Europe-Asia Studies

ISSN: 0966-8136 (Print) 1465-3427 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceas20

Citizenship, Identity and Foreign Policy: The

Contradictions and Consequences of Russia's
Passport Distribution in the Separatist Regions of
Georgia

Scott Littlefield

To cite this article: Scott Littlefield (2009) Citizenship, Identity and Foreign Policy: The
Contradictions and Consequences of Russia's Passport Distribution in the Separatist Regions of
Georgia, Europe-Asia Studies, 61:8, 1461-1482, DOI: 10.1080/09668130903134848

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668130903134848

Published online: 21 Sep 2009.

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 EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 61, No. 8, October 2009, 14611482

Discussion Article

Citizenship, Identity and Foreign Policy: The

Contradictions and Consequences of Russias
Passport Distribution in the Separatist
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Regions of Georgia

SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

Abstract
This article examines the role of Russian passports and citizenship in facilitating Abkhazian and South
Ossetian separatism in Georgia. It questions Russian leaders justication of the countrys intervention
in the August 2008 South Ossetian crisis on the basis of defending co-nationals human rights, noting
the tenuous circumstances under which citizenship was granted and Russian policymakers general
disregard for human rights among non-ethnic russkii groups both domestically and abroad. The
rationale for Russian state actions is placed within the desire for geostrategic gain in the former Soviet
Union and the restoration of civic national pride.

ON THE NIGHT OF 7 AUGUST 2008, GEORGIA RESPONDED to intermittent shelling

from South Ossetia with a military oensive, aimed at re-establishing Tbilisis control
over the separatist region. The following day the Russian government reacted,
ordering a counter-oensive to defend Russian citizens living among the separatists
and ultimately pushing well into Georgia proper (Petro 2008). The events of August
2008 highlight the problematic overlapping of national and state identities in the post-
Soviet Caucasus. The Soviet collapse of 1991 saw 15 new states and civic identities
legally recognised but this emergent geopolitical order did not sit comfortably with
many in the former Soviet Union. The de jure legitimacy of states like Georgia was
questioned both from above by imperially minded Russian politicians and from below
by ethnic separatist movements in areas like South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The
combination of Russias desire to reassert inuence over its former territorial empire

The author wishes to thank Andreas Umland, Harald Wydra and two anonymous referees for their
comments on earlier drafts of this article. All mistakes are solely attributable to the author.

ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/09/081461-22 2009 University of Glasgow

DOI: 10.1080/09668130903134848
 1462 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

and the separatists aim of acquiring leverage against their new geopolitical ruler
facilitated cooperation between them.
Since the early 1990s the Russian Federations role as a peacekeeper in Abkhazia
and South Ossetia has become a policy instrument in the hands of government
ocials. Russian politicians and businessmen have given these regions economic,
political and military support while acting to preserve a conicted status quo as a
means of leverage in relations with Georgia (Stewart 2003, p. 11; ICG Europe 2004,
pp. 1718; Trenin 2006). At a time when the Russian military has crushed separatism
in its own Caucasian republic of Chechnya and Russian ocials have decried the
secession of Kosovo from Serbia, Russian companies have invested heavily in
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Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Duma members have vocally supported the breakaway
republics, and Russias armed forces have equipped the separatists (King 2001, p. 533;
MacFarlane & Schnabel 1995, p. 315; Gusep 2005). However, perhaps the Russian
Federations most signicant political move has been providing the residents of the
separatist republics with Russian citizenship and passports. This action, in contra-
vention of the countrys mandate as an unbiased peacekeeper, lent the breakaway
republics economic support in the form of pensions and aorded Russian leaders the
excuse of acting in their citizens interests in any future conict with Tbilisi (Khashig
2002). In response to Georgias shelling of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali,
Russian President Dimitri Medvedev invoked this constructed civic identity to justify
his countrys protection of its newly coined citizens.

In accordance with the Constitution and the federal laws, as President of the Russian
Federation it is my duty to protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they
may be.
It is these circumstances that dictate the steps we will take now. We will not allow the
deaths of our fellow citizens to go unpunished. The perpetrators will receive the punishment
they deserve. (Medvedev 2008a)

Medvedev ostensibly legitimised Russias response to Georgias aggression on the

basis of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which enshrines the inherent right of
individual and collective self-defence.1 The president argued that Georgias actions
endangered Russian citizens who needed to be safeguarded. Similarly, Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov referenced the UNs responsibility to protect principle,
implying Russia was obligated to defend South Ossetians from the perpetration or
imminent threat of atrocity crimes (ICG Europe 2008, p. 28). Yet, given the
circumstances under which the separatists were naturalised, the fact the events took
place on the territory of a sovereign neighbour, and the lack of evidence of a
humanitarian crisis needing to be averted, Russias action remains legally dubious.
Russian politicians and diplomats expanded the boundaries of Russian citizenship to
include the territory of a sovereign neighbour then acted in defence of the citizens the
state had surreptitiously acquired. The citizens in need of protection were thus
only Russian through prior infringements of Georgias sovereignty. Moreover,
Russias actions in August were seen as excessive by many observers (both

1
UN Charter, available at: http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/, accessed 17 June 2009.
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1463

governments and NGOs) and had signicant humanitarian repercussions themselves

for local Georgian populations (Allison 2008; ICG Europe 2008). Ultimately, the
Russian Federations leaders do not seem to have been even-handed actors in the
crisis, but biased interventionists driven by ulterior motives. Russian media sources
initially inated the severity of the situation in South Ossetia (this is not to absolve
Western reporting of its own biased coverage of the events), despite the countrys
record of ignoring the human rights of its own citizens and others, both domestically
and abroad.2 Therefore Medvedevs and Ivanovs justications must be questioned
and the Russian military action must be considered in the context of an increasingly
tense diplomatic dialogue with Tbilisi since the election of Mikheil Saakashvili as
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Georgian President during the 2004 Rose Revolution.

This article examines the diusion and instrumentalisation of Russian citizenship in
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, noting this policys eects on Georgias frozen conicts
and hypothesising what the apparent inconsistencies reveal about Russian policy-
makers own motivations. The rst section contextualises the separatist conicts,
looking at their development from Stalinist nationalities policies through to the
break-up of the Soviet Union and to the present day. The second section explores the
Russian Foreign Ministrys (MID) action of granting citizenship to Abkhazians and
South Ossetians and the legal ramications of this action. The third section examines
the Russian governments record in defending its own citizens and upholding of
human rights at home and in the former Soviet Union. The nal section considers the
inconsistent use of Russian citizenship in the separatist conicts in light of the Russian
Federations behaviour elsewhere on the territory of Russias former imperial
holdings, while questioning whether such behaviour merely represents pragmatic
politics. Ultimately, it is argued, Russian civic national identity has been
instrumentalised towards a partial redressing of the Soviet collapse, returning Russia
to the centre of Eurasian politics and providing a direction for national identity in the
Russian Federation.

