Eight Pieces of Empire

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

  One of the officials, a barrel-chested man, was also a well-known jazz musician. He invited me in, pounded on his desk, shouted and laughed boisterously, poured a glass of cognac, and belted out a loud song.

  And then there was Aleksandr Berulava, now “vice commandant” of the city. He had given me a ride that first day in Sukhumi a year earlier. He was reviled by the Abkhaz, who accused him of tolerating abuses at the start of the “War Nobody Started.” Berulava resented journalists for not taking the Georgian side—as he saw it—in the war. He had been morose for days as the fate of the city hung in the balance.

  Now, with the end near and only the details of his fate to be decided, he seemed relieved. In fact, he was beaming. He sensed closure. His choice to stay had been made. I tried to understand his fatalism.

  Outside, the shelling was getting heavy again, and the sun was setting. I got ready to dash the half mile back to the sanatorium. As I left the building for the last time, Berulava ran after me onto the grounds with something in his hands. For a moment, I thought perhaps he wanted to harangue me. Instead, he clutched a book. It was a collection of essays by Shevardnadze, called My Choice for Democracy and Freedom, signed and dedicated personally to Berulava just two days before:

  Dearest Aleksandr,

  for your support during the darkest days in Sukhumi.

  Yours truly.

  Eduard Shevardnadze.

  He pushed it into my hands. “Here. I want you to have this. If I get out alive, you’ll return it to me. If I don’t, please keep it.…”

  It was the last time I would see Aleksandr Berulava. I still have his book.

  Back at the sanatorium, the shells pummeled us all night and all of the next day. By now there was no food. Even the battle-hardened Ed Parker was becoming more unhinged, as if that was possible. He, Thomas Goltz, and a marooned relief worker from the French aid group Médecins Sans Frontières argued over the ownership of a piece of processed cheese. Parker threatened to disembowel the aid worker. We restrained him, arguing that a Tolstoyan duel over a piece of processed cheese was not worth the trouble.

  Parker and I walked through the grounds of the sanatorium. A big jeep belonging to the aid worker was parked nearby. The door was emblazoned with a huge emblem reading MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES. Parker’s eyes lit up. “Mate, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s steal that jeep, cut off the top, and rip out the seats. We’ll give it to a bunch of drugged-up Georgian fighters and have them bolt an antiaircraft gun to the floor. Then we’ll take pictures of them firing the thing into the air with the emblem MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES on the side. We’ll publish the photos all over the world. When the Abkhaz get here, they’ll hang that aid worker from a lamppost.”

  That night, there was nothing to do but listen to the particularly fierce pounding of artillery. One shell landed in the doorway to our building, shattered the windows, and disfigured a tile mosaic in the yard featuring the face of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin. It was a dramatic night, but I had no way to report any of it. It seemed like time had stopped, existence suspended.

  IT WAS TIME to get out of the city.

  Rumors flew.

  There would be a plane out.

  Or a boat. The information spread like wildfire. We waited for a lull in the fighting. When it came, our Ukrainian cameraman from Reuters, Sergiy Karazy, and another cameraman and photographer, the Azerbaijani Farkhad Kerimov, and I set out on foot for the airport, fifteen miles away. (Two years later, Farkhad was executed by a group of Chechen rebels who mistook him for a spy.) On the misleadingly peaceful-looking road, there was not a single vehicle. We encountered a few pedestrians hauling sacks, a trickle of humanity headed out of the city. Near a train depot, an artillery shell landed about thirty yards from us. We hit the ground.

  When we approached the airport, I saw a TU-134 passenger plane approaching. Slowly it circled and then landed. A mass of fighters and a few civilians rushed it, believing they’d found their ticket out. Faces turned somber when they realized that the craft was going nowhere; as it pulled to the terminal, jet fuel leaked like rain from the wings. From a jerry-rigged gunboat in the harbor, the Abkhaz had peppered the fuel tanks with bullets, puncturing them. Soldiers rushed to and fro with buckets, trying to collect the valuable liquid before it spilled onto the ground.

