Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing
Anya von Bremzen (New York 2013)

That summer John and I went recipe collecting in the romantic, mountainous Caucasus. Reaching Tbilisi, we found the histrionic Georgian capital still reeling in shock. On April 9, Moscow’s troops had killed twenty protesters, mostly young women. Everywhere, amid balconies jutting from teetering houses and restaurants dug into cliffs around the Kura River, Tbilisians seethed with opulent rage, calling down terrible curses on Moscow. The Kremlin, meanwhile, blamed the massacre on local officials.

Ҳаҭыр зкәы сҩызцәа! Мшы бзиақәа!

This is George Hewitt speaking from Yorkshire in the north of England, where I have been Abkhazia’s Honorary Consul since 1993.

I am delighted to have been invited to participate (albeit virtually) in the opening of the Foreign Ministry’s Media Centre because several of us have long felt that such an initiative should have been undertaken many years ago. In the age of 24-hour news-services and instant mass-communication, the importance of disseminating one’s message for a country which suffered years of isolation following a destructive war, which remains poorly known to the outside-world, and which is largely viewed, if viewed at all, through the distorting filter of a foreign power cannot be emphasised too strongly.

Some of the volunteers who came to defend Abkhazia were still very young, indeed one of them was still a child -- Valery Berkhamov, a Circassian, who exchanged his school desk for life on the front line.

Valery was only 16 years old when he left his native Kabardino-Balkaria without informing his family for the war in Abkhazia. Musabi Berkhamov began searching for his son in various places of ill repute.

От обеспокоенного гражданина Абхазии

English version: Peace is for Abkhazia, war is for Ukraine? by A Concerned Citizen of Abkhazia

24 февраля ровно в четыре часа (по украинскому времени) Киев бомбили, нам объявили, что началась военная спецоперация. Вот так строки советского поэта Бориса Ковынева, с минимальными изменениями под обстановку, актуализировались 80 лет спустя.

In 1989 at the start of the Georgian-Abkhazian conflict the late Academician Andrei Sakharov in one of his last articles called Georgia a ‘mini-empire’ (Ogonёk 1989, 31).

Later, describing the relationship between Abkhazia and Georgia, he wrote: "I tend to justify the Abkhazian position. I think we should regard with special attention the problems of small peoples: freedom and rights of big nations should not be exercised at the expense of small ones" (Znamya, 1991, No.10, p.69).