Nationalism and conict in the Caucasus

The Caucasus is a region of deep ethnic nationalism and mutable civic identity,
making it an ideal ground for nominal bonds of citizenship to be exploited by the
larger forces in the region. Spanning the gap between Eastern Europe and the Middle
East while skirted by the Black and Caspian Seas, the Caucasus Mountains represent
both a formidable barrier to movement and an intercontinental land bridge. Reecting
this geography, the population composition of the Caucasus region has been shaped
by centuries of migratory movement and competition between empires. As waves of
migration have passed across this rugged terrain, pockets of linguistic and cultural
diversity have been left behind in geographic isolation even from those in neigh-
bouring valleys (Hewitt 1995; Hosking 2001, pp. 23540; Dunlop 1998, pp. 16).
Despite Russian tsars and Ottoman sultans holding nominal suzerainty, political
control has proven dicult to enforce in practice. Ethnicity has played a central role in
the formation of national identity in the Caucasus with dierent groups within a small

2
Russia Today, 10 August 2008, available at: http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/28732,
accessed 9 October 2008; Partt (2008).
 1464 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

radius often speaking completely distinct languages, following separate religions, and
practising divergent cultural norms. Russias provision of passports to Georgian
separatists must be considered in light of the regions deeper and more recent history.
In the 1920s and 1930s the USSR as a new imperial authority sought to manipulate
group boundaries in the Caucasus as part of a broader nationalities programme led by
the ethnic Georgian Josef Stalin (Pipes 1964; Sakwa 1993, pp. 4344; Smith 1999).
While MarxismLeninism held that national identity was a capitalist construct due to
wither away in humanitys progression towards a communist future, in the interim, as
the Soviet Union sought rst to spread, then merely maintain the principles of anti-
capitalist revolution, ethnic nationalism was exploited as a key means of boosting
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support for the USSRs cause and preventing the break-up of the multi-ethnic state.
Using dierent levels of national demarcation to reect the size and distinctiveness of
the numerous ethnic nations under their control, Soviet leaders placed the USSRs
nationalities in Soviet socialist republics (SSR), autonomous republics (ASSR),
autonomous oblasti (AO), oblasti and krai (Stoner-Weiss 2001, p. 108). These smaller
political units were intended to support local culture and customs alongside
programmes of korenizatsiya (rooting) aimed at boosting national distinctiveness
(Martin 2001). However, all of these ethnic nationalities were ultimately meant to be
bound by a common civic national identity as Soviet citizens. While there were
intermittent policies of Russication meant to wipe out national distinctiveness, Soviet
policy ultimately succeeded in maintaining (and in some cases creating) many of the
distinctive national identities that came to the fore as the USSR collapsed in 1991.
Where republican ties mattered little in the Soviet era, as they were superseded by
all-union ones, the ethnic geography of post-Soviet space was rife with potential
conict. The newly independent states of the former USSR were eager to assert their
political control and often conceptualised citizenship in terms of ethnicity, as that had
been the basis of their republican standing in the Soviet Union (Lepretre 2002).
Moreover, post-1991 Russia found itself shorn of its past role as a mediator between
conicting parties and sought to reassert pre-eminence in the aairs of its neighbours.
In Georgia, these various trends converged violently and their full impact has only
been revealed after a transitional phase of 17 years. In the 1990s and 2000s, as Georgia
proved unable to assert its status as sovereign across its de jure territory, Russian
politicians and diplomats sensed an opening to manipulate separatist struggle for its
own geopolitical benet by playing on the mixed identities of the Caucasian country.

Nationalism and separatism in Georgia

After the Russian Revolution, Georgia became an independent state from 1917 to
1922 (Stewart 2003, p. 6). When it was eventually absorbed into the Soviet Union it
formed part of the Transcaucasian SFSR (Soviet Federal Socialist Republic) as an
SSR (Coppieters 2004, p. i). Although the Transcaucasian SFSR was broken apart in
1925, Georgia maintained the status of SSR, now directly under the Soviet state. While
ethnic Georgians made up the majority of the republics population (62.4%),3 there

3
Ethno Kavkaz, Naselenie Respubliki Gruziya, available at: http://www.ethno-kavkaz.narod.ru/
rngeorgia.html, accessed 9 October 2008.
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1465

were numerous distinct ethnicities that came under its control, yet as all nationalities
were under the broader rule of the USSR, the slight of living under Georgian or any
other SSR nationality was not as troubling to minority nationalities as it would
become in the 1980s and 1990s when the SSRs struggled for and gained independence
from the centre.

South Ossetia. The most signicant non-Georgian entity originally within the
Georgian SSR was the South Ossetian AO (Table 1), which came under Tbilisis
jurisdiction in 1923 (ICG Europe 2004, p. 2). Although Stalin placed South Ossetia in
the Georgian SSR, its people were ethnically and culturally linked to the residents of
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the North Ossetian AO (later ASSR) located in the Russian SFSR across the border.
There were minor dierences between the two Ossetian regions: a higher concentration
of Georgians in the South than in the North and a greater percentage of Russians in
the North than in the South. Nevertheless, South Ossetia remained a relatively small
territorial and geographic unit within the Georgian republic, where many Georgians
refused to acknowledge that South Ossetians were an indigenous ethnic people,
labelling them settlers from North Ossetia (Brooke 1991; Ghebali 2004, p. 282).
However, as the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late 1980s, tension increased
between the Georgian centre and South Ossetia (ICG Europe 2004, 2007b). In 1988,
the South Ossetian Popular Front (Ademon Nykhas)4 sought to gain ASSR status
which would put it on a par with its neighbours to the north in terms of the Soviet
system of national hierarchy. In 1989, as the Georgian authorities sought to make
Georgian the national language of the republic and to marginalise the Ossetian
language and culture, GeorgianOssetian tensions increased, culminating in clashes
between the two sides. In 1990 South Ossetias independence movement gained
signicant traction. That summer, the Georgian Supreme Soviet banned regional
parties (like the Popular Front) from participating in the republics parliamentary
elections. This led to a South Ossetian boycott of the polls that ultimately brought
Zviad Gamsukhardia to power in an unstable coalition government. Instead of

TABLE 1
POPULATION OF SOUTH OSSETIA

Year 1926 1939 1959 1970 1979 1989 2007 (est.)

