ESSAYS, PUBLICISM

Rustaveli Avenue

The new Georgia was born on 9April 1989 –even before the Soviet Union received its death sentence in Belovezha forest. That was the day when in Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, special army units dispersed a peaceful pro-independence demonstration staged by the hungry masses. The attack on the demonstrators resulted in 20 deaths (most of them young women). Many more were wounded or seriously affected by the toxic gas used in the attack.

It was one of the last clashes between the Soviet Army and its own people. Very soon the national leaders of the newly independent Georgia began to claim reassuringly that the country would rapidly reach the living standards of Switzerland. “We will sell our unique Borzhomi mineral water and our unique Georgian wines to the world, and if that is not enough and we need more money, we have spring water, and we can sell that too,” they said.

The communist officials disappeared quietly. But they didn’t vanish into the past – they simple removed their communist masks and before long the whole country could see them in church, as they diligently learned to right the candles before the icons and to cross themselves devoutly.

The people started to build the new Georgia with new hopes and, at the first democratic elections in May 1991, elected a new president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia. He won 87 per cent of the votes cast by the 80 per cent who turned out.

But Georgia’s independence brought with it a multitude of problems, the most acute being a shortage of electricity. Using every conceivable (and even inconceivable) means, people sought a way out of the situation. Some were clever enough to connect their apartments or houses to two or three different power lines. The authorities regularly drew up schedules for supplying different areas at different times, but theses immediately broke down.

Depending on the quantity and quality of power supply, the country became divided into more desirable and less desirable areas, and cities into more desirable and less desirable districts. Needless to say, the city that did best was Tbilisi, the capital of independent Georgia, but even there from time to time residents would close this or that major thoroughfare to traffic to ensure that any power generated would reach their suburb.

In some remote villages, children were taught during daylight and were home after school without ever even seeing the dusty glow of what were known as “Lenin lamps”, those weak, old-fashioned lights hanging from the classroom ceiling.

At that time, people who were dubbed “the electrical men” became hugely popular. These were the petty bureaucrats, or power engineers, involved in power distribution, inevitably, the media soon elevated them to the status of pop stars – newspaper and periodical correspondents, television and radio journalists interviewed them frequently, asking endless questions, the most vital of all being exactly when will Georgia have a reliable power supply?

Their faces were known all over Georgia. People greeted them in the street, stopped them, asked them questions – everything short of asking for their autographs.

In 2004, 13 years after independence, Georgia finally got its continuous power supply. Street Lamps shone in the cities and the brightest, most “electrified” city was of course Tbilisi. The “electrical men” sank into oblivion – no one remembers their names or faces any more.

Several years ago, a new problem, a water shortage, unexpectedly emerged in Tbilisi and it looked as if history would repeat itself, “Water men” appeared on television, though this time the city’s water supply was restored fairly quickly and the media had no time to hype them up.

Georgian journalists, just like journalists in most post-Soviet countries, have now returned to their customary routine – hyping up high- ranking and less notable politicians. Thanks mainly to television; Georgian politicians have entered every home and every family. There is virtually no one in Georgia who isn’t aware of what this or that politician has for breakfast or who they had a crush on in the first grade. Even exhibitions of their childhood photographs are held as if this was an altogether ordinary and traditional event.

Today as never before, Georgian politics has become the country’s culture, its art and its economy. It has swamped the whole of the informational and human sphere, it has taken unto itself the monopoly rights on giving people hope for the future.

Politics has permeated the air breathed by every Georgian. Georgia is the most politicized country in the whole of the post-Soviet region or, more precisely, the country burning most ardently with hyper-political passions. Since Georgia has been independent, it is safe to say that it is not Georgia’s presidents who have lived the lives and problems of the nation, but the nation which has lived the lives of each of the three presidents. The people have learned of the tastes and thoughts of their presidents from television, and then either zealously defended “their” president or equally zealously attacked him as not “their own”.

Zviad Gamsakhurdia had been in office only a few months when his opponents met to demand his resignation on Rustaveli Avenue, on the exact spot where the hunger demonstration had been broken up on 9 April 1989, and where the first president occasionally organized rallies of his supporters. The crowd gradually grew. Awaiting bad news, the whole country watched developments in the capital with bated breath. The first shot fired on Rustaveli Avenue tore the nation in two. Blood was spilled. Earlier still, an armed conflict exploded in South Ossetia and there, too people died – Georgians and Ossetians.

The fire that ignited on Rustaveli Avenue engulfed the whole of Georgia and in particular the west of the country.

“Did you think that democracy would be a walk in the park?” Djaba Ioseliani, the founder of the illegal armed units and Gamsakhurdia’s fiercest enemy, asked on television. After Gamsakhurdia was exiled, it was Djaba Ioseliani who suggested inviting Eduard Shevardnadze to Georgia.

