Karterados- I’m happy to report that my work in Georgia is cited in a new book Wars and the World: The Russian Army in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, and Popular Culture by Tim Kucharzewski of the University of Potsdam in Germany. This is a long sought after vindication on two fronts.
In August 2008 when the army of the Russian Federation invaded of the beleaguered Republic of Georgia in the name of defending its proxies-cum-allies in the breakaway statelets of Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast and South Ossetia, North Ossetia’s red-headed stepchild on the other side of the Caucasus range. Having worked in Georgia in the dark days of the late Shevardnadze period, I became enthralled with this then south Caucasian backwater (as it was perceived in Washington) and its warrens of intrigue that stretched from Tbilisi to up to Pankisi.
On 7 August 2008, it happened. The Russians launched a full-scale invasion of Georgia under a rubric that remains opaque to this day. My first thought in seeing this unfolding from my New York vantage how was on earth was I going to get there and how fast could I make that happen. Obviously flying into Tbilisi wouldn’t be an option in the same manner one can’t fly into Kyiv today. Flying to Istanbul or better yet Ankara was probably the best one could aim for paired with a string of buses and taxis. I got a flight to Turkey via Düsseldorf but there was a problem. When I landed at this unremarkable German airport, my bag didn’t come off the carousel. It would turn out my bag was still back at JFK. Trying to explain to the ever courteous women at the lost luggage counter was almost enough to have me committed. “Ja so where should we forward the bag to when i arrives here?”
“Ladies I’m trying to go to a war zone with on functioning airport. How soon can we get the back to Düsseldorf?”
“With the time difference between here and New York we have no way to know right now.”
After 5 short, furious days the war ended as abruptly as it began. Tom Friedman’s shtick about two countries that both have McDonalds franchises not going to war each other was blown to pieces. The Russians would come to permanently occupy Georgian territory. Any fanciful notions by the then Saakashvilli government of reintegrating the lost regions was officially hopeless. By the time I got my bag the war would be ending. I ended up going to Barcelona and skateboarding for the rest of that summer once I realised hoofing it to the Caucasus was a literal lost cause. Part of why I couldn’t rush to Georgia without it was because my laptop and camera chargers were all in my checked bag so even if I crossed from Turkey into war torn Georgia I’d have had no way to recharge my gear if the war had dragged on. But my personal minutiae aside. thank god the invasion stopped short of entering Tbilisi and violently shuttering the country’s shaky post-Soviet democratic transformation in the wake of the so-called rose revolution.
Well over a year on, I finally returned to Georgia between working in Afghanistand and Iraqand when I did, the Finnish film director Renny Harlin, best known at home for Die Hard 2: Die Harder, was in Tbilisi to direct a fictionalised account of the invasion the year before. I befriended one of the film’s producers at a hotel bar in the Georgian capital and he told me they would be filming in actual locations of recent battles. It sounded like the definitive of the surreal. The finished prduct with its oddly obvious title 5 Days Of August was a box office disaster. Actually I’m not even sure if it got theatrical distribution.
One day I took a marhrutka (minibus) out to Gori to explore Stalin’s birthplace for something I was working on and, wham!, I walked in the middle of a hot film set. Hot as in things were on fire. My experience about this is what was cited in the above mentioned book. I’m thrilled that my work from this era lives on in academia until the present.