Total 87,375 106,118 96,807 99,421 97,988 98,000 70,000

Ossetian (%) 69.1 68.1 65.8 66.5 66.4 66.2 64.3
Georgian (%) 26.9 25.9 27.5 28.3 28.8 29 25
Russian (%) 0.2 2 2.5 1.6 2.1 n/a n/a
Other 3.8 4 4.2 3.6 2.7 n/a n/a

Sources: Ethno Kavkaz, Naselenie Respubliki Yuzhnaya Osetiya, available at: http://www.ethno-
kavkaz.narod.ru/rnsossetia.html, accessed 9 October 2008; BBC News, 27 August 2008, available at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/country_proles/3797729.stm, accessed 9 October 2008; and PGCN
(2007).

4
Ademon Nykhas is translated as popular shrine in Ossetian (Nikola Cvetkovski, The Georgian
South Ossetian Conict, Dissertation, Aalborg University, available at: http://www.caucasus.dk/
publication5.htm, accessed 17 June 2009).
 1466 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

capitulating to the new Georgian nationalist leadership however, South Ossetians

prepared to hold their own parliamentary elections. This action was swiftly rebutted
by a decree from Gamsukhardia that fomented further unrest in the region. On 11
December martial law was eectively installed in South Ossetia with a Georgian
interior troop commander becoming mayor of Tskhinvali. Conict was to grow over
the following month and to remain simmering for a year after that (ICG Europe 2004,
pp. 34). In January 1992, a month into the post-Soviet era, South Ossetia and
Georgia again came into conict as the Ossetians sought to join the Russian
Federation and avoid the growing threat to their cultural survival from Georgian
nationalism, witnessed in President Zviad Gamsukhardias statement that Georgia is
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for Georgians (Brooke 1991). A ceasere was ultimately agreed in June 1992, with
Russia mediating and becoming a peacekeeper in the now frozen conict.

Abkhazia. From 1917 to 1921 Abkhazia was part of the independent Georgian
republic; however, when the Bolsheviks took over Georgia they formed the Abkhazian
SSR and placed it alongside Georgia in the Transcaucasian SFSR. Abkhazia then
moved in parallel with Georgia to become an independent SSR in 1925 (ICG Europe
2006, p. 4). Yet, in 1931 Stalin demoted Abkhazia to an ASSR and placed it within
Georgian jurisdiction (Stewart 2003, p. 6). Following Stalins action, an inux of
Georgian settlers came to Abkhazia, dramatically shifting the republics demographic
balance. As a result there came to be more ethnic Georgians than Abkhazians living in
the region (Table 2).
In a similar way to South Ossetia, Abkhazian separatism began to emerge during
the late 1980s when Georgian authorities sought to extend Georgian culture and
language across the Georgian SSR (Stewart 2003, p. 7). In 1989, Abkhazian students
clashed with police at Sukhumi State University over proposed language and
curriculum changes. As the situation in South Ossetia turned violent in 1992, concerns
grew in Abkhazia in response to calls from the Provisional Military Council, that had
succeeded Gamsukhardia, for a return to Georgias 1921 constitution (ICG Europe
2006, p. 5). Then in July 1992 Abkhazia declared independence from Georgia and the
Georgian government responded by sending troops into the region. Abkhazia already
constituted part of the Confederation of Mountain Peoples (Konfederatsiya Gorskikh

TABLE 2
POPULATION OF ABKHAZIA

Year 1926 1939 1959 1970 1979 1989 2003

Total 201,016 311,885 404,738 486,959 486,082 525,061 215,972

Abkhazian (%) 27.8 18 15.1 15.9 17.1 17.8 43.8
Armenian (%) 12.8 15.9 15.9 15.4 15.1 14.6 20.8
Georgian (%) 32.6 29.5 39.1 41 43.9 45.7 21.3
Russian (%) 6.2 19.3 21.4 19.1 16.4 14.4 10.8
Greek (%) 7 11.1 2.2 2.7 2.8 n/a 0.7
Ukrainian (%) 2.3 2.7 2.8 2.5 2.1 n/a 0.8
Other (%) 11 4 4 3 3 8 2

Source: Ethno Kavkaz, Naselenie Respubliki Abkhaziya, available at: http://www.ethno-kavkaz.narod.ru/

rnabkhazia.html, accessed 9 October 2008.
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1467

Narodov). Formed in 1991, this group sought to unite an independent Caucasian

region from imperially minded neighbouring states through negotiations and the
defensive use of its collective military might (O konfederatsii 1991). From August
1992, thousands of volunteer Confederation ghters entered Abkhazia to battle
Georgian forces. Other external support for the Abkhazian cause came from the
Russian military in the form of bombardments on Georgian positions, materiel,
personnel and supplies (Hopf 2005, pp. 22931). On 27 September 1993, Abkhazian
forces took over the city of Sukhumi, precipitating a humanitarian disaster with
thousands of ethnic Georgians either killed or forced to ee as refugees into Georgian
controlled territory (ICG Europe 2006, p. 6). Ultimately the UN entered negotiations
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with the two sides to broker a deal whereby Russia would observe the peace process in
the region (Stewart 2003; ICG Europe 2006, 2007a).

Russian nationalism and the Caucasus region

Russian leaders have long sought a privileged role for their country in the region,
which itself played a central role in Russias emergence as an expansionist, multi-
ethnic polity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Caucasus was squeezed
between the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Extending Russian inuence in the area
proved a dicult and bloody task that inspired Pushkins poetry and saw peoples like
the Circassians nearly exterminated (Khodarkovsky 1999; Hosking 2001, pp. 23540).
This legacy of violent struggle has dened Russian relations with the region to the
present day, as witnessed in the conicts between the Russian state and semi-
autonomous regions like Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia. The diverse Caucasus
region occupies a contested place within the Russian national imagination shaded
unstably between us and other; forced into civic alignment but never shorn of its
inherent ethnic foreignness. Current attempts by the Russian Federation to redene its
relationship with the people and state of Georgia therefore represent the prolongation
of an identity struggle that has played out over centuries between the Russian centre
and neighbouring ethnic groups.
The former Soviet Unions unclear ethnic and civic boundaries have exacerbated
inter-group tensions, and sometimes led to violence. Within the contemporary Russian
Federation, Caucasians as well as Central Asians have been the subject of xenophobic
attacks (Human Rights Watch 1998). While these peoples are not ethnically Russian,
they originate from lost Soviet and tsarist imperial possessions, some of which are now
independent states, but many of which are still located within the multiethnic
Federation. While Russia has fought two brutal wars in Chechnya and suppressed
insurrection in neighbouring regions to maintain its territorial cohesion,
many Russians have simultaneously rejected the inhabitants of these regions as
non-ethnically Russian. Yet the phenomenon of ethnic intermixing runs both ways in
the former Soviet Union. Just as there are numerous non-ethnic Russians in the
Russian Federation, there are many ethnic Russians outside the Federations borders,
threatened (or potentially threatened) by non-Russian governments. For many
Russians this new reality of diminished state and ethnic inuence is dicult to come to
terms with, leading to a rise in Russian nationalist sentiment. The key tension lies
between a post-imperial mindset that aims to spread the Russian civic nation and one
 1468 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