On his return to his homeland in 1992, Shevardnadze was immediately elected head of state. The post of president had by then been abolished, but as early as November 1995, when a new constitution had been adopted, Shevardnadze was elected Georgia’s second president, with a 74 per cent vote. At first, he rewarded Ioseliani, but it wasn’t long until he put him in prison for several years – the same prison where he had been held under Gamsakhurdia. After his release, Ioseliani wrote and published a book about his time in Georgian prisons. He died soon after.

Just a few months after Shevardnadze’s return to his homeland, Georgia was accepted as a member of the UN. His supporters claimed that the UN had accepted not Georgia but Shevardnadze.

Just a few days later, Georgian National Guard tanks entered Abkhazia, sparking another bloody conflict. Georgian Politics could not remain unaffected by the war, and collapsed. To this day, different words are used to describe it in Georgia: the Russo-Georgian war, the Russo-American conflict, and even the Georgian-Georgian conflict.

At the end of September 1993, the armed conflict in Abkhazia ended, and refugees from South Ossetia were joined by some 300,000 Abkhazian refugees. Thousands of Georgians, Abkhazians and Ossetians and many others lost their lives. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the internal armed conflicts brought total economic ruin and extreme hardship to the Georgians. The country had neither bread nor electricity, and could hope only for humanitarian aid from democratic countries.

The overthrow of Gamsakhurdia’s ephemeral power wrecked many people’s hope of stability, but Shevardnadze lost no time in pointing the way to a fairy-tale-like, beautiful and democratic future.

He ruled independent Georgia as if he were still the First Secretary of its Communist Party. He had got so used to accounting for his actions to Moscow in Soviet times that when he became president of an Independent country he continued to search for someone he could report to, and at the end of his political career he started obsessively reporting to Washington, just as earlier he had reported to Moscow. Although he managed to resolve some issued, his “successor” inherited a bankrupt country, chronically explosive conflicts, a difficult economic situation, terrible corruption, a majority that was socially unprotected and had been shamelessly robbed, disappointed hopes and false promises.

Rustaveli Avenue erupted again. There were larger and smaller demonstrations, but nothing like the numbers termed the “ocean waves” (“ocean waves” being 50,000, 100,000 or 200,000 people) that were needed to overthrow the old powers that be and spark new life. Popular dissatisfaction grew slowly but steadily.

The next “ocean wave” did not hit Rustaveli Avenue until November 2003, and it culminated on 23 November, St George’s Day, in Shevardnadze’s voluntary departure. This was the action which came to be known as the Rose Revolution, and was headed by one of the leaders of the then opposition – Mikheil Saakashvili.

As long as Shevardnadze was gone, the people were willing to give carte blanche to any leader, and Mikheil Saakashvili became their next choice. On 23 November, wearing a bullet-proof vest under his coat and carrying a red rose, Saakashvili, accompanied by his associates, burst into Parliament House and drank warm tea from a cup left on the podium from which Shevardnadze had been speaking a moment before. Shevardnadze was led away from Parliament house and out of harm’s way by his bodyguards. By drinking the lukewarm tea, the new leader seemed to assume from the old leader all of Georgia’s problems and the nation’s new hopes.

Six weeks later, the people elected Saakashvili their new president with 97 per cent of the vote, a margin unprecedented in independent Georgia. The new politicians, headed by their third and youngest president, set to work with zeal. Leaving behind the stagnation of the Shevardnadze period, the country began to move forward and started to display clear signs of genuine nationhood.

But the politicians kept trying to divert the people’s attention to global politics, neglecting many domestic issues. The “new” politicians loved the spectacular fireworks and fountains, and busied themselves with new roads and grandiose building projects.

Neither the “old” nor the “new” politicians kept their pre-election promises: “We will resolve the conflicts and bring the refugees home”, “We will do away with unemployment”… All of them placed far too much hope in such slogans as “America will help us”, “The West will help us” and “We will soon be joining NATO”.

After a period of time, a people’s exaggerated hoped and boundless trusts in government inevitably end in disappointment. Those who blindly put their faith in politicians often take a long time to notice the difference between real and cosmetic politics, between a true policy overhaul and a simple facelift.

Ultimately, the actions of the new politicians repelled the community and yet again robbed the people of their hope for rapid improvement. The authorities frequently placed themselves above the low. Corruption, the gulf between the words of those in authority and their actions, the leadership’s occasionally irksome but sometimes dangerous populism, its egocentricity and messianic slant, its eternal pose of rectitude, its failure to admit mistakes and unwillingness to take advice, all of this could not help but influence the people’s attitude to Mikheil Saakashvili and his team.

The situation was also aggravated by the radicalism of an amorphous civil society, the people’s desire for a charismatic leader, their wish for rapid success in conditions of barely nascent democracy, and by the fact that the majority ignored not only the realities of modern politics but also, and more importantly, the Russian factor.

