Salome Zourabichvili is very obviously driven by a deep-seated hatred of Russia dating back to her grandparents’ decision to go into exile in 1921, in the teeth of the Red Army occupation of Georgia. It was clear that she has made it her life’s ambition to right the wrong of Georgia’s occupation, by which I inferred she meant to eradicate any hint of hated Russian influence.

Salome has a childish and romanticised historical view of Georgia rooted in her affluent childhood in central Paris and attending the Georgian church. Like a child, she was mendacious and slippery in her response to the question of her Georgian citizenship, describing herself as always having been Georgian through speech and song at home. In fact, she only gained Georgian citizenship on March 20 2004, awarded by then President Saakashvili, while she was still France’s serving Ambassador to Georgia.

The reason for Zourabichvili’s sudden citizenship was to allow her to become Georgia’s Foreign Minister, a role she carried out for a year and a half, for most of that time still employed by the French Diplomatic Service. If that sounds familiar to you, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s first Finance Minister in 2014, Natalia Jaresko, was a former State Department official, as is former President Viktor Yushchenko’s wife, Kateryna. Noone screams ‘democracy’ more, after all, than western officials put in charge of countries that they want to rescue from the tyranny of independence.

By becoming Georgian Foreign Minister while still a serving French diplomat and French citizen, she described a sense of exacting ‘revenge’ on behalf of her parents. So, it was apparent that she has spent her whole life in a private fury about the Russian menace and developed an almost fanatical determination to right what she considers to have been an historical wrong. A political opportunist, she has aligned with and dropped most political parties in Georgia on her way to the top, including Georgia Dream itself.

Like a French Greta Thunberg without the global fanbase, Zourabichvili has turned her fury more recently towards righting the so-called injustice imposed on Georgia by the 26 October election which she describes as having been stolen. She is entirely dismissive of the weak support lent to her cause by the OSCE monitoring mission, which found that the Georgian elections were generally well organised, even if there were discrepancies in a number of areas. Or to the fact that most European Heads of State have soft-pedalled on outright condemnation of the Georgia Dream party since that time.

Her position rests almost exclusively on the notion that the wrong party won, and that that must by definition be anti-democratic. That – in her words – the elections themselves were ‘really a referendum’ about Georgia’s right to choose Europe over Russia. And that the fact Georgia Dream won must axiomatically indicate that the result was fiddled.

An elderly woman, reaching back to her high-society upbringing in Paris with her Nazi sympathising relatives, she describes a young generation of Georgians who have lived and ‘studied abroad’ and are desperate to choose Europe. And yet, statistics from UNESCO show that only around 10000 Georgians study overseas in tertiary education each year, or around one quarter of a percent of the population. Her idea of the modern Georgian citizen is that of an urban rich kid, who may well yearn for a European future for their country after skiing trips to Chamonix.

That chauvinistic and narrow view of an appropriate Georgianness doesn’t represent the median of a Georgian society in which GDP per capita is just $8200. While the elections on 26 October were not perfect, a very clear pattern emerged in which rural Georgians, who make up 40% of the population, voted overwhelmingly in favour of Georgia Dream.

As has been the case since the election night itself on 26 October, Salome Zourabichvili has provided not a single scrap of evidence of Russian interference. Indeed, at the end of the interview, she conceded that Bidzina Ivanishvili himself is not even a direct agent of Russia. Bizarrely, she even described Sergei Lavrov as extremely professional. Her protest is entirely ideological; that any right-minded Georgian must necessarily have wanted to vote against Georgia Dream, and, by implication Russia, although she has never articulated persuasively how the two are linked. And that by choosing Georgia Dream, voters have either been got at or are plain stupid and not worthy of the right to vote.

But her position is also astonishingly self-interested. Narcissistic and drunk on her own propaganda, she just wants to cling to power. Come what may, Salome Zourabichvili is determined to remain President of Georgia, even though her constitutional term expires on Sunday 29 December. At first, during the interview, as if she has a grand plan that she only intends to reveal at the weekend, she refused to be drawn on her future. But by the end of the she announced that ‘I will certainly be President this time next week for the Georgian people’.

