In Georgia, Watching a Young Democracy’s Spirits Flag
August 31, 2008
At my friend Mikho’s house, no one knew where the passports were. The war had started, Russian jets had just bombed the outskirts of Tbilisi, and most commercial flights had been cancelled. Frightened Georgians were pouring over the border into Armenia, and Mikho, an archaeologist in his 50s, wanted his family to join them.
In Georgia’s past crises — the civil war in the 1990s and the subsequent years, when armed thugs ruled the streets — Mikho and his family had stayed put. But Tbilisians have wrenching memories of the last time the Russians came to town, in 1989, when Soviet troops used shovels to kill protesters. “You have this instinct, to want your descendants to survive,” he told me with a haunted look as he punched numbers into his cell phone, searching for a reasonable hotel in the Armenian capital of Yerevan.
As Mikho’s family scurried around, I rested on their couch in the muggy summer heat, wondering whether this city I had lived in for the past year was really about to be invaded. Like Beirut or Sarajevo before their wars, Tbilisi is a cosmopolitan blend of cultures boasting rich architecture, dance troupes and museums. The main drag, Rustaveli Avenue, is a vibrant buzz of booksellers, ice cream stands and upscale boutiques that are fast replacing the drab Soviet-era shops. Now, sitting a block away from all that, I tried to imagine this 1,600-year-old capital ceasing to exist.
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I had taken a break from covering education in Virginia for The Post last fall to teach journalism in Tbilisi. I first visited Georgia nine years ago as a travel writer, and I was drawn back to this land of mad declarations and grand sacrifices, hearty wines and lavish hospitality. I hadn’t been able to explain well to people at home why, on something of a whim, I had chosen to come to this jagged sliver of the Caucasus. But my Georgian friends weren’t surprised. They’re used to people falling in love with them.
American expats talk about the “Georgia-shaped hole” in their hearts when they leave, but the Russians felt that pang long ago. The poets Lermontov and Pushkin found inspiration here; the Soviet elite kept summer dachas here. Nestled at a crossroads of East and West, influenced by the Persians, the Byzantines and the ancient Greeks, Georgians pride themselves on their flexibility and their tolerance, qualities they say have allowed their small country to survive. (Despite the horror at the Russian invasion, I’ve heard of no backlash against Russians living in Georgia.)
But the Georgians have also been called the Sicilians of the Russian empire, a people who throw themselves with equal gusto into a knife fight or a love affair. The impulsiveness is seductive — and dangerous. Georgia’s young democracy is a work in progress, and cooler heads don’t always prevail. And with the Russian invasion, Georgia’s internal struggle between sense and sensibility could become even more unbalanced.
Most Americans, if they knew anything about Georgia before this month, knew of it as the tiny ex-Soviet state whose charismatic young American-educated president, Mikheil Saakashvili, led a “Rose Revolution” in 2003, using a rising tide of street demonstrations to sweep away the corrupt previous regime. “Misha,” as he’s widely called, had a boisterous personal style, but he was at home in the corridors of Washington, and his administration had ushered in a Western-style democracy, one that the Bush administration showered with financial and military support.
After I arrived here, I found that many Georgians’ views were less rosy. The new leaders had improved the roads and reformed a graft-riddled police force — but the judiciary was seen as beholden to the nation’s rulers, and the media were less free than they had been under the previous leader, former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. While most Georgians supported Saakashvili’s pro-Western stance, many felt left behind by his embrace of dog-eat-dog capitalism. A chasm had opened between haves and have-nots, based less on experience or expertise than on youth and fluency in English. Baby-faced government officials zoomed around in black SUVs, stroking their iPhones, while teachers, scientists and pensioners took on extra jobs to feed themselves.
In early November 2007, a few weeks after I arrived, the resentment spilled into the streets. The government cracked down violently on the demonstrators, shocking Georgia’s Western allies — and its own citizens.
For my students, English-speakers in their early- to mid-20s from all over Georgia, this meant abandoning their textbooks to go and report on the near-revolution. They raced up the two blocks from the school to the demonstrations, where tear gas clouded the air and masked men were beating people with truncheons. Thrilled to be putting their lessons to work, worried about the fate of their fledgling democracy, they rushed back to school to write it all up for a student newspaper that was no longer an academic exercise.
