The Republic of Spies. On a sunny afternoon earlier this summer in the garden of a freshly renovated resort overlooking the Black Sea, a group of Russian security-service and Interior Ministry officers on holiday were raising their vodka glasses. The toast: to their future summers in the separatist republic of Abkhazia, once a favorite holiday spot for Stalin's elite and now, despite its nominal independence from Georgia, Russia's newest colony. After a war in 2008 to help Abkhazia and South Ossetia partition themselves from Georgia, Russia is making itself right at home. The party's host, Alexander Tsyshba - the head of the privatization and investments department for the seaside city of Gagra - looked satisfied. After over 15 years of economic blockade by Georgia, investment in Abkhazia was almost nonexistent, the resorts were empty, and the economy was stagnant except for a trickle of business controlled by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). Now, with 3,000 Russian troops stationed in the republic, Tsyshba's old FSB friends have begun to buy up prime property across the breakaway republic. "To buy property in Abkhazia, the FSB officers use the special relationship of their long-term contacts with us," he explains with a smile. The Russian special services' "special relationship" with Abkhazia began well before the region's break from Georgia in 1991, in the days of the Soviet KGB. From Stalin's era on, every other Abkhaz family had a KGB officer, a secret agent, or an informer among their relatives. Former agents told NEWSWEEK that Moscow gave the tiny South Caucasus republic a special status - of an autonomous republic within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic - in order for the KGB to have a pleasant headquarters in the palm-lined seaside boulevards of Sukhumi. Locals like to boast that "Abkhazia used to beat the world record on the number of secret agents per capita," says Lavrik Mikvabia, a colonel in the Abkhaz border guard. And Vladimir Rubanov, a three-star general who ran the old KGB's analytical department, told NEWSWEEK that "the KGB always had its special power in Abkhazia. When I came for vacation and went out for a beer with my friend, a senior Abkhaz KGB commander, we did not have to pay for our beers or a plate of crabs. We just showed our KGB IDs." Traditions are respected in the Caucasus. So nobody was surprised when the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, inherited the Mayak sanitarium, a former KGB rehabilitation center for agents, after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Or when officers of the Federal Protection Service, the agency guarding the president and other top officials, brought their families to spend summers at the dacha that Khrushchev once used - a strictly guarded, enormous resort covering more than 10 square kilometers of seafront property in Pitsunda. Now a rotating cast of former and current FSB officers has arrived to rent and privatize luxury hotels, sanitariums, and dachas on prestigious bits of land. In the two years since Russia went to war to "liberate" Abkhazia and South Ossetia from the Republic of Georgia, the Russification in those provinces has accelerated. Almost all the best Abkhaz architectural monuments have ended up in the hands of Russian investors: the 19th-century palace of the Prince of Oldenburg; Olga's Tower; another graceful palace in the Mauritanian style in the hills overlooking the city; and Gagra's oldest landmark, the ancient Persian Attaba Fortress, dating to the fourth and fifth centuries. Luxurious real-estate developments like the Dolfin Hotel, which opened last January, have emerged along the seafront, waking Pitsunda's tourist industry from years of comatose postwar decay. Tsyshba, the Gagra privatization guru, proudly boasts that the city is "the best FSB resort." The Dolfin Hotel's manager, Alexander Chukbar, agrees, but he adds warily that the new owners "are not the kind of people one can just go up to and chat with." In Soviet days, the KGB was a state within a state. Now, with former KGB officer Vladimir Putin and his circle of former spooks still very much in control of the country, the FSB's hand extends into almost every major Russian business. Former KGB officers turned businessmen are warmly welcomed in their old Abkhaz stomping grounds - and have brought billions of dollars of investment. Rosneft, Russia's state oil company famous for its ties to the Russian security establishment, arrived this year to open an office in Sukhumi and begin a $32 million geological-research program offshore in the Black Sea, considered a prospective oil-rich region. Other groups in the Russian elite have also followed the spooks' lead. