James Hill for The New York Times
Workers finishing their lunch in Gulripshi, Georgia, before returning to pick mandarin oranges, one of the principal exports.
GULRIPSHI, Georgia — A little less than three miles from Sochi's main Olympic Stadium, the site of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Winter Games in February, the Psou River stands as Russia's border with Georgia. But no one directly on either side of the derelict border post considers any part of the region Georgia.
It is the tiny, starkly beautiful and sparsely populated enclave of Abkhazia, which sundered itself from Georgia after a brutal war of ethnic cleansing 20 years ago. Since then, though Georgia has never accepted its independence, it has struggled for international recognition as a sovereign nation, not merely an impoverished appendage of its huge neighbor and principal patron.
The awarding of the Olympics in 2007 to Sochi, so tantalizingly close, had for a time raised hopes that Abkhazia would share in the bounty, that its political cause and its feeble economy would feel at least a trickle of the wealth and attention the Games inevitably attract. Maybe a few Olympic tourists would even make their way down the Black Sea coast.
Those hopes were largely misplaced.
Russia said that for security reasons, it plans to bar all traffic from crossing the narrow bridge to and from Abkhazia from Jan. 7 through the Paralympic Games in March. Only a select few specially registered vehicles will be allowed to pass, effectively locking out an enclave to which Russia has long provided political and economic succor.
The decision threatens to disrupt an indispensable link that brings vital products from Russia and carries Abkhazia's main exports north — most notably its mandarin oranges, just as they ripen heavily on the groves that cover the lush subtropical foothills overlooking the sea.
The border restrictions have left officials here scrambling to negotiate with their Russian counterparts to ensure sufficient supplies of products the region does not produce, including flour, meat, medicines and gasoline, as well as the uninterrupted flow of exports that provide the bulk of its revenues.
"From Russia, it's practically everything," Beslan F. Eshba, Abkhazia's deputy prime minister, said in an interview in the region's governmental headquarters in the capital, Sukhumi, known officially here as Sukhum or in Abkhazian as Akua.
In Gulripshi, a small village south of the capital, the impending border restrictions have hastened a harvest that begins late in the fall and usually extends well into the new year. The mandarins and tangerines of Abkhazia and Georgia — as well as peaches, persimmons, figs and grapes — have an almost mythical nostalgia surrounding them that dates to the Soviet era, when there were few exports from abroad. The oranges arrived in Moscow and other cities like a taste of the sun in the dark winter months.
In "A Russian Journal," written in 1948, John Steinbeck described passengers gorging themselves on fruit they bought from women outside the airport at Sukhumi, "for they were people of the north who never really had enough fruit." Even now, when produce from around the world fills Russia's markets, the mandarins are revered.
In the foothills that rise from the coast, a former Soviet-era collective formerly named Ilyich after Lenin's patronymic and now known as Sophia has 47,000 mandarin trees spread across more than 225 acres. Three hundred workers swarm the trees each day to pick the fruit by hand, some of it early so that it can be sorted by size and crated by a machine installed in 1963 in order to beat the border closings.
"It's an inconvenience, of course," said Ashot Minosyan, the deputy agricultural minister of the regional government, which still owns the farm.
Much of Abkhazia still seems frozen in a Soviet-like state, the scars of its war with Georgia still visible in gutted and bullet-pocked buildings, the failure of its economy evident in the abandoned resorts that once were the prize of the Soviet elite, including Stalin and his secret police chief, Lavarentiy Beria, who was born in a village near Gulripshi.
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