  We wandered away from the bucket brigade and the airport. To where, we had no real idea. It was pointless to continue down the coastal road. The Abkhaz had cut it ten days before. There was no way out.

  We walked into a village across from the airport road. Most of the houses were deserted. But in front of one, an old woman in a long black dress and head scarf was standing in the yard. A widow. Widows in rural Georgia usually dress in black, no matter how many years have passed after the death of their husbands. They are never invisible.

  Strangely, the woman was smiling.

  She invited us in. Her name was Eteri. There was a persimmon tree in the yard, and she went outside and plucked several of the bright orange globes and tucked them into her apron. The inside of the wooden farmhouse was a typical Georgian shrine to her dead husband. It exuded timeless warmth. There was only a repressed sense of worry on her face. She cooked up a meal of chicken and soup, the supra, or Georgian feast, trumping the bleakness of the situation. She fetched some home moonshine, made from tangerines. We drank it copiously, in between her toasts to Georgia, to God, and to her dead husband, who had passed away years previously.

  I asked her if she planned to try to leave. “Of course not,” she said, nonchalantly. “The reinforcements will be here soon.” We tried to convince her to reconsider. She smiled and refused. I did not have the heart to tell her it was all over. Eteri put a kerosene lamp in a window and poured more of her moonshine. I slept deeply, with the bittersweet taste of fermented tangerines on my lips.

  In the morning, I peered out a window. The shore was visible. Large naval ships were emerging on the horizon. The Russian and Ukrainian navies had sent boats in to evacuate those who wanted to leave, and that meant just about everybody. I gathered my things and turned to say good-bye to Eteri. “Are you sure you don’t want to go with us?” I asked.

  There was no answer, just a slight smile.

  “I’ll be here,” she said. I did not know if this was naiveté or a bow to fate. After the war was over, I returned to the area and got close enough to see her house in the distance. The windows and door were flung open, and a breeze was blowing curtains back and forth. Predictably, the house had been looted. Eteri was gone.

  A mass of locals moved toward the ships. Many were sobbing. They were coming to terms with the fact that they would never see their homes again. The Georgians were leaving, knowing the Abkhaz would make sure they did—or worse—if they arrived before they fled. They would not be allowed to return—collective punishment for the war.

  The ships could not move close enough toward the shore; the water was too shallow. Women swam in their flowing dresses toward the waiting boats.

  And then there were the dogs.

  They moved in several packs around the area where the ships had pulled up. Labs, huskies, and German shepherds. Mutts and purebreds. Their owners had abandoned them. They yelped, they barked, they ran about excitedly.

  We waded out to sea with the refugees. We were hoisted on board a boat full of them. We started to pull away. One of the dogs jumped into the water and paddled his way toward the boat. A woman screamed. The captain stopped the craft. We waited, and the dog was hoisted to safety.

  Then we pulled away from the shore. Across the city of botanical gardens, palms, and pastel-colored buildings, a great many fires now burned out of control. The yelping of the dogs faded to a collective whimper as we moved toward the horizon.

  They—and we—were the lucky ones. Hundreds of people walked days through icy high-mountain passes, starving. Road bandits—of their own ethnicity—often stole their belongings as they tried to walk to safety. Dozens froze to death along the way. />
  WHEN WE REACHED the shore on the other side at Poti, we piled onto a bus. We headed toward Tbilisi. In the seat in front of me sat an older man. A rotund man, balding, the type of man you expect to see singing loud Georgian songs and toasting with wine around one of their legendary feasting tables. The man was sobbing uncontrollably. The sound rippled through the bus like a throbbing knife. He kept repeating the same word, “shvilo! shvilo!” meaning “son” or “children” in Georgian. It can also be used as a simple exclamation. In this case, it sounded more like a moan. The man glanced at me, quieted, and then burnished an apple with his coat. He turned and handed it to me.

  “Here,” he said. “You remind me of my son.” The son had heeded Shevardnadze’s call to come to the defense of the city, and he was killed in the war’s final days.