Post-communist Georgia, I was finding, is an imperfect democracy. There’s still room to criticize the government, but if you do it too publicly, you may get punished. For all the talk of Western-style reform, Georgian businessmen say that Saakashvili’s ruling party still leans on them for “donations.” And government critics are often cast as Kremlin agents — a hint at Georgia’s tormented relationship with its massive neighbor.
Even before the war, the Russian threat had become an excuse for everything from suspending civil liberties to shooting protesters with rubber bullets. It was also good for public relations: The Museum of Soviet Occupation in downtown Tbilisi featured chiaroscuro lighting, menacing Stalin posters and a video loop of the Rose Revolution, starring a triumphant Saakashvili.
But even Georgians who did not vote for Saakashvili felt a chill when, over U.S. objections, France and Germany voted in May to deny Georgia a NATO “membership action plan” for fear of angering Russia.
“Europeans don’t remember,” my neighbor sighed the day the vote was announced, as he poured me a glass of homemade white wine in his kitchen. “To the common Russian, it is not important to say, ‘We make cars’ or ‘We make refrigerators.’ But it is important to them to be able to say, ‘We make guns.’ It doesn’t make them feel good to know that people like them. It makes them feel good to know that people are afraid of them.”
The Georgians are afraid of them, but they are also intertwined with them. Russia has been Georgia’s savior and tormenter, its subjugator and protector. The Soviet Union kept them in bondage, but it also supplied them with food, jobs, education, a market for their goods. And it freed them from responsibility.
“We always had sugar daddies,” my colleague Giorgi said as we sipped strong Turkish coffee one spring day in the school cafeteria. “They would come, kill, rape, take over the land, but you always had a shepherd, always had an overseer, someone who decided for you. So in a way we’re not grown up. We are like 17-year-olds who cannot operate in real-life settings — you know, you move out, and you find that life is not fair, the outside world doesn’t necessarily love you the way your family does. So what’s the solution? As soon as we lost one shepherd, we started looking for another. So the U.S. is like a substitute for Moscow.”
During my year here, the government clampdown on the media continued. The main opposition television station was shuttered, and its owner, a rival to the president, died mysteriously in exile. Even my most eager students descended into cynicism. “It’s all very well to learn about Watergate, but when we get jobs, I can guarantee you that our editors will never, ever let us investigate the government that way,” said Natia, 22.
“And if we did,” added 23-year-old Tuta, “they wouldn’t air it.”
It was hard to stay optimistic as, over the course of the year, graduates of our program quit their jobs one after another. One came to our class and played us television spots he had produced that showed police violence and intimidation from the November crackdown. His editors did not run the stories, so he resigned.
But for all their frustration, my students didn’t want another revolution. Most Georgians I know just want a little stability. Right now, though, it’s hard to see how they will get it. The Russians seem in no hurry to leave, and if Georgian leaders banked on Western armies coming to the rescue, they miscalculated badly.
When the Russians seemed close to attacking Tbilisi, my friend Mamuka, a gaunt, gray-haired journalist and Saakashvili devotee, dusted off a Kalashnikov he’d kept from Georgia’s war in Abkhazia 15 years ago, stuck it in the back of his Mercedes and sent me a text message saying that he was ready to die fighting. He has put the gun away now, but as we drove into the shattered town of Gori last week, past blackened orchards and bombed-out apartment buildings, his face was pale with despair.
“You are very humiliated, yeah?” he said, explaining how it now feels to be Georgian. “Your pride is broken.” Earlier in the week, he said, he had thought of suicide. “Now I am thinking only of revenge.”
But what, I asked, had he and his friends expected from Russian strongman Vladimir Putin?
“Everyone said, ‘They will bomb Tbilisi and then say, “We don’t know whose plane it was.” ‘ Nobody said it would be open war between Russia and Georgia.”
As I write, the Russians have retreated farther from Tbilisi, though they’re still hunkered down in other towns. U.S. and Russian warships pass uncomfortably close to one another in the Black Sea, while on Rustaveli Avenue, the booksellers sell their books, and the teenagers lick ice-cream cones. Mikho’s family didn’t flee to Armenia. But now they know where their passports are.
Source: The Washington Post, August 2008
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/29/AR2008082902336.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
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