So having heaped scorn of the democratic failings of the electoral process in her adopted country, Salome Zourabichivili plans to mount a coup d’etat, at least in publicity terms, by insisting that she remains the rightful ruler of Georgia. What she undoubtedly wants is to create a huge scene in which she suffers a deathless martyrdom involving her being dragged out of town and exiled, bullied and bruised. Georgian authorities, which appear so far to have managed the heavily orchestrated protests in Tblisi with restraint, should continue to do so in ushering her out of power in a firm, yet polite way, so that Georgia’s incoming President, Mikheil Kavelashvili, can assume office.

Yet that doesn’t fit the geopolitical mood. Desperate to finally shut Russia out from its near abroad, there seems to be no line Western politicians and their allies in Georgia are unwilling to cross to achieve their geopolitical aims — including ignoring basic liberal principles and even overturning the will of the people wholesale. Dovetailed with ominously similar moves across the Black Sea in Moldova, meanwhile, and Tbilisi may not be the last capital to suffer.

Even if Georgia’s elections were almost certainly free and fair, the opposition has refused to accept defeat. They’ve accused the government of “stealing” the election as part of a “Russian special operation”. By Monday, thousands of pro-EU demonstrators had rallied outside the Georgian parliament. For its part, the opposition can count on a powerful ally within the Georgian state: the country’s staunchly pro-Western president Salome Zourabichvili.

Born in Paris, she’s spent most of her life working as a French diplomat, including as the country’s ambassador to Georgia. Yet despite only becoming a Georgian citizen in 2004, Zourabichvili was nonetheless confident that victory belonged to the opposition. “I do not accept this election,” she said. “It cannot be accepted, accepting it would be accepting Russia into this country, the acceptance of Georgia’s subordination to Russia.” Even more remarkably, Zourabichvili claimed that whether Russian interference could actually be proved didn’t matter. What was important, she said, was “what the Georgian population knows, feels and sees”.

If the roles were reversed, Western governments would rightly laugh off such claims as unhinged. Instead, they’re echoing her claims: Joe Biden expressed “alarm” at the election, while Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Charles Michel, president of the European Council, have both called for a probe into alleged irregularities.

Senior parliamentarians across the bloc have made similar noises. They’ve claimed that “these elections were neither free nor fair”, arguing that “the European Union cannot recognise the result” and demanding “personal sanctions” against government officials. Displaying a zero-sum mentality, typical of this new Cold War, they added “this election was about Europe or isolation, democracy or authoritarianism, freedom or Russification”, implying that Georgia was headed in the wrong direction. For his part, Boris Johnson has suggested that Georgian democracy was “stolen by Putin’s puppet government in Tbilisi”.

It’s hard to overstate how irresponsible these claims are. Consider, after all, what happened the last time Western governments forced a country geographically, politically and culturally split between Russia and the West to make a binary civilisational choice between the two. That was Ukraine — and look at the blood-stained consequences there. First: a Western-supported coup against a democratically elected government. Then: civil strife in the Donbas and outright war with Russia.

This is precisely the outcome that Irakli Kobakhidze and his Georgian Dream party are trying to avoid. The prime minister rejects the West’s “pro-Russian” labels, arguing instead that he’s just being pragmatic. Given his homeland’s history, size and geography, Kobakhidze says it makes no sense for Georgia to fully move into the Western sphere of influence, let alone sever ties with Russia altogether, or even worse adopt a confrontational attitude towards the latter. Indeed, the government has stressed the importance of having “normal, peaceful relations” with Russia.

“Given Georgia’s history, size and geography, it makes no sense to fully move into the Western sphere of influence.”

Georgia has good reasons to play it safe. Economic data shows that increased tourism and trade with Russia, alongside strengthened ties with China, have played an important role in boosting the economy, which grew by 7.5% last year. Perhaps most crucially, though, his party’s imperative is avoiding war — that is, becoming a second front in Nato’s proxy war against Russia.

Claiming that Kobakhidze is merely a pro-Russian stooge simply reflects the West’s disconnect from reality, or outright bad faith. Though the war in Ukraine has certainly opened a rift between Georgian Dream and Brussels, the party has equally been clear that it’s eager for integration with Europe. This is certainly more than rhetorical: the party enshrined pursuing EU and Nato membership in the Georgian constitution, and submitted an application for EU membership in 2022. All Kobakhidze has requested in return is that Brussels plays “by Georgian rules” as Tbilisi journeys towards the promised land in Belgium.

