One evening in December 1991, as Georgia was sliding into civil war and its capital filled with refugees, I went to one of the last performances in the Moorish-style opera house on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, the city’s central thoroughfare. They were doing Glinka’s opera Ruslan and Ludmilla, the story of two noble lovers, separated and then reunited with the aid of a magic ring, in pre-Christian Kiev. It was very cold. The lights were on, but not the heating: the few score of us in the audience, lost amid the rows of seats in the huge hall, kept our coats and gloves on – as did many of the orchestra; the string section had cut off the tips of their gloves to allow them to play. The luckless cast, lightly dressed as they were, moved about the stage as briskly as the music and action would allow, with occasional semi-surreptitious blowing on their hands. Some of the audience left at the interval. Yet the production ran its course, and cast and orchestra bowed to the sad little clatter of applause as if at a royal gala.
When I returned to Georgia this September, I met actor Alan Rickman. He told me that he had visited Tbilisi not long after my night at the opera. Conditions were still chaotic, but he had gone to a play at the Rustaveli Theatre, a little way down from the opera house. The lights failed; the actors were about to give up. Then, said Rickman, “800 candles suddenly appeared” – the audience had come prepared – and the show went on.
It’s fitting to begin with memories of stage dramas; Tbilisi is a dramatic city. It stretches out on both sides of the Mtkvari River, its left bank crammed between the river and the cliffs rising about a kilometre back. The skyline is dominated by the ruined walls of the Narikala fortress – as well as the aluminium, Soviet-era Mother Georgia statue and a huge TV tower, whose lights sparkle and flash at night creating the impression of a fiery rocket unable to take off. Below the cliffs, much of Tbilisi’s old town is mouldering; some of the latticework balconies sag so heavily that you hesitate to walk beneath them. The 19th-century houses, a little of their imperial elegance still visible, peel and crumble. But nearer the river, next to the sulphur baths where you can still get a massage and a fierce scrub, an area has been restored. It’s a long alley filled with cafés, restaurants and souvenir shops – fashioned for tourists and the emerging Georgian bourgeoisie, but little patronised by either on a warm, thundery Sunday morning. In one of the cafés, I took tea and blini, pancakes, with honey, nuts and raisins, more of a Russian than a Georgian breakfast, to the accompaniment of Russian jazz songs and a Russian conversation with the waitress. Most Georgians seem happy to speak the language, and say that those Russians still living in Georgia suffer no discrimination.
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In the town of Gori, 75km west of Tbilisi, the Stalin Museum – the complex includes the dictator’s birthplace – is open for business again after the rupture with Russia in August last year. A life-size statue of Stalin still stands. Shorena Shaverdashvili, who edits the news magazine Liberali, told me that the government of Mikheil Saakashvili – “Misha” to friend and foe – had floated the idea of getting rid of the statue, but might find it hard to do so. “His people called up journalists with the idea, hoping they would take it up,” she said. “I certainly have no objection, but I think many people, certainly in Gori, would object. The idea is top-down: it’s not popular, as far as I can see.”
Misha’s is Georgia’s third presidential regime since independence in 1991. When he won the now-customary landslide for his first term, in 2004, the most prominent part of his platform was a pledge to bring the rebel regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia back under full Georgian sovereignty. He has failed, although he curbed the burgeoning power of a third region, Ajara, and began a grudging dialogue with the Abkhaz authorities. On August 7 2008, angered by attacks on Georgians still living in South Ossetia (as in Abkhazia, they had once been the majority ethnic group), he sent in the US-trained army to silence the military emplacements of Tskinvali, the region’s capital. Almost instantly, Russia invaded the territory (many Georgians claim the incursion had already begun), chased out the Georgian army and roared into Georgia proper – including into Gori, which it shot up, although the statue of Stalin was unscathed.
I went to see a Georgian government cabinet minister, whose portfolio is “reintegration”: he is responsible for bringing back the rebel territories. Timur Yakobashvili is a member both of Tbilisi’s still numerous Jewish community (it is a familiar Georgian claim that anti-Semitism is foreign to them) and of its formidable intelligentsia. A physicist, he attended courses in foreign affairs in Birmingham, Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Upsalla; he founded the main foreign affairs think-tank, ran the foreign office’s European department and writes widely on international issues. Sitting in his big office in an ugly government block above Rustaveli Avenue, he told me that Georgia won’t negotiate with the Russians, nor the Abkhaz, nor the Ossetians. What, he asked rhetorically, would they talk about?
