The Black Sea Coast as a Landscape of Cold War Intelligence

Abstract

In the midst of the Cold War, if visitors to Kobuleti, a popular resort town on Soviet Georgia’s Black Sea coast, wandered south, they would follow a seaside road lined with palm trees or walk along the shores of its pebble beach, passing high-rise vacation complexes. On the outskirts of Batumi, they would be greeted by a lush botanical garden reaching up into the hills and showcasing the region’s subtropical abundance with citrus groves and areas devoted to the exotic plants of the Mediterranean, South America, East Asia, and even distant Australia. In Batumi itself, they would find a bustling international port, visited by container ships and tankers from across the world; they would pass sailors strolling the streets, conversing in foreign languages. The Black Sea coast was a showcase for Soviet achievements and, especially in the postStalinist era, an opening to the world beyond Soviet borders. If our travelers continued to head south from Batumi, however, they would soon enter a “forbidden border zone” (zapretnaia pogranichnaia zona) open only to carefully screened local residents and Soviet border troops, a restricted stretch of land whose topography was not detailed in public maps but instead considered classified information. The forbidden zone served as a buffer between the heavily trafficked port to the north and the nearby border with Turkey, a country described in a training manual for the Soviet border troops as a US-funded “base for the organization of subversive activity directed against the USSR.”1 If our imaginary travelers were not seized