South Ossetia: Travels in the Former Soviet Union

Although published in May, this article by Joshua Kucera on his visit to South Ossetia is doing the rounds again. It’s a fascinating insight into the breakaway region where time appears to have stood still and might even have been rolled back.

TSKHINVALI, South Ossetia—The first time I enter Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, the hotel staff immediately calls the police. They tell me that no one can process my journalist accreditation until Wednesday. It is a Sunday afternoon, and the following Tuesday is the May Day holiday, making it a four-day weekend. Can’t I just stay until then and see the town as a tourist, I ask? Nope. So about 20 minutes after I arrive, the police drive me back to the border with Georgia proper and tell me to try again later. I come back on Wednesday and find that the accreditation process consists of writing my name in a book and filling out a small piece of paper that I am told to carry with me everywhere I go. It takes about a minute.

I’m visiting South Ossetia as part of a tour across the southern edge of the former Soviet Union, looking at the wildly different directions the newly independent countries have taken since 1991. In the case of South Ossetia, a self-proclaimed independent country that is, in fact, neither independent nor a country, “nowhere” is probably the best way to describe where it’s gone. It’s perhaps the closest you can get today to experiencing the old Soviet Union, as well as a good place to get the flavor of a good old-fashioned, Cold-War-style proxy war between the United States and Russia. […] Billboards around Tskhinvali show Vladimir Putin with the legend “Our President.” […]

When I finally make it to Tskhinvali, I meet with the head of the press office, Irina Gagloeva, and she asks me whom I want to talk to. I give her the list of government officials I’d like to interview. The president? He’s in Moscow. The prime minister? Likewise. The minister of defense or the chief of the armed forces? Absolutely impossible to talk to anyone about anything military, she says. Finally, we set up meetings with the foreign minister and the deputy prime minister. That shouldn’t take very long, she says, so you can leave tomorrow. […] It’s clear that the government does not want journalists roaming around South Ossetia.

[…]

South Ossetia now appears to be a police state. Close to half the men I see on the street are police or military, and many men not in uniform openly wear pistols. Many of the police are engaged in make-work duties, it appears (including monitoring foreign journalists). There is a large detachment on the top floor of my hotel, allegedly providing security for the hotel (although I seem to be the only guest), and when some rowdy teenagers disrupt a concert celebrating Victory Day, the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Germany in World War II, a dozen or so police, including OMON forces (comparable to a SWAT team) are there to intercede.