We ascend the steps, and I am led in and introduced to Giorgi Khaindrava, the city’s “military commandant.” Just like Jaba the dramatist and the painter Kitovani, Georgi is yet another artistic figure—in this case, an actor by profession. The war is feeling more and more like a big stage production.
“Welcome, welcome to Sukhumi, my friend!” crows Commandant Khaindrava. He is boisterous, hosting—as if the mythology of Georgia’s endless wine- and feast-fueled bacchanalia is obligatory even in these difficult circumstances.
I mention to Khaindrava that the “Knights” and “Guards” have not ingratiated themselves with the local Abkhaz and non-Georgian population. They’ve accused them of looting, booze-fueled vandalism, and random violence.
He nods his head slowly. This is a problem among his men, he admits.
When the military commandant tells you he’s got a problem with random violence and uncontrolled marauding, you know there’s more trouble brewing. I ask about getting to the “front.” The problem is, there isn’t much of one. Most of the Abkhaz have retreated to the north of the region and are busy setting up an “army”—with the covert help of the Russians and some allies from ethnic brethren in Russia.
In the heady first days of the war, the Georgians demonstratively marched all the way up the coastal highway to the Russian border, planting Georgian flags, kissing the local women, and drinking with local men.
But marking territory is not the same as holding on to it.
Eighteen years later, in 2010, Giorgi Karkarashvili, a young Georgian top commander in the Abkhaz war who later became Georgia’s defense minister at the ripe age of twenty-six, makes a startling admission:
“We entered Abkhazia in a very disorganized way. We didn’t even have a specific goal, and we started looting villages along the way,” Karkarashvili says. “As a result, in the span of a month, we managed to make enemies out of the entire local population.” With such sage military planning (more driven by testosterone than strategy), the end result of the War That Nobody Started would be predictable.
I ARRIVE BACK at my apartment in Tbilisi from Abkhazia after midnight, covered in subtropical sweat and grime. Images of rare luxury swirl in my head. In this case, of hot water. One of the few perks central planning did offer was nonstop, almost-scalding tap water on demand. In urban USSR centers, one could take virtually endless free steam showers, the water pumped from giant central heating stations. Any American who grew up in a large family knows this is not something to be taken for granted.
I went to the shower and turned it on, but the water was an icy rain. I waited, but the stream remained glacial. The central hot water system never was switched back on again in Georgia; heating stations could no longer afford fuel—the end of another era.
I get a late-night phone call from a colleague. “Head of State” Eduard Shevardnadze was flying to New York the next morning to speak at the United Nations. I assumed it was already too late to sign up. “Come to the airport and just get on,” said the reporter, Zhorra Vardzelashvili.
“What do you mean ‘just get on,’ ” I countered. “We’re talking about the president’s plane. And he’s leaving in a few hours.”
“Just show up,” he said.
Rules of deference and feigned respect common to the rest of the governed world had yet to catch on. The Georgian officials were often embarrassingly deferential to foreigners. The guards at parliament barely bothered to emerge from a slouch when I passed through. There were metal detectors for show—usually switched off.
I got to the airport minutes before takeoff. Shevardnadze stands, waiting. The Man Who Ended the Cold War seemed a bit out of place in the VIP lounge, with its stained brown carpeting and sofas with cigarette holes, where cows often wandered near the molehill-bumpy runway.
“Go ask him if you can come along,” Zhorra told me.
“He’s the head of state. I can’t just ask him like that,” I said.
Zhorra looked exasperated with my formality. He knew what he was doing—himself a former aide to Shevardnadze during Communist times. Zhorra sauntered up, then whispered to Shevardnadze, who quickly flashed his Cheshire-cat smile—sometimes described as “warm” by westerners, but as “Machiavellian” by some Georgians (not to mention the Abkhaz). “Come along,” Shevardnadze lip-synced.
Shevy’s plane was in effect making its maiden voyage as the most modern aircraft in the Georgian fleet. It had just been retrofitted with extended fuel tanks and other updates.
