The Geopolitical Curse of the Caucasus

By Nodar Gabashvili

At the beginning of the book the author intended to explain the reasons of the break up of the USSR, which was necessary to understand well subsequent events in the Caucasus. The author writes of the most important aspects of the policy towards ethnical minorities in the Caucasus by the Tsarist autocracy and the Soviet Communist state. It was necessary to understand well the strategy in the region of Russian post soviet leaders Yeltsin and Putin, after the break up of the USSR. In this manuscript the author made an effort to elucidate the reasons, particularities and consequences of the conflicts in the post Soviet South Caucasus and, first of all in Chechnya and Georgia. He also intended to show that the conflicts in Mountainous Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Chechnya, the separatist regions of the Caucasus, were the events linked between them. The fact is that after having used the democratic and liberal movements of Georgia, of Baltic states and of Russia as a measure to dismantle the Soviet Communist party and the Soviet state, Yeltsin, the president of Russian Federation, began Russia’s traditional policy of dominance of the South Caucasus. The dominance of the South Caucasus and other parts of the former USSR was a measure to confirm the Great power status, a policy necessary to aliment Russian imperial nationalism, used it as a substitute of the communist ideology. Being a historian and journalist, the author gives an analysis of many materials on the subject written in various languages. The fact that the author was a witness to many events in the Caucasus is an opportunity for readers of this book a to better understand the events that are little known so far. This is why some aspects of the events in the region, like those of Georgia, are subjected to a kind of conspiracy of silence. The theme of the Caucasus is important, since the so-called frozen conflicts in the Caucasus, such as in the Mountainous Karabakh, could erupt at any time, which could involve Russia, Iran and Turkey. The author of this book is a journalist and historian from Georgia, which once was one of the republics of the Soviet Union. He participated in the independence and liberal movement of Georgia that won in 1991 the first multiparty elections. He became a Vice Minister of Foreign affairs of the government that declared independence of Georgia from the USSR. After the removing by force of this government he was forced to leave his native country. From 1995 he lived in Rome at first under protection of Vatican and then he was granted political asylum from Italy. Im Italy he has published several a books on history and international relations: “Caucasus and Yugoslavia: Forgotten Wars and Precarious Pacifications“. Stango Editore. 2001, Rome; “Georgia and Rome. 2000 Years of Dialogue between Christians“. Libreria Vaticana, 2003. Rome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nodar Gabashvili
• Release date: Sep 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9788868556815

Book preview

I

The dissolution of the USSR and the search of a new national and geopolitical identity by the post-soviet Russia

A Brief Introduction to Stalinism

Once Stalin, the Soviet leader considered one of the architects of the victory in the war with the Nazi Germany, was very popular in the West. However, after 1945 the name of Stalin and his political methods are in progressive devaluation. According to western encyclopaedias, Stalinism means political monopoly of Communist Party and the use of force, or even of terror, as a method of governing, accompanied by a cult of the main leader. The regime is based on the state property and on the monopoly of bureaucratized planned economy. This state bureaucracy constitutes the exploiter and unique oppressor of the population.

There are paradoxes and strange coincidences in history. The fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's death coincided with the birth of the great British writer George Orwell(1953). Orwell was among those few persons in the West who grasped the essence of the Soviet totalitarian system, created and run by Stalin for thirty years, and to describe it with great satirical spirit. It is evident that in the USSR Orwell's books were prohibited. As far as western Europe, and especially Italy, with the strongest Communist party in a capitalist world, they were ignored or minimized by leftist intellectuals. This is why the anniversary of Stalin's death did not attract great interest of the press and of intellectuals in this country.

In 2003, the anniversary of Stalin's death, Italian State Television showed a documentary film The rise and decline of steel Communism. P. Sinatti, the author of the comments, emphasized Stalin's positive role in defeating Nazism, but his political system andmethods were presented as a negative experience. Nevertheless, there was no explicit condemnation of Stalinism.

There was a completely different documentary film made by Inghe Wolfram and shown by German television several days before Stalin's death anniversary. Although the film had no new data on Stalin's epoch, it made available some not well- known aspects of his personality, beginning from the period of studies in Tbilisi seminary and the last days of his life.

The Russian historian O. Khlevnyuk, known as one of the best experts of Stalin and his Politburo, contributed with his comments and observations to the success of the film. The conclusion of the film on Stalin was very significant: …There is no crime that he did not commit... There is no other human society which has experienced such a criminal tyranny like that suffered by Soviet peoples during Stalin's totalitarianism. So the Soviet leader is presented without the usual extenuating justifications: Yes, a criminal, but…, with various motivations and justifications.

