[lg policy] What are there Georgians?

Sat Jun 1 14:53:25 UTC 2013

 Georgia: One Darn Thing after Another
 May 24, 2013 - 1:00pm, by Elisabeth
Brocking<http://eurasianet.org/taxonomy/term/4171>

   - Georgia <http://eurasianet.org/resource/georgia>
   - EurasiaNet's Weekly Digest <http://eurasianet.org/taxonomy/term/3279>
   - Georgian History <http://eurasianet.org/taxonomy/term/4172>

  EurasiaNet Book Review

Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia
Donald Rayfield
Reaktion Books, 2012
479 pp.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rayfield also views the 2003 Rose Revolution and its still-evolving
aftermath with an objective lens.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Was it something in the culture?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

forwarded from EurasiaNet.org

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