A Long and Winding Road to Nowhere? Georgia’s Perennial Quest for Security and Belonging
Since November of last year, Georgians have been protesting in the streets of Tbilisi and other major cities. Their numbers have varied from a few thousand to over 100,000, but the protests have been sustained for nine months. The protestors’ demands are simple: rerun the October 2024 parliamentary elections - widely seen as rigged in favor of the Georgian Dream (GD) government - and return Georgia to its path of integration with the European Union (EU). Georgia’s latest crisis continues a centuries old pattern for the ancient South Caucasus nation. As a small country in an unstable but strategically important region, finding sustainable security and a geopolitical “home” was always going to be a challenge for Georgia. The location of the South Caucasus at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East meant that external powers have long vied for influence there, often stoking conflict among regional states. In Georgia’s case, its search for security was further complicated by internal divisions in Georgian society, which often made the country easy pickings for larger neighbors with predatory designs.
Russian Occupation
While Kartvelian peoples, cultures, and languages pre-date the Common Era, as a political entity Georgia has existed since the 11th century CE - the first time the country was united in something approaching its current form. The fledgling kingdom was overrun by the Mongol invasion in the 13th Century, re-emerged in the early 14th Century, and was then swallowed by the Timurid Empire in the early 15th Century, only to re-emerge as a group of small kingdoms and principalities by the end of that century. For the next three centuries Georgia faced pressure from the Ottoman and Persian Empires to its south and was often carved up between them or existed in the form of small, only nominally independent political units.
In the late 18th Century, a potential solution to Georgia’s non-stop battle for its existence emerged when Catherine the Great’s Russia offered Georgian King Erekle II the status of a Russian protectorate. In the 1783 Treaty of Grigorievsk Russia guaranteed Georgia’s security and allowed the Georgian king to continue to rule. Georgia saw the pact as doubly beneficial because it also offered alliance with a Christian country - religious affinity being an important factor in the era before the emergence of the modern nation - and because it offered a connection to Europe, which many Georgians even then saw as their civilizational home. But the safety offered by Russia was illusory. In 1795 Persia invaded the Georgian kingdom and sacked Tbilisi while Russia stood aside. Russia then used Georgia’s weakness and the chaos caused by internal squabbles among its ruling class to formally annex the kingdom in 1801.
Red Army enters Tbilisi, 1917. (Photomuseum of Georgia)
Russia’s collapse in 1917 gave Georgia an opportunity to gain independence, which it declared in 1918 as the Georgian Democratic Republic. The new republic’s independence was hard-won and proved even harder to keep - in 1921 the Red Army invaded the country and annexed it into the Soviet Union. The modern Georgian narrative about the country’s Soviet experience emphasizes the forceful nature of its incorporation into the USSR and claims that Georgians resisted Soviet power for 70 years. It also portrays the Soviet ethno-federal system, which gave non-Georgian ethnic groups like Abkhazians and Ossetians autonomy with the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, as a time bomb planted within Soviet Georgia, which would explode if it ever sought to leave the Soviet Union. This narrative is only partially true. While Georgia was indeed invaded by the Red Army and annexed by the Bolsheviks, some of the most committed and effective Bolsheviks were Georgians. Figures like Iosef Stalin, Lavrenti Beira, and Sergo Orzhonikidze were key figures in Georgia’s annexation and the decades of brutality that followed it. As in Russia’s first annexation of Georgia in 1801, internal power struggles among Georgian elites enabled the same outcome in 1921.
Independence from the USSR
Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union on April 9, 1991, the second anniversary of a brutal Soviet crackdown on demonstrations in Tbilisi that killed 21 demonstrators and injured hundreds more. Georgia's declaration made it one of only four Soviet republics (the other three were the Baltics) to declare independence before the August 1991 coup attempt against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Georgia’s first democratically elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was a radical nationalist who alarmed Georgia’s ethnic minorities by labeling them “ungrateful guests” in the country and advancing the slogan “Georgia for Georgians.”[1] Gamsakhurdia’s rhetoric contributed directly to the outbreak of conflict in South Ossetia, one of the Georgian regions that enjoyed autonomy under the Soviet Union.
Another formerly autonomous region, Abkhazia, erupted into open secessionist war in 1992. While Gamsakhurdia’s rhetoric cannot be directly blamed for that war - he had been overthrown in a December 1991 coup - it was once again an internal Georgian power struggle that was at least partly to blame. After being overthrown, Gamsakhurdia and a group of his supporters fled to Abkhazia, launching raids into western Georgia from there, and even kidnapping Georgian government officials. New Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze launched a military operation into Abkhazia on August 14, 1992, ostensibly to free the captive Georgian officials and destroy Gamsakhurdia’s militia. When Abkhazian separatists fought back, the Georgian military drove to the Abkhazian capital Sokhumi, capturing it and declaring that Abkhazia had been fully reintegrated into the Georgian state.
