Posted on August 9, 2008 - by Venik

Georgia on a Path to Self-Destruction

I lived in Tbilisi for about a year when I was in sixth grade. Some of my best childhood memories are from that time now more than twenty years ago. My father’s family moved to Tbilisi in 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. My father was three years old then. He spent his childhood and his college years in Tbilisi. The school I went to in 1986 in Tbilisi was the same school my father attended in the 1950s. For a few months I had my dad’s math teacher.

School in Georgia was a breeze. All you had to do to get good grades was show up for classes. Even this wasn’t a strict requirement. Our school principal got us involved in gathering scrap metal for recycling. The class that collected the most scrap metal would get a prize. My dad let me in on a little secret: they were gathering scrap metal back in 1950s and, apparently, there was a reliable source of it very close to the school. Year after year the principal would weigh the collected metal, load it on a truck and dump it in the ravine behind the school. When the old principal retired, his replacement continued this tradition. The guys and I headed to the location pointed out by my dad and, without as much as breaking a sweat, found enough scrap to ensure our first place in the competition

Tbilisi had a very relaxed atmosphere for a large city. One could hail a city bus like a cab. The bus would stop anywhere – even in the middle of a busy intersection – and the driver would give you plenty of time to get aboard. It did not matter if you had no money for the ride: nobody ever asked me to pay or bothered to check my ticket. In times of plenty Georgians are generous and hospitable. When I first came to the US I thought  Americans were a lot like Georgians.

Not that Americans were particularly generous or hospitable, but, like Georgians, they were incredibly loud and annoying. Georgians were loud and annoying in a positive way: they wanted to engage you in a conversation – subject did not matter – and they wanted you to like them. The first Americans I met at the JFK airport were loud and annoying only so that they can lighten your load by getting hold of whatever dollars you had in your pockets.

Since Georgia’s independence in 1991, the country was ruled by a succession of three clowns: the ultra-nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the former Soviet foreign minister and a sell-out to the West Eduard Shevardnadze, and now Mikhail Saakashvili – a US-educated fanboy. Of the three, only Gamsakhurdia was democratically elected. Gamsakhurdia moved harshly against separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and after just one year of his presidency Georgia was consumed by a bloody civil war.

After two years of war, an effort to lead a government-in-exile, and a failed attempt to overthrow Shevardnadze, Gamsakhurdia fled the capital of Tbilisi and hid in a small village in what Pentagon generals would have called a “spider hole”. The village was surrounded by Shevardnadze loyalists and Gamsakhurdia committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Some say he might have had help. It was all downhill from there for Georgia’s democratic experiment. One has to be nuts to expect democracy from the homeland of Josef Stalin.

Georgia’s favorite national pastime is a really fun game: they put a rake on the ground and step on it repeatedly. The goal is to get hit in the head as many times as possible. Well, maybe I am exaggerating just a little. Both Shevardnadze and Saakashvili followed in the footsteps of their predecessor and ran full-speed into the issue of separatist South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Shevardnadze narrowly escaped two assassination attempts and Saakashvili managed to get his 20,000-strong army equipped with Vietnam-era Huey choppers (handed down by the US) into a war against Russia. What exactly he is expecting to get out of this is a question the answer to which so far has eluded the world’s top political analysts.

Georgia is not just poor – it’s piss-poor. Ever since Stalin, Georgia had a privileged status within the Soviet Union. Georgia’s mountains and the Black Sea coast were favorite destinations for the Russian tourist and a bottle of Georgian wine was a necessary attribute of any holiday table. Georgia lacked any substantial heavy industry or mining operations and survived primarily on the tourist trade and regular financial injections from Moscow. Jobs were plenty and pay was good. This is the way I remember Tbilisi in 1986.

Owning an automobile was the greatest desire of most Soviet citizens. A new shiny Lada or – for the really lucky ones – a black chromed out Volga was the pinnacle of financial success. Georgia had the highest car-to-resident ratio of any Soviet republic. Our neighbor used to drive his Volga to a bakery  across the street. He would back out of his driveway, cross the street in reverse, and back into the bakery’s driveway. Tbilisi was one of few places in the USSR where one could find a school teacher driving a Volga, which in the 1980s used to cost about 15,000 rubles with an average salary of about 250 rubles per month. Don ‘t ask me how they did it.

The USSR fell apart in a matter of months. The steady stream of federal funding and tourists dried up overnight and Georgia found itself in absolute poverty. Electricity and hot water became luxuries available only on select days of the week and only during certain hours. Russia was no longer willing to provide Georgia with fuel and electricity at bargain basement prices. With easy access to superior products from Italy and France, most Russians lost interest in Georgia’s only major export – its wine, Stalin’s favorite.

If in times of plenty Georgians are generous and hospitable, poverty turns them into a disorganized herd of mountain goats: aggressive and determined but utterly clueless. The post-Soviet transition was difficult on all former republics, but for Georgia it was an absolute shock. What followed was as inevitable as belch after beer: Georgia descended into the depths of a violent civil war. Hordes of destitute nationalists were fighting each other over the scanty leftovers of the glorious Soviet plethora.

Today Saakashvili’s government likes to cite statistics about the country’s impressive economic growth of 12% in 2007. Even if this figure wasn’t a complete fabrication, this growth is more than offset by high inflation, increasing budget and trade deficits, and the country’s almost complete reliance on foreign energy. More than 30% of Georgia’s 4.4 million residents barely survive below the meager poverty line, while their government spends nearly a billion US dollars on defense every year – incredibly generous funding for an army consisting of just two standard-size divisions. So what does Saakashvili do to improve his country’s economy? He starts a war with Georgia’s biggest trade partner and major energy supplier – Russia. I am sure this will do wonders for Georgia’s economy a year or two down the road.

So what will happen in Georgia now that Russian tanks are on its territory and Russian planes are over its capital? Probably nothing particularly good. Russia will not push very far with its invasion. Moscow already accomplished everything it wanted at this stage: got its tanks on the ground to prop up some friendly separatists and shattered Georgia’s plans to join NATO. Courtesy of Mikhail Saakashvili, who handed the Kremlin this easy victory on a silver platter.

Now Russia can calmly negotiate an eventual  withdrawal on its own terms (that is if Moscow plans to withdraw at all), while in the meantime bombing high-value military targets across Georgia with impunity. By the time Russian tanks drive back across the border, the only piece of operational hardware left in Georgia’s arsenal will be Saakashvili’s personal plane on which he will fly back home to the US to join his two sons and continue mooching off his wife Sandra. Yes, it is true: while thousands of Ossetian civilians are being slaughtered by Georgian soldiers, Saakashvili’s wife and two sons are safe and sound living in the US.

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