Abkhazia

I doubt many have heard of Abkhazia, let alone could point to where it is on a map. Frankly, this is not without good reason, because this relatively obscure Black Sea enclave of around a quarter of a million people is deeply poor and lacked any major industrial or military function during the Soviet period. Yet Abkhazia assumed heightened significance when it fought for its independence from Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of many such borderland conflicts, and then reached the acme of its geopolitical import in 2008, when Putin sent troops into this republic, as well as South Ossetia. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many retrospectively came to see these incursions as an early warning sign of Russia’s revanchist ambitions.

It was this top-down geopolitical lens that inspired my trip to Abkhazia and the Caucasus more broadly. And while I normally implore readers to do more historical sightseeing, this was probably the most niche I’ve ever done – especially when considering the cost and aggro of getting here. To be clear, it was a fantastic trip and absolutely worthwhile, but only for those that are especially fascinated by the geopolitics of the region.

Before I dive into Abkhazia, I want to briefly recount my experience of travelling to Russia during the war. This is not a paid advertisement and, as much as I like his movies, nor am I looking for citizenship, as was awarded to Steven Seagal. Yet I have never subscribed to the view that visiting countries whose politics you disagree with somehow legitimises their conduct or provides meaningful financial support; the Russian war machine would rage on just fine without my roubles. It might just be my nature, but if I disagree with someone I’m even more inclined to try to understand their viewpoint – not least in a country as vast and diverse as Russia. Having spent over two weeks in the country, I have to say my experience has only been positive. I don’t think Russians are the warmest nationality I’ve ever encountered, but any local that I’ve interacted with has only been polite and curious.

What I was really impressed by were my immigration experiences. Abkhazia and South Ossetia probably have the most sensitive borders in Russia, save for the war front. Both require a multi-entry Russian visa, which has a more onerous application process than for standard single entry, as well as their own individual entry permits. So when at the Abkhazia border I was pulled into a room with four Russian soldiers for forty minutes, I was understandably a little apprehensive. One took my phone, unlocked and out of my line of sight, while another asked me questions that moved between routine and random. My instinct was to remain truthful throughout, and I would advise anyone else to do the same. All of my interviewers were polite and pleasant. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that they were big cuddly teddy bears, but they never made me feel uncomfortable. Fundamentally, this is an orderly country, and if you respect the rules and its people you will be fine, which frankly isn’t that different from most places in the world. That said, it’s a massive faff and I was very pleased to have booked this as part of an organised tour, which handled all the logistics and meant there was a Russian-speaking guide on standby in case of communication breakdown. I’m sure you can do it solo if you really want, but you’ll get far less from it without someone possessing local knowledge and the language.

Emerging from this ordeal, expectations were understandably high. However, I think it would be fair to say that Abkhazia is an interesting place, rather than one that has many places of interest. This owes to a few factors. Firstly, it was not terribly important historically. There aren’t any major industries here. Abkhazia was essentially just a nice Black Sea resort for Tsarist and Soviet elites; Stalin alone had five dachas here. The second reason is the war in the 1990s, which both caused destruction at the time but also immiserated this already poor republic thereafter, due to hard borders on both the Russian and Georgian sides being imposed that weren’t lifted until the following century.

So if you’re looking for towering monuments and brutalist architecture, you won’t find it here; museums are also pretty basic or non-existent. Candidly, this came as a surprise and I initially chafed a little that a decent chunk of the itinerary was allocated to nature or fairly historically extraneous sites like monasteries. These were nice enough, but hardly justified the difficulties of getting here. For this reason, the learning was a slower, subtler process than I’m normally used to. Nothing I saw occasioned any great epiphanies, but the gradual process of osmosis over my few days here did illuminate some very interesting food for thought.

I’ll start with the non-political sites. The two nature highlights were Lake Ritsa and New Athos Cave. Both remain pretty major tourist attractions for Russians. Along with a striking abandoned Soviet sanatorium I explored, they provided a vivid window into Soviet travel and cultural life. I particularly enjoyed New Athos Cave, a vast Soviet-era attraction for which you get to take a wonderfully incongruous underground electric railway deep into the mountain. Additionally, I thought the food was generally good and well-suited to my dietary requirements: quite simple and rustic, but fresh, meat and carb-heavy and, crucially, largely nut and sesame free. If this is what I have to look forward to in Georgia when I visit in a few weeks, then I’ll eat like a champ.

