The passport of a long dead young Saudi shaheed who I'll assume died in vain in Chechnya as Russian cannon fodder. His Georgian visa was dated 1999 and perhaps he served in Khattab's Arab unit? ©2009 DHF

A nail laden suicide bomb belt on display for few to see. ©2009 DHF

An assortment of goodies including jihadi literature in Cyrillic script, anti-personnel mines and an IED. ©2009 DHF

"Oranges anyone?" A homemade bomb sans detonator. Do not attempt to eat contents! ©2009 DHF

And last but not least, the Black Widow suicide bomber mannequin! ©2009 DHF

Actors (who may be actual Georgian soldiers playing Russian soldiers) rumble through Gori's town square atop very loud BRTs and tanks on the set of the new Renny Harlin film. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

Russian-made Mi-24 "Hind" gunships rattle downtown Gori on the set of the new Renny Harlin film. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

Gori, Georgia- I hopped in a marshrutka (giant, ubiquitous post-Soviet sphere minibus) today in Tbilisi to make the pilgrimage to the birthplace of the original “Man of Steel” Ioseb (Georgian (which is actually Kartuli in its endonym) Dzugashvili aka Joseph Stalin (“Stalin” means Steel in Russian). I’ve become a bit of a Stalin junkie over the past few years in studying the all too relevant partitions of Central Asia, particularly the Ferghana valley, and the Caucasus which took place in the early Soviet period under little known circumstances in Moscow. I thought I would simply go have have a look at Stalin’s little glorified shack in the center of the city and get on another marshrutka back to Tbilisi. But when I got dropped off, there was a scene of burning Russian-made Georgian armor in the town square. Finnish film director Renny Harlin (who like Stalin uses a stage name-Lauri Mauritz Harjola-not that I am comparing a Hollywood director to the biggest mass murderer in history this side of Mao in any other way) has come to Georgia in what appears to be a sort of artistic mea culpa/comeback effort. Harlin is filming on location here about an American journalist and his travails in the five-day guns of August war of 2008. Usually in Hollywood, when there is a war involving Americans, there is an understood time embargo where you cannot make a movie about a war unless it is either long over or Americans are mostly over it as was the case with many of the Viet Nam films I watched as a boy in the early 1980s. But this film involves neither American soldiers nor needs to wait. The location he employed in Gori today was an actual location from last summer’s conflict which you may recall from some photos that were published last August. Once the surreal excitement was over, I walked two blocks and stumbled onto what I read had been Stalin’s extremely modest birthplace. A brick and wood shack protected by flimsy padlocks stands as Gori’s centerpiece attraction. The shack is ensconced in a Soviet-tribute temple to preserve it for all to see. It’s a bit odd for the Western visitor to behold this enormous befuddling contradiction in terms. Here was a man who killed a hell of a lot of people, many his fellow Caucasians, who is still adored by many Russians, even though he was in no way Russian (but perhaps it can be said he was Russified) and sent many Russians to their deaths. Yet Gori, this small, otherwise insignificant city in the south Caucasus, doesn’t have much going for it other than one of the twentieth century’s greatest monsters was born there and now it is sort of a politically macabre tourist attraction. Then the Kremlin, who is promoting a renewed interest in Stalin’s legacy of late, invaded and temporarily occupied it last summer for about nine days. There are almost too many contrasts to digest here.

The "Temple" of Joseph Stalin in Gori. ©2009 Derek Henry Flood

I’m curious to see how the Harlin film will turn out after accidentally watching an afternoon of filming. The last film of his I can remember seeing was the comical Deep Blue Sea with a weeping LL Cool J softening up his image.

In other developments, I had a new piece on Kurdistan and the PJAK come out in today’s edition of Asia Times which can be read here.

Pipeline Routes Bisecting Eurasia

Tbilisi, Georgia- I’ve just completed a mostly sleepless journey from Ezrurum, a dull, cold city in eastern Turkey, to the lush, rolling hills of temperate Tbilisi. At the border at 1am, I joined an already rolling bus from Trabzon and was seated next to a beautiful Armenian girl who was traveling from Istanbul to Yerevan with a few friends. I have been coming to this region since 1998 and for as long as I can remember, the border between Turkey and Armenia (whose endonym is acutally Hayastan) has been a frozen zone of Soviet-esque guard towers (on the Armenian side) since Turkey shunned its neighbor during the Karabagh war in 1993. This stunted diplomacy greatly benefitted Georgia (whose endonym is actually Sakartvelo) because Georgia acted as a trade go-between for Turks and Armenians for the last sixteen years. For products and people to reach Armenia from Turkey, they have had to transit Georgia. While Georgia itself was barely holding together much of this time with three separatist republics of its own to contend with, it acted as a sort of neutral transit corridor which helped keep the landlocked Armenian economy afloat. Armenia’s only other non-hostile border is that with a heavily sanctioned Iran. The Los Angeles-based Armenian diaspora help to keep their ethnic kin up and running while they maintained bullets battles with the Azeris and semantic and historical battles with the Turks over the events of the Great War and the dying days of the Ottoman (whose endonym is actually Osman-Ottoman is a corruption of the name Osman-the first Pasha) Empire. The ultimate geopolitical expression of this scenario was the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline connecting the Caspian off shore oil fields to the shores of the Mediterranean via Transcaucasia.

Both Armenia (and Iran for fairly obvious reasons) were out of the loop on the new post-Soviet energy economy. Much of Georgia’s importance for people like Senator John McCain was that Georgia was now crucial to US interests by accident of its geography. Georgia has nothing to offer in terms of resources itself particularly, but would grow to become a valued strategic client within Washington and the EU’s cooperate power structure. Mikhail Saakashvilli’s Rose Revolution with its promise of reforms and progress in a troubled democratic space was music to the West’s ears. But now as Ankara and Yerevan make a serious attempt to normalize relations, which would be a remarkable advent for peace in the region by itself, Georgia and Azerbaijan may be left out in the cold. Both nations stood by Turkey and the US, not to mention the BP-led oil consortium, and now the mood in the region may be shifting. Russia’s invasion of both sovereign Georgia and the movement of many more troops into Abkhazia and South Ossetia in August of 2008 has again altered the strategic calculus in this quintessential “Shatter Belt.” Turkey is caught somewhere in between the feigned solidarity of pan-Turkism and its ethnic-Caucasian domestic constituents.

Coming in from the Turkish border, I sat amongst  Armenians who were having to take this preposterously long, politicized bus route. I said to the girl seated next to meet as we creaked toward the Georgian capital in the wee hours of the morning that perhaps very soon this bus ride would not be such a long one not realizing that the two bitter neighbors were hours away from signing a deal in Zurich to normalize ties. If both parliaments in Turkey and Armenia ratify the new diplomatic protocols, Georgia may wake up to find itself suddenly strategically devalued by its Western sponsors making it all the more vulnerable to its northern neighbor.