The Caucasus: An Introduction 2nd Edition by Thomas de Waal (PDF)

Description

This new edition of The Caucasus is a thorough update of an essential guide that has introduced thousands of readers to a complex region. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and the break-away territories that have tried to split away from them constitute one of the most diverse and challenging regions on earth, impressing the visitor with their multi-layered history and ethnic complexity. Over the last few years, the South Caucasus region has captured international attention again because of disputes between the West and Russia, its unresolved conflicts, and its role as an energy transport corridor to Europe. The Caucasus gives the reader a historical overview and an authoritative guide to the three conflicts that have blighted the region. Thomas de Waal tells the story of the “Five-Day War” between Georgia and Russia and recent political upheavals in all three countries. He also finds time to tell the reader about Georgian wine, Baku jazz and how the coast of Abkhazia was known as”Soviet Florida.” Short, stimulating and rich in detail, The Caucasus is the perfect guide to this fascinating and little-understood region.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “His book is a factual exploratory work for the interested western readership, which helps to navigate through the complicated political network of the countries of the South Caucasus of great geopolitical importance.” — Margit Kószegi, Eurasian Geography and Economics”Thomas de Waal is a very astute author with a special sensitivity to the outside world … His writings, therefore, are surely a must read … it has also the potential of influencing western thinking about the Caucasus for generations to come.” — Krzysztof Strachota [translated by Iwona Reichardt], N/A, New Eastern Europe”A compact but rich book examining the southern side of the range, where combustible difficulties afflict three small post-Soviet countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. …If ever there was a place that needed a competent and even-tempered guide, this was it. Mr. de Waal provides one. Currently an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he has traveled through and written of the Caucasus more than most any outsider since the Kremlin’s grip over the region loosened during the Soviet collapse. His book contains history and knowing flair:..will likely have many lives. Why? The wars that broke out in the 1990s are not over. Mr. De Waal’s book is welcome now, and most useful. If one of the wars flares up again, it will be essential.” — The New York Times War Blog”Assiduously researched and lucid primer. While it may be easier for the distant academic to be dispassionate, de Waal is more than that. Through the past two decades, he has written extensively on, and from, the region for British newspapers and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. He is also the co-author of Chechnya, probably the best contemporary volume on that violent Russian republic. The Caucasus reflects a depth of understanding of the region that doesn’t stray into the didactic. In recent years, other volumes have appeared on the South Caucasus, notably Charles King’s The Ghost of Freedom, and Thomas Goltz’s diaries of Georgia and Azerbaijan. But de Waal has produced the most important work. And, as with any good book, it leaves the reader hungering for more.” — Foreign Policy”Nobody has dealt with today’s Transcaucasia as lucidly as Thomas de Waal.” –Times Literary Supplement”Well-written, accessible and engaging…[De Waal’s] magisterial histories are an essential part of a comprehensible explanation of the intractable problems that beset the region.” –International Affairs”Thomas de Waal has written one of the most vivid, clear-minded accounts of the history and current troubles of the lands between Russia and Turkey.The Caucasus defines easy explanation, and de Waal deftly untangles the webs of mystification and obfuscation that have so often marred our understanding of why this rich and beautiful region, a cradle of diverse civilizations, has failed so miserably to realize its promise.” –Ronald Grigor Suny, Professor of Social and Political History, and Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan”Europe and Asia, mountains and flatlands, Christians and Muslims, ancient cultures and modern states–the Caucasus has long been a classic borderland in many senses. Blending first-hand reporting, historical narratives, and original research, The Caucasus is an indispensable guide to the fractious politics and complicated histories of the region’s nations and peoples.” –Charles King, Professor of International Affairs and Government, Georgetown University, and author of The Ghost of Freedom”This is the definitive text for anyone interested in this complex region. De Waal describes the deep roots of current conflicts and his analysis of the present situation is right on target. It should be required reading for anyone involved in Caucasian affairs.” –Richard Miles, former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan and Georgia”The Caucasus is a mini-encyclopedia, and de Waal a peerless guide for navigating this mountainous maze of tangled enmities and ethnicities.” –Andrew Meier, author of “The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service” About the Author Thomas de Waal is a writer and scholar on the Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Black Sea and the author of four books on the region, including authoritative works on the Armenia-Azerbaijan and Chechnya conflicts. He is currently a Senior Fellow with the think-tank Carnegie Europe, based in London. De Waal has worked as a newspaper journalist in Moscow and a foreign policy analyst in Washington DC.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I’m giving the book itself four stars, but only two stars for the many editing errors, so that comes out to three stars.As far as the book itself, it is an excellent history of the Caucasus troubles, and is not too dense to read. I have been to many of the countries in the Caucasus, including Georgia and Armenia, and wish I had read the book before. It does provide excellent insight, although the past and current history of the Caucasus can be summed up by saying “every ethnic group hates every other ethnic group”. It’s sad and unnecessary.My big compliant is that there seems to have been virtually no editing on this book. There are misspelled words, missing words, extra words in sentences, etc. Why is this important? Because if the writer wants to be taken seriously as a creditable source of information, the book should not appear to be written by a fifteen year old. I hope that this is corrected in the next printing. It’s unprofessional and unacceptable for a book of this caliber to be so sloppily edited.