  ON THE TENTH day of the siege, the capital of Abkhazia fell to the Abkhaz, or was “liberated,” in the terminology they used. Shevardnadze escaped. The Georgians had patched up the wings of the plane I had seen, the plane whose fuel tanks had been shot full of holes. I wondered if the son of the man who had given me the apple had been on the same plane with the president, his body in one of those gleaming zinc coffins.

  A FEW DAYS after the fall of the city, cameraman Sergiy Karazy and I grabbed a plane from Tbilisi to the Russian city of Sochi. We made our way down the Black Sea coast. We crossed the Psou River back into Abkhazia.

  A Russian border guard whom I recognized greeted me. Trucks full of looted goods were pulling up to the border between Russia and Abkhazia. Some of the more absurd aspects of the war had unnerved the man.

  “A couple of days ago a Polish guy tried to cross the border, saying he wanted to fight for ‘little Abkhazia.’ I asked him, ‘Can you tell the difference between a Georgian and an Abkhaz?’ He told me no. They let him through anyway.”

  On the horizon, hundreds of trucks filled the roads. They were stacked high with war loot—carpets, furniture, appliances, somebody else’s bric-a-brac.

  When we got to the capital, looting was in full swing. I walked up to a house where Abkhaz partisans were loading furniture into a truck. They were bickering about what to do with the spoils. I recognized one of the men immediately. He looked more erudite than the rest of the group, mostly rank-and-file fighters on a victory high. He identified himself as a member of the Abkhaz parliament. He acknowledged me, embarrassed. The fighters continued loading their war trophies into the truck unabated.

  “What you see here is sad, but it is true,” he told me. “This is the way of war.” (And it was. There were elements of this on every side in all the post-Soviet wars I witnessed: Few passed up the chance of looting or “taking trophies” when given the opportunity.)

  Behind a building near the sanatorium where we’d stayed, I saw two bodies, one of an old woman and another of a middle-aged man. They had been shot. Kerchiefs covered their faces.

  A monkey stood on a bridge nearby, looking rather confused and evidently pondering his next destination. Monkeys are not native to Abkhazia. He was from a scientific research center full of hundreds of primates nearby. They had been used in medical experiments, and a few had actually been sent into space in the Soviet space program. Georgian troops stole many of them and turned them into pets. They elevated some to war mascot status, riding about in their tanks with the monkeys atop—like slapstick commanders. Now primate conscription had ended, and the monkeys were relishing their newfound freedom.

  LATER, I SAW an Abkhaz journalist whom I recognized. He greeted me warmly. Behind us, the “Supreme Soviet” was charred. Some of those inside had resisted, and the Abkhaz and their allies had set it ablaze after dragging out those last Georgians who had stayed behind.

  I asked about Aleksandr Berulava, the man who had given me Shevardnadze’s book to keep for him.

  “Berulava?” the journalist asked wryly. “Berulava was executed.”

  His death was likely a gruesome one. Both sides, especially during the waning days of the war, had, among other things, taken to chopping off ears from dead adversaries or plucking out eyes (often before they were killed).

  I SAW THE Preacher Man again. He smiled broadly. In his broken Russian, he shouted, “Slava Bogu!” several times. Literally, the term translates as “Glory to God.” But it is used as an interjection, rather than literally, something along the lines of “Thank God for that” or “luckily.”

  The Preacher Man was oblivious to having misused his limited Russian syntax, however. Instead, he kept repeating the phrase. “Slava Bogu! Slava Bogu!” It lilted like a feather in the sultry, smoke-scented air.

  The Abkhaz journalist turned to me and whispered, “What the hell does he mean by that, “Slava Bogu!”?

  “He just means it,” I answered. “He just means it.”

  We moved south out of the city on foot, in the direction of the airport. All along the horizon, houses were burning and being looted.

  Though several days had passed, there were still packs of dogs running aimlessly along the road, searching for their abdicated owners. I swear I recognized some of them.

  The War That Nobody Started had ended.

  At least for now.

