Enmity of the Peoples

By Justin Lyle Special to Russia Profile 11/15/2010 As More Dukhobors Leave Javakheti for Russia, Their Homes Get Taken Over by Ethnic Armenians, but the Georgians Do Little to Integrate the Region Into Their Own State

The story of the departure of the Russian Dukhobor religious sect from Georgia since independence paints a damning portrait of the integration of the Javakheti region into today’s Georgian state. Tbilisi’s failure to engage the majority-Armenian region of Javakheti in a substantive integration process has left the area caught between two states, to the overwhelming detriment of the region’s population.


The Dukhobors, a Russian religious sect that arrived in Georgia in the 1840s, have endured a turbulent history. Driven from Russia for their dissent from Orthodoxy, they settled in the majority-Armenian Samtskhe-Javakheti region of present-day Georgia, which borders both Armenia and Turkey to the south. Dukhobors have remained in the village of Gorelovka and in small surrounding villages to this day, though their numbers have seen continuous decline. The group, of which communities also exist in Russia and Canada, subscribes to a spiritual creed centring on the individual’s struggle to follow the principles of honesty, generosity, hard work and fulfilment of the Ten Commandments, and does not acknowledge any worldly intermediary between man and God.

Eighty years before the arrival of Soviet Communism in Georgia, the Dukhobors cultivated crops and bred livestock on their own models of the collective farm. Land and cattle were regularly re-allocated to meet the changing needs of different families within the community concerned. From the 1930s onward, however, outspoken Dukhobors were deported and the group’s ceremonial rites were forced into secrecy. Its common agricultural system, on the other hand, remained largely intact and was seamlessly reincarnated under the Soviets as an exceptionally productive Kolkhoz.  The quaint and colourful Orphanage Building – the sect’s ceremonial center – was used for grain storage.

Following a phase of gradual emigration to Russia in the 1980s with the continuous decline of the Soviet structures, the period just before and after Georgian independence saw the first departures of Dukhobors en masse. The general socio-economic turmoil of the time, and particularly the vicious inter-ethnic chaos brought to Georgia by the ultra-nationalist President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, instilled a sense of insecurity in the Dukhobors and the majority-Armenian population of Javakheti alike. As a result of the ethnic-Armenian response to Gamsakhurdia’s “Georgia for the Georgians” agenda, from 1991 to 1993, Javakheti was administered independently by an ethnic-Armenian paramilitary organization, “Javakh.” A Georgian state cut into fragments by civil war made the prospect of resettlement to Russia more attractive, and by the mid-1990s the Dukhobor population in Georgia had halved to about 1,400. As one remaining Dukhobor man described the circumstances, “Sixteen-year-old boys were standing at the roadside with Kalashnikovs. Of course people panicked.”  

Another driver of emigration has been the proactive efforts by Russians and the Russian state to draw Dukhobors back to the land of their kin. In the early 1990s Russian ethnographers and the representatives of the Russian nationalist organization “Rodina” (Homeland) appeared in Javakheti to encourage Dukhobors to resettle to Russia. In some cases they even provided houses to Dukhobors there. Since early 2007 the Russian government has been implementing a more comprehensive policy, announced by President Vladimir Putin in June of 2006, to repatriate “compatriots” residing outside Russia in other areas of the former Soviet Union. Its purpose is to counteract the current Russian demographic crisis, as low birth rates are reducing the population by 700,000 people per year. Roughly 600 Javakheti Dukhobors have already taken advantage of this program, and have resettled to the Tambov Region of central Russia, while most of the few remaining Dukhobors in Javakheti are likely to follow suit before the program ends in 2012.

Demographic Feuds

This progressive dwindling of the Dukhobor presence in Javakheti has opened up a space of competition between the Georgian authorities and the local Armenian population, which has not been fully resolved even today. Amid the bitter ethnic tensions of the early 1990s, this rivalry centred on a rush to buy up Dukhobor houses for the future resettlement of ethnic Georgians and Armenians, respectively. Georgian and Armenian nationalist foundations bought roughly equal numbers of Dukhobor houses and began resettling their co-ethnics in Gorelovka and the surrounding villages, with each group aiming to alter the demographic balance to their own advantage.

On the Georgian side, the recipients of these houses were predominantly eco-migrants – people displaced from their homes by landslides and other natural disasters in the mountainous Adjara Region of Georgia. Apart from being unused to the harsh climate of Javakheti, the so-called “Georgian Siberia,” many of these migrants faced harassment by the local Armenians, who perceived them as pawns of a Georgian nationalization agenda. Most of these people either sold or abandoned their homes and returned to their native regions. The resettled Armenians were, by contrast, natives of remote villages in Samtskhe-Javakheti, already well adjusted to the harsh living conditions and welcomed by the existing Armenian community.

