The political drama in Ukraine is being replicated across the Black Sea in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia. There too, Moscow has been deeply involved. There too, its candidate faces defeat but is busy pulling as many strings as possible in order to turn the democratically expressed will of the people on its head — with Moscow’s full support.

In last month’s presidential elections, opposition candidate Sergey Bagapsh was widely thought to have defeated the Kremlin-backed candidate, Raul Khadzhimba. That was recognized by the region’s Supreme Court but it then reversed its decision because of pressure from the outgoing government. The government has demanded a repeat election and the outgoing President Vladislav Ardzinba now refuses to step down until one has taken place. Bagapsh, however, intends to have himself inaugurated this Saturday and he has a massive army of supporters to back him.

Last Friday they stormed government buildings in the capital, Sukhumi. The next day, perhaps sensing the direction things were moving, Parliament recognized him as the new president. But matters are getting messy: Moscow has threatened to intervene in Abkhazia despite the fact that the province is part of an independent country. Were that to happen, it would trigger a major international row.

Moscow of course cares not at all. It has done it before. It backed the occupation of the disputed Armenian-majority region of Nagorno Karabakh to weaken Azerbaijan; it supports the Russian-dominated breakaway region of Transdniester to undermine Moldova; it supported the Abkhaz breakaway from the very start to punish Georgia for leaning toward NATO and the West. Now it is busy stirring up threats of secession in Ukraine if the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko becomes president.

On Saturday, the Ukrainian representative to the EU said that Ukraine was an old nation but a very young democracy. He could just as easily have been talking about Abkhazia or Azerbaijan or any of the other former Soviet states that are experiencing so many difficulties with democracy. Not that being “a young democracy” is any guarantee of things working well, as the row over who won the US election four years ago proves.

There are lessons to be learned about democracy in places where it does not have roots. Before condemning Russia for its own retreat from democracy or its unashamed meddling in its former empire, however, we should not ignore the evident hypocrisy of the rest of us. In 1996, when Boris Yeltsin defeated the renascent communists in the Russian elections, most of us breathed a heavy sigh of relief —because we did not want the communists to win. But the election was fixed. Likewise, the world said nothing in 1991 when the Algerian elections were quashed after the Islamists had won.

Definitions of democracy, it seems, are not unlike definitions of terrorism. They can too easily depend on where we stand and who else is involved.