The ‘No’ republic
Georgia
In Gagra, where Stalin had his Black Sea dacha, a dog bit my producer Alex. Since the USSR’s collapse Gagra has been in Abkhazia, an illegal, separatist region of Georgia. Not the place to find rabies vaccine. We raced to Sochi in Russia, overtaking Putin’s armoured columns pulling back from their blitzkrieg against Georgia. Here in a hospital soaked with dried blood from pugilistic Muscovite holidaymakers, Alex had his jabs. Next, the taxi driver — a cantankerous Armenian — attempted to rob us.
The only thing I will miss about Abkhazia is the landscape: mountains above, sea below. Part of the natural charm is its arrested development due to 16 years of war. The Abkhazians ethnically cleansed half the population. Entire towns have become forests of oleander, silent but for cicadas, random gunfire and bored youths effecting handbrake turns in battered Ladas. I grazed on figs, plums and apples among derelict farms, stepping carefully to avoid landmines. I found herds of cows in destroyed banks and apartment blocks. Abkhazia could sell itself as a movie location for post-Apocalyptic film sets.
I did like the rural folk. They were generous with their wine, honey and cheese — the secret, they say, to their longevity. They arebig-nosed Circassians. Many women looked disconcertingly like my wife Claire, who has a Caucasus ancestry. And at the funeral of a young soldier killed by a roadside bomb I met a peasant who was the spitting image of Boris Johnson, but with ginger hair.
But Abkhazians lingering in the ruined towns are a miserable bunch, their character a mix of ex-Soviet idleness, tribalism and self-pity. ‘The Georgians are clever at making people like them, but Abkhazians just don’t care,’ the Vice President told me. All conversations must dwell on their long history of persecution. ‘Blood never forgets,’ said one man in Ochamchera, a ruined town where horses outnumbered people at rush hour.
After days of boot-faced waitresses, no laundry and history lectures, I was astonished when our minders revealed that tourism was Abkhazia’s economic mainstay, together with the growing of nuts. When I gave a man 20 Marlboro reds to smoke instead of his disgusting local brand, he looked crestfallen. I asked, ‘What’s the matter?’ He replied, ‘If I get used to Marlboros, how will I feel when I go back to Russian cigarettes?’
Our female minders, ‘Nyet 1’ and ‘Nyet 2’ I called them, refused almost our every request. ‘Good news,’ said Nyet 1, after denying us access to the Kodori Gorge where a battle had just occurred. ‘We may visit the Abkhazian war heroes’ museum,’ said Nyet 2. Nyet 1 offered to show us a zoo full of monkeys the Soviets used to breed for Soyuz space missions. ‘In Abkhazia we have the only very large statue of a space monkey in the world,’ Nyet 2 announced.
‘Please let us visit the Gorge?’
‘Nyet,’ they said.
Nyet 1 said she had a fiancé. We met him when he got off a tank with an AK-47, pointed at the camera and said, ‘Nyet’. Nyet 1 lectured us on Abkhazian cultural practices such as ‘bride kidnapping’. One evening our work delayed her return home until late and her fiancé came to meet us on the road with two of his friends. ‘He wants to beat you up,’ Nyet 1 said brightly.
‘We were just trying to kidnap you,’ I said. Nyet 1 did not look amused. Finally we were permitted to visit the Gorge. I have never seen a more beautiful wilderness, with its cobalt rushing river, virgin forests and jagged mountains. Anti-tank mines were still attached to the bridges, which the Georgians did not have time to blow before they fled under the Russian assault. Piles of ammunition supplied by Georgia’s Western allies lay scattered among farms freshly abandoned by their ethnic Svan inhabitants. Pigs and cows wandered untended. Apples and plums dropped from the branch and rotted in the heat.
A dead dog surrounded by bullet casings lay in one house, its blood leaking across a family’s photographs in a ransacked house. ‘It’s horrible what happened to these people,’ Nyet 1 agreed. ‘But what about the Abkhazian people and what has happened to them in history?’ The Abkhazians destroyed their republic in order to save it and only Russia has moved to give it recognition. ‘Hugo Chavez has said he will, too,’ said Nyet 2. ‘And Syria,’ said Nyet 1. This, then, is the frontline in the new Cold War.
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