“This is my school and my town,” he said. “A few years ago I was back there in the ‘W’s’ sitting where you are. And a lot of your parents who are here today were in that class with me. I’m sure you expect me to say that it’s an honor to be here—and it is, indeed.”
Stillwater High’s favorite son had come home to give his valedictory just three months before his assassination.
I expected an inspiring oration challenging the graduates to seize the future. What Freddie delivered was far more personal and revealing.
“My dream for you is two things,” he said, “that you always remember where you came from and that you learn that there’s a big world out there that needs you. Because I’m a guy that’s seen it and I’ve come back to tell you.”
The stories he told gave a hint about his peripatetic career after postings in Russia and Turkey. The first stop for the Russian-speaking Sovietologist was the Horn of Africa. The transfer put him on the front line of a proxy war with Moscow.
“I spent several years in Ethiopia,” he said. “There was a war going on there for about thirty years. The government lost that war—but in a last desperate attempt to win they started pulling my daughter’s Ethiopian classmates out of school. They would go to their houses at night and pull thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children out of bed and send them to the front. There’s no way for you to know what that’s like—but I’ve seen it and I’ve come back to tell you.”
After his apparent success in Ethiopia, he returned to the Soviet Bloc.
“I was in Berlin on the day they started tearing down the Wall,” he said. “They made a hole in the Wall and I just walked into East Berlin. It was unimaginable. The whole world changed that day.”
After that, Freddie traveled extensively throughout the former Soviet Union: Russia, Siberia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and ultimately Georgia. “Last year I was the first American invited to the old Soviet space center to watch the liftoff of a Russian rocket,” he said. “Last month I saw grandmothers in Moscow selling their shoes to buy food. These are hard times in Russia—but I think the Russians are going to make it.”
Freddie’s concluding words would have made a fitting eulogy: “I’ve had dinner with kings and presidents. I’ve interpreted for ambassadors and secretaries of state. I’ve run into interesting people all over the world. And I would say I’m very happy with where I am and what I’m doing. I’ve had a good life. And I don’t regret any of the choices I made.”
I turned off the videos and thought about what I’d seen and heard. In both the interview and the graduation speech Freddie made attestations of being fulfilled by family and faith. But these statements seemed out of sync with the rest of his narrative. He was most alive when painting himself as a man on the move, disconnected from pedestrian commitments, utterly consumed with matters of consequence. His conversation was completely devoid of references to other people in his life. There was no team, there was only Freddie.
I pondered the utility of this particular insight. I wasn’t sure, but I thought it might help explain how he ended up on the Old Military Road without backup.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
THE THIEF IN LAW
I now had a human client and a humanized victim. What I needed next was a deeper knowledge of Georgia’s recent political history. I was pretty sure that without an adequate appreciation of the formal and informal forces struggling for control of Tbilisi, I would never solve the mystery of Freddie Woodruff’s murder and might even get myself killed.
My education began in books and ended in admiration. The Georgians, I learned, are a hearty, passionate, extraordinary people. During the Soviet era, ideologues developed an elaborate mythology asserting that the Russian conquest of the Caucasus was both anti-imperialist and progressive: “anti-imperialist” because the Russians liberated the region from the Ottoman and Persian empires, and “progressive” because it opened the way for peoples of the region to develop their cultures and economies according to their own needs and desires. The culmination of this happy process was, allegedly, the Soviet system itself—a giant leap forward that bestowed on the region the blessings of brotherhood, peace, and prosperity.
While the conquerors congratulated themselves for their good intentions, the conquered experienced the occupation from a slightly different perspective. To the peoples of the Caucasus, the Soviet Union (and the Russian Empire before it) were colonial powers—outlanders who supplanted local power structures and economic models for their own benefit. Admittedly, their colonization of this multiethnic, multilinguistic, multireligious region did have some positive effects: It created more peaceful conditions and more orderly administration; it led to the development of infrastructure; and it promoted industrialization. However, by its nature the Russo-Soviet colonial model was more pernicious than that of other European colonial empires.
Unlike its British counterpart, the Soviet colonial system never sought to develop local institutions of self-government. The Communist Party did not cultivate colonial administrators and cadres of indigenous civil servants. Instead, local party officials were conditioned to obey and implement orders that emanated from a distant central government. As a consequence, the needs and desires of the local populace were always a lower priority than the dictates from Moscow.
Any government that persistently refuses to respond to the demands of the governed comes to be viewed by them as (at best) irrelevant and (at worst) illegitimate. To the average Georgian, the local administration was an utterly corrupt and self-serving bureaucracy that governed by terror and the promotion of ethnic rivalries and resentments. It was the newest in a long line of enemies to be evaded, exploited, manipulated, and cheated. In the absence of any proper government, people relied on family, clan, and ethnic group for social cohesion and basic survival. They bought and sold in the black market—and thereby became willingly complicit in officially illegal activity. As a result of this lifestyle of defiance, any generalized sense of civic responsibility atrophied and any basic respect for the rule of law was compromised.
