Eurasia Insight:
BATUMI: MAKING A BREAK FOR THE WEST
Joshua Kucera: 5/18/07
Part two in a series

In Batumi I arrange with Intourist, the former Soviet state travel agency that has since been privatized, to get a translator and guide to help me around town. They set me up with Anna, a 22-year-old blonde Russian whose family has lived in Batumi since her grandfather, an army officer, was posted here in 1949.

I hadn’t asked for a Russian translator, but it’s appropriate. The new Georgian government that took power after the 2003 Rose Revolution is trying strongly to reorient itself away from Russia, its overlord for the past 130 years, and toward the West. Russian-backed separatists still bedevil Georgia in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. But here in the autonomous republic of Ajara, the new government has achieved an early, significant victory: The former strongman governor Aslan Abashidze, an ally of Russia, has been ousted and a pro-Western regional government is now in power. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. So together, an American and a Russian, we set out to explore the new Ajara.

Anna has the cheekbones, lips and figure of a model. She also has a model’s skill for looking completely uninterested in whatever she is doing. She speaks Georgian, but prefers to translate our interviews in Russian. I ask if she’d taken part in the demonstrations in Batumi that helped bring down Abashidze. “It’s not for me,” she says. “I feel like a guest here.” She is still in college and says she doesn’t know what she’ll do when she graduates, though it’s hard to see her staying here too long.

For 300 years Ajara was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, but Batumi was a backwater. Russia took control of Ajara in 1878, and quickly developed Batumi into a major center for its growing oil industry. Trains shipped oil from Baku to Batumi, where it was loaded on ships headed for Europe and the United States. One of the first oil pipelines in the world was built here, and by 1900 there were 13 foreign consulates in Batumi. That history was evident everywhere in Batumi, with its gracious two-story Russian colonial buildings, and the seaside pedestrian boulevard, built in 1884 and still much beloved by city residents.

Batumi’s beauty had lately been hidden, though. During the Soviet period, tall concrete apartment blocks were built in the center amid decaying 19th century edifices. Under Abashidze’s rule, economic conditions grew increasingly dire – chronic electricity shortages meant the city was often completely dark at night, and a main movie theater and circus in the center were closed because they were close to Abashidze’s residence and he didn’t want people milling around his house.

The new Ajaran government believes tourism is the key to its economic future, and one of its first moves was to make Batumi a pleasant place to visit. So, in less than three years, the city has received a thorough facelift. There are decorative floodlights on many of the center’s historic buildings, which have all been freshly painted. Apartment blocks have been painted bright red, blue and yellow, and their balconies covered with transparent colored plastic – visibly cheap, but more attractive than crumbling concrete. Five fountains have been built and two others reconstructed. A huge, brand new Ferris wheel looms over the city, waiting for the summer tourist season.

“We have a lot of potential for tourism, but we have to give tourists something good to look at,” said Lela Shanidze, a spokeswoman for Batumi City Hal. The city budget has more than doubled since the Abashidze era, and almost all of the increase – more than $12 million last year – has gone to the beautification program. And the program is not yet finished. Shanidze shows me a PowerPoint presentation of planned developments in the city, which include a “dolphinarium” and a residential complex with an indoor swimming pool. All of the streets in the center will be repaved as well, she said.

Foreign investors are taking an interest in Ajara. Privatization has brought in a total of $50 million over the last four years, said Natela Tsiklashvili, the Ajaran minister of finance and economy. The largest single investment is an $18 million hotel project by a Kazakhstani company, the Silk Road Group. Partly as a result of all this, regional officials are projecting that up to 350,000 tourists will visit the area this year, up from 83,000 in 2004. Foreign tourists, especially from Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan are expected to fuel the increase.

But the changes Batumi has seen are limited to a few dozen blocks in the center. Outside this privileged zone, the city continues to crumble. The roads have massive potholes, which collect the rain that falls steadily throughout my visit. One night I’m invited to dinner on the outskirts of the city at the house of Omar, a member of a professional Georgian dance group. First I visit the class he teaches to children learning traditional Georgian dance. Their parents pay about $9 a month for the classes, out of an average salary of about $90. Still, Omar estimates that 60 percent of Batumi’s children take these dance classes.

After the class we buy some frozen Georgian khinkali dumplings (still delicious when frozen, I discover) and red wine in two-liter Pepsi bottles. Omar pays on credit. The street to his house isn’t lit at all, so we avoid the puddles using the lights on our cell phones. Still, inside it’s cozy and comfortable, and I get a taste of the hospitality of which Georgians are justly proud, even on the family’s limited means. With all of the male members of the family and two of Omar’s friends we toast me, our parents, our ancestors, babies who have been born recently, friends who weren’t there, loved ones who had died, my successful journey and my return to Georgia and Batumi one day. At midnight, when we walk to the main road to catch me a cab back to my hotel, Omar pays the taxi driver before I get in, and pays no attention to my protests.

The next day I visit the Stalin Museum, amid a dirty row of building supplies shops. I take a quick tour of the museum, which commemorates the two months that Stalin spent in Batumi as a 21-year-old organizing the city’s fractious Marxists into a potent political force. The museum is in the small boarding house where Stalin stayed; his bed and, improbably, his towel are on display. The guide, Alexander Chkhaidze, tells me that Stalin was arrested six times but escaped from prison five of those times, and I wonder how history might have turned out differently had czarist Russia’s prison security been tighter.

Then Alexander and I go to his office to talk about Stalin’s legacy and modern-day Georgia. The room is so cold I can see my breath, and Alexander wears a black wool overcoat buttoned to the top, plus a scarf and an Adidas stocking cap. He says most people’s lives haven’t improved much since the new government took over. “In Tbilisi and in Batumi people live well. Everywhere else people are so poor,” he said. At least his job wasn’t hard: I had been the only visitor that day, and he showed me the guest registry and there had been a 20-day period in March when not a single person visited.

One day, I visited the Adlia base on the southern edge of Batumi. This used to be the home of the Batumi battalion, a cohort of about 400 men loyal to Abashidze and commanded by a retired Russian general. These forces gained local notoriety when they blew up bridges connecting Ajara to the rest of Georgia in the last days of Abashidze’s rule; most have since been integrated into regular Georgian army units.

The base is now the home of the Georgian 2nd Light Infantry Battalion. The unit’s commander, Capt. Merab Kikabidze, greeted me with a bristly kiss on the cheek – I had met him in a restaurant the night before, so now we were friends. I knew he spoke good English, so I left Anna the translator behind. Kikabidze had sharp features and closely cropped hair. He wore a uniform virtually identical to those worn by American soldiers, and perched on top of his head are the Wiley-X brand sunglasses overwhelmingly preferred by American GIs. The soldiers of his battalion marched crisply around the base’s grounds, chanting in Georgian. We walked into his whitewashed headquarters building surrounded by palm trees, and a little yellow dog followed us inside.

I asked if his unit had participated in any joint training with units from other armies. These exercises are the bread-and-butter of military cooperation, done by countries who might expect to fight together in the future. “Not yet, unfortunately. But in the future we will, with an American brigade,” he says. Is he open to military cooperation with Russia again in the future? “No, never.”

As we conversed, a French warship was lying at anchor in Batumi’s harbor, and a US Navy officer was in town to arrange a port call for an American ship the following week. Ajara, it is clear, is now firmly in the grip of the West.

Editor’s Note: Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based freelance writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East.