⭐de Waal writes well and provides a thorough background to present day ( – 3 years and update please with a Silk Road perspective) grounding on a complex region with internal and intra region complexities that mirror politics on the larger stage. Nuanced, unbiased and we’ll researched. Great for a traveler who wants to go deeper and for the inquisitive who just wanna know more.

⭐I learned a lot about this mysterious remote part of the world.Now I have a better understanding of the news.

⭐Some would argue that the precise moment that marked the beginning of the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union was February 20, 1988, when the regional soviet governing the Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast—an autonomous region of mostly ethnic Armenians within the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan—voted to redraw the maps and attach Nagorno-Karabakh to the Soviet Republic of Armenia. Thus began a long, bloody, and yet unresolved conflict in the Caucasus that has ravaged once proud cities and claimed many thousands of lives of combatants and civilians alike. The U.S.S.R. went out of business on December 25, 1991, about midway through what has been dubbed the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, which ended on May 12, 1994, an Armenian victory that established de facto—if internationally unrecognized—independence for the Republic of Artsakh (also known as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic), but left much unsettled. Smoldering grievances that remained would come to spark future hostilities. That day came last fall, when the long uneasy stalemate ended suddenly with an Azerbaijani offensive in the short-lived 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War that had ruinous consequences for the Armenian side. Few Americans have ever heard of Nagorno-Karabakh, but I was far better informed because when the war broke out I happened to be reading The Caucasus: An Introduction, by Thomas De Waal, a well-written, insightful, and—as it turns out—powerfully relevant book that in its careful analysis of this particular region raises troubling questions about human behavior in similar socio-political environments elsewhere. What is the Caucasus? A region best described as a corridor between the Black Sea on one side and the Caspian Sea on the other, with boundaries at the south on Turkey and Iran, and at the north by Russia and the Greater Caucasus mountain range that has long been seen as the natural border between Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Above those mountains in southern Russia is what is commonly referred to as the North Caucasus, which includes Dagestan and Chechnya. Beneath them lies Transcaucasia, comprised of the three tiny nations of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, whose modern history began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and are the focus of De Waal’s fascinating study. The history of the Caucasus is the story of peoples dominated by the great powers beyond their borders, and despite independence this remains true to this day: Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 to support separatist enclaves in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in the first European war of the twenty-first century; Turkey provided military support to Azerbaijan in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. At this point, some readers of this review will pause, intimidated by exotic place names in an unfamiliar geography. Fortunately, De Waal makes that part easy with a series of outstanding maps that puts the past and the present into appropriate context. At the same time, the author eases our journey through an often-uncertain terrain by applying a talented pen to a dense, but highly readable narrative that assumes no prior knowledge of the Caucasus. At first glance, this work has the look and feel of a textbook of sorts, but because De Waal has such a fine-tuned sense of the lands and the peoples he chronicles, there are times when the reader feels as if a skilled travel writer was escorting them through history and then delivering them to the brink of tomorrow. Throughout, breakout boxes lend a captivating sense of intimacy to places and events that after all host human beings who like their counterparts in other troubled regions live, laugh, and sometimes tragically perish because of their proximity to armed conflict that typically has little to do with them personally. De Waal proves himself a strong researcher, as well as an excellent observer highly gifted with an analytical acumen that not only carefully scrutinizes the complexity of a region bordered by potentially menacing great powers, and pregnant with territorial disputes, historic enmities, and religious division, but identifies the tolerance and common ground in shared cultures enjoyed by its ordinary inhabitants if left to their own devices. More than once, the author bemoans the division driven by elites on all sides of competing causes that have swept up the common folk who have lived peacefully side-by-side for generations, igniting passions that led to brutality and even massacre. This is a tragic tale we have seen replayed elsewhere, with escalation to genocide among former neighbors in what was once Yugoslavia, for instance, and also in Rwanda. For all the bloodletting, it has not risen to that level in the Caucasus, but unfortunately spots like Nagorno-Karabakh have all the ingredients for some future catastrophe if wiser heads do not prevail. I picked up this book quite randomly last summer en route from a Vermont Airbnb in my first visit to a brick-and-mortar bookstore since the start of the pandemic. A rare positive from quarantine has been a good deal of time to read and reflect. I am grateful that The Caucasus: An Introduction was in the fat stack of books that I consumed in that period. Place names and details are certain to fade, but I will long remember the greater themes De Waal explored here. If you are curious about the world, I would definitely recommend this book to you.