The most culturally immersive experience I had was lunch at a traditional peasant home. It’s not the kind of activity I normally go for but, being on a group tour, I kept an open mind. This was really tested at points, most notably being fed a slice of goat’s face, complete with bits of teeth still in it, proudly displayed on the table. Suffice to say it wasn’t my bag and had to be washed down with copious amounts of home-brewed wine that was characteristically potent.

Now onto the good stuff. We went to a couple of abandoned mining towns, which had a very eerie aesthetic. This was my second trip to Russia and first outside of Moscow and St Petersburg. Listening to former miners pine for the good old days of the Soviet Union was fascinating. The Soviet Union explicitly aspired to match Western living standards; seeing photos of the town before its deindustrialisation and ruin, it’s clear that even its successes were a pretty spectacular failure. However, what followed was undoubtedly even worse. The town of Akarmara has been almost completely abandoned, with a real echo of Britain’s industrial north in the 1980s. And while this isn’t a novel perspective, you can certainly understand that if there are thousands of such towns dotted across the former Soviet Union, why many in Russia are wistful about it and supportive of more revanchist politics.

In terms of inhabited places, we saw a couple but, as Abkhazia is incredibly small and rural, the only major one was the capital: Sukhumi. It’s a city that bears the scars of war but also in many ways defied my expectations. The main promenade is lovely, even more so when lit up at night, populated by handsome neo-classical buildings from the Tsarist era that face out towards the Black Sea. You can follow this all the way along to the presidential building, which is the first I’ve ever seen without gates or guards. I asked my guide how this was possible and apparently a previous president had built some, but this was reversed when he was kicked out of office. I think this is worth dwelling on for a moment because it really speaks to Abkhazian politics and their sense of self. Although there was a profusion of flags and monuments to the conflict throughout the republic, which is understandable given the toll, it did not feel militaristic at all. I think I saw one police officer during my three days here and barely any Russian flags. Once you cross the border, there’s very little to suggest this is one of the most sensitive borders in Russia. Moscow’s control of Abkhazia is undeniably considerable, yet such a top-down lens can overlook the meaningful degree of agency the people of Abkhazia have within their republic. Unlike in other sensitive republics such as Chechnya, it suggests a more secure and relaxed posturing, and a deft handling of relations with Moscow.

The first war in Abkhazia (1992-93) was fought between the Georgian government, with some paramilitary backing, and a coalition of Abkhaz separatists and North Caucasian militants. Abkhazia occupied a fairly unique position in the Soviet Union, as an autonomous republic situated within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Demographically, it was around 46% Georgian, 18% Abkhaz and the rest a mix of Russians, Armenians et al. In the dying days of the Soviet Union in March 1991, a referendum was held in each republic on whether to remain part of a “renewed federation”. The Georgian population, including those in Abkhazia, boycotted the referendum. However, Abkhazia’s non-Georgian population participated, resulting in a 99% vote in favour with a 52% turnout. Not a resounding victory by any measure, but – as I was at pains to remind “remoaners” after the Brexit referendum – absolutely a plurality of votes.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: political upheaval in a constitutionally ambiguous multi-ethnic region couldn’t have ended well, and you’d be right. After a brief flirtation with power-sharing, fighting broke out in August 1992 and would continue until September the following year. To take Moscow out of the equation for the moment, I think this raises some really interesting questions about sovereignty and the right of a people to self-determination.

When I first read about this conflict, my sympathy was squarely with Georgia who, alongside its neighbours, had seemingly been bullied by the big bear. This is undoubtedly true, not just in relation to Russia’s interventions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but also its broader skullduggery in Georgian politics. Yet I’ve left Abkhazia with a fairly strong feeling that Georgia is almost as guilty of doing the same to this small republic. Until its independence, Georgia had been part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union for nearly two centuries. It has a strong national identity, underpinned by language, culture and deep historic connection to land. However, this does not apply uniformly across territorial boundaries that, whether Georgians like it or not, were determined by Moscow, not them. Clearly, with 46% of the republic Georgian before the outbreak of war, Abkhazia was very Georgian. But that is not a majority. As a Brit, I can’t help but look to Northern Ireland and imagine the uproar if Catholics became a majority of the population and voted to leave the UK, and London responded with tanks and artillery barrages.

The truth is that Georgia, like many countries when they gain their independence, was deeply nationalistic and, concomitantly, maximalist in its territorial ambitions. If the Soviet Union had given them Abkhazia and South Ossetia, then that is what their leadership felt they were entitled to. Yet they overplayed their hand in 1992, unable to realise those ambitions militarily and, as I will discuss in my South Ossetia blog, again in 2008. You can’t pick and choose which liberal principles suit you. Either you believe in the sovereignty of peoples and their right to self-determination, or you operate by a more Hobbesian calculus that acknowledges the balance of power and makes decisions accordingly – but I’m not sure you can ride roughshod over a referendum and then cry foul when somebody else intervenes in your politics.

