The outrage and hope of Georgia’s uprising

Georgia’s government recently decided to spend money on fresh black “Robocop” uniforms for their riot police, with shiny new helmets to match. After parliamentary elections in October, they might have been forgiven for thinking the kit would go back on the precinct shelves with barely a scuff — a little shopsoiled at worst. 

Protests immediately after the vote were predicted, but turned out to be sporadic and rudderless. The lackluster opposition figures were hopelessly divided, little known and incapable of inspiring a following. And while there were credible allegations of vote-rigging, enough voters were fearful of losing their meagre state incomes — or fearful of rattling observers in the Kremlin, for whom the country is still “their” backyard — that victory for the ruling “Georgian Dream” Party could be presented as a fait accompli. 

Given sufficient time, it would come to be accepted. Some legal wrangling, and hand wringing from western governments — all that could be weathered, as the temperatures dropped and the year came to a close.

But a week in Georgian politics often lasts a lot longer than the accepted unit of sudden change in more stable countries. When Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze decided last Thursday was a good moment to declare, with his habitual, sullen swagger, that integration talks with Europe had been suspended for four years, the meaning of hubris was revealed to him in all its formidable, ancient depth: within hours, the streets had erupted. Not only in the capital Tbilisi, but in normally somnolent provincial towns the length of the country. 

Kobakhidze has achieved what enfeebled opposition parties have failed to do for years: he has united most of the people against him, the ruling elite, and everything they stand for.

Much as he may now like to claim in press conferences that the demonstrations — which grow in size each night, despite ever more brutal police tactics — are the work of nefarious forces, or a misunderstanding of what he said last week; and much as his opponents might wish to claim a sliver of the sudden glory; events on the streets of Georgia appear a lot like that rare thing: a true popular uprising. 

It is fueled by sheer outrage. Georgians had long ago “priced in” the tawdriness of the new political class that came to power a dozen years ago with promises of stability and investment when the previous pro-Western administration went off the rails. The figurehead of the Georgian Dream Party, Bidzina Ivanishvili, by far the country’s richest man, is political paymaster (and puppet master) general. 

Ivanishvili, worth around $7 billion at last count, acquired his fortune buying up state-owned assets following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He then came back home to build a vast residence overlooking Tbilisi, installed an aquarium for his pet sharks, and regularly uproots rare trees for a private dendrarium. He is also said to be fond of zebras. One of his sons is an albino self-styled rapper who owns a lavish house in Brazil. 

The mayor of Tbilisi, Kakha Kaladze, a middle-aged ex-footballer, who played with AC Milan back in the day, is now said to go back to Italy for hair styling, and the re-supply of designer togs. 

And it surprised no one when a Georgian Dream prime minister was revealed to have taken a private jet to fly alongside his son to the USA for the boy’s first day at a Pennsylvania business school — taking off from a country where the average monthly wage after-tax remains less than £500. 

All of this, dismal as it was, simply went with the territory. But there was one thing that united Georgians more than scorn for the dictator-lite lifestyle of their leaders: polling had reliably demonstrated that enthusiasm for EU membership, and even eventually for NATO accession, was consistently sky high, even if the populace was deeply divided on other matters. 

Perhaps Ivanishvili and his government felt emboldened. After all, although the legislation read as if had been hastily run off a photocopier in the Kremlin stationery office, Georgian Dream had just forced through laws hampering foreign funding for civil society groups and banning LGBT “propaganda.” Slavish, if sotto voce, obeisance to Putin’s needs, unspoken at least in public, is something the party has long stood accused of, yet appeared to be getting away with. 

Until last week, that is, when Georgian Dream called time on the European dream, and lost control of the country — quite literally overnight.

Prime Minister Kobakhidze may now be wondering why he had been in such an apparently needless hurry. If the demonstrators get their way, he may have plenty of time to think it over — perhaps aboard a flight overseas, or possibly in secure accommodation nearer home. As for those gathering again this evening, they are in no doubt about the urgency of the matter, and why it has to be resolved on the streets. 

“We all know perfectly well every night that they going to drive us back, but we go out anyway,” says Giorgi, an IT engineer in his early thirties, packing a mask and getting ready to return to the parliament building where the protests begin. 

Until last week, Giorgi thought the occasional sparsely-attended demonstrations were a waste of time. Like many young people, he didn’t bother showing up — he had given up hope, and was wondering instead how to get what savings he has into a foreign bank account, just in case. 

“But people are seriously angry now. We knew before the elections they wanted to drag us back to Russia, but now they aren’t even bothering to hide it. They’ve given us no other way to make ourselves heard.”

Giorgi says what happens each night is not organized: there are no leaders, no rousing speeches — no tribune to speak from, even. The marchers choose their route on the hoof — and decide when to flee for safety — as the night takes its course, and the police switch up their tactics before the sun rises. 

