Well I’m headed to Abkhazia for the week. I’ll be doing at least one story for the Times and hopefully can get some more stuff published as well. It just occurred to me that I actually didn’t think through my plan as well as I should have. I’ll be arriving Saturday morning so the amount of people who will be available and willing to talk to me will be limited. All well, that’s why I’m staying until the middle of next week.

And this way Ilina (see Kazbegi post) and I can soak up some sun and get the feel for the place before I have to start working (Ilina’s leaving Sunday, she’s only in it for the vacation).

David Ignatius, of whom I am a great fan, had an interesting column this week previewing Obama’s trip to Moscow and begging the the question “what does Russia want?”

Ignatius recently visited a conference of Russia-based think tanks under the title “What Does Russia Think” — a question equally unanswerable. The conversation of course centered on Putin. Is he good or bad for Russia?

Just like the immortal chapter in the Brother’s Karamazov, the question remains if Russia’s Grand Inquisitor has truly granted a gift to the people — taking their freedom and returning them security.

There’s a palpable sense here that Putin has brought “miracle, mystery and authority” to a Russia that was severely traumatized by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The country is certainly less free than it was under Boris Yeltsin, but Putin is immensely popular — and nobody wants to return to the crazy, freewheeling time of transition.

The Russia that Obama will encounter is proud and prickly. The country’s leaders aren’t sure what they want from America, other than to be respected and taken seriously. U.S. analysts talk about a new strategic partnership, but Russian officials are mistrustful of large American designs. They think the United States took advantage of them during their years of weakness, and they’re still licking their wounds.

I think that’s a fair analysis. The conference itself yielded many interesting bits to chew on that add depth to the pros and cons discussion of Mr. Putin.

Putin is the tough guy who put a wounded country back together after the fall of communism. “Russia emerged from the chaos of 1991 with disproportionately large political and socio-psychological scars,” explained Alexey Chesnakov, a former Putin adviser who is director of the Center for Current Policy. When Putin became president in 1999, he brought “authoritarianism by consensus,” said the head of another Russian think tank.

Modern Russia is still anxious, even though it’s more orderly. Russians worry about the jumble of nationalities within their borders and assertive neighbors such as Georgia and Ukraine. It’s an “overheated, overloaded society,” said a prominent anthropologist who, like some of his colleagues, was speaking on background. Nervous Russians are “running away from their freedom,” offered a leading sociologist. With the loss of its empire, Russia is “like an amputated body,” ventured Vyacheslav Glazychev, an urban planning professor who heads several institutes. It has a “horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces,” he added.

What is interesting about this discussion is that Putin’s politics are seen as a representation of the personality of the nation. In some ways he is the anti-Yeltsin. 

At the end of the day, the only answer to these questions is that there is no answer.

“We want equality. We want our interests recognized — to have them considered as significant,” said one Russian panelist. But when Americans attending the meeting asked for specifics, another Russian who is a prominent politician suggested: “The real problem is that we don’t understand what we want.”

And therein lies the problem. Enter the Grand Inquisitor. He will find the way.

During my first week here I was offered a last minute spot on a trip up to Kazbegi. Apparently some friends of friends were going up to the mountains and only had three people to rent out a four-bedroom room in a bed and breakfast and were looking for someone to join and bring the costs down.

The whole weekend trip was going to cost around 50 lari or $30 including transportation and food, so I gladly hopped aboard.

It ended up being a great time, I am not exaggerating when I say I have never seen such astounding natural beauty in my life.

  Twenty years ago, Kazbegi was a prime tourist destination for Soviet citizens. The small town nestled in the shadow of Mount Kazbek (16,558 ft) even applied to be a site for the Winter Olympics. But, as the Soviet empire disintegrated so did Kazbegi’s prestige.

Ilina and Valera

From the left, Ilina, yours truly and Andro. Not pictured -- Valera, the enthusiastic photographer.

Andro thinks wearing a pancho in a waterfall will keep him dry.

Frontline’s Daniel Bennett discussed in his blog yesterday research showing that “a cocktail of fear, censorship, jingoism, cyberwar, PR, and threats to journalists led to chronic misinformation” during the brief conflict between Georgia and Russia last August.

The local media of each side in the conflict, largely toting the official line, were essentially reporting on “two separate simultaneous conflicts” with Georgia viewing it as an open invasion by Russian forces, and Russian media purporting that the Russian army was intervening to halt a genocide in South Ossetia.

Journalists did not report the other side of the conflict and there was a “slide of journalism into propaganda”.  Censorship, political pressures, and patriotism all contributed to journalists’ failure to represent different points of view on the conflict. Misinformation abounded in a climate of unchallenged facts and figures.

This was not the case only in the local media, the report found. While researcher Margarita Akhvlediani examined only BBC’s reporting as an international mainstream source that “made its contribution to the confusion” it was by no means the only international media organization presenting skewed coverage.

I actually felt that BBC was one of the most credible sources I could find. In this blog I deplored CNN’s coverage multiple times as they maintained their banner as “Russia invades Georgia” for several days and balanced several 15-minute-long interviews with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili with occasional 30-second-to-one-minute-long comments by Russian officials. The research seems to agree.

Interestingly, Akhvlediani claims that “with no real differences in public alternative information, Internet blogs became a crucial way of checking what really happened”. Although blogs are “a very new social phenomenon in the Caucasus” they are becoming increasingly influential. New blogs and forum topics were started to discuss the war.

I admit, I was far from getting everything right here in Three Kings, but I am still proud of what I was able to decipher while American media organizations seemed to be covering the conflict by simply handing the microphone to U.S. and Georgian officials (for a look back, here are the Three Kings archives, starting at the outset of the war).

While the most Western governments, the United States included, continue to maintain the view that Russia was mostly responsible for the conflict, every international humanitarian, monitoring and peacekeeping organization with direct view of the events as they unfolded on the ground have agreed that the conflict was provoked by the overnight bombardment of Tskhinval, the de facto capital of South Ossetia, and subsequent ground incursion by Georgian forces. It is still unclear when, but at some point, Russian peacekeepers serving under a U.N. mandate were hit in their base near Tskhinval and suffered casualties.

Today, I think perhaps the best barometer for what happened is what the Georgian people now thinks. I have yet to meet a Georgian that believes what their president still claims — that Russia decided to up and invade them one day. This is not to say that the Georgians I have talked to are in any way fans of the Russian government and its political ambitions in the region, but the protests aimed at unseating Saakashvili should make the point pretty clear.

Regardless of what the U.S. State Department says, the Georgians hold their president responsible for starting a war and losing it. The war cost them hundreds of lives, an estimated $1 billion in damage and end to any hopes that Georgia will be able to reintegrate its two break-away republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which constituted 20 percent of Georgia’s original territory.

"On the other side of this mountain is Chechnya." A view of Kazbegi from the bed and breakfast porch.

Hey everyone.

I apologize for the long pause in Three Kings. I have been working on a few different stories and leads and didn’t want to spoil any future publication of them by discussing them in too much detail here, but such caution was probably unnecessary.

Anywho, a full update on life in this part of the world is coming. Stay tuned!