Why Am I in Georgia?

I am in Georgia — the country, not the state. Most Americans don’t know there is a country called Georgia. When I had to call customer service to figure out why my phone wasn’t making calls in Georgia despite the international plan I bought before I left, neither the robots nor the live Americans I finally got in customer service knew that there is a country as well as a state called Georgia. One of the customer service people told me that I was confused. He was only convinced that it was him that was confused after I got him to google Tbilisi, Georgia.

I am in Georgia in solidarity with Georgian Greens and socialists, and indeed the 80% of Georgians, who prefer the democratic freedoms in Europe to their west over to the repressive Russian autocracy to their north. I will be interviewing these pro-democracy activists in order to share their perspectives with Greens and socialists back in the U.S.

Georgians vote on Saturday, October 26 in parliamentary elections where the basic choice is between the pro-Russia Georgia Dream and the pro-Western opposition.

Georgia is like the U.S., and nearby Moldova, in that they have elections where the stark choice is between liberal democracy and autocracy led by criminal billionaires.

Georgia is also like Ukraine and Moldova in that Russia militarily occupies significant portions of their internationally recognized territories. Russia occupies 20% of Ukraine and Georgia and 12% of Moldova.

The criminal billionaire leading the pro-Putin forces in Georgia is Bidzina Ivanishvili. This oligarch made his $7 billion fortune in computers, metals, and banking in the violent conflicts to get control of economic assets during the rapid privatization of the Russian economy in the 1990s. Ivanishvili is the oligarch behind the rise of the ruling Georgia Dream party, which displaced the increasingly authoritarian and repressive United National Movement under Mikheil Saakashvili in 2012.

Ivanishvili and Georgia Dream were nominally pro-European, socially liberal, and democratic when they first came to power. The Georgia Green Party had one member of parliament elected as part of the Georgia Dream slate in the country’s proportional representation system between 2012 and 2020. But the Georgia Greens withdrew in 2020 from the Georgia Dream slate as that party turned toward the kind of authoritarian, repressive, and socially conservative program that characterizes Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party to the north.

The last year has seen massive protests in the capital Tbilisi against a foreign agents registration law modeled after its Russian counterpart that Putin’s minions have used to repress all political and anti-war opposition. Last year, the protests got the parliament to back off. But this spring the parliament finally passed the law in May in the face of massive protests and a presidential veto the parliament had to overrule. Many Georgians are worried that the harsh police response to protests is just a foreshadowing of more state violence to keep the Georgian Dream in power.

Oligarch Ivanishvili promised for a second time at a campaign rally a few days ago to ban all pro-European political parties if Georgian Dream party wins. He also says the pro-European parties are trying to start a war with Russia, seemingly laying down the premise for holding on to power by force if Georgian Dream loses the election.

President Zourabichvili, an independent who was elected with Georgia Dream endorsement in 2018, has urged a vote for anyone but Georgia Dream in hopes that all the opposition parties can pull together a post-election governing coalition without Georgia Dream. The problem is that the biggest opposition party is the United National Movement who the voters threw out in 2012 for the same anti-authoritarian reasons that many now want to throw out the Georgia Dream. Progressives in Georgia are frustrated like Greens in the U.S. that the major party coalitions offer such miserable options.

Oligarch Ivanishvili has tried to mobilize the vote around culture war issues — promoting traditional family values including anti-LGBT laws — as well as the whipping up fear of Russian military intervention if Georgians elect a pro-European coalition to power.

President Zourabichvili has tried to make the central election issue a choice between pro-EU democracy against pro-Russian autocracy. She has urged the opposition parties, which are a range of socially liberal to conservative parties, to campaign on the democracy question and save the cultural issues to post-election debate in a democracy.

The Georgia Green Party decided after negotiating with opposition parties for placement on a coalition slate to abstain from this election. They said they could not get any media coverage running independently as the Green Party because all the commercial media only cover the paying oligarch-backed parties. The Greens have turned to preparing for local elections next year

Credible pre-election polls show a close race. Many fear election rigging by the ruling Georgia Dream party. Others fear Russian military intervention if the Georgia Dream loses. Some are going to hold their nose to vote for Georgia Dream in hopes of avoiding more Russian military intervention.

The crooked oligarch trying to buy elections in Moldava is Ilan Shor. Shore outright stole his billion. He defrauded three Moldovan banks out of about $1 billion in 2014, which was about 12% of Moldova’s GDP. Shor was convicted in absentia. Now Shor is pouring millions into Moldova’s elections this fall from his current home in Russia to encourage votes against the country’s pro-EU President Maia Sandu and a referendum to put the goal of EU membership in the country’s constitution. In the first round of elections on October 20, the pro-EU referendum passed with a razor thin 50.5% and Sandu came in first in the first round of the presidential election with 42% of the vote. Her pro-Russian opponent in the November 3 runoff election is Alexandr Stoianoglo who received 26%. Oligarch Shor is backing Stoianoglo.

