Mapping Chaos
Maps and mapmaking have long been mined by historians as a record of the ways people organized and conceived of the space around them. Artur Tsutsiyev clearly had less antiquarian goals in mind when he set out to look at the ever-shifting ethnic and political mosaic of the Caucasus through the prism of maps. The reader still gets miniature glimpses of historical charts, but the author mostly isolates the key turns in the history of the Caucasus and renders them in the schematic form of 50 maps, supplying detailed commentary along the way.
The starting point of 1774 refers to Russia’s decisive victories against the Ottoman Empire, which launched a process of increasing Russian penetration into the area, one that partially turned back only with the fall of the Soviet Union. The author explores the paradoxical endeavor of imposing a functional administrative makeup over territories with variable and uncertain ethnic composition. While the Caucasus can be distinctly marked out as a geographical entity, the fluidity of internal borders between the various confessions, fiefdoms, political formations, linguistic and ethnic groups has rigged the region with volatile fault lines that do not lend themselves easily to mapmaking. For better or worse, today’s political patchwork was borne out of these efforts. The imperial overseers conjured up imaginary borders where there were none, relying to an extent on faint but real divisions between groups. The consequences of these Sisyphean labors still reverberate in various vicious conflicts.
The author’s glum inference from his study seems to be that a region with so many moving parts is likely to continue to smolder, as contemporary mapmakers take their turn at visualizing viable frontiers that match today’s political realities. Tsutsiyev’s standpoint will hardly convince the anguished people living in the region for whom the unreality of borders does not mesh with the certainties of their beliefs and livelihood. The book is still a uniquely valuable resource for the strategists and scholars interested in the Caucasus, a region much easier schematized and carved out on paper than in the haze of frayed human emotions.
"Russia Profile" April 16, 2007
