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Spheres of Influence

Mark Simakovsky

Mark D. Simakovsky is a U.S. Fulbright Post-Graduate Fellow working with the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies (GFSIS). Simakovsky is following up an MA in International Relations from Georgetown University with research focusing on Georgian—Russian relations. He took time to speak with Georgia Today about his work here, his interest in the Caucasus and Georgia’s increasingly important role as a player on the world stage.

GT: How did you become interested in post-Soviet studies?

MS: Well, my parents are Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union who wound up settling in Columbus, Ohio. They emigrated in 1975, from Leningrad and I am the first person in my family to be born in the U.S. When I was growing up I developed a strong interest in Russian history – we only spoke Russian in the house and I was given a sort of tantalizing view of Russia through my parent’s stories and through books, as I’d never been to the region myself. As an undergraduate at Miami of Ohio I majored in Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs and wrote a thesis on “Putin’s World View and How it Shapes Russian Foreign Policy” – and this was right around the time when everyone was saying “Who is Putin?” – no one really knew who he was.

GT: What did you focus on in graduate school and how did Georgia come into the frame?

MS: It was really a kind of continuation of undergrad, although I started to focus on conflict peace issues. Georgia came into the picture for me more or less by chance: I saw Saakashvili speak after the Rose Revolution at John’s Hopkins and he just blew me away. I’d never really been attracted by a politician and he was simply fascinating. Here was this post-Soviet leader who was talking about things like building new relations with the west, dealing with corruption, trying to build a multi-ethnic state – things that I hadn’t ever really heard from any of the post-Soviet cronies.

GT: So your interest in Georgia was sparked by what you saw in Saakashvili as a new leader?

MS: Not exactly. My sort of ultimate interest has always been how to bring the United States and Russia together – how to improve the geopolitical relations between these two countries. The three traditional, officially sanctioned, strategic “pillars of cooperation” between Russia and the U.S. have consisted of energy issues, weapons proliferation, and terrorism. How much cooperation actually takes place on the ground is, of course, up for debate. What I’ve always felt is that there are actually bigger challenges at stake that need to be addressed, and that Eurasia is the arena in which to address them. The state-to-state issues – problems that are common to the post-Soviet sphere such as underdevelopment, corruption and instability culminating in revolution – are, in fact, where Russia and the U.S. may be able to find some real common ground. So after I saw Saakashvili speak I started to read more about Georgia and frozen conflicts in the Caucasus and somehow everything started to connect – as I said, my parents are from Russia, I’m from the U.S. and somehow, for me, Georgia became a link. I thought that somehow Georgia provided an opportunity for the U.S. and Russia to cooperate in such a way that the interests of all three countries involved could be satisfactorily served.

GT: What kind of research are you doing here?

MS: Here my focus is on Russian – Georgian relations. What I want to do is to cut through all the rhetoric – there’s the Georgian line that “Russia is an occupier, a colonizer and it is trying to take Abkhazia and South Ossetia” and I want to figure out how true this is: if Russia really does have an organized strategy in the South Caucasus and if so, what that strategy really is. Since I’m focusing on Russian-Georgian relations I obviously had to include the Russian side so I was in Moscow this September to conduct a number of interviews with academics, journalists and a few government advisors. My interest is in U.S. national security interests as they pertain to Eurasian space, particularly geopolitics and strategy.

GT: It sounds like what you’ve been finding isn’t necessarily in-step with the official line.

MS: I’ve been going over the research and the interviews I did in Moscow and what I’m seeing is that there is no unified Russian strategy with regards to the Caucasus – there’s no coherent ideal that Russia is trying to uphold. For good or for bad, I don’t think that Russia has decided exactly what it wants, particularly from the separatist regions. In fact, I think that it’s easier for them to keep these conflicts frozen because that way they don’t need to make a choice. I mean, these situations definitely help Russia because there’s a strong feeling in Russia that if its influence in the region dwindles then it will be replaced by someone else’s – in this case the United States.

GT: So, in Russia’s eyes, the notion of an independent Caucasus region with its own self-determination is not seen as an option?

MS: Well, look at the military base issue. These bases that Russia just removed had no strategic value whatsoever. I mean they couldn’t even start the engines on some of the military equipment that had been sitting on these bases and they had to get tow trucks to move all this stuff out. It’s almost like a 19th Century ideal that bases equal influence: if you have people on the ground – even if they’re not doing anything and not contributing to stability in the country – then you have influence. But Georgia was clearly against the existence of these bases and all they were doing was poisoning relations between the two countries so what’s better: having improved relations with Georgia or having this “idea” that somehow one or two thousand troops on the ground equals influence? It’s an old mentality in Russia that thinks “If we remove these bases they’re just going to be replaced by NATO and we don’t want to be seen as having been pushed out of our sphere of influence.”

GT: What makes the Caucasus different in this respect from other former Soviet countries?

MS: Well to me it’s fascinating. If you read Russian literature and if you try to understand the Russian mentality, the Caucasus is really intertwined with this notion of influence. The Russian idea of a “civilizing order” built on the notion of a Christian civilization spreading development and modernization goes back at least to the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. In fact the battle over the Caucasus is still being fought – in Chechnya we are seeing the continuation of a war that began in the 19th Century. This intense history of bloodshed and heroism – these things become part of the national fabric of a culture. You read Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, which was written over a hundred and fifty years ago, and you’re reading a story which is still quite relevant today, particularly from a geo-political perspective. It was because of Russia’s involvement in the Caucasus that they were able to push into Central Asia. The notion of Russia as a “Russian” state is only a modern phenomenon because Russia has always been an empire and the Caucasus played such a big role in forming Russia’s imperial identity so to be pushed out of the region is particularly difficult for the Russians to swallow.
I also think that a big part of Russia’s preoccupation with the Caucasus is this idea, which I was alluding to earlier, that Russia always feels encroached upon by foreign powers. It’s almost like a “zero-sum” mentality which says that “If we lose the Caucasus, then the West – NATO or the U.S. – is going to encircle us.”