that intends to benet the ethnic Russian core of the expansive state; this dierence is
captured by a comparison of civic-rossiiskii and ethnic-russkii nationalism.
The inclusion of non-russkii populations in the Russian (Rossiiskaya) Federation
is a contentious issue for many in the country. Some Russian nationalist voices have
called for a consolidation of rossiiskii and russkii territory. The writer Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn (1995) proposed a new greater Russian state that would include the
territories of Belarus, eastern Ukraine and northern Kazakhstan, alongside a Russia
shorn of non-russkii regions like Chechnya. However, Russian leaders have focused
on stabilising the holdings of the Russian Federation, although calls have been made
to defend the human rights of ethnic-russkii populations abroad. Russia has sought
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a favoured status for itself in the aairs of its former Soviet neighbours, dubbing
them the near abroad and considering them regions of Russias special interests
(Lavrov 2008). There are thus countervailing forces of territorial (or at least
political) expansion and consolidation running alongside goals of protecting russkii
co-ethnics. Added to this are of course the burdens of being the largest and most
formidable piece in a recently dismantled state puzzle, a situation that has forced
Russia to take on the burden of maintaining stability in many corners of the former
Soviet Union. This has strained Kremlin budgets and created diplomatic headaches
for the Foreign Ministry in places as diverse as Tajikistan, Moldova and of course
Georgia.

Russians as peacekeepers in Abkhazia and South Ossetia

Despite its inclusion in the accords for resolving the Abkhazian and South Ossetian
conicts as a neutral peacekeeper, Russia has been accused of abusing its role to gain
leverage against Georgia in what ultimately has become a struggle for inuence in the
Caucasus. From 1992 to 2008, various actors within the Georgian leadership
repeatedly called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the separatist areas
because of the alleged biases of those peacekeepers. Under the speakership of Nino
Burjanadze, the Georgian parliament passed resolutions criticising the Russian forces
and asking for their withdrawal in October 2005, February 2006 and July 2006 (after
similar resolutions were passed in 1997, 2001 and 2002).5 Opposition criticism focused
on the lack of action on these resolutions but otherwise agreed with their content. In
June 2008, Mikheil Saakashvili described the tension over peacekeepers in Abkhazia
as the major issue in Georgias relations with Russia, and noted: the conict has
moved out from the frozen condition and that Russian railway troops and
paratroopers were eectively undertaking a militarised annexation of Georgian
territory.6 An EU Parliamentary resolution that same month [took] the view that
the . . . peacekeeping format must be revised since the Russian troops have lost their

5
Civil Georgia, 18 July 2006, available at: http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id13084; see
also http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id11800; http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id11816 and
http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id13079, all sites accessed 14 April 2009.
6
Rustavi 2 TV, 9 June 2008, interview with President Saakashvili, transcript reproduced on Civil
Georgia, 10 June 2008, available at: http://www.civilgeorgia.ge/eng/article.php?id18516, accessed 13
April 2009.
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1469

role of neutral and impartial peacekeepers.7 Other bodies of which Russia was a
member, like the OSCE and UN, pushed for the dierent parties to solve the separatist
disputes peacefully but oered few practical suggestions for doing so. Russias ocial
view has generally been that its forces are needed to prevent a return to violence in the
breakaway regions.8
While some argue that Russia has maintained separatist instability in Georgia in
order to make itself an invaluable conict mediator (Coppieters 2004, p. xiv), this
does not give full credit to Kremlin concerns about the situation in Georgia. The
Russian leadership has consistently stressed an interest in maintaining amicable
stability on its borders. One reason for this is its concern to combat the threat of
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terrorism entering Russia from abroad and seeking to further break apart the
Russian Federation. As a zone of conicted national identities and blurred state
borders, Russias CaucasianCentral Asian soft underbelly therefore represents a
signicant threat to the Russian Federations continued existence (at least in its
current form). In the Northern Caucasus, the Russian Federation has felt the
greatest opposition to its own integrity, making it especially sensitive to the
situation in neighbouring Georgia. However, it is not simply stability that Russian
foreign policy has sought to promote in the former Soviet Union, but a region of
friendly states. Thus the threat of Georgia entering NATO prompted the Russian
Federation to maintain instability on its own terms in Abkhazia and South Ossetia
instead of an unfriendly stability with the Western alliance making increasing gains
in former Soviet Union territory. To join NATO a state is expected to resolve
international, ethnic, and external territorial disputes by peaceful means.9
Therefore by perpetuating the frozen conicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia,
Russia could hold up Georgias bid to join the alliance.
Economically, Abkhazia and (especially) South Ossetia are at best marginally viable
as independent states (Gumba & Ketsba 2004; Indans 2007, p. 134; Dzhikaev &
Parastaev 2004). The signicance of this economic vulnerability has allowed Russia to
ingratiate itself to the separatists through direct and indirect economic aid. The most
direct means of Russian government support to the breakaway regions is through
paying pensions to the Abkhazians and South Ossetians it has granted citizenship
(Khashig 2002). Russian political and business bodies have also invested heavily in the
separatists economic infrastructure, for example rebuilding rail links with Abkhazia
(Isakova 2004). In April 2008, the Kremlin lifted the economic embargo on the two
regions it imposed in the original ceaseres (Gamova 2007). Yet Russian companies
were already doing business in the two breakaway republics. Not surprisingly, Putin

