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 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.
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.
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.
But even Georgians who did not vote for Saakashvili felt a chill when, over US objections, France and Germany voted in May to deny Georgia a NATO “membership action plan” for fear of angering Russia.
The Georgians are afraid of Russians, but they are also intertwined with them. Russia has been Georgia’s savior and tormentor, 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.
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.
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.”
