In Russia's Shadow

By Kevin Fedarko

He traded his pressed suits for combat fatigues and a gun. He ignored the pleas of bodyguards who begged him to go home for his own safety. At one point, Eduard Shevardnadze even vowed to die in Sukhumi rather than surrender to the Abkhazian rebels laying siege to the Black Sea capital of their autonomous region in Georgia. But by last Monday, the battle was lost. Shevardnadze had little choice but to board a plane jammed with wounded soldiers to return, vanquished, to the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. "God knows I did all I could so this terrible day would never come," he said. "May I be forgiven by my contemporaries and posterity."

The Georgian leader angrily blamed big-neighbor Russia for the debacle. He apologized for his own role in accepting the Russian-devised cease-fire terms that left Sukhumi vulnerable to surprise attack. And he vowed that Georgia would one day retake the province. "If this generation is unable to do it," he said, "the next one will," a promise of warfare for decades to come.

Sukhumi's fall leaves Shevardnadze ruling over a shrunken state as Georgia's other ethnic minorities and political dissenters capitalize on the chaos. The breakaway region of Abkhazia has effectively won itself independence. So has the autonomous enclave of South Ossetia, now partly a protectorate of Russia. A small region called Adjaria is virtually independent, and in the western area of Mingrelia, insurgents are rallying to Georgia's former President Zviad Gamsakhurdia. Last week his supporters effectively cut off Georgia's access to the sea by capturing the port of Poti. "Georgia doesn't really exist anymore," says a British diplomat.

What goes for Georgia also applies to other nations along the highly combustible southern rim of the old Soviet Union -- a region where Moscow's hard-line nationalists are playing power games that harken back to more than two centuries of Russian imperialism. Tactics may differ from place to place, but the strategy appears to be the same: restoring Moscow's influence by weakening its neighbors and making them ever more dependent on Russia. Last week at the U.N. General Assembly, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev declared what amounted to a Monroe Doctrine, asserting Moscow's right to intervene in the former Soviet possessions that hard-liners call the "near abroad." Said he: "Russia realizes that no international organization or group of states can replace our peacekeeping efforts in this specific post- Soviet space."

In many cases, this involves exploiting the political aspirations of ethnic minorities, like the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, who are waging a war of secession from Muslim Azerbaijan. In other cases, there is brute force of the sort Russia has brought to bear in Tajikistan, where democratic and Islamic opposition groups joined hands to bring down the post-Soviet government. After Russian troops stepped in to help a neocommunist faction crush the democratic alliance, the new government was willing to have the Russian army stay. Analysts say a similar strategy was employed in Azerbaijan, where the Russians reportedly provided guns to a rival of Prime Minister Abulfaz Elchibey, considered by many as one of the most anti-Russian leaders in the old Soviet Union. That paved the way for Geidar Aliyev, a former KGB man, to take power; he demonstrated his gratitude by asking that Azerbaijan be readmitted to the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States.

U.S. officials say Russian interference in the near abroad comes not from Yeltsin but from the nationalist forces that oppose him. Aside from traditional concerns for security, many Russian hard-liners seek to assuage the humiliation that has accompanied the transition from a swaggering superpower to a bewildered mastodon with little control over its destiny. "They feel pushed around," says Paul Goble, senior associate at Washington's Carnegie Endowment. "They can't strike back at the World Bank, but they sure as hell can strike back at the Georgians."

If it is unclear whether Moscow's political leaders ordered such meddling, they have certainly failed to stop it. Western officials say the Abkhazian victory would have been impossible without the connivance of Russian commanders who provided tanks, artillery and other sophisticated weapons that enabled the Abkhazians, who make up only 17% of their province's population, to outgun the Georgians. When the rebels broke the cease-fire mediated by Moscow, the Russian troops who were supposed to guarantee the truce looked the other way.

Now that he needs army support for his survival, Yeltsin seems loath to antagonize military hard-liners. But that strategy could backfire as smaller and weaker republics, fearing Russian domination, rush to elect firebrand leaders of their own. Spouting inflamed rhetoric and pursuing alliances with countries hostile to Russia, these leaders often wind up providing Moscow with just the provocation it requires for intervention.

With reporting by William Mader/London, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Ann M. Simmons/Moscow