GT: Well, the U.S. has been showing quite a bit of interest in the Caucasus lately, and in Georgia in particular. How realistic are Russia’s fears in this respect?

MS: Since the fall of the Soviet Union the primary U.S. interest, in my opinion, has been to support the sovereignty and independence of the former Soviet countries. Why? You could say it’s because of the U.S. government’s love for democracy, but in the strictly geopolitical sense – in a coldhearted, strategic sense – it’s because if these countries are independent and sovereign and strong, then it reduces Russian influence. American policy has been to prevent regional superpowers from forming because this serves U.S. interests: it would not be in U.S. interests, for example, to have Russia control all the energy access routes running through the region, or for Russia to be able to influence the internal decisions of these countries at will. So in a sense, U.S. support of independence and sovereignty in former Soviet countries is also a way to reduce Russian influence. One of the things I heard most often in Russia was “Why are you guys pushing so hard for political change?” In Russia, political change tends to mean instability and instability breeds conflicts and more problems. But, it’s also “zero-sum” on the U.S. side: why was the U.S. pushing so hard for democracy in Ukraine but isn’t really pushing Azerbaijan at all with the elections coming up there? Because there’s oil in Azerbaijan and Aliev is friendly with the United States … so, like Russia, the U.S. is far from innocent when it comes to statesmanship in the Caucasus.

GT: So back to you for a moment. You’re interested in going into government?

MS: Yes, that’s my interest. I’ve been fascinated with geopolitics and strategy and also with Russia and the former Soviet Union. I think that this is the best way for me to give something back to a country that took my parents in: I wouldn’t be where I am right now and my parents wouldn’t be where they are if we were still living in Russia.

GT: What are your feelings about U.S. policy in the region?

MS: My focus isn’t actually on U.S. policy, at least at the moment. But I do think that if you have to choose between recent U.S. and Russian policy as it relates to the post-Soviet space then U.S. policy has been much more effective and much more correct. With that said, I don’t think that either country has truly grasped what the real problems in these regions are. At the moment, I think that the U.S. making a potentially big mistake by jumping on the backs of these recent revolutions and thinking that if a revolution installs new, Western-oriented political elites then the country’s major problems will be solved. I think that the biggest problem affecting the post-Soviet space – and this is something that Russia completely ignored throughout the 1990s – is the total divide between the political elites and the public. The revolution itself is the easy part, as we’re seeing right now in Ukraine: Yushchenko is having a huge problem even keeping his opposition together and if you talk to people in the street here in Georgia I think that you’ll find more people who say that they’re unhappy with what’s going on in the government.

GT: What about the feeling in the U.S. among academicians and policymakers about what’s going on in Georgia?

MS: I think that Georgia is a hot topic not just in economics and development but also for academic researchers in a variety of fields. For example, one professor I know, who has also helped me a lot, James V. Wertsch at Washington University in St. Louis, has written an article entitled “Georgia as a Laboratory for Democracy” (to appear in “Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization”) – it’s a great article as it sort of compares what’s happening in Georgia to a science experiment: Georgia is trying to create a democracy in the post-Soviet space, and between the Caucasus and Central Asia, Georgia could be the only country that’s trying this experiment. I agree – I think that Georgia is trying to build a democracy, but a lot of people I’ve talked to in Russia say “Don’t kid yourself – this elite is no different from the Shevarnadze administration and you’re going to see Saakashvili overthrown like every other president of Georgia was overthrown before him.” The Russians just don’t have any faith in democracy in Georgia. President Bush, on the other hand, whenever he talks about democracy in the world, he always points to Georgia as an example – this tiny country of less than five million people. He says “freedom is spreading, democracy is spreading” and then he lists countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Ukraine. So this is focusing attention on Georgia.

GT: The Bush administration is expressing a vested interest by saying that democracy is spreading in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Bush adds Georgia to this list, how much of it do you think is based in reality and how much is rhetoric?

MS: I’m not going to speak for the president …

GT: Why not?

MS: Well, I think that Bush believes that the democratic system in Georgia is strengthening. Weather or not he really understands the situation on the ground in Georgia … in fact, I’m sure he doesn’t and I don’t know if you can really expect the U.S. president to satisfactorily understand the domestic situation in another country, but when you look from afar it looks like democracy is taking hold here: popular revolution and the end of a previously static, enormously corrupt regime. So Bush believes in it but yes, in terms of rhetoric, the Bush administration is using Georgia in that sense. I attended an interesting talk given by the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, Robert Hunter, where he made an interesting point – he said something like “Right now, Georgia has an opportunity because it occupies something like a niche interest for the United States. The U.S. is interested in promoting democracy and Georgia is trying to form one so therefore Georgia fits into U.S. interests right now, particularly because it’s such a small country. If Georgia fails in this endeavor then it’s almost certain that the U.S. will forget about Georgia.” This doesn’t represent the current administration’s foreign policy but he’s got a point: the U.S. is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into this country and Georgia’s current government does have a responsibility to understand that if they get it wrong, if they fail, if they try to solve the separatist conflicts using violence, I think that the U.S. will wash its hands of Georgia.

Anthony Schierman
7.10.2005