In short, then, Georgian Dream’s geoeconomic platform can be summed up as follows: focusing on economic growth and preserving internal stability by maintaining friendly political and economic relations with both the West and Russia, and the wider non-Western bloc, while avoiding being drawn into external conflicts. Taken together, then, Kobakhidze’s hard-nosed approach can plausibly be compared to another Western bête noire: Hungary. No wonder Orbán was the first EU leader to travel to Tbilisi and congratulate Georgian Dream on its victory. “Nobody wants their own country to be destroyed and involved in war”, the Hungarian leader said. “Therefore, we understand the Georgian people’s decision to choose in favour of freedom.”

To quote Orbán, many Georgians seem happy not letting their country become a “second Ukraine” — while also pursuing a “multipolar” agenda elsewhere, notably partnering with China to build a strategic port on the Black Sea. Unfortunately, it seems like the West has other plans. Indeed, Washington and its allies seem to be applying the same playbook to Georgia as they did to Ukraine. Just as in the lead-up to the 2014 coup in Kyiv, they’re first denying the legitimacy of the elected government, accusing it of being a Russian pawn. From there, they’re using Western-funded “NGOs” to mobilise the pro-EU minority against the government, while also pushing for sanctions. If the government still doesn’t yield to the pressure, they’ll try to move to the next phase: unrest in parliament and on the streets; a hoped-for police crackdown; and ultimately the toppling of the government and the appearance of a friendly pro-Western alternative.

Certainly, influential Western foreign policy think tanks are already predicting exactly this scenario. In a recent article, the Atlantic Council argued that “Georgia’s 2024 parliamentary election has entered its ‘Maidan’ phase” — and that Western governments must “support the Georgian people in both the immediate period ahead and the longer term”. The Nato establishment’s aims couldn’t be clearer.

Yet in the event, fomenting a Ukraine-style “coup” in Georgia may prove challenging. That’s partly because most Georgians are determined to avoid this outcome, and partly because Kobakhidze has been “coup-proofing” the country for some time. In May, for instance, the government passed the “Transparency of Foreign Influence” law, mandating that any NGO receiving 20% or more of its funding from outside sources must register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power”. The EU and US accused the bill of being a sign of Georgia’s “democratic backsliding” and “Russification” — and even imposed sanctions. Protests followed, some of which were joined by Western politicians, only fuelling the country’s political polarisation.

Yet as the Georgian government rightly points out, variations of its so-called “foreign agent” act already exist across the West. No less striking, there’s plenty of evidence that NGOs do play a nefarious role in the country’s politics: it’s just that they pursue pro-Western agendas. For one thing, there are the raw numbers. Though reliable data is hard to find — itself part of the problem — there are roughly 30,000 NGOs in Georgia. That’s a huge number for a country of less than four million people. Then there’s the question of funding. Most of Georgia’s charities are financed by the US, EU and other “philanthropic” institutions, notably George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

And while these varied organisations officially focus on innocuous topics such as democracy and human rights, it’s no secret that Western governments use them to push their own interests, up to and including regime change. Western-funded NGOs, for example, played a key role in fostering several “colour revolutions” in the early 2000s. That mostly involved non-violent protests, swiftly leading to pro-Western changes of government: especially in post-Soviet states like Ukraine (2004-5), Kyrgyzstan (2005) and even Georgia itself (2003).

It’s telling in this regard that Victoria Nuland, the former US diplomat who played a key role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, has just joined the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED): one of the key players in the NGO-isation of US foreign policy. No wonder Bidzina Ivanishvili, one of the main founders of Georgian Dream, recently described the NGO class as a “pseudo-elite” nurtured by foreigners, and one basically embarrassed by its own country. It’s surely revealing too that Georgian opposition politicians are often interviewed with EU, US and Nato flags in the background.

