Freedom is more precious than bread!
During the blockade, women crossed borders to sell goods and earn money for essentials.
The bridge over the Psou is short. A woman could walk its length in a minute, less if her load was light, and in those years the loads were rarely light. She came at first light, before the guards grew bored and petty, pushing a wheelbarrow stacked with tangerines, or hazelnuts, or whatever the garden had surrendered that week. On the far bank lay Russia: the markets of Adler and Sochi, buyers with roubles in their pockets. She sold what she had and carried back flour. Sugar, if there was any to be had. Then home across the same short bridge, to do it all again the next morning.
Her husband could not come with her. Nor her brother, nor her grown sons. Under the sanctions imposed in 1994, no Abkhazian man between sixteen and sixty-five was allowed to cross that river by any legal route. So the women crossed. They became the providers of a republic that had run out of bread.
This is the part most people have forgotten, if they ever knew it at all.
The 'Action Against Hunger' NGO in Abkhazia. Photos by Bernard Bisson (1998).
Ask a casual observer what happened between Georgia and Abkhazia in the 1990s and you tend to get a tidy story. Abkhazia, the small rebel territory on the Black Sea, was Moscow’s creature. Russia armed it, shielded it, and used it to punish Tbilisi for turning west. The whole quarrel was really a Russian one, fought through an Abkhazian proxy.
Clean. Memorable. And, for the decade that matters most, untrue.
Look at what Boris Yeltsin’s government actually did. On 3 February 1994, barely months after the guns fell silent, Boris Yeltsin and Eduard Shevardnadze signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation between Russia and Georgia. Standing among the officials behind them was Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin’s foreign minister, a man Abkhazians remember as wholly Tbilisi’s friend. The policy that followed was not pro-Abkhazian in any sense. It was the opposite. Russia joined Georgia in choking the place.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze after signing the Treaty on Friendship, Good-Neighbourliness and Co-operation, 3 February 1994. Among the officials behind them are Andrei Kozyrev and Jaba Ioseliani.
The instrument was the Commonwealth of Independent States, the loose club of post-Soviet republics. At Georgia’s insistence, the CIS agreed to seal Abkhazia off. Most of the member presidents signed. Only Belarus and Turkmenistan held back, citing the neutrality written into their own constitutions. Everyone else fell into line behind Moscow and Tbilisi.
Life on a scrap of paper
A blockade is an abstract word. Here is what it meant on the ground.
The list of goods permitted in or out of Abkhazia was so short you could write it on a scrap of paper and have room to spare. Ordinary antibiotics were banned. Think about that for a moment. A hospital cannot run without antibiotics, and the hospitals of Abkhazia were asked to run without them, treating the wounded and the sick of a country still raw from war.
By December 1994 the bread had nearly gone. The shortages turned catastrophic. What little bread there was went to pensioners, and a pension then came to three thousand roubles a month, which bought less each week. People filled the streets. Their slogan was not a demand for territory or recognition. It was simpler than that: freedom is more precious than bread.
"For Georgians, the sun rises not in the east, but in the north—in Russia."
— 'Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze' By Carolyn Ekedahl, Melvin A. Gooman · 2010 (pp.22 23)]
Here the story takes a turn the puppet theory cannot explain. Abkhazia’s own Russian community, the Russian-speakers living inside the republic, protested the sanctions and appealed directly to Yeltsin to lift them. The blockade was supposed to be Moscow’s weapon. Yet it was starving Moscow’s own people along with everyone else, and they said so out loud, in a public letter to their president.
Then the violence reached into the government itself. On 11 September 1995, Yuri Voronov, the Abkhazian vice-premier, was shot dead in his flat in central Sukhum. Voronov was an archaeologist and historian, Abkhazia-born but ethnically Russian, who had spent years arguing against Georgian attempts to rewrite the region’s past. Who ordered his killing has never been established. It remains a matter of speculation to this day, and honesty requires saying so plainly rather than filling the silence with a convenient name.
The screw turns
If the early blockade was severe, what came next was near-total. On 19 January 1996, the CIS heads of state met in Moscow and agreed to cut almost every remaining thread: trade, finance, communications, transport. Stanislav Lakoba, then a senior figure in the Abkhazian parliament, told Interfax that Russia was now openly siding with Georgia, and that the decision could only serve the republic’s isolation. Every time Abkhazia offered a compromise, he said, it was met with tougher sanctions.
The sea had been the lifeline. With the Psou crossing strangled, ships brought what aid arrived, carrying supplies from Greece, Israel and Turkey to the port of Sukhum. So the screw turned there too. In March 1996, Russian border guards tried to stop a Turkish vessel entering the harbour, citing the January blockade. Abkhazian leaders accused Russia of trampling human rights and stoking a fresh war.