Abkhazia's self-declared government appealed to Moscow for help, and Russia responded by allowing thousands of fighters from the Russian North Caucasus to enter Abkhazia, led by the notorious Shamil Basayev. Russia also provided more direct military assistance by transferring heavy weapons to the Abkhazian side, turning a blind eye to its violations of ceasefire agreements, and bombing Georgian-occupied Sokhumi and other towns populated by ethnic Georgians. Russian denials that its air force was bombing Georgian forces always rang hollow but became absurd after Georgian forces shot down a Russian Su-27 fighter bombing them in March 1993.[2] Russian intervention sealed Georgia’s fate in Abkhazia: Sokhumi fell to separatist forces in September 1993, setting off a wave of ethnic cleansing that forced some 250,000 Georgians to flee.
For the rest of the 1990s Georgia was a failing state. Shevardnadze ruled a country with a collapsing economy, social dislocation, and simmering ethnic conflict. A Soviet politician to his core, Shevardnadze regularly fixed elections to keep himself in power. But he also turned Georgia toward the West, enrolling the country in NATO’s Partnership for Peace Program - an initial step toward membership - encouraging young Georgians to take advantage of scholarship programs that sent them to be educated in the West and allowing Western civil society organizations to operate freely in the country.
Rose Revolution
This combination of an authoritarian political system and an increasingly robust civil society proved to be Shevardnadze’s undoing. When Shevardnadze presided over yet another fixed election in 2003, thousands of Georgians, with a cadre of young, Western-educated activists centered around Mikhail Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania, and Nino Burjanadze in the vanguard, surrounded the parliament building and demanded new elections. Some of the protestors carried roses to signify their peaceful intent, and the police surrounding parliament parted to let them pass. When the protestors entered parliament, Shevardnadze fled, and his government collapsed. New elections in January 2004 installed Saakashvili as president and gave his United National Movement (UNM) a strong parliamentary majority.
What followed was a burst of reform and energy unprecedented in Georgia’s modern history. The new Georgian government embarked on radical economic reform and a furious effort to root out the corruption - both petty and grand - that had plagued Georgia for generations. Saakashvili also doubled down on Shevardnadze’s tentative steps toward Western integration, declaring that joining NATO and the EU were his country’s foreign policy priorities. This got the attention of the West, with Western leaders often holding Georgia up as an example of a small country with little history of political or physical security making brave choices that promised a brighter future for its people. US President George W. Bush visited Georgia in May 2005, calling the country a “beacon of liberty”.[3]
Unfortunately for Georgia, Russia had also noticed its former satellite’s burst of reform and turn toward the West. Although it initially adopted a wait and see attitude toward the events in Georgia, the Kremlin soon decided it needed to stop Tbilisi’s efforts to leave Russia’s orbit and integrate with the West. Personal enmity between Saakashvili and Putin - including Saakashvili calling the much shorter Russian leader a Lilli-Putin - further stoked tensions.[4] In early 2008 Russia began a series of escalations in Abkhazia, where a fragile peace had prevailed since the end of the 1992-1994 war. Russian rhetoric became increasingly bellicose, and Kremlin increased its military contingent in Abkhazia - ostensibly there as peacekeepers but, in reality, there to augment the Abkhazian military capability - by some 500 soldiers. In violation of the 1994 ceasefire agreement with Georgia, Moscow began conducting diplomatic relations directly with the separatist regimes in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
August 2008 War
The Georgian government became increasingly alarmed by these moves, which it likened to “creeping annexation” of Georgian territory[5]. Tbilisi hoped the April 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest would throw it a lifeline in the form of a membership invitation. The thinking in the Georgian government - and some Western governments - was that a formal membership offer would serve as a deterrent to further Russian escalation. At the summit, the issue of Georgia’s (and Ukraine’s) membership became the cause of a showdown between a US-led camp pushing for Georgia and Ukraine to get a formal membership offer and a German-led camp resisting the idea. In the end NATO split the difference. While it stopped short of a formal membership offer with a timeline, the summit communique declared that “these countries will become members of NATO” one day[6].
In retrospect, this was the worst of both worlds for Georgia. It alerted Russia that NATO was serious about admitting Georgia to the alliance but also made clear that, at the moment, the country enjoyed no special status with NATO, and certainly nothing approaching the security guarantee Tbilisi coveted. Within a few months of the summit, Russian attention shifted to Georgia’s other breakaway region of South Ossetia. If the Russian escalation in Abkhazia made Tbilisi nervous, the escalation in South Ossetia sent it into a panic. South Ossetia was not only far closer to the Georgian capital than Abkhazia was, but escalation there was far harder to control. In Abkhazia there were no Georgian troops and few Georgian civilians, both having been driven out in the aftermath of the 1992-1994 war. South Ossetia still had a battalion of Georgian military forces stationed there as part of a tripartite peacekeeping force along with Russians and Ossetians. It also had numerous villages where ethnic Georgians still predominated.