For him, and for the presidency, things have in one respect changed for the better since the short war, though the Russians were the victors.“It’s clear now. No more illusions,” he said. “Russia was the aggressor; it upheld puppet regimes in the two regions – and in South Ossetia, it was the government, with so-called ‘ministers’ who had never been there before, secret service officers from Tomsk or Perm.”
In September, after I had left Tbilisi, the European Union published its report – highly critical of Georgia – on the war with Russia. Yakobashvili took the press conference, saying that the report had noted years of Russian provocations before the war, and that “from the very first page it says that the war did not start on August 7 or 8 last year, that it was a culmination of previously staged attacks and provocations”.
Yakobashvili told me that when he was running a think-tank, he invited people from the Russian institutes to take part in discussions. “And I would ask them: what should we learn from Russia? What is your example? And the one thing they would come up with was: we can train your army. I said to them – do you like your army? They could not say they did. So I said – why do you want ours to become like yours? Russia has no soft power, no model for others to follow. It can do hard power, and fear, but that is all.
“I have to say that the Russians did us a favour by cutting us off from gas and electricity. We had shortages when we were dependent. Now, it’s not an issue. Do you see shortages?” Indeed, Tbilisi blazes through the night, sending a kind of message to the bear up north. The government and public buildings are illuminated, Rustaveli is splendidly lit, the TV tower glitters and flashes over all. The combined brilliance seems to say to the Russians: look – you cut off the oil, gas and electricity we used to get from you, and see how we prosper!
It’s a theme taken up by Kakha Bendukidze. He’s something of a legend in the making: a Tbilisi- and Moscow-educated biochemist who, in his late twenties, was put in charge of a molecular genetics lab in the Russian Academy of Sciences. When Gorbachev opened up the economy to a little of the market in the late 1980s, Bendukidze dived through the escape hatch, establishing a biochemical company, then buying stock in the biggest Soviet engineering company, Uralmash, then merging it with other concerns to create the biggest engineering corporation in Russia.
He found time to make friends with democratically minded Russians seeking to establish the institutions of civil society in the post-Soviet state. Some were friends of mine, and I met him in the early 1990s in their flat, where he would join the crowded evenings of discussion, and contribute an acerbic, acute commentary on the fragile Yeltsin regime. Bendukidze had been to Britain to kick-start his study of English, and he told me about an epiphany, when he finally understood the depth of British civil society. At a busy train station, he had seen groups of badly dressed men hanging about the platforms with notebooks, sometimes writing excitedly. He thought at first they were secret service men: later, he learnt they were train spotters. A country, he said, in which people log train numbers as a hobby and are not assumed to be spying on fellow citizens is a stable democracy.
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Bendukidze invited me to a long lunch in one of Tbilisi’s many good restaurants, grumbling all the while that, since his cook-genius of a wife was away, he could only give me this sub-standard fare. He had left active management of his engineering corporation in 2004 and, on a trip to Tbilisi, was recruited by the newly elected president to be his economics minister, later his chief of staff, now a consultant and eminence grise. He is a vast, bulky man, with a grin and a sly wit; like Yakobashvili, he believes the Russian embargoes have helped the economy. Russia’s ban on Georgia’s famed wine is forcing the industry to find western markets and upgrade its technology. To be sure, the war had caused a dip: but before, the economy had grown at about 8 per cent a year, and would again. The picture windows of the top-floor restaurant looked out across the old town to the Narikala fortress on the cliffs; the afternoon was stormy, with black clouds swooping low on the fortress and the aluminium Mother Georgia, or Kartlis Deda, a sword in her right hand held horizontally across her stomach, her left aloft, holding a bowl of wine – the first to repel enemies, the second to welcome friends.
As we ate, we were joined by Nina Kancheli, a main aide to Saakashvili, who was dining with members of her family. Her father, the composer Giya Kancheli, was there. Along with Arvo Part and Alfred Schnittke, he was part of an internationally recognised group of postwar Soviet composers, and has lived in the west since 1991; he came to the table, embraced Bendukidze a little awkwardly, and withdrew. There was a slight embarrassment: Kancheli, who like most of the Georgian intelligentsia had supported the young president, was now – quietly – opposed. The people with whom he worked, especially in the theatre (he was musical director of the Rustaveli Theatre for years), now largely hate the president; in turn, Saakashvili’s people, such as Bendukidze, regard them as ageing, Soviet-era leftovers, used to privilege, refusing to move on.