The famous British historian Robert Conquest, the author of The Great Terror, who had no illusions regarding Stalin, made a statement that Stalin may have considered capitalism so inhumane, that it was justified to use all methods, including violence, to destroy it. It is necessary to note that the Bolsheviks denied the traditional morality. For them it was permissible anything that served to the interests of proletariat and its revolution. This conviction allowed them to be merciless with their class enemies.

It was another British historian, Symon Sebag Montefiore, who has tried to give a definite response to this question. He visited Georgia to obtain access to some documents and letters from Stalin's archives. He has no doubt that Stalin's actions were conditioned by his ideology. Stalin believed fanatically that his repressions were necessary to create an ideal society, an utopian reality without social classes. Therefore, for him it is therefore was not Stalin's personality but the Communist ideology to be the driving force of his crimes. This opinion is shared by S. Courtois, one of authors of The Black Book of Communism.

This point of view is not shared by many other historians. They have difficulties establishing whether Stalin's actions were based on his ideological convictions, or he was a mere opportunist full of ambitions and thirst for power. Some of them have doubts whether he ever was a Marxist. The well-known historian Moshe Levin considered Stalin essentially extraneous to Marxism.

The absence of sufficient information and documents makes it impossible to answer some questions regarding Stalin's personality. There is a widespread conviction that as long as the Kremlin's archives are closed, it will be difficult to understand some hidden aspects of Stalin's personality, which influenced his political habits and decision making.5 Indeed, the opening of the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has stimulated historical research of Stalin's period, which has given a possibility to make some important conclusions, such as, practically confirming Conquest's estimates of the number of victims of Stalin's state terrorism.

After having used his colleagues' research, German historian Manfred Hildemaier presented four versions of causes of Stalin's repressions.(1)The first one also presented in the Black book of Communism and shared by some important European specialists of history, emphasizes direct connection between Communist ideology and repressions. The second version explains the cause of Stalin's repressions by his political system, while the third one explains this phenomenon as a result of conditions and contradictions inherent to the Soviet Society. And at the end the terror was explained by the situation of chaos provoked by the difficult transition and aggravated by the struggle for power on various levels of the state.

German experts' interest in Stalin is comprehensible, because the fate of their country was marked by the struggle between Nazism and Communism. German historians are especially interested to compare these ideologies, trying to find out some resemblance between them. There is nothing new in this. Already in the 1930's some European social democrats and liberals began to look for some common elements and aspects between Nazism and Communism, such as the cult of the supreme leader and in one party dictatorship. Their arguments and points of view were driven by political interest and not by the necessity to ascertain the truth.

When Stalin became an ally of democratic states in the war against Nazi Germany, the problem of Communism's essence was set aside in the West, but it came to light after the beginning of the Cold War. Despite that, in some countries of the West, like Italy, France and West Germany, the issue of Stalin's repressions remained marginal, he was for them one of the principal architects of the victory against Nazism. Only after publication of the great Russian writer Solzhenitsyn's works, many western intellectuals began to see Stalin in a different light.

After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in1989, it seemed that the theme of Stalinism would have become a problem of studies without ideological pressure. But in reality these hopes vanished. The well-known historians Alain Besancon and Albert Malia have emphasized the phenomenon of hypermnesia, that is exaggerated interest in Nazism, and amnesia of Communism. (2)

It was Ann Applebaum, the author of a new book on Stalin's Gulag, that has written with indignation that Communism's crimes were forgiven and forgotten. Another historian Timothy Garton Ash emphasizes that the asymmetry of consensus about Nazism and Communism is one of the alarming aspects of our epoch, but he recognizes that Marxism was favoured by the goodness of its intentions. (3)

Hannah Arendt was among the first philosophers of the highest level who tried to give a scientific explanation to the theme of equivalence between Nazism and Communism, these great totalitarianisms of the last century.

German experts F. Maier and Dietrich Beirau are among those who see common elements between Nazism and Communism. For example they point out the presence in these regimes of a common concept of the enemy and the consequent efforts to destroy it; and this as a decisive element to achieve the consensus of masses.

There are historians, like D. Diner, F. Buren, M. Lewin and others, many of them with left wing convictions, who consider Nazism and Communism different ideologies either from the point of view of principles or political actions. They emphasize that unlike Hitler, Stalin disintegrated the state, the party, the political elite, and created a new system adapted to his need of personal rule. These historians note that it is possible to compare Hitler and Stalin as personalities and not their ideologies. They are sure that Stalinism had nothing in common with Marxism, being only a deviation from this ideology.

After Stalin's death, the new Soviet leadership, presided over by Khrushchev, confessed his crimes and errors, explaining it with the character of his personality. For Khrushchev all achievements of the Soviet state were thanks to Marxist-Leninist ideology, while negative experience was the consequence of Stalin's personality. Moshe Lewin, Roy Medvedev, Stephen Cohen, Robert Tucker consider the Stalinism a specific political system that possesses its own history

It seems that born in a poor family of Georgia, colonized and humiliated by Tsarist Russia, Stalin was afflicted by the complex of inferiority that as usual generates paranoia. Notwithstanding this, there are many western and Russian historians who see the direct line between Lenin's policy and that of his successor Stalin ( Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Ulam, Alexandr Soljenitsyn, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others). The patriarch of Russian studies in Italy, V. Strada, has written on this subject: The system of concentration camps, the so- called the Gulag Archipelago, was not in reality Stalin's creation, but flourished from the first days of Soviet power thanks to Lenin's initiative and the whole group of Soviet leaders of that period. These camps later began to spread as a metastases in the country.(4)

The problem of political inheritance is also very important. There was a long period, when European left wing thinkers saw in18th century French revolutionary politician Robespierre the common father of Lenin and Stalin. This was a method to establish direct connexion between the French and Bolshevik revolutions, and so it was possible to link Jacobin's terror with the Gulag, recognized as actions to destroy the past and to set up a new and fair society. This is why the French revolution of 1789 became the idealistic heritage of Communists in various countries, which expressed their loyalty to Soviet leadership.

The French historian F. Furet was the first to emphasize that father of Lenin and Stalin was only Marx, and so it was necessary to dissociate the French revolution from the Russian October revolution of 1917, because it was a bourgeois revolution which conditioned the rising of contemporary liberal democracy.

If the idea of separation between church and state was written in the United States Constitution, the French revolution and its military expansion succeeded to spread this concept through the whole of Europe, and it was a preamble for liberal democracy. On the contrary, there was a different kind of society that was created in the Soviet Union, and it had practically nothing in common with western liberal democracy.

The Russian revolution was in reality a coup d' etat, and initially this was recognized also by Bolshevik leaders. The success of their action was facilitated by the weakness of the bourgeois class in a country with a lack of capitalist experience. The Bolshevik revolution destroyed the embryos of liberal democracy in Russia. So, many liberal intellectuals were either sent to the Gulag or had to flee the Soviet Union.

They did not have great support or compassion from many left wing European intellectuals. The crisis of liberal democracy and capitalism in the 1930's made them look with interest and hope to Stalin's experiment in the USSR. The alliance of the Soviet Union with western democracies in their conflict with Nazi Germany became a great alibi for the past crimes of the dictator. It is surprising that so many western intellectuals remained influenced by the Soviet propaganda machine's camouflage of Stalin's real personality and intentions. The paradox is that even President Roosevelt and his staff had made many concessions to Stalin, being sure of his future conversion to democracy and its rules after the end of the war.

The same sort of illusion and ingenuousness occurred in the 1990s. Strobe Talbott, the former Deputy Secretary of State during Clinton's presidency (from 1994-2001), has written in his book that the American leader erroneously considered president Yeltsin as the only real guarantee of democracy in Russia.(5)

The fact that Yeltsin abolished the Soviet Communist party (August of 1991) and later dissolved the Soviet Union with the promise to recreate a new democratic society assured him a wide western support. This is why Clinton supported and made too many concessions to his Russian friend even in critical situations, when, for example, Yeltsin ordered to bombard the palace of the Soviet supreme, a sort of parliament, which was in disaccord with him.

After that event it became evident that Yeltsin failed to become a true democratic leader, because he did not overcome his authoritarian mentality forged in the illiberal Soviet political hierarchy. It was Yeltsin, who the West hailed as a liberal and democratic leader, who was the first to put people from the security services into Russian politics, and then he anointed a former KGB officer as his successor to guarantee either influence or economic interests of his loyalists, emphasized Russian expert L. Shevtsova. (6)

Former Russian dissident V. Bukovsky reproached Yeltsin for his refusal to implement a previous decision to put on trial the Soviet Communist party, that would have been a step to dismantle the power of the nomenclature ( the political elite of the Soviet Union)) and secret services. It would have been a decisive condition on the road of a definitive de-Stalinisation and democratisation of post-Soviet Russia. On the contrary, Yeltsin crafted the constitution that enshrined the highly centralized, unaccountable, personified power that Putin used to strengthen his power in Russia.

Being a colonel in the KGB, the pillar of Soviet repressive system, Putin has stimulated Stalin's rehabilitation presented in new school textbooks of history as efficient manager and great patriot.(7) At the same time the famous literary books like Doctor Zhivago of Pasternak, The Gulag Archipelago of Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov's short stories, which describe the tragedy of Stalin's epoch, were relegated to the list of works of no importance for students. Many intellectuals expressed their protest against this decision, a sign that Russia, despite many recidivisms of the past, has changed.

Indeed, there are many contradictions in Putin's Russia. There is a well-known organization, Memorial, which has its principle aim to conserve the historical memory of Stalin's purges and repressions. Meanwhile, there are in Russia semi-militarised youth groups sustained by the government, like that of Nashi, with their cult of Stalin as the architect of the Soviet Union's transformation to a superpower.(8)The fact is that Communist ideology, with its expansionist pretensions, favoured Soviet imperialistic projects. As F. Furet wrote: the Communist idea has met imperial power without abandoning anything of its substance(9)

Putin's policy has also ambitious plans to restore Russia's world power status. But Russian history shows that to maintain such a status Russia needed an authoritarian system, and this was the main reason of its backwardness and a hindrance to its modernization. Peter the Great and many other rulers of Russia used to make efforts to take possession of European science and technology, while rejecting its values, and avoiding imitation of European political systems and institutions. The isolation or dominance of the continent was for Russia a guarantee to avoid a possible democratic contamination.

Stalin considered power a sort of religion, a key to radical change of society. Human beings were for him only a means to achieve his aims. Such a complete break between morality and politics, and the concentration of power in the hands of a single person, had very negative consequences. Even Stalin's colleagues understood this and tried in vain, after Stalin's death, to establish a sort of collective leadership.

No politician in the USSR and then in Russia has had, after Stalin's death, such a great power as President Putin. He has assumed a paternalistic attitude to the people, as if he were a Tsar. Such paternalism is in Russian historic tradition. This means that decisions should be made by persons considered the most powerful and intelligent ones, otherwise family and society are exposed to various dangers.

Although political parties, parliament and an election system exist in modern Russia, they are too distant from the western democratic standards. The mechanism of the Russian political system assures dominance of it by Putin and his colleagues of the KGB.(10) Despite this, there were journalists and politicians in the West, who considered that Russia succeeded to change and to make an important step towards democracy. Many Russian liberals and former dissidents, like Sergey Kovaliov, criticized such a tendency to overestimate Putin's political personality. L. Shevtsova considered Putin's political system a half–baked autocratic regime or pseudo democracy, more dangerous and destructive than the pure autocracy Russians suffered under for decades.(11)

L. Shevtsova is right when she emphasizes that authoritarian or totalitarian regimes at some point create a longing for freedom. Imitation democracies , on the other hand, only serve to discredit liberal democratic institutions and principles, and the citizens living within them may at some point actually prefer a real iron hand… The West has to decide whether it wants cosy relations with the Kremlin, or whether it wants Russia to be free." (12)

At the end it would be interesting to emphasize a coincidence. 2003 became the year of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, a totalitarian state inspired by Stalinism's model. (13) The president of Iraq never hid his admiration for Stalin and tried to imitate him.

Dissent and Dissidents in the USSR

The Russian Tsars' abdication on 25 February 1917 was the result of a movement of mass protest, because of sufferings provoked by the war with Germany. In this really democratic revolution, Bolsheviks were practically absent, but they were the only party that exploited it as an occasion to seize the power and to impose a new authoritarian rule in Russia. Several months later Bolsheviks organized a coup d' etat, later called by them the Great October Socialist Revolution.

It was Lenin's tactics for seizure of power in Russia that many leading Russian intellectuals, like the patriarch of Russian Social Democrats, G. Plekhanov, were against. They were sure that Bolshevik experiment in a rural county (peasants in Tsarist Russia were 80-85 percent of the population) and insufficient political culture signified a new tyranny. They reminded that Marx had predicted that communism would come in the most advanced capitalist countries, not in backward Russia.

Some members of the Bolshevik party's leadership, like Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, also considered the seizure of power premature and were against. Lenin insisted that it was necessary not to miss a historical possibility to seize the power and to decide after what to do with it.

Many Bolsheviks were against the Treaty of Brest- Litovsk Peace (3 March 1918) with Germany, which conceded a part of the Russian empire to the enemy. Lenin, who had had with Germans secret negotiations and agreements, succeeded to impose his will by threatening his resignation or demise.

The absence of an established and agreed upon strategy was one of the reasons of internal dissent in the party that later transformed into a struggle for power. Stalin expelled from the party and then from the USSR his left wing rival Trotsky, the adept of an idea of permanent revolution, who proposed the strategy of transforming of the USSR into sort of a great military stronghold to carry out the export of revolution to other countries. Stalin also defeated Bukharin's right wing of the Bolshevik party, with its proposal to permit citizens to have private businesses and enrich themselves, which signified conservation in the Soviet economy of some mechanisms of capitalism.

At the beginning Stalin was rather magnanimous with his rivals in the Bolshevik party, also because he took in consideration the importance of European public opinion, where Communist parties were rising in influence. The advent of Nazism in Germany lowered the moral climate in European politics, which facilitated Stalin's state terrorism strategy. It was a great terror not only against common citizens, but also against many members of the Bolshevik party. So he repressed all Bolshevik leadership and created his own obedient political elite. The party was transformed into a monolithic organization that submitted to Stalin's strategy and decisions, considered by his sympathizers as a necessity to resist Nazism's aggression. However, after Stalin's death it became obvious that the party's unanimous character was an illusion.

Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev carried out the policy of partial de- Stalinization. His destruction of Stalin's cult was not only a method to legitimise himself to the detriment of his more famous predecessor, considered one of the architects of Nazism's defeat. Khrushchev's de-Stalinization was also an attempt of bureaucracy to establish the rules of promotion and eviction from power of members of the political elite, without using Stalin's extreme repressive methods. When Khrushchev's opponents were pushed out of Politburo, they had a possibility to conserve their civil rights and pensions, impossible in Stalin's period with its practice of the death sentence.

Khrushchev's de-Stalinization was also a signal that the USSR wanted détente with the West and intended to concentrate efforts on economy, and, therefore, to resolve agricultural problems. His slogan that the USSR wanted to reach and to leave behind the USA in the production of milk, butter and meat had a boomerang effect on Soviet citizens, who were convinced by Soviet propaganda of Communism's supremacy. More informed after Khrushchev's efforts to weaken Soviet isolation from the external world, they began to understand the difference of their country with the western states, first of all from the point of view of quality of life.

The problem, however, was not only the deficit of agricultural products. Many representatives of Soviet intelligentsia suffered more from censorship and restriction on intellectual freedom in a country where Communist ideology had a full monopoly.

The phenomenon of the intelligentsia was a result of some particularities of Russian historical development of the 19th century. It was a social layer of lawyers, teachers, doctors and other intellectual professions, often of humble origin, who were bearers of special moral qualities. In the situation of Russia's backwardness compared with the liberal development of European countries, the intelligentsia had played a role of mediation between Tsarist authorities and common people, a kind of protection for them.

The intelligentsia also had a critical attitude towards authorities that created an intellectual atmosphere for the great development in 19th century of Russian literature and some limited progress of civil society. So at the beginning of the last century, Russia had a multi-party system, journalists and politicians of high quality, and great writers like Tolstoy, Chekhov, Blok, Bunin, Kuprin and others. The Bolshevik revolution was a turning point in this efforts to approach towards Europe's liberal standards. The Bolsheviks outlawed political parties, being especially severe with Russia's social democratic party, with which once they had been assembled in the same party.(14) They also dismantled the system of free press and the judicial system and, therefore, compelled thousands of persons of intellectual professions and of a high level of education to emigrate and to escape from illiberal policies of the Bolsheviks. Such a brain drain from Russia, with the consequent intellectual impoverishment of the nation, was not a great problem for the Bolsheviks. They created their own intelligentsia inculcating in them obedience to Marxist- Leninist ideology and conformism. In spite of this, a part of the new scientific and cultural elite succeeded to conserve some traditions of Russian intelligentsia. The best representatives of this elite later became dissidents.

Bolsheviks gave preference to the formation of scientific research specialists, because they wanted to gain economic and military supremacy over capitalist countries and to export their model of society. Some of these specialists achieved such a high intellectual level that they were able to make a valid critical analysis of various aspects of the Soviet system. It became evident for them that Soviet society needed changes. So began the cultural and political activities of V. Bukovsky, A. Solzhenitsyn, A. Sakharov, specialists of physics, mathematics and biology, who became leaders of the Russian dissident movement, which began its activities in the USSR in the 1960s. A paradox is that the Soviet leader Khrushchev's policy paved the way to the rise of an anti-communist dissident movement.

Historically, dissidents were persons who did not share existing religious dogmas and rules, openly challenging them. In the Soviet Union, those called dissidents were persons who openly challenged the Soviet ideology and system. They were not afraid to be defenders of human rights and to denounce the system that did not permit elementary rights. The citizens had not the right to choose their place of residence, to go abroad to visit foreign countries and to emigrate, the permission to demonstrate and to strike. There was no liberty of press or free parliamentary elections, which signified the lack of legal access to political institutions. The USSR was a totalitarian state, therefore, to be a dissident was to become an object of heavy repressions. This is why there was a limited number of dissidents in the USSR, and so the word dissident became the synonym of hero.

The Soviet leader Khrushchev dared to criticise his predecessor Stalin only after his death. His revelations of Stalin's crimes in the background of declining economic and social conditions, while western countries experienced a period of great development, had an effect of awakening many members of the intelligentsia from their previous illusions.

Khrushchev's partial de-Stalinisation was also a great positive stimulus to literary works as a possibility to revaluate Stalin's past. The novel of B. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago were a great disappointment to the party's leadership, that based their propaganda on the thesis that Stalin's crimes were the result of his personality and errors. Pasternak's and Solzhenitsyn's books showed that Bolshevism was inspired by Jacobinism's justification of violence for political goals, and so Stalin's repressions were only a continuation of policies which began with the Bolshevik revolution and were in the nature of its ideology.

Khrushchev's successor, L Brezhnev, prohibited Solzhenitsyn's books and in 1974 expelled him from the USSR. He banned Khrushchev from public life and carried out a partial re-Stalinisation, a step considered necessary to avoid a break-down of the Soviet empire. The events in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed that such a possibility really existed. So Brezhnev gave the order to crush the dissident movement in the USSR. In 1976 the chief of the KGB, Andropov, announced that this movement no longer existed, but he was wrong. A decade later the USSR did not exist any more, although no efforts were spared to save the communist state.

Many dissidents were arrested, others, like A. Solzhenitsyn, were compelled to emigrate. Andropov introduced also a method of compulsory psychiatric cure of dissidents, based on consideration that dissent was a sort of mental disease.

It was very difficult for Andropov to use against Russian physicist and dissident Sakharov the methods employed against other dissidents, because he had great consideration for the regard of Soviets who were famous abroad. Being the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, Sakharov had made a key contribution to the transformation of the USSR into a super power, but later he was among those who contributed to the break -down of the USSR. The fact is that, instead of enjoying his high social status and privileges, he became one of the most authoritative critics of the Soviet government and the whole political system of the USSR.

There were few persons that knew better than Sakharov the danger of nuclear arms for the very existence of human beings. This is why for him it was necessary to combine scientific development with ethics. The totalitarian Soviet system, with its concentration of power in the hands of several leaders freed from control of society, was able to facilitate tensions and conflicts, made even more dangerous because of the presence of nuclear weapons. Democratisation of the USSR was a condition expected to lower the danger of a possible nuclear conflict.

The danger of a nuclear conflict between the West and the Soviet Union was aggravated by an ideological confrontation as a result of the Soviet anti-capitalist Marxist-Leninist philosophy. So the Soviet Union had to reject its anti-capitalist messianic idea, especially of the world Communist revolution, that had been a justification of expansionism, and had augmented the Cold War spirit.

To avoid a situation of the Soviet Union's unilateral concessions to the West, Sakharov proposed the concept of convergence between Capitalism and Socialism. The western countries had to accept some socialist concepts, like that of tutelage of political and social rights of the working population, in exchange for the Soviet Union's democratisation. The Soviet Union had the right to conserve some elements of its system not in contradiction with democracy and human rights, but could avoid excessive liberalisation of its economy, in contradiction with its traditions.

Sakharov was sure that democratic countries were less inclined to use military force than totalitarian ones. The United States' democratic system made it more difficult for this country to exploit its military supremacy over other states, including the USSR. For example, the United States did not use their supremacy to liberate North Korea from Communism. They used their military might only to restore the situation of the Korean peninsula's division, existing before the war. When general Macarthur had tried to convince American public opinion of the necessity to escalate the war in Korea, he got the sack from President Truman, and it was a proof that the military was under the control of political institutions.

The United States had all possibilities to win in Vietnam, but had to withdraw their troops, due to the pressure of public opinion, that was against the conflict. United States never dared to send their troops to occupy Castro's Communist Cuba. May be such American reticence to use its military force in Cuba affected Khrushchev's decision to install nuclear missiles there in 1962, a decision that created a real possibility of nuclear conflict between the USA and USSR. Only president Kennedy's diplomatic capability and Khrushchev's concession, who knew from his personal experience the tragedy of any war, made it quite possible to avoid a nuclear catastrophe.

Khrushchev's compromising spirit was also the result of American supremacy in both quality and quantity of nuclear missiles ( four to one). This is why the Soviet Union under Brezhnev made enormous efforts with the aim to achieve nuclear parity with the United States. The USA permitted it, although economically it was much stronger than the USSR. The parity between the USA and USSR, an equilibrium of nuclear fear, seemed a guarantee of prevention of a conflict between them.

