Russia: Georgia on Their Minds

To cure me seemed hard even to Him who created me.

—The Knight in the Leopard Skin Tariel, the knight in the leopard skin, was the great folk hero of Georgia —before Joseph Stalin came along. To the warlike people of the high wine-and-fruit-growing country between the Black and Caspian seas, Tariel was the perfect combination of vice and virtue. He could slash a man in two with a snap of his whip, slay 10,000 enemies in a single sortie, then weep like a woman at the thought of his own cruelty. Stalin...