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov has lost no time grabbing a massive piece of land outside Gagra for a $70 million resort complex the locals call "Project Moscow." Luzhkov is also constructing a gigantic office in Sukhumi to coordinate investments from Moscow, to be called the Moscow Center. Russia's Ministries of Defense, Agriculture, and the Interior have reclaimed state dachas in Sukhumi, Gagra, and Gudauta so that their employees can vacation there. Alexander Tkachev, the governor of Krasnodar region in southern Russia, has spent the last two summers in the dacha built by Stalin's secret police chief; he rents it from the local government, which can't afford to renovate it. And Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Russia's nuclear-energy agency, owns a winery in Abkhazia, according to the local administration. But the biggest investor of all is Prime Minister Putin, who visited Abkhazia last summer for the war's first anniversary, and pledged $500 million in state aid to strengthen Abkhaz defense. He has also promised millions for a huge project to redevelop the town of Pitsunda, famous for its enormous old pine trees - beloved by the tsars, the Soviets, and the new Russian elites alike. The Russian government is planning to build what Astamur Ketsba, head of the regional administration, calls "Putin City" - a lavish luxury resort with a port for yachts, health clubs, and private beaches. It is expected to be ready in time for the 2014 Winter Olympics in nearby Sochi. In the meantime, Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh told NEWSWEEK that he has already received 300 million rubles of 9 billion offered, and that he has reached an agreement with Putin that will allow Russian citizens to own private property in Abkhazia. He boasted that the airport Sukhumi will open next month is better than the one in Sochi, and that soon, Russian S-300 surface-to-air missiles will be stationed in his breakaway republic. Not all the locals are happy about the invasion of Russian money, fearing an assault on their newly won independence. Tomara Lakrba, the main architect of the towns of Gagra and Pitsunda, says she was "astonished" when she saw the proposed designs for Putin City, which - with more than 10 stories (where three or four are normal) - she considered tall and ugly. "I realized that Russian security services gave us our independence in order to be able to decide what to buy and build in our cities," she says. Many young Abkhaz also feel concerned about the Russian elite buying up their proud, small state. "I do not think Russians understand that we are different; we do not want to be a KGB state again. We would never give our land back to Georgia, but to be independent, we mean from Russia as well," says Akhra Smyr, a youth community activist in Sukhumi. He and other irritated young activists shared with NEWSWEEK their frustration about how Russian tanks destroyed the roads in the Gali region and how their international phone code has become +7, the same as Russia's. Abkhazia's tiny military also feels steamrollered by the FSB, which has taken over controlling the border with Georgia. There are only two checkpoints (of more than a dozen) left under Abkhaz control, and some 120 Abkhaz officers have lost their jobs. Sixty were fired outright and 60 were turned into customs agents. "We are all war veterans," says the commander of Abkhaz border troops, Col. Lavrik Mikvabia. "We spilled blood for our freedom. The FSB border officers should remember that when they treat us as if we were their colony." It seems too late, though, for the Abkhaz to reconsider their pact with their powerful northern neighbor. Abkhazia's border with Georgia is secured by a full division of Russia's border guards, who answer to the FSB. Bright orange trucks - with the double-headed-eagle logo of the Russian Federal Construction Co. - crawl along the coastal roads, carrying sand and gravel for the seven-story buildings the FSB is building for the border guards and their families in Gali, a regional center on the border with Georgia. With so much Russian money being poured into Abkhazia, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's calls for the Russian military's immediate withdrawal ring a little hollow. Never mind the ceasefire terms that ended the war, under which Moscow promised to withdraw. "Russia has just arrived," President Bagapsh told NEWSWEEK. The West should "stop having any illusions about what they call Russian occupiers leaving any time soon." [Maytisin/Newsweek/18August2010]
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Bernard Knox, 95, One of World's Foremost Scholars of Classical Literature. After two years of fighting in Europe during World War II, a swashbuckling U.S. Army captain named Bernard Knox took momentary refuge in a bombed-out farmhouse in Italy. There, peeking from beneath the rubble, was a gilt-edged volume by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. Capt. Knox had studied Latin in college and remembered enough to translate a bit: "Here right and wrong are reversed," began a passage about war that served as an epiphany for the young soldier. "These lines, written some thirty years before the birth of Christ, expressed, more directly and passionately than any modern statement I knew of, the reality of the world I was living in: the shell-pocked mine-infested fields, the shattered cities," he later recalled. "I thought to myself: 'If I ever get out of this, I'm going back to the classics and study them seriously.' " After the war, Bernard Knox became one of the world's foremost scholars of classical literature and served as the founding director of the Harvard University-affiliated Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington. Dr. Knox died July 22 at his home in Bethesda of a heart ailment. He was 95. A British-born expert in the works of Sophocles, he was known for his ability to brush the cobwebs off ancient texts and illuminate their enduring relevance in the modern world. He wrote and spoke widely, often seeking out popular audiences to argue that buried beneath the classics' dead languages are durable