Newsweek has an interesting article today about the KGB’s long tradition of working (and playing) in Abkhazia and how this legacy has been passed on to the FSB and carried over to the present day. Here’s an excerpt:

The Russian special services’ “special relationship” with Abkhazia began well before the region’s break from Georgia in 1991, in the days of the Soviet KGB. From Stalin’s era on, every other Abkhaz family had a KGB officer, a secret agent, or an informer among their relatives. Former agents told NEWSWEEK that Moscow gave the tiny South Caucasus republic a special status–of an autonomous republic within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic–in order for the KGB to have a pleasant headquarters in the palm-lined seaside boulevards of Sukhumi. Locals like to boast that “Abkhazia used to beat the world record on the number of secret agents per capita,” says Lavrik Mikvabia, a colonel in the Abkhaz border guard. And Vladimir Rubanov, a three-star general who ran the old KGB’s analytical department, told NEWSWEEK that “the KGB always had its special power in Abkhazia. When I came for vacation and went out for a beer with my friend, a senior Abkhaz KGB commander, we did not have to pay for our beers or a plate of crabs. We just showed our KGB IDs.”