Beginning on 9 April 1989, Russia took centre stage in the Georgian political theatre. It was the ever-present monster of Rustaveli Avenue, its evil genius, its eminence grise. IN the political show staged by Russian political producers, like in a cheap television comedy, all that happened seemed an absurd, coarse caricature. As if batting with demons, Russia first took on Georgian wine, then Georgia citrus fruit and Borzhomi mineral water, and finally those Georgians whom fate had thrown onto Russian territory.

Georgia is the only Caucasian country on which Russia has imposed a visa requirement. None of the governments of independent Georgia has managed to build a normal relationship with Russia, once its major market, though Western leaders have advised time and time again to “please take the Russian factor into account”. Georgian and Russian leaders took turns at making relations worse. In 2006, Russia deported Georgian citizens from its various regions based on their citizenship.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia had a population of over 5 million; it is less than 4 million today. Over a million people have left our country, some say a million and half. Most of the emigrants have now acquired new citizenship, and while others return from time to time, the country’s instability makes it hard to hope for their permanent return.

People from other countries often say that we, the Georgians, are an artistic people. It may be because we love the theatre. The number of theatres in Georgia has doubled, and perhaps even trebled, in the last 15 years. I know for sure that Georgia has the most theatres per capita in the whole of the Caucasus. Even during the “dark age” (when there was no electricity), in the winter, the stage was lit by electricity from generators and the theatres were always full. Incidentally, the famous Rustaveli Theatre is on Rustaveli Avenue, a short walk from the Parliament building.

Our celebrations are also theatrical, and so is our politics. The Tamada, or toastmaster, at a celebration meal is like a president. Politicians themselves frequently say “let’s put on a good show”, “What sort of a show is that?”, “We will teach them stage management”, or “It is all going according to our scenario”. Needless to say, they mean their own political theatre.

The Georgian for “bread and circuses” is “bread, wine and circuses”. The “simple” Georgian of this tale is a hospitable, sociable person.

And another thing – Georgians love television. Per capita ownership of TV sets in poverty-stricken Georgia is among the top 10 countries in the world (bread, wine and television”). All these years, Georgia’s television sets have been full of political news and red-hot developments, politicians, personalities pretending to be politicians, and talented and talentless showbusiness people, all this while its refrigerators were half empty, and sometimes just plain empty. That was how the “simple” Georgians lived, with their crammed television sets and their empty refrigerators.

Although the new government had some successes, it was four years to the day from the   start of the Rose Revolution that the “ocean waves” of unrest again stormed up Rustaveli Avenue (different sources put the number of demonstrators at between 100,000 and 150,000). But this time it didn’t end with a new leader coming to power. The “happy ending of the Rose Revolution was not to be repeated. Saakashvili said that the state was the state, and on 7 November, on the very day and in the very place where for 60 years Soviet Georgia celebrated the October Revolution with parades and demonstrations, the authorities demonstrated their own power: they dispersed a peaceful protest with water cannons, rubber truncheons, gas and bullets – rubber ones, but bullets nevertheless. There were also noise generators, whose blood-curdling howls resounded through the dreams of the escaping demonstrators for several weeks afterwards. The authorities had “cleared” (as was said in officialese) Rustaveli Avenue and, later on, the Rika (the Kura Embankment). Fortunately no lives were lost but up to 700 casualties sought medical help. The then prime minister immediately tried to reassure the people, saying: “Don’t be afraid, the tear gas wasn’t made in Russia, we imported it from the West”. But hardly anyone paid him any attention. A state of emergency was declared. A number of TV and radio companies were closed down. Later, some scientists dubbed these events “a lesser ‘37” or “the new 9 April”, while others maintained the low had to be upheld, there was no other solution and that Georgian statehood had been saved.

For the umpteenth time, the people were divided. The Avenue of Presidential Undoing forced even Mikheil Saakashvili to resign, only on this occasion the president himself named the new election day – 5 January 2008. He named the day and we won again, but without the previous overwhelming majority. He polled 53 per cent of the votes.

On the day of his inauguration, which took place on 20 January in front of Parliament House (again in Rustaveli Avenue), his many opponents gathered at the Tbilisi Race Track. Saakasvili repeated his campaign slogan – “A Georgia without poverty” – and the opposition, both in the capital and in other cities repeated: “The elections were rigged” and “We don’t accept Saakashvili as president”. This time, the presidential elections did not unite Georgia, and only confirmed its division.

Of all the countries in the Caucasus and in the whole of the post-Soviet region, Georgia continues to hold the spot in terms of number of the problems it has and their complexly. They include unresolved conflicts and a weak economy. So far, the government hasn’t created the peaceful, constructively governed space which is the prerequisite for progress and stability. Our society has yet to learn how to temper its boundless optimism with reality. Without the emergence of a new political culture, without a harmonious relationship between the authorities and society, the people’s hopes will always be deceived and the main player in our country’s political history will be Rustaveli Avenue, and not Georgian politicians.

2008