책冊

Book Reviews – Focusing on Articles Related to Georgia (Gruziya)

Robert Kaplan, after graduating with an English degree from a regional American university, worked for a small newspaper in Vermont. In the late 1970s, watching the Lebanese Civil War on the nightly news, he dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent, but no major newspaper would hire him. Eventually, he traveled the Mediterranean with just a backpack, settling in a slum in Athens, where the cost of living was low and it was easy to move to conflict zones like the Middle East and Afghanistan. He barely made a living by selling foreign news articles here and there, and if his manuscripts didn't sell, he would even sell his blood to make ends meet.

He was not someone who traveled only between major cities on business class flights, like a diplomat or a global corporate executive. He traveled overland, frequenting dilapidated buses and train restrooms where the pipes were exposed like intestines. Walking the roads this way, he realized how geography and culture define human destiny, and he learned that geopolitics is a discipline understood not from a desk, but from the soles of one's feet. And he predicted that when the Cold War ended, peace would not come; instead, the nationalism suppressed under the Cold War's oppression would erupt again.

He traveled the Balkans and wrote *Balkan Ghosts*, a book famous for reportedly influencing President Bill Clinton's intervention in the Yugoslav Civil War. The reason I like Kaplan is that while he lyrically describes the landscapes he passes through, he simultaneously reveals the harshness of human nature and the cruelty of power hidden behind those beautiful scenes. It's similar to the style of Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who, after beheading Japanese invaders, calmly recorded the windy sea in his *Nanjung Ilgi* (War Diary).

For Kaplan, travel is not just movement. Travel allows one to see new landscapes, and new landscapes bring new hope. Meeting new people is like seeing new landscapes. There is always a companion on his journeys. It is the voice of the soul that comes from within us, and when that voice is lost, the classics left by people of the past take its place.

I remember wandering aimlessly during my college days, watching a 500-won movie at the French Cultural Center in Samcheong-dong, and then roaming the corridors of the old Joseon Government-General building, which was then used as the National Museum of Korea. A brief conversation I had with a woman I met by chance at an art exhibition, whose name I no longer remember, remains an endless landscape of memories, distorted with the passage of time. People become more anxious as they get older. However, Kaplan's books, which awaken our desire for the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East, places we have not yet visited, give us hope that we can still be young. One such book is 『To the Tartar Steppe』, written after traveling through the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central Asia immediately after the Cold War.

The reason I am so attached to this book is that it awakens my experience of traveling through Central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Syria, and Israel for six months immediately after the Cold War when I was young, and allows me to continuously reinterpret that experience. By reinterpreting the landscape immediately after the Cold War, I have come to a deeper understanding of the essence of geopolitics and the technological hegemony war that has revived in the Trump era. 『To the Tartar Steppe』 contains an impressive article about Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first president of Georgia.

Georgia, the land where East and West meet

Georgia is a country located between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea. It was a crossroads that had to be passed to go from Xi'an, China, along the Silk Road, through northern Persia, to Rome. In ancient times, it was called the Kingdom of Iberia, and it is a country with its own unique alphabet and a long Christian tradition. This country adopted Christianity as its state religion in the early 4th century, even earlier than the Roman Empire.

The Caucasus was originally a place where hundreds of languages and ethnic groups coexisted. Rugged mountain ranges and deep valleys separated them, and each community stubbornly preserved its customs and language. Georgia has mountains with perpetual snow, and on the Black Sea coast, there is a beautiful port city called Batumi. This people has always lived between Byzantium and Persia, Mongolia, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Russia. It is, in the true sense of the word, a land where East and West meet.

This duality is also reflected in Georgian names. It's a history where Konstantin and Genghis Khan seem to coexist in the same space. Men have a strong macho culture, enjoying drinking all night, shooting guns, and fighting, while women are religious and resilient. Sitting in a cafe in Tbilisi's Old Town, you can still see Byzantine-style onion-domed churches and encounter people drinking wine while listening to the Russian song 'Million Scarlet Roses.'