  BURIED FIVE TIMES: INSURGENTS IN FLAT BLACK NYLONS

  Eduard Shevardnadze (The Man Who Ended the Cold War) fled Abkhazia not in a boat or on a freezing mountain pass. He flew out in that same last, ravaged, jet-fuel-dripping plane we saw at the Sukhumi airport, its wings full of bullet holes. Workers had patched them with metal strips and scavenged up just enough fuel for a quick escape back into government-controlled territory.

  Or what was left of it.

  This latest insurrection was under way even before the War That Nobody Started ended. Georgia was entering its fourth war in less than two years of independence. From the empire’s crown jewel to failed state.

  The protagonist was none other than Zviad Gamsakhurdia, elected president in 1990, but quickly having evoked the ire of many within months, including the artists-turned-warlords Kitovani and Ioseliani.

  Proclaiming Gamsakhurdia an autocrat and demagogue, they felt the best way to unseat him was to lug large-caliber artillery pieces into the upper floors of the nearby Intourist hotel and fire them directly at the parliament from less than a hundred yards away.

  It was an excessive use of firepower, to say the least—like going after ants with a sledgehammer—done more for the warlords’ warped sense of “Georgia as Vaudeville” effect (there were TV crews to show off for, after all) than for anything faintly resembling military logic. After a couple of weeks of blasting away, a once-elegant city center was reduced to a series of smoking holes and gutted neoclassical facades. They could indeed boast, at least, of forcing Gamsakhurdia to flee—to Chechnya, where he found a fellow traveler in the rebel, rabidly anti-Kremlin leader there, Dzhokhar Dudayev.

  That did not mean Gamsakhurdia had lost all backing, especially in the countryside or outside Tbilisi. To call them “supporters” would be an understatement. These were devotees, worshippers of a kind, and Gamsakhurdia was a near-deity for many of them.

  The evocation of this allure seems simple enough on the surface: Zviad was the son of Georgia’s most famous twentieth-century writer, Konstantin Gamsakhurdia. While the Western reader may have never heard of such epics as The Smile of Dionysus, these works have deep resonance in the literature-obsessed Georgian soul. Konstantin’s bitter criticism of the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia and his exile to an island in the Arctic Ocean, where he came close to suicide before distracting his mind by translating Dante, reinforced his credentials.

  Zviad was a linguist and ethnographer with an explosive temper and a penchant for rants against ethnic minorities like the Abkhaz. He once said that the Abkhaz should “leave Georgia and go back where they came from,” embracing a radical claim that the Abkhaz were originally mountain dwellers from outside Georgia who had gradually migrated to the Georgian Black Sea coast. “The Abkhaz nation doesn’t exist,” he yelled through a megap
hone in front of the Georgian parliament during one rally in 1990. Today in Georgia such statements sound absurd. But in the supercharged ethnic frenzy of the Soviet collapse, they found resonance.

  Aside from his nationalist creds—important at that time—Zviad’s ascension was bolstered by his taking over the mantle of Georgia’s leading anti-Soviet dissident. He was tossed, KGB-style, into a mental hospital for a spell, further boosting his own standing. Deeper reasons prevailed for the mystic adoration he inspired among his devotees. The surrealism surrounding his death helps illustrate some of them.

  But Zviad in the autumn of 1993 was far from dead.

  • • •

  SHEVARDNADZE’S LOSS OF Abkhazia gave him a chance to reclaim power. Wild throngs greeted Gamsakhurdia upon his return from exile to western Georgia, his power base. He proclaimed himself president again and, with a few hundred ragged troops, advanced toward the capital, most of the remnants of the government’s “army” having scattered or getting ready to.

  Alas, he had barely unpacked his bags when Shevardnadze pulled a desperate move. The same man who accused the Russians of engineering his defeat in Abkhazia now invited those same Russian troops to intervene to save his own regime, even greeting them as they docked on the Black Sea coast. In exchange, the Man Who Won the Cold War signed Georgia up to the Russia-led Commonwealth of Independent States, Moscow’s pitiful effort to cobble some loose USSR fragments back together.

  With the Russians pouring in and his insurgent forces vastly outnumbered, Zviad retreated for a last stand in the western Georgian town of Zugdidi. We prepared to scramble off to find him before the inevitable occurred: his capture, escape, or death.