Thomas Goltz

Author and Academic Adventurer

Books, Etc.

OVERVIEW: An Unplanned Caucasus Trtiptych

_{A lover of books and writing since I can remember, and then after a decade living off my reporting in Turkey and environs (the greater Middle East, Balkans in the 1980s, etc.), in the pre-Internet ‘Stone Age’ of 1991, the Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA), based in the Ivy League college town of Hanover, New Hampshire, granted me a two-year fellowship to explore the Turkic-speaking regions of Soviet Central Asia.}

_{The most concrete request from the fellowship trustees at ICWA was simple: ‘Write us a monthly report about what you experience,’}

_{Then the ‘Evil Empire’ (so-named by Ronald Reagan) started to fall apart, and I shifted my research from focusing on the ‘-stans’ of post-Soviet Central Asia to the reality of the ‘-trans,’ of the post-Soviet Caucasus.}

_{In doing so, I rapidly became less a scholar and more what some folks call a ‘war correspondent’ – a term I have always loathed, however accurate it might have been. I preferred to think of myself as a working witness to history as it was happening..}

_{My new residence in Baku, Azerbaijan was a perfect perch to be a fly-on-the-wall voyeur (and sometimes, almost participant) to the hurly-burly of post-Soviet conflict, and in real time, meaning war, both civil and intra-national as well as, arguably, the first taste of ‘terrorism’ that has become such a blight on the international stage.}

_{Residence in Baku not only allowed me to give close attention the convoluted political process at hand in Azerbaijan (three presidents and two acting presidents in two years) but also to track the disastrous war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Mountainous (‘Nagorno’) Karabakh. The chaos of post-Soviet Georgia and the independence movement in post-Soviet Chechnya was merely an overnight train-ride away.}

_{At the end of my ICWA adventure, I had a mass of monthly ICWA reports as well as scores of news and feature reports I had written for The Washington Post and then The New York Times and said to myself: ‘Self, you have just written a book, and nearly by accident.’}

_{Actually, the ICWA fellowship in the Post-Soviet Caucasus eventually spawned not one book, but three—and thus became a completely unplanned ‘Caucasus Triptych:’ Azerbaijan Diary (M.E. Sharpe, 1998), Chechnya Diary (Thomas Dunne/St. Martins, 2003) and Georgia Diary (M.E. Sharpe, 2006/09).}While none were techincally 'diaries' per se, all were certainly written in a highly personal style based on first-hand reporting and experience that my publishers thought evoked classics such as William Shirer’s ‘Berlin Diary’ (1941). Of course Iwas flattered by the comparison.

But I am even more gratified that two of my books have now been published in the language of the country they are about: GEORGIA DIARY in Georgian in 2014, and AZERBAIJAN DIARY in Azerbaijani in 2016, strongly suggesting that my personalized approach had/has resonance among the local population: I was not just a 'parachute' western journalist dropping in for a day or two to capture 'The Truth' and then get the hell out, but a long-term observer who actually understood how to look for nuance.

_{(CHECHNYA DIARY was translated into Turkish, the language of my adopted country where I spend a good part of each year, in 2006, thanks in part to the large North Caucasian (‘Circassian’) diaspora in that country, which almost counts as a translation into Noxchi Mot, meaning the Chechen language itself.}Additionally, I understand that a Russian-language anthology of elements of all three books is pending.)

While it is as impossible for me to declare which one of my Caucasus books is ‘the best’ as it is for a parent to declare which of their three children is the apple of their eye, I think it fair to say that all of my book-children are radically different from each other.

_{AZERBIAJAN DIARY—A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-rich, War-torn, Post-Soviet Republic}₍_{M.E. Sharpe/1998) was a work of almost pure discovery.}

_{Not only was there very little written on the country in English (or Turkish or German, my three ‘primary’ languages) at the time I arrived in Baku that distant summer of 1991, but there was no way for me to access any deep background had any been written for the very good reason that there was nothing called ‘the Internet’ back then. I was on my own, and soaked up information and impressions like a sponge, whether about the Karabakh war, politics, personalities, culture, the economics of oil and gas, and Azerbaijan’s unique geopolitical situation as a ‘pivot’ state (the only country in the world bordering both Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran), while also being the only mainly Muslim state (and Shi’ite at that) to maintain not just a friendly, but even a strategic friendship with Israel.}

_{Baku also served as a convenient front seat to study Azerbaijani political society in depth, from the rise and fall of Abulfez Elchibey and the Popular Front government of 1992-93, and a base from which to establish a personal relationship with Heydar Aliyev, the former KGB General, former First Communist Party Secretary, former Politburo Member—Number Two We first met in Naxjivan in 1991 when he was still in self-exile, and we remained on a first-name basis until his death in 2003. Indeed, many people both inside and outside of Azerbaijan regard my portrait of ‘The Old Man’ as the closest thing to an unauthorized (if still flattering) biography of this extraordinary Post-Soviet survivor ever published.}

_{Futurely, I will include a taster in the guise of Chapter Twenty-Four: "Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan…" wherein Heydar Aliyev calls for a referendum to legally depose President Abulfez Elchibey (at the suggestion of the US Embassy!) and then gets himself elected President of Azerbaijan...}

I only learned this twist of political events in that twisted summer of 1993 years--maybe a decade--later during a deep-rembrance conversation with the US ambo at the time. While a little surprised, I was not shocked. The whole point of US policy toward the post-Soviet Caucausus then (and now) seems to have been centered on energy (for Europe) transfered by any means other than Russia (or Iran).