It’s clear, in short, that the moral panic over Georgia’s “foreign agent” law had little to do with democracy. Rather, as the historian Bryan Gigantino puts it, Western countries fear the rule would strip them of “important leverage” in the country’s domestic and foreign policy. Samantha Power, head of USAID, essentially admitted as much when she said that the law “gravely threatens Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future”.

This is perhaps the most hypocritical aspect of the Western narrative about somewhere like Georgia. Whatever Russia’s “foreign influence” — and it surely exists — the West’s is far greater. More to the point, it’s perfectly natural for a country like Georgia, straddling the border between Europe and Asia, to exploit the ongoing “multipolarisation” of global politics and boost its own autonomy. Given the West’s own tumbling influence, meanwhile, ham-fisted attempts to forcefully disrupt this process will only push Georgians even closer into the arms of Russia and China.

And while Tbilisi’s future remains undecided, this is far from just Georgia’s problem. After all, something similar is now happening in Moldova. There, too, recent elections revealed a deeply divided electorate. No less important is the role of Western and Western-funded NGOs in that country. For example, various deputies of the pro-Western ruling party, and even the current president of Moldova, have previously participated in Soros Foundations programmes. Combined with the potential for similar trouble elsewhere in the post-Soviet sphere, and it’s clear that the Georgian Dream could yet become a nightmare right across the region.

Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n09/andrew-cockburn/diary

In Tbilisi

One evening​ in early March, I stood on Rustaveli Avenue in front of the floodlit Georgian parliament in the midst of a crowd that was swelling rapidly as ever more people, including families with children and dogs, joined the protest. The demonstration had originally been scheduled for two days later, when a new law backed by the ruling party, Georgian Dream, was due to be voted on: any organisation receiving more than 20 per cent of its money from abroad would be forced to register as an ‘agent of foreign influence’. Although its supporters claimed the law was modelled on the Foreign Agents Registration Act that the US introduced in 1938, the people around me were more conscious of a similar measure enacted by Vladimir Putin in 2019, which led to the debilitation of civil society in Russia. Word had spread that the authorities had quietly moved forward the vote on the new law.

Everyone seems to know everyone else in Tbilisi, as was clear from cheerful reunions happening all around me. Friends eagerly discussed the latest developments, while the more active types at the front of the crowd took turns kicking a steel barrier erected by the police. ‘This is my tenth demonstration,’ Nina, a student of audiovisual arts at the Free University, told me. ‘It’s what I do.’ The atmosphere became less relaxed later that night. Police cars were torched, and protesters were met with water cannon and pepper spray. (Afterwards, a friend who received a full dose of pepper spray described the effects as being ‘like Adjika’ – a very hot Georgian sauce – ‘but not so sharp!’)

The crowd was overwhelmingly young. Many of them had been alerted to the protests through the nexus of Tbilisi’s flourishing nightclubs, which feature entertainment ranging from heavy metal drag to the Georgian National Ballet. Acting as communal centres for the generation born after independence, the clubs exert a significant political influence: they are places, one protester told me, ‘for seeing how many we are, and how strong we can be together’. As the March protests gathered force, the clubs closed to encourage patrons to demonstrate instead. Andro Eradze, founder of the LeftBank club, was careful to stress that there was no central co-ordination. ‘It happens naturally, without too much thinking.’ He said a defining moment was the massively destructive flash flood of June 2015, which killed twenty and left the city deep in mud. Lions, tigers and other dangerous animals escaped from the zoo and stalked the streets for days. While the ill-prepared government struggled to cope with the devastation, thousands of young people spontaneously mobilised to clean up the mess. ‘I was part of that,’ Eradze told me. ‘It was phenomenally important for the growth of communal consciousness.’ This was the generation, uninterested in and even contemptuous of established political structures, that stood around me now. Few seemed to have read the draft law, but all of them thought it would destroy any connection they might have to liberal freedoms, because it would involve the removal of foreign funding from the civil society NGOs on which many depend.