7
The European Parliament resolution of 5 June 2008 on the situation in Georgia, Brussels, 5 June
2008, available at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef-//EP//TEXTTAP6-
TA-2008-02530DOCXMLV0//EN, accessed 13 April 2009.
8
Summary of Statement by Sergey Lavrov, Russias Minister of Foreign Aairs, in Security Council
Meeting on Cooperation between UNSC and Regional Organizations, New York, September 20,
2006, 20 September 2006, available at: http://www.un.int/russia/new/MainRoot/docs/o_news/
210906/newen7.htm, accessed 20 April 2009.
9
NATO Handbook, Chapter 3: The Opening Up of the Alliance, available at: http://www.nato.int/
docu/handbook/2001/hb030103.htm, accessed 17 April 2009.
 1470 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

and Medvedev announced their intention for the Russian Federation to nance the
reconstruction eort in South Ossetia after the ghting of August 2008.10
Russian military support for the regimes in Abkhazia and South Ossetia has gone
beyond the mere stationing of peacekeepers. In the years leading up to the conict,
Russian ghter planes violated Georgian airspace around the separatist regions
numerous times. August 2007 saw a Russian missile jettisoned (although it did not
explode) near South Ossetia, while in April 2008 a Russian MiG-29 appeared to shoot
down a Georgian drone o the coast of Abkhazia (Gorst 2007; Ministerstvo
inostrannykh 2008; Ministry of Foreign Aairs of Georgia 2008). Events escalated
further when Russia ultimately demonstrated its willingness to defend the separatists
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by force in August 2008. Nevertheless, Russias military backing for the regimes in
Abkhazia and South Ossetia was never made explicit as the Kremlin continually
stressed its unbiased role as peacekeeper to the frozen conicts.
Support for the separatist regimes was often expressed by the Duma before the
conict erupted, but this did not become ocial state policy until August 2008. While
individual members of the government voiced support for the separatist regimes in the
years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian presidency consistently
denied ocial support to the separatists (Stewart 2003, p. 11). However, after the
Georgian attack on South Ossetia, the Russian Duma and presidency united in
backing both separatist regions bids for independence (Medvedev 2008b). Russias
support of the separatist regimes came in the face of intense foreign pressure to
preserve Georgias territorial integrity, and was granted despite the risks that
separatism presented for the Russian Federations own territorial cohesion.
Justifying his actions, Medvedev claimed the need to defend rossiiskii citizens. Yet
the parameters for employing the UNs 2005 responsibility to protect principle were
not met in the Georgian conict. The essence of the 2005 UN resolution is that states
are responsible for protecting their citizens against genocide, war crimes, crimes
against humanity and ethnic cleansing and agree to help other states in fullling these
ideals. When this is manifestly not happening all peaceful means should be used to
protect the vulnerable populations. Finally, in the case of continued violations, the
UNSC can consider a more forceful response (Bellamy 2008, pp. 62223). Further, the
principle only applies on a states own territory and is thereby inapplicable to
expatriate citizens (ICG Europe 2008, p. 28). Therefore Russias case against Georgia
on the grounds of responsibility to protect has weak traction. Despite numerous
claims to the contrary, little solid evidence was compiled of genocide, crimes against
humanity or ethnic cleansing on the part of the Georgians (although many ethnic
Georgians were forced from South Ossetia after the ghting). Nevertheless, Georgia
did endanger innocent lives with its artillery bombardment of Tskhinvali, which
constitutes a war crime. While there was cause for concern (although not as much as
Medvedev, Lavrov and Putin alleged), Russia did not follow the correct protocol of
seeking a peaceful solution and then acting through the UNSC; it simply reacted in a
matter of hours to Tbilisis onslaught. In any case, the responsibility to protect

10
Russia Today, 10 August 2008, available at: http://www.russiatoday.com/news/news/28732,
accessed 9 October 2008; RIA Novosti, 20 August 2008, available at: http://en.rian.ru/russia/
20080820/116153237.html, accessed 9 October 2008.
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1471

principle would not have applied to the Georgian separatists as they were not on
Russian territory, despite holding Russian Federation passports. While it is possible to
argue against the viability of a human rights mechanism that cannot respond quickly,
requires UNSC sanction, and must be carried out by the de jure sovereign when
peoples lives are at stake, Russias actions were not supported by international law,
thus undercutting its defence.
Beyond the Russian leaderships manipulation and transgression of the responsi-
bility to protect principle, the process by which the Abkhazians and South Ossetians
gained Russian citizenship was neither straightforward nor necessarily legally valid.
This raises the question of whether the Russian Federations actions were motivated
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by other factors like staunching the advance of NATO or making a point to other
former Soviet Union governments about confronting Russia (or even the fruit of
Putins personal animosity towards Saakashvili11). Russias relations with the
breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia were governed by practical
security concerns and post-imperial concerns before the issue of humanitarian causes
even arose. The circumstances surrounding Russias actions in August 2008 do little to
combat the notion that the post-conict couching of Russian concerns in the language
of legal obligations and human rights was a thin cover for pragmatic geopolitics.

Russian citizenship for Georgian separatists

Provided with the opportunity, many in Abkhazia and South Ossetia were happy to
spurn Georgian rule and embrace the Russian Federation. However, Russias action
of providing the separatists with passports and citizenship represented a unilateral
abrogation of its peacekeeping duties and was illegitimate in Georgias eyes, further
weakening the Kremlins argument that it was a responsible actor protecting its
citizens. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgian citizenship was rejected by
Abkhazians and South Ossetians, with the result that many of the local populations
held no recognised citizenship (Khashig 2002). This meant that these people did not
have an international identity and a means of travelling abroad as locally issued
documents like passports were not accepted by other countries (Krivenyuk 2004).
Moreover this gave the stateless separatists an unclear legal status as the jurisdictional
authority of Georgia in these regions was de facto undermined. Nevertheless, the
separatists were not denied Georgian citizenship; they merely refused to accept it.
Since the 1954 UN Convention Relating to the Status to Stateless Persons, the
holding of citizenship has been recognised as a basic, and some argue even
fundamental, human right (Barton et al. 2002; Weissbrodt & Collins 2006, p. 248).
Therefore the denial of citizenship constitutes a serious infringement on peoples well
being. In the cases of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the separatists were not (de jure)
denied the right to citizenship by the Georgian authorities; however, they (de facto)
refused to accept this civic national identity. Initially many residents of the separatist
regions retained Soviet era documents which allowed them to travel into Russia and
gave them face internationally. Yet, as Soviet documents stopped being recognised in

11
This animosity was evidenced, for example, in a leaked comment Putin made to French President
Nicolas Sarkozy about hanging Saakashvili from the balls (Bremner 2008).
 1472 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