Duh...

As for the Azerbaijani-language translation, I can only provide the cover and back-page. Despite an order from 'The Old Man' himselfback in the year 2000, the book itself was only published in Baku in 2016, and as a limited edition. Ah, well.

_{CHECHNYA DIARY: A War Correspondent’s Story of Surviving The War In}_Chechnya_{(Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins Press, 2003) is as narrow in focus as the Azerbaijan book is a broad canvas of ‘Soviet’-style self re-discovery through the trauma of war.}

_{Set almost entirely in a small farming town called Samashki that became notorious in the first Chechen-Russian war of 1994-96, it is the story of making a film on ‘The Chechen Spirit’ for an American television program, but quickly became much larger than that.}

_{Briefly, I found myself living in the town as the unexpected guest of a local militia commander named Hussein and his extended family, often tagging along on ambush missions. You might say that I was cutting it very close to the sharpest edge of journalistic impartiality. But the main lesson learned from my Samashki story is that the Heisenberg Principle about the ‘Observer Affecting The Observed’ applies equally to war-journalism as to quantum physics: had I not been there, 'observing' from a detached distance, would things have become as ugly as they did, simply because I was there, making a career, based on recording death?}

I include the Prologue (“A War Correspondent On A Roof”) as a taster, a YouTube link to my BBC treatment about my 'return' to Samashki in the inter-war period as well as a link to a Australian PhD dissertation based on the weirdly acurate g breanalysis of where the book emerged from, long before everyone could claim Post Traumatic Stress Syndrom to mask their diverse sins--past, current and future.

I kept all elements of the familiar orgy of Death and Destruction in Chechnya out of my original (English) book, but invited another soul-scarred surviver to add her devastating pix to the Turkish translation...Thanks, Heidi Bradner.

_{GEORGIA DIARY: A Chronicle of War and Political Chaos in the Post-Soviet Caucasus}_{(M.E. Sharpe 2006/2009) was first published in 2006, thus giving me some fifteen years to reflect on pre-Soviet then Soviet and then post-Soviet Georgian reality (from Zviad Gamaskhurdia to Eduard Shevardnadze and Mikhail Saakashvili) in a way I could not when writing either the Azerbaijani or Chechen books.}

_{Then, following the disastrous Russian-Georgian war of August 2008 my publisher gave me the option to do an updated paperback edition with a new Epilogue, thus giving me a further couple of years to think about the post-post-Soviet reality, meaning that of the ‘New Russia’ under Vladimir Putin and making for a book spanning the years 1991 through 2009.}

_{I would like to offer the Preface as a taster; those musings are based on Bertolt Brecht’s “A Caucasian Chalk Circle.”}

But this gets better, author-wise.

Somewhere along the literary highway, some guy identifying himself as 'G.K.' contacted me about the book. G.K. lived in the Princeton area, and had attended one of my presentation while on book tour. A Georgian, he really liked my book on his country, maybe specifically because of all the freaky front-line stuff I had lived through but was nowhere found in the standard (English) record about the chaos of his native land. More specifically, while G.K could and had read my obscure opus, his father had/could not. Had my book been translated into Georgian--and if not, why not?

To cut to the chase: within a mere year, G.K. had translated my entire Georgia Diary into his native language at no expense to anyone; I got it vetted by four or five trusted Georgian literatii pals who know my style, and with a child's portion of grease from some just 'One Tree In The Forest' folks from Azerbaijan doing business in Georgia, suddenly I was the Talk of Tbilisi Town.

Nice, how it happens like that, sometimes and shamelessly, I will provide to Georgian-language TV interviews...)

(PS: for all my 'merican writer pals: how many of you have had your stuff translated into Georgian (or Azerbaijani or Hungarian, which is coming up!)

