User:Nanobear~enwiki/SO war background

The Ossetians, an Iranic-speaking people, look to the Don River area for their ethnic origins. In the 13th century, they were pushed southwards and settled along the border with Georgia during the Mongol invasions. Ossetians and Georgians have had a long and complex history with periods of peaceful coexistence interspersed with violence from both sides.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Georgia stayed Menshevik controlled, while the Bolsheviks took control of Russia. In June 1920, a Russian-sponsored Ossetian force attacked the Georgian Army and People' Guard. "'The Georgians reacted with vigour and defeated the insurgents and their supporters in a series of hard-fought battles. Five thousand people perished in the fighting and 20,000 Ossetes fled into Soviet Russia. The Georgian People's Guard displayed a frenzy of chauvinistic zeal during the mopping-up operations, many villages being burnt to the ground and large areas of fertile land ravaged and depopulated.'"Eight months later, the Red Army successfully invaded Georgia and in 1922 the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast was created.

In 1990, as the USSR neared collapse, the longtime anti-Soviet dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia was emerging as Georgia's first independent leader. In basing his campaign for the presidency on a nationalist platform, dubbed Georgia for Georgians,  he projected ethnic Georgians, who at the time constituted 70% of the population, as the country's true patriots, to the debasement of South Ossetians as newcomers.