Russia and elsewhere, the populations of separatist areas risked becoming

internationally isolated.12 Yet Georgia was not legally at fault for the stateless plight
of the separatists; Abkhazians and South Ossetians were simply unwilling to accept
Georgian citizenship.
One proposed solution was for the residents of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to be
issued Nansen passports (Khashig 2008). These documents, which were originally
issued to Russians who had ed the Soviet Union during and after the Russian Civil
War, provide stateless refugees with a legal existence internationally and the ability to
travel (Weiss 1954, p. 205). However, Abkhazians and South Ossetians living in their
homelands were not refugees with a vital need to cross borders but separatists within
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the internationally recognised Republic of Georgia who refused the citizenship oered
them.
A second alternative for allowing Abkhazians and South Ossetians to travel abroad
was the duplication of the UN travel document scheme in Kosovo. In this scheme
Kosovo Albanians were granted special passports by the UN Mission in Kosovo
(UNMIK) allowing them to travel abroad instead of relying on Yugoslavian or
Serbian documents (UNMIK 2001). The Kosovo documents were similar to the
Nansen ones in giving stateless people an international identity but without their being
refugees. This solution was proposed by Tsiza Gumba, a retired Abkhazian
parliamentary deputy (Krivenyuk 2004), as a means of allowing Abkhazians to travel
internationally but not tying them to what they felt was a hostile foreign government.
However, as with the Nansen-type passport, appeals for a Kosovo-type passport were
denied (Khashig 2008). The major obstacle to UNMIK-like documents was a lack of
international recognition. Where some 40 countries recognised the UNMIK scheme as
valid,13 no state appeared willing to participate in such a programme in Abkhazia or
South Ossetia; residents were simply told to acquire Georgian passports.
While the situation of stateless Abkhazians and South Ossetians was ostensibly
similar to that of ethnic Russians in Estonia in the years after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the situation with passports and citizenship was dierent. After gaining
independence in 1991, Estonia put rm restrictions on the ability of its large russkii
population to acquire citizenship, thereby limiting the minority groups ability to
inuence electoral politics in the country and travel abroad (Andersen 1997, pp. 313
14). This situation was eased by the issuing of aliens passports in 1996 to aliens with
valid residence permit[s] in Estonia and without travel document[s] of any other
country or the possibility of obtaining them (Smith 2003, p. 24).14 However, unlike
the separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Estonias russkii population was
generally interested in gaining citizenship (or at least a stable legal existence) in the
country of their de jure residence. Moreover, to qualify for the aliens passport scheme
these stateless people had to engage with the authorities in Tallinn, obtaining a
residence permit before applying for the travel document. In Abkhazia and South

12
RBK, 24 January 2003, available at: http://toprbc.ru/politics/24/01/2003/49496.shtml, accessed 5
September 2008; UNHCR Moscow (2004, p. 3).
13
AFP, 7 September 2007, available at: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jWIhQCAuPGD-
NEruvqQKzy34KkxLQ, accessed 9 September 2008.
14
Kodakondus-Ja Migratsiooniamet, Aliens Passport: Terms, available at: http://www.mig.ee/
index.php/mg/eng/identity_documents/alien_s_passport, accessed 8 April 2009.
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1473

Ossetia the separatists had no desire to become Georgian citizens or recognise

Georgias sovereignty over them. Again, they had been oered Georgian citizenship
but rejected Tbilisis overtures, preferring to remain stateless than become Georgians.
Ultimately the Russian Ministry of Foreign Aairs (MID), the outside actor most
involved in the conict zones, provided the separatists with Russian passports. This
action directly challenged Georgias territorial sovereignty and biased Russias role in
conict mediation. While the Russian Federation politicians justied their countrys
provision of passports on humanitarian grounds and Russian law allowed stateless
people in the former Soviet Union to acquire Russian Federation citizenship through a
simplied procedure without residency, the MID eectively intervened in another
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sovereign states aairs and undercut the peacemaking eorts it was meant to
support.15
While the process of acquiring Russian citizenship for Abkhazians and South
Ossetians went relatively smoothly throughout the 1990s, a Russian citizenship law
proposed in 2002 complicated the procedure for former USSR citizens (Khashig 2002;
UNHCR Moscow 2004). From 1992 to 2003 possession of a Soviet passport made it
relatively easy to acquire a Russian passport and many Russians continued using
Soviet era documents with stamps in them denoting that they were citizens of the
Russian Federation. However, a 1997 government resolution started the process of
phasing out the use of USSR documents in Russia, although they remain valid
identication documents for Russian citizens. As a result of this change residents of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia hurried in 2002 and 2003 to acquire Russian documents,
a move which Russian authorities actively encouraged (Osipovich 2008). Khashig
describes the process in Abkhazia in 2002:

Since June 1, the public organisation, the Congress of Russian Communities of Abkhazia, has
been collecting Abkhazians Soviet era travel documents. It has sent them to [a] consular
department specially set up by Moscow foreign ministry ocials in the city of Sochi, on the
Black Sea coast just north of the breakaway region. When they have been checked, they are
returned with a new page inserted certifying Russian citizenship. (Khashig 2002)

The main goal of Russias action appeared to be making as many Abkhazians and
South Ossetians as possible into Russian citizens and by 2003 some 80% of the
regions residents held Russian Federation passports.16 Yet many separatist applicants
seem to have been made citizens of Russia without acquiring Russian internal
passports granting the right to enter Russia itself (UNHCR 2004, pp. 14).
The MIDs distribution of passports to Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatists
represented a two-level approach to international legal norms. On the one hand,
Russia supported the right of stateless people to citizenship. On the other hand, Russia
trampled on the sovereignty of its neighbour and subverted Georgian attempts at
consolidating a civic national identity over its territorial holdings. Thus Medvedevs

15
RBK, 24 January 2003, available at: http://toprbc.ru/politics/24/01/2003/49496.shtml, accessed 5
September 2008; Ghebali (2004, p. 285).
16
Itar-Tass, Russian Ministry Conrms 80 per cent of Abkhaz are Russian Citizens, 19 August
2005, available at: http://www.unomig.org/media/headlines/?id4163, accessed 5 September 2008.
 1474 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

call for a right to defend Russian citizens is problematic because these citizens were
legitimately Georgians by virtue of being born on Georgian territory (jus soli) who the
MID had underhandedly naturalised (Weissbrodt & Collins 2006). While Russia
claimed to be upholding Georgian sovereignty in its peacekeeping role, the MIDs
passport policy concerning the separatists blurred the lines of jurisdiction, creating
rossiiskii populations on Georgian land. Where Medvedev cried foul over the
infringement of its citizens rights in South Ossetia, it was the Russian MID that
originally violated Georgias sovereign relationship with these very individuals.