Georgian peacekeepers and civilians became targets in the Russian-led escalation in South Ossetia starting on August 1st.[7] On the same day, a roadside bomb injured five Georgian policemen there.[8] On August 7th Saakashvili sent his envoy Temuri Iakobashvili to South Ossetia to meet with Ossetian and Russian officials to defuse tension, but both spurned him by boycotting the meeting. Saakashvili then declared a unilateral ceasefire that evening but attacks continued, killing a Georgian peacekeeper, who became the war’s first casualty. Just before midnight, after learning that Russian forces had entered South Ossetia, Saakashvili made the fateful decision to launch a military operation.[9] Moscow was ready and defeated the Georgian military in a five-day war that saw Russian forces attack out of both Abkhazia and South Ossetia into other parts of Georgia, eventually halting some 50 kilometers from Tbilisi.
The 2008 war was a watershed event in Georgia’s political development and its quest for security, although its effects took years to manifest. In the immediate aftermath of the war support for Saakashvili and his government remained strong, both inside Georgia and among its Western partners. In the years after the war, however, Saakashvili became increasingly intolerant of opposition to his rule and the pace of reform slowed. But the political opposition to his rule was composed of small, squabbling parties that were more the personal projects of powerful people than national political movements with identifiable philosophies and goals. This all changed, and fast, with the emergence of the Georgian Dream (GD) party in 2012.
Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream
Financed by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in the chaotic, cutthroat environment of 1990s Russia, GD had money, organization, and the clear goal of unseating UNM. It did so in the 2012 parliamentary elections. Although Saakashvili remained president until 2013, Ivanishvili became Prime Minister and real political power shifted to him and the parliament dominated by his party. In its early years GD continued on the path of Western integration. It continued to claim it was committed to NATO integration and continued to support Georgia’s role in Afghanistan. Georgia had the largest contingent from a non-NATO state in Afghanistan and Georgian soldiers fought in dangerous areas of the country while some NATO allies remained in safer areas and even then, rarely ventured from their bases. GD also continued Georgia’s integration with the EU, signing an Association Agreement in 2014 that contained a free trade agreement and allowed Georgians visa-free travel to the EU.
Where GD differed starkly from UNM was in its approach to Russia. Ivanishvili’s strong ties to that country led him to pursue a far less confrontational approach that extended beyond simply toning down the rhetoric. While it continued to decry Russia’s military presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the GD government began quietly mending ties with Moscow. Trade between the two burgeoned and Russians began flocking to Georgia’s beaches, mountains, and ancient cities as tourists. This dual policy of Western integration combined with rapprochement with Russia was always going to be hard to maintain, especially in a country where opinion polls have consistently shown 75-85% support for European integration,[10] with similar majorities characterizing Russia as Georgia’s biggest threat.[11]
Although cracks appeared earlier, the entire foundation of the dual policy crumbled in June 2019, when the Georgian government allowed Russian parliamentarian Sergei Gavrilov to chair a parliamentary assembly of Christian Orthodox countries in Tbilisi. The sight of a Russian politician at the speaker’s podium in the Georgian parliament while Russian troops occupied Georgian territory only a few dozen kilometers away caused outrage in Georgian society, which spilled into the streets in protest. The government cracked down hard on the protestors, using rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse them, and what is now known as Gavrilov Night marked an inflection point for Ivanishvili and GD. From this point forward, they saw Georgia’s civil society as a threat to their rule, and Georgia’s Western partners as the ultimate source of that threat due to their support of civil society organizations.
Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine only amplified GD’s perception of threat from Georgia’s own people and the West. Georgians immediately understood that Ukraine’s plight mirrored their own. On the day of the invasion throngs of people marched in Tbilisi and other cities to condemn Russia and express their support for Ukraine. Overnight, Ukrainian flags, stickers, and graffiti appeared in Tbilisi and other cities. The GD government had long been skeptical of Ukraine, and the reason was yet another split in the Georgian political elite. After the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity (commonly known as EuroMaidan) in 2013-14, the new Ukrainian government offered Saakashvili and several other former UNM officials citizenship and government roles. While the intent of this was to leverage their experience in reforming government, for the GD leadership, which had brought charges against Saakashvili, this amounted to a betrayal.
When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 forced Georgia’s government to choose between supporting the will of its people and its Western partners, or de facto siding with Russia, it chose the latter. GD not only refused to join Western economic sanctions against Russia, but appears to be assisting Russia economically. Indeed, in 2023 the US named Georgia as one of five countries actively helping Moscow evade sanctions.[12] The Georgian government also began an information campaign directed at both Ukraine and its Western partners, accusing the West of trying to “drag” Georgia into the war against Russia.[13] Finally, GD began adopting Russian-style laws banning “LGBT propaganda” and forcing organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents”.