There was, however, one Georgian institution that had not been undermined by Soviet colonial administration. It was the Vory v Zakone—the Thieves in Law. In Georgia, a thief in law is a professional criminal and respected member of society who operates an alternative government in the cracks and shadows of the established order. In addition to conducting illicit business activities, the thief’s minions serve as neighborhood supervisors, judge-arbitrators, and private security. If your car is stolen, the thief can find it and tell you how much you have to pay to get it back. He can clear your building of homeless squatters that the police will not touch. But above all, the thief in law can provide reliable protection for businesses and fair arbitration of their commercial disputes. Of course, all these services come at a price—but the thief’s process is incorruptible and he can be counted on to keep his agreements and to enforce his decisions.
A Georgian might ignore the laws passed by parliament, but he would never ignore a thief’s law.
A thief in law is a gangster who—after proving himself repeatedly in the crucible of Soviet prison—has been chosen as a vor, a godfather, a leader with a demonstrated talent for organization and a proven résumé of violence. He has sworn to abide by the Thieves’ Code, has been marked with the tattoos of his rank, and is utterly devoted to crime.
In the Soviet Union, where making a profit was an offense punishable by death, the thief in law was a practical dissident and a proto-capitalist. His violations of the colonizer’s criminal code were secretly cheered as acts of civil disobedience and patriotic resistance. He was celebrated as a nationalist hero—a kind of racketeering Robin Hood with a merry band of psychopaths.
And when the Soviet Union disappeared from the Georgian stage, it was a larger-than-life criminal genius who filled the vacuum left by its implosion. Jaba Ioseliani was a playwright, bandit, entrepreneur, and killer. He was one part Arthur Miller and tw
o parts Al Capone. A professor of theater science, he boasted a PhD and more than twenty-five years in prison. He had authored several successful plays and been elected “curator” of the mafia in Georgia. He was admired by intelligentsia and supported by bureaucrats. His network of relationships—both criminal and political—connected him to all corners of the Soviet Union. And when that union began to come apart, this amoral Renaissance man was ideally positioned to seize control.
Disintegration of the USSR started in 1988. The cool breeze of glasnost blew in from Moscow and whipped up a whirlwind of Georgian nationalism. There were nonstop political rallies in the Tbilisi city center. Students held hunger strikes demanding that the Soviet constitution be amended to allow Georgia to secede. The local patriarch led the crowd in the Lord’s Prayer—a forbidden act of religiosity made militant because it was spoken in Georgian. And there were speeches by the rock stars of resistance: Georgian academics and artists who had made a life in the USSR as professional dissidents. They seized center stage and demanded national independence.
Soviet soldiers kept an uneasy watch from the periphery, unsure how to react to protest in the age of perestroika. They did nothing until April 9, 1989, when—buttressed by shock troops from outside Georgia—the soldiers attacked a candlelight vigil with nightsticks, shovels, and tear gas.
“I have just been told that the danger is real,” the patriarch announced in the darkness. “We may have only a few minutes left before they start.”
“Long live Georgia!” cried someone in the crowd. “Lift up your souls because God is on our side!”
When it was over, twenty people were dead and four thousand wounded. The show of force had been intended to frighten the Georgians into submission. Instead, it incited them to revolution. They sloughed off the last vestiges of Moscow’s central control and began an inexorable march toward secession. This wildly destabilizing process was led by an ultranationalist literature professor from Tbilisi State University.
Zviad Gamsakhurdia was a virulent anticommunist with no practical experience as a politician. He was an urbane chauvinist whom the US Congress once nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. His principal qualifications for leadership were intolerance of opposition and contempt for compromise. These traits would propel him to the presidency and assure the catastrophic failure of his administration.
In the aftermath of the April 9 massacre Gamsakhurdia formed a coalition of nationalist parties and a militia to protect it. This political movement—called the Round Table/Free Georgia bloc—was united around two propositions: total independence for Georgia and complete transition to a market economy. These populist themes inspired a previously disenfranchised electorate. The newly aroused common man wanted to redefine both Georgia’s relationship to Russia and Russian influence within Georgia. It was a comprehensive revolution: a threat to Moscow and a threat to the Georgian elite who drew their power and prestige from Moscow. This nationalist political platform guaranteed the formation of a powerful fifth column intent on maintaining Georgia’s connection to Russia.
A man of ideas, Gamsakhurdia had little appreciation for the practical mechanics of power. He created an armed “national guard” to protect the politicians and then delegated its leadership to a friend with no military experience. This newly minted general—a sculptor named Tengiz Kitovani—began immediately to acquire weapons and matériel from Soviet armories scattered throughout Georgia. Regrettably, his accumulation of lethal firepower was not subject to any official civilian control. Gamsakhurdia had naively established Kitovani as an authentic warlord and legitimate competitor for supremacy.
Nevertheless, Kitovani and his national guard were neither the largest nor the most menacing independent army marauding through Georgia. That distinction belonged to mafia godfather Jaba Ioseliani and his Horsemen.
