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<h1 class="">Georgia: One Darn Thing after Another</h1>
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<span class="">May 24, 2013 - 1:00pm</span>, by <span class=""><a href="http://eurasianet.org/taxonomy/term/4171">Elisabeth Brocking</a></span> </div>
<div class=""><ul class=""><li class=""><a href="http://eurasianet.org/resource/georgia" rel="tag" title="">Georgia</a></li><li class=""><a href="http://eurasianet.org/taxonomy/term/3279" rel="tag" title="Receive weekly updateson the notable eventsin Central Asia.">EurasiaNet's Weekly Digest</a></li>
<li class=""><a href="http://eurasianet.org/taxonomy/term/4172" rel="tag" title="">Georgian History</a></li></ul></div>
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EurasiaNet Book Review </div>
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<p>Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia<br>
Donald Rayfield<br>
Reaktion Books, 2012<br>
479 pp.</p>
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<p>Why are there Georgians? Donald Rayfield’s grim history makes one
wonder how they escaped vanishing as a people, as was the fate of
Khazars and Avars. Yet Georgians not only endured, but created an
internationally-recognized self-governing state.</p>
<p>More chronicle than analysis, Rayfield’s Edge of Empires exhaustively
describes Georgia’s harrowing past. But, disappointingly, it offers few
clues about why that nation has proven so resilient.</p>
<p>Rayfield, Professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of
London and a renowned historian and linguist, has written a thorough and
careful account of the speakers of the Kartvelian languages,
principally Georgian, from the Bronze Age to 2010. A valuable reference
work, Edge of Empires is lucid, detailed and mercifully free from
jargon.</p>
<p>Some insights sparkle in the largely gloomy story, such as the
discussion of Tsarist Russia’s inadvertent role in creating a unified
Georgia, first by building institutions and exposing Georgians to new
thinking, and, then, through the use of repressive policies that forged
the notion of a common enemy in the eyes of the local population.
Rayfield’s expertise on Stalin and his circle shines when he examines
the career of Lavrenti Beria, the KGB chief. Meanwhile, his account of
Georgian émigrés during the Second World War highlights the ambivalence
of patriotism. </p>
<p>Rayfield also views the 2003 Rose Revolution and its still-evolving aftermath with an objective lens.</p>
<p>Scholars wanting to trace Georgia’s princely houses will benefit from
the dynastic tables and a thorough index. On the down side, more and
better maps would have been welcome.</p>
<p>Precisely 60 percent of the text covers events prior to 1800 and,
like a real-life Candide, it chroincles a cavalcade of atrocities
visited upon Georgians by sundry invaders and their own rulers.
Occasionally darkly comic—one local despot “weeping over his son’s
corpse, struck his [own] head with an iron cudgel and dropped dead”—the
story is mostly gruesome. </p>
<p>Tbilisi’s fate during the Mongol invasion is typical: “tens of
thousands were killed with unspeakable cruelty; the streets were awash
with blood, brains and human hair”. Eye-gouging, often ordered by
Georgian princes against rival relatives, occurs with depressing
frequency. In reading about 17th century western Georgia’s
mini-monarchs, one learns they are driven by “concupiscence,
vengefulness and idiocy,” a mix that produces “internecine war,
depositions and restorations, abduction, adultery, mutilation, murder
and treachery.” With a few exceptions, this picture fits the whole
epoch. </p>
<p>These centuries were violent throughout Eurasia and Europe. But the
sheer weight of brutality, pestilence, enslavement and misgovernment
piled onto a small rocky country and its people makes the Kartvelians’
survival astonishing. Rayfield, unfortunately, doesn’t tell us how they
did it.</p>
<p>Was it something in the culture?</p>
<p>There are glimpses into what might have been a deeper work, as when
Rayfield notes that Georgia’s greatest king and first unifier, 12th
century David the Builder, was the first to call the country
“Sakartvelo” (land of the Kartvelians). Tracing this usage over time
could have revealed the growth of the idea of a cohesive Georgian
nation. But art, literature, language and faith are mentioned only in
occasional paragraphs—a major disappointment from the author of The
Literature of Georgia. And while Rayfield notes controversies over the
autocephaly of the Georgian Orthodox Church and determined resistance to
Soviet efforts to lower the status of the language, he refrains from
drawing larger conclusions about their roles in the survival of the
Georgian people. </p>
<p>Culture is a slippery term and Rayfield correctly avoids rhapsodies
about fierce highlanders and sloe-eyed princesses bearing goblets of
wine. Like other small nationalities in tough neighborhoods, Georgians
are shrewd survivors, enduring and often outwitting shah, sultan, czar
and commissar alike. But while cultural identity is often
sentimentalized, hero-tales, customs, and family and village histories
do provide coherence and foster resistance to assimilation by occupiers,
especially when linked to a faith and language distinct from the
outsider’s. Ireland and Serbia, among many others, relied on these
identity markers to withstand centuries of oppression. Is this also a
key for Georgia?</p>
<p>Additional questions that have relevance to contemporary Georgia go
unaddressed. Did the Kartvelians’ disunity paradoxically build in
resilience, ensuring that when one region was conquered, others could
survive? Were the turbulent mountain princes—while busy killing and
maiming each other—also accidental progenitors of democratic resistance
to centralized authoritarianism? Does the singularity of the language
group—not Slavic or even Indo-European—offer speakers a built-in “friend
or foe” mechanism? And while Edge of Empires carefully shows how
individual Abkhaz, Ossetians and Georgians interact throughout the
centuries—usually in dynastic struggles—it does not assess how these
peoples viewed the development of an encompassing “Georgian” state.</p>
<p>While Rayfield shouldn’t be blamed for failing to answer questions he
hasn’t posed, this austere and strictly chronological work ends up
standing in splendid isolation. Edge of Empires does not engage other
scholarship on Georgia and lacks either an initial or final chapter
laying out key themes or drawing conclusions. It is a work of massive
and impressive erudition but does not have much explanatory force.</p><p><a href="http://eurasianet.org/node/67017?utm_source=Weekly+Digest&utm_campaign=abe53e7dac-my_google_analytics_key&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d6d0d0e55f-abe53e7dac-205692161">http://eurasianet.org/node/67017?utm_source=Weekly+Digest&utm_campaign=abe53e7dac-my_google_analytics_key&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d6d0d0e55f-abe53e7dac-205692161</a><br>
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