Some restaurants are providing ad hoc servings of hot food, and some public spaces have opened their doors to offer shelter. A Facebook group coordinates householders with spare rooms for stranded demonstrators — a kind of Airbnb service for the uprising, free of charge, of course. 

An app was launched that shows where the police are, and where to find an ambulance, in real time. It is rudimentary, and looks a bit like Minecraft for revolutionaries, but it works.

“Each night, it’s like I am sending my husband off to war,” says Eli, Giorgi’s wife. “By day, he works from home. In the evening, he leaves for the demos — it’s also as though he is going to work now.”

“When I am at home, I feel disheartened, and exhausted by it all,” Giorgi says, putting his boots on. “But as soon as I get to the demo, I get my strength back, and feel optimistic again.”

The government may have water cannon, tear gas and savage men in masks, willing to beat unarmed demonstrators when they’re already face down on the wet, winter asphalt of Rustaveli Avenue. But the crowds have weapons of their own that the soakings and beatings appear powerless to counter: contempt for their would-be rulers, and black humor, cut with absolute derision.

One night, a young girl draped in the white and red flag of St. George flipped her finger to whoever was manning the water cannon — and then proceeded to slowly wash her hair in the jet as it streamed over the crowd. 

“Will you bathe me?” reads a sign around the neck of a young man who has come in a dressing gown with a towel round his shoulders. Someone else has rigged up firecrackers into a makeshift Gatling gun, peppering the police lines and lighting up the night sky over the parliament building.

In provincial towns, usually quiet, jokes are doing the rounds about the water cannon — in down-at-heel Rustavi, where intermittent running water is a permanent fact of life, social media wags are begging the riot police to be generous with the supply if deployed in their town. While in Batumi on the Black Sea, which witnesses downpours that sometimes last for days, they remind the authorities that water is the last thing they’re scared of.

Back in Tbilisi, a priest remonstrates with impassive men lined shoulder to shoulder in masks and visored helmets. And an older woman with long silver hair bears a funeral bouquet; the card attached says, “The Russian Dream met a shameful defeat at the hands of the people, and has passed away.”

For it is not only youngsters, hungry for a vision of the future that doesn’t ask them to look over their shoulder at the big Russian neighbor to the north — and all it stands for in terms of venality, brutality and cynical disdain for individual aspiration. The Soviet generation, many of whom are still nostalgic for “the good old days,” has lost patience with the government, too.

Eli’s parents — Giorgi’s in-laws — were until recently devoted supporters of the Georgian Dream party. Both are refugees from a civil war in the early 90s that split the country — and both are terrified of conflict. For a while, the threat of upsetting Putin, and of bloodshed as in Ukraine, convinced them to hold their nose and double down on their support for the government. In last month’s elections, they finally voted against it.

“Power in this country should not rest in the hands of one man,” says David, who works at a market in a suburb of the capital. “The courts, judges and police should not follow the orders of just one man. The ‘Georgian Dream’ has brought the country to the brink of chaos.”

His wife Emma agrees. “You can’t have matters of state being decided by whatever Ivanishvili says he wants — or dreams of,” she says, referring to the billionaire on the hill. “But of course I am scared of war. Peace, for me, is the most important thing of all.”

Men and women have been repeatedly kicked, punched and hosed down. More will be in the firing line again tonight. One man is in a coma after being struck by a tear gas canister fired at close range to his forehead; complex surgery has reportedly been paused. The government praises the police for keeping order, noting precisely how many officers have been injured, while glossing over the number of arrests and beatings dished out to members of the public. 

A report by the Association of Young Lawyers of Georgia, published yesterday, details the violence demonstrators have reported not just on the streets, but after arrest, inside police trucks: by up to six policemen, taking it in turns to beat them round the kidneys, and threatening rape by truncheon if they put up a fight. Several of those treated this way said a senior officer was at hand to tell the men to make sure they didn’t kill anyone by mistake.

For now, there have been no deaths, and it is not clear what will happen if somebody were to be killed. In a small country with a long history of invasion, and struggling to survive in a tough geopolitical neighborhood, the well-being of young people is valued extraordinarily highly.

But what is plainly alive and flourishing is a sense not simply of outrage, but of hope — a commodity that mere days ago seemed in very short supply. The Kremlin spokesman has predictably ascribed what’s happening to machinations by enemies abroad. He would say that. He may even believe it: Putin’s people can perhaps no longer bring themselves to think that someone would choose to revolt against his self-appointed overlords unless provoked into it by the perfidious “collective West.” It would suit Kremlin apologists closer to home to share this miserable opinion of their fellow man — especially if he is far away, in a little-known country.

As I write, Giorgi is still out on the streets. It is nearly four in the morning. Anything could happen. “When I see how people keep going back, every night, despite the beatings and water cannon, that’s when I believe that we are different. We won’t go down the Russian route, the Belarusian route,” says Eli. “It is at times like this that I realize it is always worth fighting to the end. Just like those who are being beaten and charged down now, and are still protesting.”