truths about the human experience. He said the brilliance of Homer's "Iliad," for example, was the epic's ability to show that war is at once horrifying and magnetic - that it "has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice which peace time, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command. "Three thousand years have not changed the human condition in this respect," he said in a 1979 speech. "He was a great light in our profession," said Deborah Boedeker, a Brown University professor who succeeded Dr. Knox as director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. "He was a great philologist - and I think that is where his appreciation of literature started, with his real knowledge of and nuanced appreciation of the language. But he was able to translate that into terms that could be of great interest to any lay person." Dr. Knox established himself as a force in classical scholarship with his first book, "Oedipus at Thebes" (1957), which examined Sophocles' tragic hero in the context of 5th-century Athenean civilization and won praise for its lucid prose. The volume was reissued in 1998 by Yale University Press. He edited the "Norton Book of Classical Literature" (1993) and wrote frequently for popular publications including The Washington Post and the New York Review of Books. He wrote critically acclaimed introductions for modern translations by his one-time student Robert Fagles of Sophocles' "Three Theban Plays" (1982), the Homeric epics "The Iliad" (1990) and "The Odyssey" (1996) and Virgil's "The Aeneid" (2006). Later in his career, Dr. Knox argued frequently and forcefully against those he called "advocates of multiculturalism and militant feminists" who criticized the classical canon as racist and classist and pushed for universities to teach a wider range of literature. His essays and talks were collected in books including "The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics" (1993) and "Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal" (1994). The Greeks "have stood the test of time, more than 2,000 years of it, and have become a basic element of our character, of our nature," he wrote. "And, as the Roman poet Horace remarked, you may toss nature out with a pitchfork, but it will still come running back in." Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was born Nov. 24, 1914, in West Yorkshire, England. He grew up in London and received a scholarship to study the classics at St. John's College at Cambridge. But the country was mired in economic depression, Hitler had come to power in Germany and the young Dr. Knox spent more time planning protests with left-wing student groups than he did studying. "I didn't do any work. All I did was go to demonstrations and study Karl Marx, though I must say, I never did read 'Das Kapital,' " he told the Washington Times in 1989. "The world situation was so menacing that I didn't think I'd live very long. I thought that war was coming and studying Latin and Greek didn't seem relevant." He received a bachelor's degree in 1936 and then volunteered to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. After he was shot and severely wounded, he returned to London and immigrated to the United States to marry Betty Baur, an American woman he had met while she was studying at Cambridge. They were married from 1939 until her death in 2006. Survivors include their son, MacGregor Knox of London; a sister; and two grandchildren. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Dr. Knox joined the U.S. Army and took the oath of American citizenship while stationed in England in 1943. Not long afterward, he went to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's wartime predecessor. Noting Dr. Knox's command of French, the OSS assigned him to parachute into German-occupied France, arm citizens and prepare them to rise up against Hitler's troops. Later, Dr. Knox was sent on a similar mission to aid the underground resistance in Italy. He was slated to go next to the Pacific when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, effectively ending the war. His military decorations included two Bronze Star Medals and the French Croix de Guerre. After the war, he studied at Yale University. He received a doctorate in classics and served on Yale's faculty from 1948 until 1961, when he was named director of the new Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington. Dr. Knox served until his retirement in 1985 as director of the center, which offers year-long residential fellowships for junior scholars. In that job, he mentored many of his field's prominent thinkers. He was the recipient of numerous awards and was chosen in 1992 to give the National Endowment of the Humanities' prestigious Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor bestowed by the federal government for intellectual achievement in the humanities. He was a member of the Cosmos Club in Washington and was a founder of the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage. "It was the Greeks who started it all," he said, receiving an award from the Cosmos Club in 1979. "They are not just our roots, they are our sinews, our flesh and blood; they are what makes the West different from Islam, from India, from China," he said. "In fact, to be a professor of ancient Greek is to be a professor of modernity." [Brown/WashingtonPost/20August2010] 2ff7e9595c
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