⭐The mighty range of the Caucasus mountains runs between the Black Sea and the Caspian. For millennia numerous peoples took refuge in its fastnesses, to the north and to the south. Others inhabited the valleys and plains. De Waal’s book covers only those who lived on the south side, the people who today live in the modern nations of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Though those three nations may be dominated by the eponymous groups, there are many others—for example, Abkhaz, Ajarians, Ossetians, Lezgin, Kurds, and Svans. After a quick general history, the book turns to the development and political history of the three modern states—during Tsarist times; in that brief period between 1917 and 1921 when three weak, disorganized states emerged and were overwhelmed by the Bolsheviks; under Communism; and finally after the end of the Soviet Union. If you read newspapers or serious news magazines over the last 30 years, you no doubt ran across articles dealing with all these countries and their multitude of quarrels—among themselves and with their neighbors, Russia, Turkey and Iran. Names like Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Nakhichevan, Ajaria, Gamsamkhurdia, Shevarnadze, Ter-Petrosian, Kocharian, Aliev and a lot of others that don’t fly off the tongues of Westerners flew across the pages and often disappeared with no trace. Owing to the fickle attention spans of Euro-American news media, you probably were left wondering at times. What the _______ is going on? You did not, without some independent research, find out. For an antidote to this lack of knowledge, I advise you to get hold of this excellent book. It is extremely well-written, avoids national bias, and covers the ground in such a way that you’ll feel that at last you have some idea of the politics and problems of the South Caucasus. The author, a British journalist, obviously knows the area well. In addition to the reportage on the wars, the political struggles, and overall problems, he provides numerous riffs on such subjects as Lermontov (famous 19th century Russian writer), Rustaveli Avenue (the Ginza of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital), how Georgian was Stalin?, Baku jazz, Shusha (the old capital of Nagorno-Karabakh), the Greeks of Abkhazia, and many other, perhaps esoteric, but highly interesting subjects. Several good maps are included, so are a bunch of typos.

⭐Decent introduction overall, but dotted with inexcusable factual inaccuracies.

⭐I bought this after a fantastic holiday taking in Georgia, Armenia and Kyiv. We had some great guides but it was clear that there was far more to it. Their views were inevitably coloured by their life experiences which were absolutely fascinating but I wanted to know more about how the area had evolved as well as the broader political picture. Suffice it to say that it is complex and ever changing.Most of the books I found on Amazon were quite old, but when I discovered that this one was being updated (late 2018) I placed an advance order immediately. The fluid politics of the region mean that it is inevitably out of date already, but it covers complex topics in a balanced and straightforward manner. He is not afraid to point out when poor decisions have led to dire consequences, but this is presented in a factual way without apportioning blame.It’s a relatively easy read and you will come away more knowledgeable than you started. You will not get this depth of information or balance when you visit, but reading it after coming home meant that things did start to click into place. Coming from a relatively stable island state, it’s difficult to appreciate the ever-changing borders and the feelings of ethnic groups that have been displaced or who believe they have rights to certain lands held by others. Definitely worth buying if you have any interest in the post-soviet world.

⭐A fascinating look at societies based in the region staking Europe and Asia. I’ve always been fascinated by Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia (mainly because of the scripts of the latter two) and de Waal does a great job of outlining their histories over the past 200 years, covering the Ottoman Empire, Persian involvement, Russian conquest, and Sovietisation of the area.This has recently been updated skillfully and knowledgeably.One niggling and deeply annoying criticism, however (and this is no reflection on the author); the publisher’s should be ashamed at the appalling typo’s and errors in the layout – particularly in the latter half of the book. Please, OUP, employ a proofreader to correct these before you consider a reprint!

⭐This is such an interesting area and this book more than does it justice….deeply researched and very accessible……..bravo!

⭐I love the writing style :)So interesting!

⭐great book, easy and quick to read.

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