_(E-BOOKS)

_{Assassinating Shakespeare}_{(Saqi Books, 2006) is actually my first book-book, and one that took me a half-a-lifetime to get published.}

_{First drafted around 1979/80 from hand-written notes detailing my adventures as a street-level, Shakespearian performance artist (‘busker’) in East, Central and Southern Africa in 1977/78, I punched together a manuscript around 1980 or so and then entered the land of The Frustrated Young Writer. ‘Shakespeare’ was rejected by some thirty US publishers over the next decade, and seemed destined to become a ‘bottom drawer’ manuscript in my opus when a London publisher (who knew of my work on Azerbaijan and Chechnya) suddenly made an offer to publish my African ‘orphan.’}

_{While grateful to Saqi Press for having published the book, I was less delighted by their promotional and even distributional efforts: despite glowing reviews (see the full-page notice in The New York Times ‘Christmas’ Review of Books in 2006 below), ‘Shakespeare’ was simply not available aside from the odd copy on Amazon.com. My frustration level grew to the point that I refused Saqi’s offer to turn ‘Shakespeare’ into an electronic book, choosing instead to re-publish an Amazon ‘Kindle’ version myself, and one purged of typos and with a new cover.}

_{Should readers of this website be inspired to purchase a copy of ‘Shakespeare,’ my recommendation is to Go Kindle!}

Here is the New York Times review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/books/review/Riding.t.html

More personal reviews came from my mother and fasther, to whom the book is dedicated. My late, great father declared that I was lucky to be alive once he completed reading the Shakespeare book. I am not sure if my mother ever finished it, saying just that she hated the book because it exposed deep family fissures; but she still recommends it to book-club friends.

Go figure.

Meanwhile, an old pal of mine whose Hungarian family had returned to Budapest in the early 1990s stumbled on Shakespeare during a visit to New York, and decided to publish the book in Magyar...

Wow!

I know of no other of my literatii pals who have been published in that langauge!...

_{AN OIL ODYSSEY}_{is the saga of the insane Soviet side-car motorcycle trip down the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline designed to bring Azerbaijani crude oil from the Caspian Sea to the eastern Mediterranean Turkish port of Ceyhan (‘Jeyhan’) via Georgia that I organized in August, 2000. The book is filled with international intrigue, bitter personal rivalries among team members (we were twelve bike riders, plus hangers-on) and even a love affair. It is also one weird motorcycle epic that explores the concept of “Who Says Geopolitics Can’t Be Fun?”}

_{Here is the link to Amazon Kindle:}

_{There is also a ‘music-video’ five-minute piece on YouTube, accessed via:}

_{ON-AGGREGATE: Champions Without A Home,}_{meanwhile, is the photo-rich saga of Azerbaijan’s ‘refugee’ Qarabağ-Ağdam football/soccer team who were forced to abandon their home city and stadium in July, 1993 as enemy Armenians conquered and then looted and occupied the place in the final year of the vicious Karabakh war. Bouncing from stadium to stadium during the late 1990s and then early 2000s, in 2014 the revitalized team won the Azerbaijani national championship, and thus qualified to test their feet (and resolve) against Europa League Big Boys such as Italy’s InterMilan and the French St. Etienne. By sheerest chance, I was invited to travel with this ‘Cinderella’ and make a documentary film about their trails and travails (See the ‘VIDEO’ link) and then turn it all into a book.}

_{Here is the video link, XXXXXX, and here is the Amazon/Kindle book connection.}

_CHAPTERS

_{I have also been flattered by inviting to write chapters in a number of books edited by others as anthologies or original work. These include everything from the chapters on Looting and Inserting Refugees Into Occupied Territory in Roy Gutman/David Rieff’s CRIMES OF WAR (1999) to a tongue-in-cheek treatment of my first encounter with a Turkish barbershop in the Turkey-focused edition of James Villers’ TRAVELERS’ TALES (2002). I also supplied an original chapter on Brigham Young in Jack Newfield and Mark Jacobsen’s AMERICAN MONSTERS (2004) as well as the ‘Frame The Chaos,’ second chapter in Svante Cornell/Frederick Starr’s THE GUNS OF AUGUST 2008 (RUSSIA’s WAR IN GEORGIA) (2009). Most recently, I was ‘officially’ inducted into menagerie of Montana writers when Allen Jones of Bangtail Press asked for a piece on Syria for his AN ELK RIVER BOOKS READER (2014).}

_{Other pre-published chapters have appeared in German and Norwegian anthologies (mainly on Azerbaijan) such as XXXX’s YYYYYYY and ZZZZZ’s ABC. I have heard tale of pirate chapter publications in French, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Japanese and Korean, but cannot verify.}

_OTHER

_{I have several ‘early’ book-like objects dating back to the 1980s, but they are mainly photo-rich, travel-related items about Turkey,and are seriously dated and thus I would not recommend.}

_{THE FUTURE}

_{Subject to change, my future book projects include a Russian language-inspired anthology of selected chapters of the ‘Caucasus Triptych’ under the working title of ‘Working The Rock Face’ as well as a potpourri of (mainly) unpublished essays written between circa 1975 and 2015 that I call ‘Fargo, Farewell,’ a specific reference to my erstwhile hometown in North Dakota.}

_{While ‘Rock Face’ is a bold-face anthology of published work, ‘Fargo’ covers everything from hanging out with the so-called ‘Devil-Worshipping’ Yezidi Kurds of northern Iraq to the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, as well as a hyper-cynical tour of the last-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s 9-floor dacha on the shores of the Black Sea in what was once post-Soviet Georgia (now separatist Abkhazia)…}

_{Here are some tasters.}

_{I will keep you posted!}