After takeoff, Shevardnadze’s personal stewardess took command of the in-flight program. She was a twenty-five-year-old pop singer by the name of Anna Jacki. Anna had curly red hair and a petite body, and was well known for what by Georgian standards were her racy music videos. Her clothing was so tight, it appeared to be sprayed on.
Anna helped hand out the meals, which consisted of hand-sliced blobs of fatty beef on blanched, tasteless bread. The meat also turned out to be rancid. As a consequence, I spent two days in New York looking into a toilet bowl.
We stopped for fuel in the Icelandic capital, Reykjavík. The city was wrapped in one of its legendary fog attacks. The runway appeared out of nowhere as the pilot tried to land. Unsurprisingly, we overshot it. The plane groaned as he violently jerked it back up and banked hard to the left, over the icy Atlantic below.
We landed safely on the second attempt. By this time, however, the plane full of normally boisterous Georgians was shaken into silence.
The Icelanders wheeled out their prime minister to meet with the Man Who Ended the Cold War, Shevardnadze, now more a curiosity piece than statesman to the West, as if his plane were a UFO and those aboard it green men with antennae. The Icelanders hurried him and several of his ministers off to a meeting room, giving the diplomatic nonevent (fuel stopover) an air of mysterious intrigue.
The real fruits born of the first and possibly last Icelandic-Georgian summit remain a mystery to this day. Back on the Presidential Plane, nervous faces greeted us. A crew member agitatedly discussed something in the front.
Anna the pop-star-presidential-stewardess later revealed the reason for the commotion: The windshield of the plane had cracked in a spiderweb pattern. Aviation rules mandated that it be unconditionally grounded. The crack was a decompression risk, and we were about to head over the frigid Atlantic again.
The irony that our intended path was similar to that of the Titanic—almost exactly eighty years earlier—was not lost on us.
Shevardnadze had other ideas.
“Fly on,” he calmly told the pilots, after learning a replacement would have to be brought from Moscow, at least a two-day delay, including repair time, which would have meant missing the UN session.
There was only a small, low-level State Department retinue waiting on the tarmac when we landed at JFK. The Cold War was over. Shevardnadze’s once-tall standing carried a lot less coin. As we taxied in, broken windshield intact, a tiny retinue of unknown US State Department officials waited below to greet him, a sea change from the red-carpet treatment he was used to from world leaders as the Soviet foreign minister. Shevardnadze, who rarely took insult to heart, grunted something in disgust to an aide. Here was a global giant who had been confused with the leader of a Third World country. Which in fact he now was.
Shevardnadze got a better reception at the United Nations, where he made an impassioned speech about the dangers of what he claimed was “aggressive separatism” in Abkhazia. However, some of the Georgian journalists and government officials on the trip never saw it—they skipped the protocol bit and busied themselves scouring the bowels of the Bronx for cut-rate TVs and stereos.
Once we took off for Georgia a few days later, the Man Who Ended the Cold War made his customary foray into the back of the aircraft to greet those aboard. He did a quick double take, however. The rear half of the plane was jammed with boxes reading SONY, JVC, and PIONEER. They’d converted the Presidential Plane into a flying warehouse of cheap electronics.
&
nbsp; As the shop tour continued, the war in Abkhazia was escalating. Cease-fires had been signed and broken, the fighting escalating, the Georgians retreating. By late October, the Georgians controlled only the capital, Sukhumi, and a few lesser towns.
Later that month, possibly as a burst of revenge or effort to wipe out the historical record of the Abkhaz’s presence in the region, a group of Georgian fighters torched the building housing the Abkhaz cultural archives in Sukhumi, effectively destroying history. Saved were only a few thousand out of some 170,000 unique documents and artifacts. This greatly embittered the Abkhaz in a way that has never been forgotten.
The war was now Shevardnadze’s, even though he appears to have been opposed to launching it. He had gone from Berlin Wall smasher to returning to power in his smallish, chaotic, but now independent Georgia. Shevardnadze’s detractors in Moscow hated him for “destroying” the USSR—along with Gorbachev—by “giving away” East Germany. Now the man who helped bring down the big empire was left trying to hold together the remnants of another fragmenting land, his native Georgia.