RussianGeorgian relations
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To be fully understood, the MIDs passport policies towards Abkhazia and South
Ossetia must be viewed in the context of a RussianGeorgian relationship which had
dramatically worsened since Mikheil Saakashvilis rise to power in 2004. Upon being
elected President of Georgia it was unlikely that Saakashvili would enjoy good
relations with the Russian Federation. Saakashvili became president on the back of
the Rose Revolution in which protests against the manipulation of parliamentary
elections led to the ouster of the Russian backed Eduard Shevardnadze as president.
Saakashvili brought a dramatically dierent worldview to the presidency and
personied the loss of Russias power over Georgia. A lawyer who had been educated
in the United States, Misha looked to the West for Georgias future political course
(King 2004). The new president initially seemed willing to work with Russian
politicians, despite their backing of his opponent in the 2004 election; however,
confrontation always lay beneath the surface. On the one hand, the nationalists
supporting Saakashvili demanded a reassertion of Tbilisis sovereignty over all of its
territory, while on the other hand, the president spurned Russian inuence and looked
to NATO and the EU for partnerships.
One of Saakashvilis key election pledges was to regain control of the separatist
regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which put him at odds with a Russian political
establishment that seemed intent on maintaining these breakaway regions as leverage
against Georgia (Isakova 2004). In 2006 the RussiaGeorgia relationship declined
dramatically. That spring, Russias consumer rights watchdog (Rospotrebnadzor)
boycotted Georgian wine and mineral water imports under the pretext of health code
violations.17 A larger diplomatic row erupted with Georgias detention and ultimate
expulsion of four Russian military ocers accused of espionage (Petriashvili 2006). In
the ensuing tit-for-tat exchange, Russian authorities began expelling Georgian illegal
immigrants and severed transport links between the two countries. These actions were
painful for a Georgian economy that relied heavily on remittance payments from and
exports to the Russian Federation. However, Georgia maintained strong GDP growth
and the public rallied around Saakashvili (Indans 2007, p. 134). Standing up to Russia
appeared to be politically rewarding in a country that previously enjoyed warm

17
BBC News, 5 May 2006, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4976304.stm,
accessed 3 October 2008; BBC News, 30 March 2006, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/
europe/4860454.stm, accessed 3 October 2008.
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1475

relations with its larger neighbour, demonstrating just how dramatically the countries
relationship had changed.
RussianGeorgian relations continued to be uneasy in the winter of 20062007 as
Gazprom raised the price of gas exports to Georgia to European rates, pushing
Georgia to import its gas from Azerbaijan (Indans 2007, p. 133). Moreover, Georgia
continued its moves towards the West, both intensifying talks on NATO entry and
vocalising its ambitions for EU membership. Speeches by visiting US politicians
seemed to conrm this new direction in Georgias outlook on the world. While Russia
sought to punish Georgia for attempting to leave its sphere of inuence, the action of
severing economic ties made Georgia more independent and condent on the world
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stage. As a result Russian leaders became even less inuential in Georgian aairs.
Ultimately, one of the few political means of leverage against Tbilisi that remained
in the possession of Russian policy makers was the ability to manipulate separatist
conict. The granting of citizenship to Abkhazians and South Ossetians, while
couched in the language of human rights protection, strengthened the Kremlins hand
in Georgia where other means of inuence had been eaten away during Saakashvilis
term in oce. Furthermore, this was a move of broader geopolitical signicance.
While in February 2008, Russian leaders felt they had been ignored by Western
countries that recognised Kosovos independence from Serbia, August 2008 showed
that the Russian Federation still had to be accounted for in international politics,
while arming the countrys dominant position in the former Soviet Union. The
Russian Federation was able to undercut Georgias ability to seek membership of
NATO (and to a lesser extent the EU) while sending a message to other ex-Soviet
states of the need to account for Russia in policy decisions. Although Russias moves
were not entirely justiable from a legal perspective, they proved eective in meeting
the countrys goals. Moreover, Russian leaders argued the ambiguous legality of their
actions was little dierent than that surrounding Western policies.

Contradictions of Russias defence of its citizens human rights in Georgia

As discussed earlier, from the standpoint of international law, the right to protect
principle does not apply to Russias actions in defence of South Ossetians in August
2008. Still, it is understandable that a government might have a strong interest in the
well being of its citizens, or the idea of human rights in general. If this were the case the
government, it could be argued, would probably be consistently interested in human
rights issues with respect to its citizens and more broadly. Yet, the Russian Federation
has a poor record of defending Russian citizens in the neighbouring Northern
Caucasus and has not supported human rights consistently in Russia or the former
Soviet Union (Gill 2008). While Georgias assault on South Ossetia killed innocent
civilians and Russian peacekeepers, Russian sources inated reports on the extent of
the damage and numbers of casualties (Partt 2008). Medvedevs reference to a
humanitarian catastrophe in attempting to legitimise his response reects a dierent
position on the well being of foreigners and non-russkii Russian citizens than the
country has taken in other cases.
For a leadership ostensibly concerned with human rights, Russias actions have, at
times, been startling. In 2005, the Russian Federation gave political and judicial
 1476 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

support to a government that killed hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in

Uzbekistan. Within the Russian Federation, the rights of Russian citizens have been
frequently compromised by state actions. The most obvious curtailment of citizen
rights came in the two Chechen campaigns, where Russian citizens were victimised by
the militarys confrontation with rebel groups. Human rights abuses against Russian
citizens by government authorities have taken a variety of forms, many of which target
non-russkii people. These include generalised police indierence to xenophobic attacks
in the country and the marginalisation of groups like the Meshketian Turks who have
systematically been denied citizenship in Krasnodar krai (Barton et al. 2002, p. 5).
Russian political concern for human rights appears strongest with regard to Russian
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speakers in Estonia, Latvia, Moldova and Ukraine. As with Georgian separatists,

these former Soviet Russian speakers live in states that have dicult, or potentially
troublesome, relations with the Russian Federation, lending weight to the argument
that Russian leaders view human rights as a tool for manipulating neighbouring states
rather than the basis of principled policy making.
In the former Soviet Union, Russian state ocials prioritisation of political
expediency over human rights has been clearly evidenced in Uzbekistan. In May 2005,
riot police in the Uzbek city of Andijon harshly suppressed peaceful demonstrations.
Opening re on a crowd, the police killed numerous demonstrators (187 by the Uzbek
governments count; 750 according to opposition sources) (ICG Asia 2005; Human
Rights Watch 2005). Thousands more ed across the border to neighbouring Central
Asian countries, fearful of returning to Uzbekistan. The violent overreaction of
Uzbekistans leaders, who it has been argued feared a coloured revolution in their
country, was condemned by the West, despite the usefulness of Uzbekistan in NATO-
led operations in Afghanistan (Tavernise 2008). Russian politicians, however, did not
question the Uzbek governments account of the events, supporting the line that the
disturbance was caused by terrorists and claiming to have intelligence linking the
protesters to Afghan extremists (Tarzi 2005). Russian prosecutors ordered the Andijon
refugees in the Russian Federation to be extradited to Uzbekistan where they were
regarded as terrorists. Moreover, Russian authorities stripped Russian citizenship
from an ethnic Uzbek Russian citizen who had been detained regarding the
disturbance (Saidazimova 2006). However, in denying that human rights violations
had taken place or the need for more investigation, the Russian Federation improved
its relations with Uzbekistan, reinforcing the countries strategic relationship.
Apart from the case of Georgia, Russian leaders have been most keen to defend
co-nationals who are ethnic russkii but often not rossiiskii citizens (although there are
fears that the MID is continuing its politicised passport distribution elsewhere18). This
was seen with respect to the Baltic states, and Ukraine, as well as the Transdniestrian
region of Moldova. The ethnically-russkii populations of these states were pushed to
assimilate with the language and culture of their new country (Lepretre 2002). In some
cases, in Estonia and Latvia, this involved their being denied citizenship unless
they learned the local language (Weil 2001). In other cases, such as Ukraine, the
language issue comprised a ght against the government mandating a national

