War in the Caucasus - Russia uses terror as it did before

IT’S BEEN 40 years since the Soviet Union’s old Cold War armies cracked down so emphatically and violently on Czechoslovakia, sending tanks to crush unarmed civilians marching on the streets of Prague.

Twelve years earlier — 1956 — they crushed the by-now-realised dreams of independence and democracy in Hungary. Eight years earlier the Soviets brought the world to the edge of war by blockading Berlin.

These interventions were not so much showing the steel in the velvet glove as revealing the reality behind a barely worn mask, a reality that for a considerable period in the second half of the last century justified Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire description.

Dissent was not tolerated and small countries fringing the Soviet Union had no prospect of an independent existence. They represented a buffer zone between the USSR and the West and any moves towards closer links with the ‘decadent’ West were not tolerated. Nationalist and democratic aspirations were crushed and Soviet hegemony was non-negotiable.

In the past few days Georgia has learnt that that hard reality is timeless; that great — or greater — powers have no compunction in protecting their interests.

What a tragedy that Russia has not learnt a lesson too — that countries can only be coerced for so long, and that self-determination can be deferred, but rarely denied forever. Just as Czechoslovakia, albeit as two entities, just as Hungary, Estonia, Latvia and Poland have built new places in the world, Georgia is unlikely to make Moscow the focus of its ambitions now it has opted for the attractions of the West.

In recent years, under an earlier version of the current leadership, Russia has shown it is capable of violent suppression. Atrocities were committed during the Chechen Wars of 1994 and 1999; a repeat of that savagery has the potential to enflame the entire region.

Russia has long resented Georgia’s ambitions to have closer ties with the West, and its latest bid to join Nato and the EU is seen by Moscow as a provocation too far. Russia is fostering secessionist movements in South Ossetia and breakaway Abkhazia. It believes it can undermine Georgia and end its immediate prospect of Nato or EU membership and, at the same time, demonstrate to the West that it has gone too far by encouraging Georgia’s ambitions.

Undoubtedly Russia will feel entirely justified, believing that it is defending itself against Western ambitions in today’s version of the Great Game. The re-emergence of a bellicose Mother Russia determined to be the great power it imagines it once was poses a threat to us all and requires energetic diplomacy.

What a pity it is, too, that Russia is resorting to the oldest methods just at the very moment that another communist superpower — China — is beginning to convince the world that it has embraced the prospect of great change in a confident and outward-looking way.