Having achieved parity and exploited America's rising isolationism after Vietnam's defeat, the Soviet Union began its policy of stimulation of revolutionary movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, that was nothing other than justifications of its expansionism. However, the Soviet economic weakness and Reagan's more assertive policy rendered impossible the Soviet Union's victory in the Cold War.

Unlike in the USA, Soviet leadership was free of control of an elected parliament or public opinion. On the contrary, the Soviet Politburo had mass- media and public opinion under its total control. This is why the Soviet Union invaded without hesitation Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia(1968) and Afghanistan (1979), carrying out these actions with the pretext of defence of socialist values.

After the intervention in Czechoslovakia, only eight Soviet dissidents dared to go to Red square to demonstrate their protest, and they were immediately arrested by KGB. Later, only Sakharov and several other dissidents expressed their disapproval of the intervention in Afghanistan. All of them, excluding Sakharov, were arrested. Sakharov was sent to Gorky, a city on the river Volga. He lived there, with his wife E. Bonner, in an apartment under surveillance of KGB and without the right to leave.

Notwithstanding such limitations, Sakharov sometimes succeeded to have contacts with western journalists. He influenced western European governments' decision to install American medium range missile as a response to the Soviet Union's previous measures of the same kind.

The Soviet missiles were aimed at the most important capitals of western Europe, and it was a kind of political pressure on them. There were persons in Politburo who believed in a possibility of Soviet military and political dominance of western Europe, based on its nuclear supremacy. They were sure that America was so weakened after Vietnam that it did not want to risk a nuclear conflict with the USSR to defend Europe from invasion by Soviet ground forces.

There were also many persons in the West that also believed in the Soviet Union's supremacy and its imminent conquest of the continent. They even proposed a defeatist slogan: better red than dead. Such an attitude was based on opinion diffused in some western circles of the Soviet Union's imminent dominance of Europe, because of its political and economic supremacy.

When the West decided to install its missiles, it signified the readiness of Europeans to defend their liberty. This decision was also influenced by Sakharov's articles in which he revealed the deficiencies of Soviet political and, especially, economic systems, considered the result of subjugating economics and sciences to political and ideological control of the party.

The myopia of the Soviet Communist party was to obstruct the development of those branches of science, such as sociology, cybernetics, genetics or sociology, which were considered in contradiction with the monopolistic Marxist-Leninist ideology. This is why Stalin's authorities gave support to the theory of Professor Lysenko. His use of pseudo-scientific methods had very negative results for agriculture. Indeed, such a subordination to of science to ideology was not so innocuous as it might have seemed. Many non-conformist Soviet scientists became victims of Stalin's purges, among them physicists Liepunsky, Obremov, Berg, and Landau.

Landau, a real genius of physics, was saved thanks to the appeal of a great Russian scientist, Pyotr Kapitsa, to Stalin. The argument was that Landau was necessary to strengthen Soviet military capability. Indeed, Landau later became the author of a mathematical calculation necessary to create nuclear bombs.

After Stalin's death, when the system of repression was not the same as before, Landau gave up his work for the military industry because he was reluctant to contribute to the strengthening of Soviet totalitarianism.

Landau's decision and his personality in general had a great influence on Sakharov's transformation into a dissident, conditioned by his rising doubts about the efficiency of the Soviet political system and planned economy. One day he even asked, with some naiveté (or even possibly the idea that he could have some influence with this particular man), the director of the Soviet nuclear program and one of the chief's of KGB, Lavrenti Beria: Why are our programs carried out with such a slowness? Why are we always late in comparison with the United States and other nations? Why, in the technological race, are we are behind them? Only years later, Sakharov was able to find answers to these questions: the backwardness of the USSR was a consequence of insufficient democratic structures of the government, of the impossibility to manage the economy by administration methods, of the absence of intellectual liberty, of the lack of adequate information and facts at the disposal of the population. (15)

It may seem strange that Sakharov had such conversations on Soviet problems with a KGB general who persecuted persons with a critical mind. Being well informed of deficiencies of Soviet system, Beria tried to find some solution to them. His proposal to contribute to the reunification of Germany, could have been a measure to find compromise with capitalist countries and receive some necessary financial aid to reform the USSR. Some of Beria's ideas resembled those of Gorbachev's perestroika, but were premature. (16) Beria was accused of treason and sentenced to death. It is possible that his proposal to introduce a real federal system and to give more rights to Soviet republics could have saved the USSR from the break up

Perestroika became possible after Gorbachev's entry to the Kremlin in 1985. One of his first decisions was to invite Sakharov from exile. Sakharov and other dissidents were ready to contribute to the renewal of the society. It was natural for them, also because perestroika's concepts resembled ideas expressed in Sakharov's writings. But soon it became evident that Gorbachev intended to improve and save the system and not to transform it. This is why, instead of reforming the KGB and diminishing its power, an idea several times expressed by Sakharov, Gorbachev used this organization as an instrument of controlling a partial liberalization process in the country.