These laws serve two purposes: they will damage or destroy civil society organizations and independent media, and they serve as an indicator to the Kremlin that Tbilisi is quietly turning in its direction. Indeed, the Russian government has noticed and praised Tbilisi’s new laws.[14] Although GD claims the new laws - especially the one on “foreign agents” - are about “transparency”, in reality they are virtual copies of similar laws adopted in Russia. Indeed, the “foreign agents” law is so draconian that even the Dog Organization of Georgia (DOG), which runs a no-kill dog shelter outside Tbilisi, falls under the law’s definition of a “foreign agent”.[15] These laws, the rigged October 2024 parliamentary election, and the GD government’s November 2024 announcement that it was suspending its EU integration process[16] brought Georgians to the streets, where they remain eight months later.
At a Crossroads Again
Georgia stands at a crossroads. The current struggle between its robust, Western-style civil society and its authoritarian, Russian-style government is existential - only one will survive in its current form. And as has been the case for a millennium, internal divisions are combining with intervention by external powers to put Georgia under intense pressure. The positions of Moscow and Brussels in this struggle are clear. The US - once firmly on the side of Europe and Georgian civil society - is now the wild card. The Georgian government, which has been trying to position itself to the Trump Administration as a sort of “mini Hungary” to gain Washington’s attention, clearly hopes Trump will throw it a lifeline, or at a minimum turn a blind eye as GD cracks down with even greater violence to end the protests once and for all. If this happens, Georgia may once again enter Russia’s orbit. If it does, it will join the growing list of casualties of America’s turn away from decades of supporting an international order - however imperfect - where laws and norms hold sway, in favor of one where might makes right and smaller states are forced to choose between being vassals or victims of their powerful neighbors.
[1] Robert English, “Georgia: The Ignored History”, New York Review of Books, November 6, 2008, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/06/georgia-the-ignored-history/
[2] Said Aminov, “Georgia’s Air Defense in the War with South Ossetia”, Moscow Defense Brief, #2 (16), 2009, http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/3-2008/item3/article3/
[3] “Bush hails Georgia as 'beacon of liberty'”, The Guardian, May 10, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/may/10/georgia.usa
[4] Mike Eckel, “Saakashvili: Ukraine is 'first geopolitical revolution of the 21st century'”, The Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 2014, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0130/Saakashvili-Ukraine-is-first-geopolitical-revolution-of-the-21st-century
[5] Interview with Georgian Ambassador to the US Vasil Sikharulidze, August 2008.
[6] Bucharest Summit Declaration, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, April 3, 2008, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_8443.htm
[7] Brian Whitmore, “Is the Clock Ticking for Saakashvili?”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, September 12, 2008, https://www.rferl.org/a/Is_The_Clock_Ticking_For_Saakashvili/1199512.html
[8] “Russia’s War with Georgia: 2008 Timeline”, UNHCR, August 4, 2014, https://webarchive.archive.unhcr.org/20230522140336/https://www.refworld.org/docid/53e0e3e04.html
[9] Whitmore, “Is the Clock Ticking for Saakashvili?”
[10] “Poll: Majority of Georgians Support Demands of Ongoing Protests, Blame Ruling Party for Political Crisis”, Civil Georgia, February 10, 2025, https://civil.ge/archives/661383
[11] Kateryna Hodunova, “Most Georgians See Russia as Enemy, Survey Shows”, The Kyiv Independent, July 20, 2024, https://kyivindependent.com/most-georgians-see-russia-as-enemy-survey-shows/
[12] Anna Kholodnova, “Politico: The US has identified five countries that help Russia circumvent sanctions. Further restrictions are under discussion”, Babel.ua, June 8, 2023, https://babel.ua/en/news/94833-politico-the-us-has-identified-five-countries-that-help-russia-circumvent-sanctions-further-restrictions-are-under-discussion
[13] Oleksandra Zimko, “Tbilisi accuses West of dragging Georgia into war - USA reacts”, RBC-Ukraine, May 5, 2024, https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/tbilisi-accuses-west-of-dragging-georgia-1714935579.html
[14] “Russian State Duma Chairman Praises Georgian Dream’s Foreign Agents Bill”, Civil.ge, April 18, 2024, https://civil.ge/archives/600194
[15] Among the "foreign agents" is a shelter for dogs”, Vijesti, May 29, 2024, https://en.vijesti.me/world-a/evropa/709086/among-foreign-agents-and-shelter-for-dogs
[16] Sophiko Megrelidze, “Georgia suspends talks on joining the European Union and accuses the bloc of blackmail”, Associated Press, November 29, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/georgia-cabinet-election-russia-european-union-kobakhidze-1291827f76eac552a2918b4b584fa5a0
