Ossetia: the small Caucasus land that moves the great powers

(To Giampiero Venturi)
01/03/17

Vladikavkaz train station is pastel colored, between ocher and orange. The air weighs. The cold seems still, attached to things around. Walking seems to swallow iron.

It often snows here, halfway between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, immersed in a rigid basin between the walls of blue and gray mountains. The peaks of the Caucasus that detach themselves in the background beyond the railway are scary. They seem to close at any moment.

Vladikavkaz means "dominator of the Caucasus". Until Kavkaz we get there. For Vladi can help Vlad, the master of dark stories coming from the East ...

The night train from Rostov arrives at the 10. It takes 13 hours hours and like a broken toy stops icy in the heart of Alania, another name of this land as big as Umbria, but closed in the bottom of the Russian Federation.

In the entrance hall of the station, before the stairs, a mustache, light-haired hat-clothes and many people wearing the eternal signs of socialist modesty parade. We are in the far south, we are in Ossetia, we are in Russia.

20 km beyond the station is Ingushetia; after other 15 is Chechnya. It's scary to say, but the Federation roads and trains arrive everywhere.

Ingush and Chechens go arm in arm. It will be for Islam or because unlike the Ossetians, they both have a controversial relationship with the Russians. Ossetians and Russians are a commune, you know: perhaps because they are Orthodox Christians or perhaps because the history of the Caucasus has so desired.

At these latitudes the interweaving of peoples was a tangle full of knots already in the days of the tsars. Reading A hero of our time of Lermontov we understand: nothing has changed in two centuries.

Of all the geographic entities of the Caucasus, 7 are in the Russian Federation. They are the so-called North Caucasus: in addition to Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, one hour from here is Kabardino-Balkaria, then Circassia and the Stavropol Territory.

It's cold and it's right this way. There are two in the parking lot of the station minibuses yellow and two Lada, our old 124 FIAT, which in the Caucasus are anything but vintage. They have the plate with the 15 that identifies Ossetia-Alania.

If you go straight along Kirova, you will reach Prospekt Mira in ten minutes on foot. It's the Vladivkaz to drink, full of cafes and restaurants. All that is not Soviet horror is in the Russian-French style as is often the case in deep Russia.

Trams pass through Prospekt Mira and people pass by. At the center there are the trees that are instead immobile, like the Cyrillic writing. Like all the autonomous republics of Mother Russia, the Constitution allows Ossetia-Alania an official language to support Russian. But in Vladikavkaz the problem is not there. People here feel more Russian than elsewhere.

Someone looks and intrigues.

Just a few rubles are enough for one pirog and a beer Daryal. In Ossetia we eat heavy but decently. Wine is also produced here, but the best comes from the south, from Georgia.

Yes, Georgia. Not that of Gone With the Wind, but the one over Mount Kazbek, at 30 km from Vladikavkaz.

It is there that we begin to discuss. For Russians and Ossetians, over the border is still Ossetia, not Georgia. A land as big as the Molise that asks to meet in the north, with which it even shares the flag.

As long as Georgia and Ossetia were under Moscow, the borders remained an internal issue. From the 1991, however, Russia and Georgia have taken different paths and each has brought with it a piece of land: the north in the Federation; the south with Tbilisi.

With Shevardnadze, president of Georgia, there were no big problems. With the election as president of Saakashvili everything changed. Georgian nationalism, with the help of the American senator McCain, has become Russophobia and in the 2008 the ruckus has broken out. In the 2015 Saakashvili was appointed governor of the Odessa region by the Ukrainian president Porošenko, but that's another story ... 

Ossetians and Georgians after the 2008 armistice remain thus, hovering over a critical future. In the autonomous territory of Ossetia, the administration of Tbilisi has not arrived for years. Car license plates are also different. Those with the red and white flag and the RSO initials cannot circulate in Georgia.

The international niche community, but in the meantime it begins to heat up. The knots that do not melt sooner or later come to the comb.

For 9 April 2017 the autonomous government of South Ossetia has called a referendum to change the name of the republic, adding the name Alania to the official wording. Tbilisi protests, dreading the next annexation to Russia.

The referendum follows those on the independence of 1991 and 2006, but now it is different. The Western anti-Russian specters think of the Crimea and the waters come back agitated. The Cold War threats and tones return. On the one hand, Russia is accused of fomenting separatism. On the other hand, it should be noted that South Ossetia, already de facto independent and linked to Moscow for the 90% of the economy, has the right to choose its future.

The question of the people here is still the same: why do international borders apply to Ossetians but not to Kosovars?

In some ways, the question makes you smile. Tskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia has only 35.000 inhabitants. All South Ossetia has the same population as Rieti. North and South put together do not exceed the inhabitants of the province of Lecce.

How does a land so small to weigh so much?

The answer is in the fear itself.

The former Soviet spaces are everywhere a land of conflict after the return of Moscow on the big table of world politics. It happens in Ukraine, it happens in the Baltic countries, it happens in Transnistria, it happens in the Caucasus ...

However, common sense should help to distinguish.

There are countries that have been part of the USSR undergoing Russian supremacy as an invasion. Without prejudice to the rights of the Russian populations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, a certain hostile sentiment of the Baltic to Moscow can also be there. It was the war that imposed language and flag.

For other lands, the friction is artificial, deliberately pretentious. The example of Ossetia is worth more than all. Ossetians are part of the Russian galaxy, there are not many margins. It's not history, it's not geography, it's just logic ... Unlike Abcasia, the other Georgian autonomous region that wants to break away from Tbilisi, South Ossetia does not even ask for independence: it directly asks for annexation to Moscow. Leonid Tibilov, the current president of the Ossetia, makes him understand without half measures. Moscow is absurd to take time to avoid accusations of interference.  

So Russian expansionism or self-determination of peoples? Just turn to Vladikavkaz to get an idea ...

It is not easy to make radical opposing visions, especially in these parts.

Pope Ratzinger in 2008 expressed his regret for so many Christian people who killed each other. Only four years earlier, in the middle of the Second Chechen War, the Beslan massacre had given the alarm: while the US and Europe were concerned about stemming Russia, Islamic extremism left its mark. Half an hour from Vladikavkaz is the shrine of the massacre ...

This is a borderland, a land full of blood and pain.

Meanwhile, the Terek river flows cold in the heart of the city. It gives the name to the Grozny football team, in Chechnya, which plays with Alania Vladikavkaz in the Russian series A. Mocking the ball: binds peoples more than politics or a thousand words.

The sun goes down, the snow on the peaks around the city makes everything like steel.

Behind a park bench, walk people and pass a tram.

It is Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, Russia.