Some of Shor’s money is apparently being promised to buy votes. BBC reported on a voter who expected to be paid for her vote but wasn’t.

When we asked directly whether she had been offered cash to vote, she admitted it without qualms. She was angry that a man who had sent her to the polling station was no longer answering her calls. “He tricked me!” she said.

The criminal oligarch in the US elections is, of course, Donald Trump, whose all-time favorite lawyer was Roy Cohn, who was also the attorney for the witch-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy and several of New York’s mafia dons.

All three of these elections reflect a disturbing trend of growing collaboration between billionaire oligarchs, organized crime, and autocratic states. We will know whether they are gaining power in the next month when we see the results of elections over next month in Georgia, Moldova, and the United States.

Georgia had the world’s first elected socialist government in 1918

Georgia, the country, is at intersection of Eastern Europe and West Asia in the mountainous southern Caucasus region. It lies across the Black Sea from Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria to Georgia’s west. Georgia is bordered by the Black Sea to its west, by Russia to the north, by Turkey to the southeast, by Armenia to the south, and by Azerbaijan to the southeast. An independent kingdom in the Middle Ages, Georgia has successively colonized by the Mongol, Ottoman, Persian, and finally Russian empires.

Georgia declared independence in 1918 after the 1917 Russian revolution. It elected the world’s first socialist government with an 81.5% majority for parliament. The Georgian branch of Russia’s Social Democratic Labor Party was affiliated with the Menshevik faction as opposed to the Bolshevik faction. Ruling until 1921, the Georgian Social Democratic Party gave peasants their own land for the first time, enfranchised women, abolished the death penalty, began universal public education, and began to gradually and progressively socialize Georgia’s small industrial sector by purchasing assets instead of expropriating them without compensation. This socialist experiment ended when the Russian Red Army, particularly at the urging of Georgia native Joseph Stalin, recolonized Georgia in 1921 and smashed Georgian Social Democratic Party. The 1918 socialist government of Georgia remains an inspiration to contemporary leftist youth in Georgia.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Georgia declared its independence again in 1991. Russia intervened militarily in inter-ethnic conflicts in 1992-93, leading to the Russian military occupation and administration of the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia. Another round of Russian military intervention broke out in 2008 after George W. Bush accounted that the U.S. wanted Georgia to join NATO. Russia recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, although the international community does not. Nearly 200,000 ethnic Georgians with expelled from South Ossetia.

Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1985 to 1991, was named as the head of Georgia’s new government in March 1992 and ruled until 2003 when he was deposed by the Rose Revolution, a popular uprising against election fraud that re-elected Shevardnadze. The Rose Revolution was one of the so-called color revolutions in the post-Soviet space for liberal democracy that counter-revolutionary Russia claims were orchestrated by Western covert action, as if the masses of people in these countries did not have their own reasons to revolt. Besides Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), the co-called color revolutions include Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004), Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution (2005) and Armenia’s Velvet Revolution (2018).

One of the leaders of the Rose Revolution, Zurab Zhvania, had been an early leader of Georgia’s Green Party during the fight for independence in the late 1980s and then in the first three years of the new parliament representing the Green Party. Zhvania would switch to Shevardnadze’s party in 1995 and become chair of the Parliament until 2001, when he broke with Shevardnadze over corruption. Zhvania formed a new party with Mikheil Saakashvili. Zhania would become prime ministry and Saakashvili would became Georgia’s prime minister from 2003 to 2005. But Zhvania died in 2005 under suspicious circumstances that his family and many observers believe was an assassination.

I will report next on my meeting with the leadership of the Greens Party of Georgia, the oldest party in Georgia and one of the counters of the European Federation of Green Parties. It had 11 members of the parliament in the 1990s in the early years of independence before oligarch’s bought the political system. Left and progressive politics is now largely absent from electoral politics. The left that exists is influential in street politics and cultural, literary, and academic spheres. But it yet to build, or rebuild, a competitive mass party on the left. That, too, is familiar to American leftists.

As a small country of 3.7 million people, Georgia has to navigate its way among the big powers around it, particularly the Russian giant to the north but also the economic hegemony to the west. It has to make its way in a world order that only gives lip service to the national and democratic rights of small nations and largely submits the demands of the big imperialist powers.

The parliamentary elections I am here to observe on Saturday, October 26 seem to be about whether Georgians are going to submit to that neo-colonial world order under the pro-Russian leadership of pro-Russia Georgia Dream or try to resist it by electing a pro-European but flawed coalition of parties.

Howie Hawkins 2020

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