The passenger sailings went one by one. After Georgia complained to the International Maritime Organisation, the little boat Ritsa stopped carrying passengers to Turkey. The twice-weekly Trabzon ferry ceased. Freight ships could still dock, but Georgia demanded the right to inspect their cargoes, and Abkhazia refused to let it. Then, in February 1997, the communications ministries of Russia and Georgia signed an agreement in Tbilisi to switch off the channels that still linked Abkhazia to the world. By that April, a phone call to or from Abkhazia was routed through Georgia rather than Russia. The republic could barely speak to anyone without Tbilisi listening.
The women who held it together
Through all of it, the wheelbarrows kept moving across the Psou.
With the men of working age locked out of the border, the daily work of survival fell to the women. They grew the fruit, picked the hazelnuts, loaded the barrows, and made the crossing into Russia to sell. They came back with flour and sugar and whatever medicine they could find. They fed their families and their neighbours. They kept the markets alive and, in keeping them alive, kept Abkhazia alive.
The 'Action Against Hunger' NGO in Abkhazia. Photos by Bernard Bisson (1998).
It was not heroic in the way films are heroic. It was a woman with cold hands and an aching back, doing the same hard thing every morning because no one else was permitted to. Multiply her by thousands and you have the engine that carried a republic through its worst years. When Abkhazians speak now of that time, it is the women they speak of first.
The West, applauding
And the wider world? It cheered Tbilisi on.
Germany’s foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, called the CIS sanctions a serious step in the right direction. Speaking in the Georgian parliament in January 1996, he said Germany backed “Georgia’s territorial integrity and that separatist demands for independence had no grounds and would win no support from Germany or the international community. He planned, he added, to take the matter up with Yeltsin in person that Saturday. The blockade was no grubby secret. It was a respectable policy, endorsed in parliaments, applauded by Western statesmen who saw in it the rightful defence of a sovereign border.
For most of the 1990s, then, the hand that pressed down on Abkhazia was not only Russian. It was Russian and Georgian together, with Western approval ringing in the background.
And the wider world? It cheered Tbilisi on.
Germany’s foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, called the CIS sanctions a serious step in the right direction. Speaking in the Georgian parliament in January 1996, he said Germany backed “Georgia’s territorial integrity and that separatist demands for independence had no grounds and would win no support from Germany or the international community. He planned, he added, to take the matter up with Yeltsin in person that Saturday. The blockade was no grubby secret. It was a respectable policy, endorsed in parliaments, applauded by Western statesmen who saw in it the rightful defence of a sovereign border.
For most of the 1990s, then, the hand that pressed down on Abkhazia was not only Russian. It was Russian and Georgian together, with Western approval ringing in the background.
Moscow, SOVETSKAYA ROSSIYA in Russian. January 18, 1996 p.7
The slow thaw
The blockade held, more or less, until around 2000. It eased only after Vladimir Putin came to power, and even then not all at once. The restrictions loosened by degrees, until the worst of the isolation finally lifted.
That shift left a mark on how Abkhazians saw their giant neighbour. A people blockaded by Yeltsin and rescued, as they understood it, by Putin drew the obvious conclusion. What looked from the outside like a return to the Russian fold felt from the inside like the first solidarity they had been shown in years. The puppet theory gets the chronology exactly backwards. Abkhazia did not drift towards Russia because Russia had always held its strings. It drifted because, for the better part of a decade, Russia had stood with the people strangling it, and then, late, changed its mind.
The isolation outlived the 1990s in quieter forms. In 2009, leaders of Turkey’s large Circassian community, several million strong and including hundreds of thousands of Abkhaz descent, pressed Ankara to restore direct travel and reopen the Trabzon ferry. Turkey, they pointed out, had enforced the embargo for years and lost standing in Abkhazia for it. They wanted the short crossing back.
A short crossing. That is where this began, with a woman and a wheelbarrow on a bridge over the Psou, doing the work the men were forbidden to do. It is worth remembering who closed that bridge, and who stood and applauded while it stayed shut. The story we tell ourselves about that decade is upside down. The record is right there, on its scrap of paper.
The Observer (London, England), 12 July 1998, page 27. Neal Ascherson, Scottish journalist and writer.
Further reading
+ The Hand of Moscow and the Sterility of Geneva, by Izida Chania
+ Tales of War: Georgian Narratives and Their Justifications 30 Years On, by Alexey Lomiya