Georgia was incorporated into the Russian Empire, then briefly gained independence, and later became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. The most infamous figure born in this country is Stalin. Although he was Georgian, he brutally suppressed Georgian nationalism more than anyone else, sending countless nationalists to Siberia to die. The anecdote that in his later years, when he visited his hometown, he grieved for the friends he had purged, encapsulates the tragedy of this nation.

Gamsakhurdia: From Poet to Revolutionary

There was a pale intellectual who wrote poetry in English and translated Shakespeare. His name was Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He was a poet and literary critic, an anti-communist nationalist activist, and at the same time, a politician strongly drawn to power. He taught English literature at Tbilisi State University and translated numerous English and American literary works, including Shakespeare, into Georgian. He was imprisoned several times for organizing nationalist movements under the Soviet regime, and continued his independence movement even after his release.

When Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost began in the 1980s, the Georgian nationalist movement led by Gamsakhurdia spread throughout the Caucasus, including Armenia and Azerbaijan. Ethnic conflict in the region was one of the important factors that accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union. In that sense, he was a peripheral player in the end of the Cold War. The bloody crackdown by Soviet troops on anti-Soviet protests in Tbilisi in 1989 became a decisive turning point for the Georgian independence movement. At the time, the protests were compounded by tensions surrounding the Abkhazian issue and Georgian sovereignty. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Gamsakhurdia became the first president of independent Georgia with overwhelming support. I still prefer the name 'Gruzia' to 'Georgia'. Not only does it avoid confusion with the US state of Georgia, but it also better captures the historical texture of the country.

The Catastrophe of Nationalism

In the 1980s, Gamsakhurdia was a symbol of morality and resistance. However, after coming to power, he changed rapidly. He promoted Greater Georgian nationalism, excluding minorities and opponents, and his armed security organization began to suppress not only communists but also former nationalist comrades. Eventually, Georgia fell into civil war. The economy collapsed, and gunshots echoed through Tbilisi every night. It was chaos, a tangle of macho culture, armed groups, and criminal organizations.

Russia supported Abkhazian separatist forces to weaken Georgia, resulting in thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. Despite wielding nationalist violence, Gamsakhurdia was an intellectual who always seemed embarrassed in front of the public and couldn't look people in the eye. Perhaps he resembled the characters in the Hamlet he translated. Ousted by a coup, he went into exile in Chechnya and attempted a comeback under the protection of Dzhokhar Dudayev's forces. He even allied himself with forces he had once opposed. However, after all attempts failed, he ended his life with a pistol in 1993.

After the fall of the Georgian Dream, the armed forces that seized power needed legitimacy. So they called in Eduard Shevardnadze, who had been the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party during the Soviet era and gained international fame as the Soviet Foreign Minister during the Gorbachev era. However, Shevardnadze consolidated his power by successively eliminating the forces that had brought him to power.

The person who emerged to challenge him was Mikheil Saakashvili. A US-educated lawyer fluent in English, French, and Russian, he led the Rose Revolution in 2003 and came to power, strongly pushing for Westernization and administrative reform. However, his politics also had the unique excessive energy of Georgia. In 2008, he clashed head-on with Russia in the war over South Ossetia, and eventually walked the path of political downfall. Afterward, he served as the governor of Odesa, Ukraine, but was dismissed, and after returning home, he was imprisoned on various charges.

Still in the autumn of the Middle Ages

In a sense, Georgia is still stuck in the autumn of the Middle Ages. On the edge between Western Europe and Russia, it has not fully transitioned to modernity, looking at both worlds simultaneously. The current Georgian regime maintains a certain distance from Russia but does not completely turn its back. Perhaps that is the long geopolitical nature of this country.

I once visited the old town of Tbilisi, where the real model for 'A Million Roses' supposedly lived. Alleyways paved with granite over a thousand years old, a shabby bar below the house where the painter Niko Pirosmani lived, people dancing all night, Georgian wine that was still unripe and astringent like Beaujolais Nouveau. A poet recited Russian poetry, and the women in the bar were not legendary chaste ladies but modern women living freely and wildly. At that moment, I understood why Kaplan so persistently documented Georgia. This country is a place where beautiful scenery and brutal history, poetry and guns, wine and blood coexist. And 'The Road to Tatar' is the most lyrical record of that very contradiction.