Sakharov proposed to Gorbachev to reform the KGB and to put it under control of society. He saw it as a method to involve the intelligentsia and members of various layers of society in the process of a real democratisation.

There were also other dissidents who, like Sakharov, began to be disappointed by perestroika's deliberately insufficient democratic process. Sergei Kovaliov, one of the most influential former Soviet dissidents, saw in perestroika only an action of fictitious democratisation to convince western countries to aid the Soviet economic difficulties. He had the chance to obtain a Politburo document of 10 December 1987, signed by leading architects of perestroika. like Foreign Minister E. Shevardnadze, a member of Politbiuro A. Yakovlev, and KGB chief V. Kryuchkov. This document presented Kovaliov and other dissidents as subversive persons and, therefore, a threat to the state. So it was found necessary to obstruct the conference on human rights sponsored by these dissidents. But the KGB had to act with caution so as not to attract the attention of the western mass–media. (17)

This document of Kovaliov could be a key to comprehend what happened in Georgia, one of the republics of the USSR, in 1991. After 70 years of Soviet Communism, there was an elected parliament in multi-party elections. The victory of the coalition of parties bent on achieving independence paved the way to the election of its leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia, former Soviet dissident, to the post of president. This specialist of Christian and English literature, philologist and writer had great support of a part of the population and intelligentsia. They remembered well his dissident activities in the period of E. Shevardnadze's rule in Georgia. Being one of the founders of Helsinki's Group of Human Rights, he was jailed and put on trial by Shevardnadze's order.

Gamsakhurdia's movement's aim was to achieve independence from the Soviet Union with democratic and non-violent methods. This is why his election was not good news for Shevardnadze and many of the nomenclature. The Soviet authorities, and especially the KGB, that still controlled Georgia, permitted Gamsakhurdia's election, because it was necessary to show to the West Soviet Union's democratic metamorphosis. At the same time, Georgia was for the Kremlin the show case that independentist movements contained the virus of nationalism that menaced national minorities inside Soviet republics. So the West had to support Soviet President Gorbachev and the integrity of the USSR.

It seemed that the clashes between Georgians and Ossetians in South Ossetia's region, which declared its separation from Georgia, confirmed this point of view. Gamasakhurdia had limited power and did not control special forces, so he made appeal to central Soviet authorities to intervene. The Soviet authorities response was to ignore his appeal, and instead to use the situation to manipulate for its own purposes.

This was one of reasons why, on 9 April 1991, Georgia declared unilateral independence, which, however, was not recognized by the Kremlin. On March of the same year Gamsakhurdia had a meeting with the president of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin, who took positive measures to stabilize the situation in South Ossetia, recognizing the region as a part of Georgia. (Yeltsin supported independent movements of Georgia and the Baltic states, those considered necessary in his struggle for power with Soviet president Gorbachev).

In August of 1991, Gorbachev and Yeltsin recognized the Baltic states' independence and not that of Georgia. In September, there began in Georgia protest demonstrations of some elements of the nomenclature and of extra-parliamentary political forces, that tried to compel Gamsakhurdia and the parliament to resign, but had no support from the population. Gamsakhurdia also succeeded to conserve a stable situation in the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia and in regions with Armenian and Azeri minorities in Georgia.

In November of 1991, E. Shevardnadze became again the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR. It was not a mere coincidence that in this period, when many western correspondents participated in a denigration campaign against Gamsakhurdia carried out by the Soviet press, he was presented as a nationalist and a person with authoritarian tendencies. Therefore, the military insurrection against Gamsakhurdia on 22 December 1991 and its victory in Tbilisi was not perceived in many western countries as an action against a legally elected president and parliament.

In March of 1992, Shevardnadze returned from Moscow to Tbilisi and became the chief of Military council, and praised those in the intelligentsia who had taken up arms against Gamsakhurdia. In reality the major part of the insurgents were persons of the privileged Soviet political class. This is why in Georgia, since Gamsakhurdia's ouster from power, there was never carried out a lustration of former KGB agents, and the restriction for them to have access to high posts in government administration, as had happened in Eastern European countries. There was no political or juridical re-evaluation of the communist past, the archives regarding the Soviet period repressions remained closed.

It was well-known