At 41, the president’s best cards are his relative youth, his firm pro-western stance and his even more adamantine opposition to Russia. The older generation grumbles that refusal to speak either to the Russians or the Abkhaz is not a policy, that he scorns their once-formidable cultural strength and that his creeping authoritarianism should give the west pause in their support – or at least grounds for more robust, even public, criticism. They are not alone. Both of the leading British activist/experts – Tom de Waal, Caucasus editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and Jonathan Cohen, Caucasus project manager at Conciliation Resources, an independent charity working to build lasting peace in wartorn societies – are critical of Saakashvili. Cohen, an old friend whom I met on my trip to Tbilisi and who travelled on to Abkhazia to talk to the authorities there, told me: “There are things to talk about with the Abkhaz. They don’t want to be trapped into a relationship only with Russia. They want a European option; Saakashvili is damaging the possibility of a dialogue.”
While the loudest critics I met came from the older cultural intelligentsia, this is not wholly a generational divide. The most powerful figure in the opposition, Irakli Alasania, former Georgian ambassador to the UN and at 35 even younger than Saakashvili, favours a renewed dialogue with the Abkhaz and is actively seeking western support: last month, he addressed a crowded meeting in the House of Commons.
Few Georgians need convincing that Russia can employ hard power against their country – and will, with impunity. The argument is over to what extent contemptuous defiance is the best response – or whether, as in the Soviet period, the bear can be placated with charm and a glass of good wine.
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I learnt much of the background to this deep division because I had a friend in Tbilisi in one of its leading dramatic figures: Keti Dolidze, artistic director of the Tumanashvili Theatre and organiser of the annual Gift theatre festival. Her welcome, though warm, was distracted: a few days earlier, she had been fired and told that there would be no more official support for Gift. A big, handsome woman in late middle age, she was spitting mad, and could talk of little else: the Saakashvili people were narrow, authoritarian and uncultured, oblivious to the country’s heritage. The culture minister, Nikoloz Rurua – appointed last December, from a background in security – was an ignoramus put there to bear down on free thought.
Dolidze’s many international contacts have rallied: the British director Hilary Wood wrote to Saakashvili in September, using more diplomatic tones than her and her Georgian supporters but posing the same charge: that the sacking was political: “I am very afraid that the dismissal of Keti Dolidze may be seen in the west as an act of political censorship. Surely in democratic Georgia this cannot be so?”
One night, Dolidze took me to meet Tbilisi’s most prominent dissident, Giorgi Gachechiladze in his “cell” – a cell, that is, which is actually a tiny TV studio in the down-at-heel offices of Maestro TV, an opposition station that broadcasts Gachechiladze’s rambling talk-show to Tbilisi through the small hours. A poet and rapper, he has not left his self-imposed jail since January, his cell representing the imprisonment of free thought by the Saakashvili regime. He is sallow, complains of feeling unwell, and smokes continually; but his venom against the president is fresh. He believes that his brother, the wine merchant Levan Gachechiladze, who challenged Saakashvili in last year’s presidential elections, should have won. Instead, he said, corrupt officials cheated him of victory (the election commission said Saakashvili won just under 53 per cent, Gachechiladze 27 per cent, a result broadly supported by independent exit polls). Gachechiladze sees the present regime as fascist, at least potentially. A glove puppet of Kakha Bendukidze hung on his bunk.
The day before I left Tbilisi, I returned to the Rustaveli theatre. The doyenne of the Georgian stage and screen, Medea Chakhava, had died after nearly 70 years of performing, and her body, encased in a white casket, was laid out on the theatre’s stage. It seemed as if all Tbilisi trooped in to pay their respects. As I stood at one of the boxes, the president, preceded by bodyguards, appeared in a side door, joined the queue and paraded around the stage, shaking the hands of relatives who seemed to accept his presence with neither excitement nor rancour. He had done his duty (minimally), but he had been seen. It seemed as though it was the most New Georgia would do for the Old.
John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor
