Immediately after the Russian Federation attacked Georgia, the presidents of all four European Union member countries located on Russia’s borders gathered in Tbilisi to show their solidarity. This action speaks volumes in and of itself: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, together with non-EU member Ukraine, profoundly mistrust and fear a Vladimir Putin-led nation, as well they should, considering the long history of Russian expansion and subjugation of independent neighboring nations.
To remain with the Georgian example, this invasion is but a repeat of what happened in 1921, when my father, Noe Jordania, was president of Georgia. Then, as now, our country was resolutely democratic, which was and remains anathema to the Russian totalitarian regimes. That year, breaking a nonaggression treaty signed a scant few months before, the Bolshevik Red Army supported by the Ossetians then living in Georgia attacked and occupied the Georgian republic and forcibly incorporated it into the Soviet empire just as the czars did in 1805, under the pretext of protecting that tiny country from the Persians and the Turks. At various times in history, all the nations bordering on Russia suffered a similar fate.
On the domestic front, with few exceptions, everybody fears Putin, knowing full well that anyone opposing or criticizing the Kremlin power runs the risk of being murdered like the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the exKGB operative Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned and permanently disfigured like Ukraine’s president Victor Yushchenko, jailed like the businessman Mikhail Khodorovsky and many others, or, at best, badly beaten or roughed up like the world chess champion Gary Kasparov and his supporters who challenged the leadership in recent elections.
The sad thing is that while individually Russians can be and often are wonderful people, as a nation they seem unable to shake their acceptance and support of autocratic, dictatorial regimes. The events in Georgia demonstrate once and for all that Russia has remained basically the same throughout the centuries, whether it is called Czarist Empire, Soviet Union or Russian Federation. Hopefully, the whole world will finally realize that Russia never did and still does not function according to the democratic principles of the Western world. Russia is authoritarian, to say the least, and always has been.
Putin’s official title has morphed from prime minister to president, after a travesty of an election where practically nothing changed in the power structure. He may see himself as the forceful leader of a great country, but in reality he is very simply a ruthless dictator in the lineage of Stalin, Lenin, Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible and practically all his predecessors in the thousandyear Russian history. His country and the world deserve better.
Redjeb Jordania is the son of Noe Jordania, the president of the first Republic of Georgia. Noe Jordania led Georgia from 1918 until driven into exile in 1921 by the Soviet Red Army. He led a governmentinexile from France until his death in 1953. His son lives in East Hampton, New York, USA.