Today, with Armenian demographic and political predominance in the region established, ethnic-tensions have subsided. Georgian state resettlement of eco-migrants has in the last few years recommenced at a trickle. The general marginalization of these settlers has made their arrival uncontroversial for the local population. The Akhalkalaki and Ninotsminda districts that make up the Javakheti part of the Samtskhe-Javakheti today are 95 percent populated by ethnic Armenians.

Everybody’s Means Nobody’s

Despite the overwhelming prominence of ethnic conflict narratives in the early 1990s, the status quo is underpinned less by ethnic divisions than by the administrative setup of Samtskhe-Javakheti and the region’s limited practical integration into the Georgian state. The compromise solution that drew Javakheti back into Georgia proper installed the ethnic-Armenian leaders of “Javakh” in lucrative public posts, without securing substantive political re-integration. This flawed arrangement has contributed to a decisive legacy of isolation and clientelism in the region. For years Javakheti was effectively disregarded by the central authorities, which caused the region’s economy and infrastructure to break down. The concurrent lack of oversight also fed the capture of former state land and property by a small number of Armenian businessmen enjoying close connections to the municipal authorities in Javakheti’s districts.

In today’s sadly under-industrialized Javakheti, a meagre income from land cultivation is the only source of revenue for the overwhelming majority of residents, and those unable to secure a significant plot of land struggle to make ends meet. Most hard hit are the roughly 50 eco-migrant families resettled to Gorelovka in the last few years, many of whom remain without even the two-hectare land allocation promised within the state resettlement process. As long as the municipal authorities fail to provide families with a minimum of land for subsistence farming, they are left to fight for a fragile living as wage-laborers. As one ethnic-Georgian commented, “It’s like we are not living in Georgia. Unless the state starts doing something to help eco-migrants build a life here, none of us will stay.”
 
Meanwhile, the decisive blow to the remaining Dukhobor community in the Gorelovka village – the loss of its cooperative agricultural land, or “Dukhoborets” – is at once both strikingly peculiar and broadly characteristic of today’s Javakheti. During the first wave of land privatization in Georgia in 1992, the Dukhobor community rejected the standard nationwide land distribution deal of 1.25 hectares per family, preferring to retain their ancient communal landholding and mode of cultivation. Since independence the Soviet-era kolkhoz was defunct, and while the Dukhobors of Gorelovka continued to work the land as they had always done, no legal document guaranteed their ownership of it. Ownership of the land was disputed by the municipal authorities, which left the “Dukhoborets” formally, at least, a state property. In 2009 the stalemate was resolved in an unlikely and telling fashion. A secretive and treacherous deal, whose details remain unclear and unexamined, saw the final chairman of the Dukhoborets sell the Dukhobor land – which he did not formally possess – to a local Armenian businessman. Remarkably enough, the municipal authorities demonstrated no interest in recovering what they had long considered state property, and the Dukhobor community was made landless from one day to the next.     

Armenian Georgians   

According to Medea Turashvili of the International Crisis Group, one major barrier to the integration of Armenian Javakheti is insufficient knowledge of the state language, Georgian, which has direct implications for people’s access to higher-education and administrative institutions. She noted that while efforts were made to provide Georgian-language education to public administration officials in the region, other citizens of the region have been left out. “It’s a question of priorities. Programs were introduced, but since the 2008 war [in South Ossetia] the resources have not been there,” she said.

The lack of comprehensive education programs from Tbilisi is only half of the story, however. The local population itself tends to identify more readily with the Armenian state than with the Georgian one, and the area receives Armenian-language teaching materials as well as other basic social support from the neighbouring kin state. Turashvili also stressed the importance of the administrative division of labor in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region as a whole. “The governor for the region, appointed by Tbilisi, has only a limited supervisory role. This leaves the municipal authorities with significant freedom of manoeuvre,” she noted.

This detachment from the central authorities in Tbilisi is mirrored by a similarly ambiguous relationship with the Armenian authorities in Yerevan. Mamuka Areshidze of the House of Free Opinion think-tank in Tbilisi said that while the Armenian population in Javakheti sees Armenian as its own state language and calls for more self-government powers, this perspective is not supported in Yerevan. “The Armenian economy is weak, and it is dependent on maintaining open trade corridors with Georgia. The Batumi and Poti ports are their primary concern,” he said. The Armenian capital has not supported calls for autonomy in Javakheti, and has in the past even helped Tbilisi to quell disturbances by arresting disruptive Armenian activists.  

Yerevan’s prioritization of stability and good relations with Tbilisi has left some Armenians in Javakheti feeling betrayed, but above all it marks the region’s peculiar current political isolation between the two states. Tbilisi’s internationally co-funded efforts to improve transport links to the region, both by road and rail, will enhance the viability of micro-level agricultural trade and increase the region’s communication with the rest of Georgia. On the other hand, though, poor governance at the municipal level has already driven the Dukhobor community from the region and made life almost untenable for Georgian eco-migrants recently resettled there. As long as Tbilisi leaves the municipal authorities to their own devices, the rural population of Javakheti will continue to bear the burden of this political isolation and lack of accountability.