As Soviet control of Georgia collapsed, there was a sharp increase in ethnic clashes. Some of this violence was a natural product of long-simmering tensions; some a direct result of Soviet mischief. Ioseliani used these conflicts as an excuse to form a private army called Mkhedrioni. The name (translated in English as “the Horsemen”) had deep cultural resonance for Georgians: it conjured images of Cossacks riding to the rescue of persecuted Christians. However, unlike those fifteenth-century knights, the freebooters in Mkhedrioni did not swear allegiance to state or church. Instead, their oath was to obey Ioseliani alone. In return for this absolute obedience, the Thief in Law agreed to be their benefactor, guaranteeing the profit of their adventure.
Within a few months the mafia chieftain was commanding a heavily armed corps of five thousand opportunists. Weapons for this brigade-sized force—including heavy artillery, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and helicopters—were supplied by Soviet military units stationed in Georgia. Moscow was building a proxy army and expanding a long-standing partnership with the mafia.
In the meantime, as a result of intense pressure from the opposition, Georgia held the USSR’s first democratic multiparty election. The Round Table/Free Georgia bloc won a convincing 64 percent of the votes cast. The Communist Party—also running on a platform of Georgian independence and free market reforms—won 30 percent of the votes cast. However, Gamsakhurdia used his authority as leader of parliament to prevent any of the Communist delegates from participating in the legislative body. His commitment to democracy did not extend to those with whom he disagreed.
On April 9, 1991—the second anniversary of the Tbilisi massacre—the nationalist-dominated parliament declared Georgian independence from the USSR. This was the first time in history that a Soviet republic had left the Union. Secession was an unprecedented event with unpredictable consequences. But the world took little notice. Public attention was (at the time) distracted by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and his subsequent eviction.
A month later Gamsakhurdia was elected president of “independent” Georgia. Ninety percent of the adult population voted and 86 percent of them voted for Gamsakhurdia. Armed with this mandate, the new president began immediately to sever ties with Moscow. He was openly hostile to both Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and his Georgian-born foreign secretary, Eduard Shevardnadze. These two unelected Communist functionaries enjoyed near saintlike status in the West. It was an article of faith among the liberal democracies that anyone who opposed Gorby was by definition bad. Even President George Bush denounced Gamsakhurdia as a man “swimming against the tide.” As a result, the first democratically elected president of Georgia—a political dissident who had been imprisoned by Shevardnadze—was disqualified from Western support because he refused to recognize the virtues of his former jailers.
Gamsakhurdia moved aggressively to check Moscow’s influence in Georgia. He banned the local Communist Party and suspended the process for establishing new political organizations. He prohibited public criticism offending the “honor and dignity” of the president. He dispatched the national guard to South Ossetia to suppress a Russian-backed independence movement. And he stripped Mkhedrioni of its official status as a benevolent rescue corps and declared illegal its private ownership of military-style weapons.
All of this was carefully chronicled and criticized in the West. Politicians and press described Gamsakhurdia as authoritarian, dictatorial, and insane. The NGO Helsinki Watch adjudged his government guilty of “severe violations of human rights.” One of the principal indictments was his arrest of warlord Jaba Ioseliani. The mafia godfather—in jail on weapons charges—had reinvented himself as a political dissident and prisoner of conscience. When Gamsakhurdia declared the mafia chief ineligible to run for president, liberals everywhere were righteously apoplectic.
Two things were becoming apparent: The West would spend no blood or treasure to defend Georgia’s popularly elected president from subversion; and Ioseliani intended to take control of the new republic’s legitimate government.
Gamsakhurdia’s political isolation became more acute after the failed putsch against Gorbachev in 1991. Russian pr
emier Boris Yeltsin proposed that Georgia join a Commonwealth of Independent States. Gamsakhurdia’s vehement refusal provoked crippling economic sanctions by Russia and demonstrations by Tbilisi intellectuals. They accused Gamsakhurdia of fascism. To these formerly privileged members of the One Party elite, the Georgian president’s application of majority rule was just a little too much democracy.
Fearing that a victory by Soviet hardliners would be followed by an attack on Georgia, Gamsakhurdia moved to consolidate his power. He ordered the national guard to turn in its weapons and subordinate itself to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But it was too late. Kitovani liked being a warlord and did not want to surrender his prerogatives. He defied the government and together with about half his troops joined the opposition. Soon an internecine war was raging in the center of Tbilisi. The government and opposition forces were evenly matched until Kitovani liberated Ioseliani from jail. The Mkhedrioni warlord was immediately given leadership of the movement to oust Gamsakhurdia. He ordered his Horsemen to surround the parliament building, where the president was hiding in a Cold War–era bunker. For two weeks they hammered away with cannons, tanks, and bombs. The West—which had been scandalized by Gamsakhurdia’s nonviolent dispersals of illegal demonstrations—said nothing as Mkhedrioni laid waste to the city and killed more than two hundred people.
Georgia’s first democratically elected president was removed by coup d’état on January 6, 1992. After barely eight months in office, Gamsakhurdia fled the country and was replaced by an unholy trinity—Mkhedrioni warlord Jaba Ioseliani; national guard warlord Tengiz Kitovani; and prime minister Tengiz Sigua. However, there was no ambiguity about who sat at the pinnacle of this triumvirate. As Ioseliani said in a frank assessment of his relationship to Kitovani, “In Georgia there came into authority a known Thief over an unknown sculptor.”
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