EXODUS
Autumn gave way to a winter and spring of pitched battles, the Georgians barely hanging on to Sukhumi. The “War That Nobody Started” was clearly not going according to plan. Not that there had ever been a “plan.”
As sultry summer set in, fighting periodically severed the only road link to the capital, cutting it off from the outside world. The Georgians launched bloody counteroffensives, reopening the meandering coastal highway for a few more days. Soon after, it would be sliced again, reopened, and recut. The strangulation of a dying man, then easing up ever so slightly just as he loses consciousness, allowing mocking reprieves of oxygenated euphoria as the inevitable approaches.
I, a few other reporters, and the odd aid worker stayed near the front lines, at a sprawling old facility built for Red Army bigwigs. Its official name was typically Soviet: the Resort Sanatorium of the Moscow Military District. Palatial digs by Soviet standards, the sanatorium sits amid twenty sensual acres of palms, orchids, and oleanders: a botanist’s subtropical dream. It was the only place left to stay. Georgian units had commandeered the rest of the hotels. The Abkhaz had shelled others into disrepair.
The sanatorium oozed with the air of empire, a coveted Kremlin colonial outpost. Russian generals had vacationed here for decades. You could feel their ghosts frolicking on the spacious balconies. The foamy waves of the Black Sea lapped onto the beaches below them.
Most of the “resort” workers abdicated as the war intensified—leaving behind a crew of local caretakers. The gaggle of clerks, cooks, and cleaners had long been at the condescending beck and call of vacationing generals. Now, like a group of mutinous deckhands who’d thrown their sadistic captain overboard, they reveled in ironic revenge. There were almost no guests, no running water, and little food. Notoriously inaccurate missiles fired by the Abkhaz regularly scored direct hits on the sanatorium grounds, blasting out windows. The now-ruling worker class was oblivious to these inconveniences. The estate was theirs, and they relished it.
One of the newly crowned was Marina, a chambermaid. A gregarious, wispy fifty-something, Marina was permanently clad in homemade black ruffled skirts that reached her ankles, even in the most oppressive of sea humidity. She derived great joy from her newfound powers. Marina took special delight in one particular act: conferring the keys to rooms once reserved for the top Soviet military elite unto hitherto unauthorized ruffians like me.
Leading me to my room, Marina would dangle the keys suggestively from their carved wooden tags and then carefully glide them into the locks. With the weight of her small body behind her, she’d dramatically push open the doors to reveal my double-roomed chamber with twelve-foot ceilings. There were large beds with ruffled spreads, kitsch red-velvet love seats, and amenities like the crystal water decanters that doubled as receptacles for my morning birdbaths. The decanters were a godsend, for when I turned on the wheeled taps in the bathroom, usually nothing came out. At best, foul-smelling brown water trickled down.
“General Ivanov once holidayed here for two weeks,” Marina cackled. “I’ll tell you something else: Comrade Belinsky’s wife used to love to sleep in this bed, and not always alone.” She giggled, placing the keys in my hands as if they were diamonds.
Every evening as the sun was setting over the sea, at precisely eight o’clock, the caretakers switched on a rumbling old diesel generator. The sanatorium became practically the only island of light in the darkened capital. The few of us who called the sanatorium home gathered nightly on the veranda. We drank from jugs of crude homemade wine and smoked the chokingly acrid local Abkhazian-produced cigarettes, Astra. With little else to do, we watched and listened to evenings of exploding artillery shells.
We could often see blasts from a pier a few hundred meters away. The Abkhaz shelled it nightly. In the lush hills surrounding the city, firefights erupted in quick bursts. We traded vacuous interpretations about what was going on, trying to make sense of it all. It was a way to pass time, aided by bravado about the ongoing battles.