Now, let’s bring Moscow in. I think many are guilty of projecting post-Ukraine Russia onto early post-Soviet conflicts and, while there are clearly some continuities, it elides considerable nuance. Firstly, to state the obvious, Vladimir Putin played no part in the first Abkhaz conflict – he was a mid-ranking official in St Petersburg at this time. Yeltsin was a very different president and inherited a very different hand when he took power. Russia was a basket case in the early 1990s: economically tumultuous, endemically corrupt and facing looming insurgencies in places like Chechnya. Abkhazia was probably not high on Moscow’s list of priorities. And while there was undoubtedly sympathy for them which manifested in intelligence sharing and arms supplies, there was also a lot of “Russian” support that may not have been directed from Moscow. As happened across the Russian federation at this time, corrupt and disillusioned soldiers sold weapons to the highest bidders illegally, which both Georgians and Abkhazians took advantage of. The North Caucasian soldiers that fought alongside Abkhazia, although Russian by nationality, were the exact kind of people that would later take up arms against Moscow in the subsequent Chechen wars.

Yet a slightly benign chaos reading does not alone explain this picture. It has since come to light that as the Soviet Union disintegrated, its leadership deliberately sought to foment separatism in breakaway regions across the former republics as a tool for keeping successor states weak and pliant. There’s always a danger of overcorrecting into accepting Soviet-era self-mythology – the image of an omniscient, all-controlling Moscow pulling strings across the Russosphere – when the reality of the 1990s was frequently one of improvisation and muddle. What seems most defensible is that there were structural incentives to keep Georgia unstable, with ethno-Russian sympathy operating as a permissive background condition that let individual commanders and factions within a fractured security apparatus freelance support to Abkhaz and North Caucasian fighters. This falls short of the clean, centrally directed intervention of 2008, though even that contrast shouldn’t be overdrawn: 2008 likely involved Russia exploiting a pretext Saakashvili handed it rather than manufacturing the conflict outright. The real difference between ’92-93 and 2008 may be less about whether Russia was “directing” events than about how overt it was willing to be, given how much stronger its position had become by the later date.

For those unaware, Yeltsin’s office issued a statement in August 1991, before the Soviet Union had even formally dissolved, reserving Russia’s right to revise borders with any republic that left the union. At the subsequent press conference, his press secretary Voshchanov named four territories Moscow had in mind: Abkhazia, Crimea, Donetsk and Northern Kazakhstan. Three of the four have since been invaded or annexed. Draw your own conclusions.

I want to be unequivocally clear that I do not condone Putin’s wars of aggression against Russia’s neighbours. But I also believe that convictions are generally underpinned by a degree of truth and that the borders of the Soviet Union, which from the perspective of those who drew them were simply symbolic, were clearly ill-conceived and unfair on Russian speakers. There is an awful echo of the 1930s in this. Although comparisons between Hitler and Putin are facile and threadbare, I think more tactful Georgian politicians would have determined that Russia was unprecedentedly weak in that period and would always eventually reassert itself, using that recovered strength to right what it perceived as historic wrongs. We may have deluded ourselves for a time in our post-Berlin Wall reverie that great power competition is a relic of the past and that actors within the international community would henceforth play nicely, yet there was a real risk-reward calculation to be made by Georgian politicians on two occasions now, and it looks like both times they made the wrong call.

To finish the story, the second war in 2008 was really a spillover from the South Ossetian conflict, which I’ll give proper airtime to in the next post. Essentially, separatist forces, backed by an emboldened and more capable Russia, quickly consolidated control over Abkhazia and recognised its independence. For the people of Abkhazia, however, this left them in a kind of limbo.

Ultimately, Abkhazia’s future remains an open question. Independence in any meaningful sense is probably not viable for a republic of 250,000 with a shattered economy and a high risk of closed borders on both sides. Georgia has made noises about reconciliation yet has done little to earn the trust of a population with whom it has fought violently twice in most people’s living memory. Russia is an imperfect guarantor, nobody’s first choice, but for most Abkhazians, it seems, is preferable to the alternative. Whether Moscow will ultimately decide annexation serves its interests better than the current ambiguity is a question I’ll return to when I get to South Ossetia.