18
Delo, 22 September 2008, available at: http://www.delo.ua/news/87411/, accessed 6 October 2008;
Kuzio (2008).
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1477

language19 or schools even teaching their pupils in such a tongue (Moldova) (Coretchi
et al. 2002). The beached diaspora (Laitin 1998, p. 29) of ethnic Russians left outside of
the Russian Federation when the Soviet tide receded represents an emotional issue within
Russian politics that touches on many Russians disillusionment at the USSRs collapse.
In the Baltic, Moldovan and Ukrainian cases, Russian politicians privileging of a
russkii identity has been based on an ethno-cultural argument as opposed to the
legalistically framed right to defend Russian citizens living in the separatist regions of
Georgia. However, in both instances an emotional call was made by Russian leaders to
the loss of empire. Russkii populations outside the Russian Federation are now subject
to the laws of non-Russian states, which do not privilege them in the same way as they
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were privileged in the Russian Empire or USSR (Hughes & Sasse 2002, p. 230).
Demonstrating the rm link between the rossiiskii state and russkii ethnicity, there is
an implication that the former is meant to protect the later, even though the Russian
Federations imperial predecessors included numerous non-ethnic Russians (such as in
Uzbekistan) whose well being is apparently of less concern to the rossiiskii state. By
contrast, the defence of rossiiskii nationals in Georgia has demonstrated that Russia is
still a force to be reckoned with in the former Soviet Union and that it retains the
ability to manipulate politics in the realm of its former dominance.
While Medvedev invoked international human rights laws and norms in defending
Russian citizens in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in August 2008, Russias leaders have
handled those concepts inconsistently at home and in the former Soviet Union. Far from
acting as a staunch defender of minority rights and humane politics, the Russian state has
been a chronic transgressor in these areas. Claims that Abkhazians and South Ossetians
have been subjected to brutal treatment by the Georgian government seem strange
coming from a Russian leadership that has sanctioned the killing of tens of thousands of
its own citizens in Chechnya and has supported repressive regimes such as in Uzbekistan.
Medvedevs reference to universal norms of behaviour that the Russian Federation itself
has had diculty maintaining, and the civic rights of Russian citizens who would be
subject to xenophobic aggression domestically, imply that the countrys politicians have
ulterior motivations behind their legalistic arguments for the 2008 intervention in
Georgia. There is, of course, no need for states to act consistently and concerns over
human rights are at particular risk of falling prey to shrewd political calculations.
However, by looking at these very areas of inconsistency it is possible to sift out some of
the larger motivating forces in policy creation. Thus, looking at the RussianGeorgian
case, the events of August 2008 are more likely rooted in the two states troubled relations
and the Russian political establishments diculty in accepting the consequences of the
Soviet Unions demise than concerns over the fate of Russian Federation passport
holders in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Conclusion
Behind the MIDs surreptitious distribution of passports to Georgian separatists
and Russian leaders incoherent stance on human rights lies a continuing battle

19
Unian, 22 April 2008, available at: http://unian.net/eng/news/news-247757.html, accessed 6
October 2008.
 1478 SCOTT LITTLEFIELD

between ethnic and civic national identity for precedence in the Russian
Federations domestic and foreign aairs. Russia remains wedded to a conception
of state greatness that privileges territorial holding and geopolitical inuence, but
has nominally attempted to pursue this ideal through adopting norms of human
rights and international law that lie in contradiction with such imperial political
ideals. While framed in legalistic terms, Medvedevs call (noted above) to a duty to
defend the lives and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they may be represents a
return to historical power relationships and the exchange of legal guarantees for a
governing concept of might is right on the territory of the former Soviet Union.
Despite the presidents call to combat legal nihilism in the Russian legal system, the
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countrys actions in August 2008 contradicted legal norms for dealing with extra-
territorial conict. Moreover, the right to protect principle was invalid in this
context and the Russian Federations response to Georgia was both dispropor-
tionate to any need to safeguard South Ossetians and precipitated a further
humanitarian crisis with regards to ethnic Georgian populations in the separatist
regions that faced reprisals and forced evacuations.
Having considered the legitimacy and consistency of the Kremlins policy in
response to Georgias actions in South Ossetia in August 2008, this article concludes
that Russian passports and citizenship were granted to separatist populations to
further the Russian Federations geopolitical interests and not for humanitarian
reasons. Such a description of Russian policy motivations is in keeping with Russian
actions during, before, and after the conict and is consistent with Russian policies
elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and further abroad. Since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, and especially under Putin, the Russian Federation consistently
favoured pragmatic political calculation over human rights when the two conicted.
The 2008 clash in the Caucasus seems to indicate that this value system remains intact
under President Medvedevs administration.
The MIDs initial granting of passports to Abkhazian and South Ossetian
separatists was intended to increase the Russian Federations leverage over Georgia
and demonstrate its pre-eminence in regional aairs. Likewise, the countrys
military incursion onto Georgian territory dented Georgias capacity to act
independently of Russia, showing that, despite Tbilisis irtation with the West
and NATO, Georgia remains rmly within the Kremlins sphere of inuence.
Human rights served as a pretext for Russian military action to gain leverage and
prestige in the countrys dealings with Georgia. Once Russias citizens were
threatened by an unfriendly power, the Kremlin used this as an excuse to lash out,
defending its compatriots more as a matter of state pride than from a genuine wish
to protect Abkhazians and South Ossetians. Far from heralding a transformation
of the Russian Federations underlying political value system, the cloak of
international law and human rights that Medvedev wrapped himself in to defend
his countrys actions in the Caucasus has merely disguised traditional motivations
of improving Russias geostrategic position and bolstering the identity narrative of
state greatness (derzhavnost).

University of Cambridge
 CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY 1479

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