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A Tolerant Nationalism
As Georgia searches for its path after a decade and a half of crisis, the descendants of this small country's first nationalists would do well to look to their own past.
By Ronald Grigor Suny
Published: January 13, 2006
Georgia is a country much in the news lately, what with the success of its Rose Revolution and the overthrow of President Eduard Shevardnadze, the visibility of Shevardnadze's energetic and charismatic successor, Mikheil Saakashvili, and the visit to Tbilisi last year by U.S. President George W. Bush. To those who read the headlines, Georgia would seem to be emerging from a devastating decade and a half of civil and ethnic war, political corrosion, territorial breakup and widespread corruption. For those who pay greater attention, however, the situation appears not so rosy, the country's problems chronic and intractable. The initial euphoria of November 2003 has since been replaced by greater sobriety, even disillusionment. For many, the bloom of the Rose Revolution has faded.
Yet pessimism about Georgia's future may be premature. That small country has faced far more dire crises than it is experiencing at present. Its history is replete with invasions and conquests by larger imperial powers, with near extinction, division and dispersion. And over and over again, as nationalists proudly proclaim, it has managed to rebound. As Czech writer Milan Kundera has famously said, "A small nation can disappear, and it knows it," but Georgia, like its neighbor Armenia, has made a habit of defying the odds.
Georgians are at one and the same time an ancient people with a distinct cultural and linguistic history and a relatively new nation, formed in the bosom of several empires. Until tsarist Russia annexed them in the early 19th century, the Georgian lands were seldom unified. The first nationalists -- products of Russian education and European learning -- took pride in their language, founded newspapers and actively promoted Georgian literature. But unlike the chauvinistic nationalism that would appear at the end of the Soviet empire, the most widespread popular movement in Georgia before and during the revolution of 1917 was a European-style social democracy based on ethnic tolerance, democratic institutions and social justice. These intellectually distinguished, moderate Marxists dominated Georgian politics from the 1890s through the establishment of an independent state in 1918 and up till the Bolshevik invasion of 1921, which forced them to flee to the West.
Stephen F. Jones of Mount Holyoke College has been researching Georgian social democracy for a quarter century. As a fellow traveler along the byways of Caucasian historiography and a peer reviewer of an earlier version of this book, I have long been impressed by his unparalleled knowledge of both language and country. In what is likely to be the first of two volumes (the second will cover the brief period of independence prior to Soviet annexation) Jones explores what has been generally written off as a rather esoteric subject: a socialist movement in a small, remote country a century ago. Whatever interest this movement has sparked has been largely due to one of its dropouts, the young Josef Stalin, who broke with his comrades and left Georgia to make a career in Russia with the more radical wing of the Social Democratic Party, the Bolsheviks. Yet it was the measured, democratic Mensheviks who won the factional struggle in Georgia. And it was the Mensheviks of Georgia who adopted a winning strategy that would later be followed in Third World revolutions: They were the first Marxist movement to mobilize the village peasantry into a revolutionary force.
At the outset, in the 1890s, social democracy was confined to small circles of intellectuals, many of them educated in the same Orthodox seminary where Stalin studied. These passionate activists argued that Georgia, as a borderland of the Russian empire, suffered from dual oppression by the Russian bureaucratic autocracy and the emerging capitalist market economy dominated by the local Armenian bourgeoisie. Revolutionary socialism, heavily tinged with anti-colonial nationalism, was the means to bring an end to both. After years of propaganda work and legal agitation, the socialists forged ties with the embryonic working classes of Tbilisi, Baku and Batumi. In response to the first Russian Revolution, in 1905, thousands of Georgian peasants, inspired by the workers and under the influence of the social democrats, boycotted their landlords and set up a short-lived independent government, free of tsarist authority and controlled by the peasants and their leaders.
For MT From left, Irakli Tsereteli and Nikolai "Karlo" Chkheidze chaired the Petrograd Soviet, while Noe Zhordania was Georgia's first president. |  | |
The 1905 revolution proved to be a harsh passage for the peoples of the South Caucasus. A civil war broke out between militant workers and peasants, on one side, and the armed might of the Russian government, on the other. Assassinations of officials, armed resistance and sensational robberies by revolutionaries were matched by state terror, punitive expeditions and mass executions. Here Stalin learned to fight violence with violence, a formative lesson on which he would draw with greater ferocity in the next revolution.
Although the Mensheviks also fought in this losing war with tsarism, the lesson they learned was the need for greater caution. In the years between 1907 and 1917, the Georgian socialists won elections to the Russian State Duma and emerged as leaders in the legal opposition to autocracy. When revolution broke out in 1917, men like Nikolai "Karlo" Chkheidze and Irakli Tsereteli appeared at the head of the Petrograd Soviet. Back home in Georgia, the grand old man of social democracy, Noe Zhordania, became the acknowledged leader of the Tbilisi Soviet and, later, the elected president of the independent republic. In contrast to other Marxist parties in power, however, the Georgians established a successful democratic government. Although their rule was not free of ethnic conflict and violence -- after all a civil war was raging in Russia at the time -- they managed for almost three years to keep their fragile state from falling apart without resorting to authoritarian rule and widespread terror.
Jones splendidly tells the story of how the Georgians taught Russian socialists the value of working with peasants and participating in elective institutions. Yet for all their intellectual acumen, courageous resistance and steadfast adherence to democracy in the heat of revolutionary turmoil, the Mensheviks of Georgia fell victim to the Red Army in 1921. They ended their days squabbling with one another in the suburbs of Paris, dreaming and conspiring to return to power in Georgia, but not living long enough to see the Soviet Union's collapse.
When Georgia reemerged as an independent state in 1991, the social democrats were nowhere to be seen. Post-Soviet Georgians had no interest in any form of socialism, smitten instead by the exclusivist nationalism of the former dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia, which rapidly led to secessionist rebellions in the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and a destructive civil war on the streets of Tbilisi. Shevardnadze succeeded Gamsakhurdia and, having forsaken his communist past, soon placed a picture of the Virgin Mary over his desk. Saakashvili in turn overthrew Shevardnadze and quickly adopted a new national flag with five red crosses. Today, Georgians are once again reconstructing their sense of themselves and their nation. While some form of nationalism will be required to hold Georgia together, a people so enamored of and haunted by their history might better profit by turning back to an earlier tradition of tolerance, democracy and -- dare I say it -- socialism. Of course, they will have to call it something else.
Ronald Grigor Suny is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and the author of "The Making of the Georgian Nation" and "The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the U.S.S.R. and the Successor States."
Copyright © 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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