Neither the Abkhaz nor the government shed much illumination on the situation. They bragged of astounding but nonexistent battlefield triumphs. They underestimated their losses with equal shamelessness. Yes, one could visit the front, but that offered few real clues about what was going on. This was a war being fought mostly with random barrages. Both sides favored rockets whose nickname grad means “hail,” as in a hailstorm. They were just as inaccurate as their name. During attacks, they rained on the besieged capital from truck-mounted batteries that could fire off a couple of dozen of the treacherous things at a time. Grads were conceived by Soviet munitions designers to frighten incoming infantry, not for precision. The effect was, predictably, devastating. The attacks rarely hit anything strategic. Sometimes they simply decapitated innocent pedestrians brave enough to venture out for food or supplies. The Georgians would answer by firing the same inaccurate grads at the Abkhaz positions.
From our nighttime perch on the veranda, we had a perfect view of the entire bay. It would have been possible to watch the movements of naval ships or patrol boats. Except that neither side had a real navy.
Life went on, amid the bombardments. From my post along the veranda, I occasionally heard cries of passion wafting from rooms of the sanatorium. I wondered if it could be Marina. I wondered if she was gleefully taking revenge on the wives of those haughty military generals. They had sometimes vacationed at the sanatorium alone, away from their military husbands. Perhaps Marina was making the most of those oversized beds, before the war took that away from her.
More cease-fires came and went, and as missiles continued to rain down on the city, a silence descended. The wide avenues, lined by incongruously pastel buildings and botanical gardens, emptied by the day. Pedestrians deserted the promenade along the seafront, where ships full of tourists had docked just a summer before. The exodus began with the start of the war. Now it accelerated. It was a gradual march out of the capital, done stealthily, like a family facing eviction. Just as no one wants the neighbors to see the truck backing up at the door, the men who could have fought at the front did not want to be seen abandoning their city. They seemed to look away on their way out, avoiding eye contact.
THE STREETS STREAMED with women dragging bags, bright woven bags with stripes, full of family albums, heirlooms, and clothes. Bags became a main topic of discussion. Who was selling them, where to buy them, when more might arrive at the bazaar? Which kinds were strongest and which would rip, which were the easiest to sling over one’s shoulder, which ones were waterproof? Once the bags were filled, families would haul them to a curbside and wait for a passing bus to come, at least during times when the only road out was not cut by battles. The lucky drove out with their cars stacked high with belongings. But the preferred method of escape was through the airport.
Of course, by now, scheduled passenger planes were no longer flying. People wanted out, no
t in. Getting onto one of the departing planes was a matter of persistence, luck, and social position. I had an unfair advantage. At the press center, a man handled getting journalists out of the capital.
Aleksandr Khaindrava was the uncle of Sukhumi’s military commandant—the actor Giorgi Khaindrava, whom I’d met on my first trip. A septuagenarian, Alexander projected the avuncular aura of a southern college professor. He occupied a room in Stalin’s summer retreat. As a young man, he’d grown up in China, in the city of Kharbin, among a community of Soviet exiles who fled amid the Bolshevik Revolution. His King’s English empowered him to deal with the press. Few other people around spoke English at all, and he delighted in me as a captive audience.
ALEKSANDR KHAINDRAVA WAS a man shipwrecked by the shifting fortunes of empires and exile. This made a lonely soul of him. And so, instead of expediting my way out of the city, he impeded it. He pretended not to know when the next plane full of Georgian paramilitaries would land, making space for escapees. On an old plastic rotary phone, his long crinkled fingers dialed the numbers for the airport with excruciating slowness. He knew himself that the city’s telephone lines were so bad that barely one call in a hundred might get through.
When Aleksandr did get through to the airport, he’d often say, beaming, “I’m so sorry, the plane just left.” For him it was a reprieve that meant another hour of conversation over tea, sixty minutes less loneliness in a country that was his, yet not altogether his, in a war that was neither his nor anyone’s in particular.
The airport, once I did reach it in spite of Aleksandr’s gentleman’s loneliness-laden chivalry, was a war zone of a different kind.
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