MARCCH.org – Medical Aid and Relief for the Children of Chechnya.
Donald Rayfield is emeritus professor of the school of modern languages, Queen Mary University of London. Among his books is Stalin and his Hangmen (Random House, 2005), which has appeared in five other languages. He is editor-in-chief of the Comprehensive Georgian-English Dictionary (Garnett Press, 2006), a work of 1,440,000 entries and nearly 1,800 pages in two volumes. (openDemocracy).
Donald Rayfield (born 1942) is professor of Russian and Georgian at the University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police. He is also a series editor for books about Russian writers and intelligentsia. (wikipedia).
He writes: It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have settled there over the past 2,000 years … (full text).
The Georgia-Russia conflict: lost territory, found nation, 18 August 2008.
He says: « An intimate past and bitter present make it hard for Russians and Georgians to live as neighbours but impossible to separate completely ». (live journal).
Solzhenitsyn’s literary career spans more than 60 years, from verse he composed and memorised in prison and the camps before Stalin’s death, to the handful of short stories and novellas (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matriona’s Yard) of the 1960s which propelled him to fame, together with Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation, and the major novels, In the First Circle and Cancer Ward (both 1968), composed simultaneously with the monumental historical documentation of Stalin’s political penal system The Gulag Archipelago (1973-8) … (full text).
… He has just been awarded an OBE for Chekhov: A Life and for his work on Russian history.
He writes also: … The third Russian illusion about Georgia is one of patronage, that Moscow can effectively direct Tbilisi’s choice of political leader. The extraordinary antagonism displayed by Vladimir Putin’s officials and army officers towards Georgia can be perhaps explained by their initial support for the « rose revolution » of 2003-04 that brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power: so great was their hatred for Eduard Shevardnadze (Saakashvili’s predecessor as Georgia’s president and the former Soviet foreign minister, whom they blamed for the Soviet system’s demise) that anyone who overthrew him was bound to find some sympathy in Moscow … (full text Russia vs Georgia: a war of perceptions, 24 August 2007).
The two regions at the heart of the Georgia-Russia war of August 2008 must be understood in their own terms if the problem of Georgia – and western illusions about the country – are to be seriously addressed, says Donald Rayfield … (full text).