Downhill in Otherland

Lesley Chamberlain
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This piece was published in the TLS of December 11, 1998

Peter Nasmyth
GEORGIA
In the mountains of poetry
306pp. Richmond: Curzon. £25
0 7007 0955 X

The Caucasian republic of Georgia, romanticized by generations of Russian poets after it came under Russian dominion earlier last century, continued to enjoy the status of the Russian Otherland in Soviet times. It was the kind of refuge for something, not quite the soul, which the Mediterranean offers the British today. Even a decade ago, the reasons for this were obvious to any visitor from East or West. The snowy peaks and exotic local customs and costumes radiated natural glamour. The capital, Tbilisi, had something of the fairy-tale, with its maple-lined streets, balconied wooden houses and decorative people. Exchanging the smell of cheap diesel and Intourist disinfectant for the sweeter air and easy elegance of Turkey's northern neighbour, a Westerner might well wonder why Communism in general could not be more like this. Soviet Russians, leaders and led alike, flocked to take restorative holidays in the mild climate of the Black Sea resorts of Sukhumi and Batumi. Writers, from Lermontov to Pasternak, extolled the same sense of vitality, as it were on a higher plane, while Georgians simply boasted of their longevity. The local food was good, the history went deep, and music and world-class theatre flourished. Not only tribal life but also the ancient buildings and treasures of the Georgian Orthodox Church survived quite untouched, and there were relics and sites from the ancient world, not least Colchis, connected to Medea and to Jason and the Argonauts, which added to the fascination of the place.

Georgia certainly caught the imagination of the photographer and journalist Peter Nasmyth. After his first trip in 1982, in search of some incentive to self-discovery he returned again and again. He learnt the non-Indo-European language, with its unique script, immersed himself in the history and wrote a pioneering book in 1992, which Georgia:In the mountains of poetry now expands and updates. Nasmyth loves the country and has many friends there, and his work will be indispensable to all serious travellers to the Caucasus in the next few years. He is part of a small but passionate tradition of British interest in Georgia. The first Chief British Commissioner of the Caucasus, Oliver Wardrop, set up an office in Menshevik Tbilisi in 1919, while his sister Marjory translated into English the Georgian national epic, The Knight in the Panther Skin. Most recently, Nasmyth travelled with the first British Ambassador to independent Georgia, Stephen Nash, and his deputy. It seems slightly imprudent that Britain's three fore-most Georgian experts all set out together to Georgia's border with Chechnya. They did well to avoid kidnap. But it would be hard to conclude from Nasmyth's unsentimental testimony that independence has so far brought Georgia anything other than poverty and shame. No sooner had it waved its white, black and magenta flag at the departing Russian oppressor, than Georgia promptly insisted that south Ossetia remain under its rule rather than join pro-Russian north Ossetia. Two weeks' civil war in 1992 then forced the first elected President, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, to flee. He died later in obscure circumstances while planning to retake Tbilisi. Georgian troops that same year, in a disastrous move, marched into the former Soviet autonomous republic of Abkhazia, which, with Russian help, then expelled 250,000 Georgians. After the various conflicts had died down, Western aid agencies were obliged to make Georgia a prime relief target. In all the old empire no former Soviet republic had declined more rapidly.

As in the rest of the former Soviet Union, the mafia in Georgia has supervised a brutal transition to capitalism, with further casual loss of life. The once elegant streets are pockmarked and battered. Georgians still drive Ladas, but often with a Kalashnikov on the back seat. Two attempts have been made on the life of the President, Eduard Shevardnadze, formerly Gorbachev's foreign minister and Georgia's greatest asset. Commercial influences from Europe and across the Atlantic meanwhile compete for the painfully exposed cultural low ground.

Among the most useful sections of Nasmyth's book are his eyewitness accounts of violence and confusion, especially his vivid evocation of the days of mourning and protest after Soviet Special Forces opened fire on teenage demonstrators in Tbilisi in April 1989. Among his friends are bewildered youngsters instinctively clinging to nationalism or to the Church. He observes how, in their anti-Russian frenzy, the Georgians tore down the Soviet statue of Mother Georgia in the capital, only to replace it with one virtually identical. The continuing desire to celebrate Georgia's most famous son, Joseph Stalin, dismays him. Faced with demonstrations of barbaric machismo and political primitivism, Peter Nasmyth quotes the Freudian Marxist Erich Fromm on nationalism as "a cultural demand for individualism in societies with nowhere to place it". He speaks wisely of a culture whose main survival technique has become hospitality, and illustrates the point with an anecdote about hospitality enforced at gunpoint. His photographs show exactly why this historical wonderland, caught between the twelfth and the twenty-first centuries, received the thumbs up from the BBC Travel Show. But his text is imbued with melancholy.

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