Homemade signs in Georgian and English pledging allegiance to Europe and denouncing Russia mingled with Georgian and EU flags. None of the signs was in Russian, and I didn’t see or hear any of the sixty thousand or more Russians who have decamped to Georgia since the start of the war, an unpopular influx that, while boosting the economy (which grew 10 per cent last year), has greatly increased the cost of living – rents have doubled in Tbilisi. Graffiti reading ‘Deport Russians’ has started to appear on city walls. To the outside world, the anti-Russian mood seems to confirm that Georgia is divided, as Ukraine was in 2013, between a popular pro-Western opposition and a regime taking its orders from the Kremlin.

On the international stage, that opposition is symbolised by Mikheil ‘Misha’ Saakashvili, Georgia’s former president, who was arrested on his return to the country in 2021, having been charged in absentia with multiple abuses of power during his rule. Saakashvili is the subject of heartfelt appeals from Western politicians and media outlets demanding his release from prison on health grounds. (He has been on intermittent hunger strike since 2021, claims that he has been poisoned and is serially reported to be ‘near death’. He is, according to the Observer, being held in a hospital in Tbilisi and is ‘gaunt and confused’.) But the only Georgian public figure I saw depicted on protest signs, shown in a torrid embrace with Putin, was Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire oligarch universally assumed to be the true ruler of the country, but who has no official post and never appears in public. Nor were there any politicians among the speakers denouncing the ‘Russian law’ from the steps of parliament. Later in the week, when a former minister who now leads a small opposition party seized a microphone, the crowd chanted ‘Leave’ until the microphone was torn from his grasp by a well-known local artist who declared that ‘this is a time for art and love.’ The general atmosphere reminded me of the anti-Wall Street Occupy movement a dozen years ago, which was eventually clubbed into submission by Mike Bloomberg’s police. Here in Tbilisi the persistent and increasingly angry crowds achieved a better result. After three days of escalating protests, the government withdrew the law.

Street protests in Georgia have a long record of success. In 1978, when Soviet power seemed incontestable, thousands flocked to the same spot on Rustaveli Avenue, then the home of the powerless Supreme Soviet of Georgia. The Kremlin had decreed that Russian should replace Georgian as the official language. Protest in Soviet times was very dangerous: in 1956, a demonstration protesting against Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, and his slurs about the late dictator’s fellow Georgians, had been bloodily crushed by the military. But in 1978, Eduard Shevardnadze, then the local Communist Party boss, persuaded the Kremlin to hold back the troops and accept Georgian as the official language – an unprecedented concession by Moscow.

Just over a decade later, with Soviet power beginning to crumble, Georgians gathered again, demanding the right to secede from the USSR. On 9 April 1989, the crowd was beaten back by troops wielding shovels – twenty were killed. It was a turning point. ‘Before the massacre of 9 April, maybe some people were for independence but most were not,’ according to Tedo Japaridze, who would later become foreign minister. ‘The next morning, everyone in the country woke up a patriot.’ After independence in 1991 Georgia descended into chaos. ‘Everyone who lived through the 1990s is still traumatised by those years,’ one of this year’s protesters told me, and he counted off the various civil wars and insurrections of the period – ‘at least four’ – on his fingers. Parliament itself was the site of pitched battles, with one post-independence leader making a last stand in the cellars. Shevardnadze, politically recast, became president in 1995 and began rebuilding a country now shorn of the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Shevardnadze made progress in stabilising the country, negotiating the evacuation of Russian military bases and crafting a new constitution: he even applied to join Nato. But his regime was marked by widespread corruption. Spearheaded by a group of young politicians that included Saakashvili, the opposition denounced the 2003 parliamentary elections that reinstalled him as rigged and took to the streets. Brandishing red roses, Saakashvili and a band of followers stormed into the parliament chamber, interrupting Shevardnadze mid-speech and chasing him away. He resigned shortly afterwards.

‘It established a precedent in Georgia,’ a Georgian Dream MP told me. ‘When they occupied the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, the US government didn’t fall. But when Saakashvili took over the chamber the government fell. So now there is the idea that if you physically occupy the parliament, the government will fall.’ Among those fervently invested in change were the growing number of foreign-funded NGOs engaged in the promotion of ‘civil society’. There may also have been more shadowy forces at work. The late Greg Stephens, an operative with the US political consultancy Black, Manafort and Stone, exclaimed proudly at a meeting in London: ‘I did Georgia. $30 million. So cheap!’

Saakashvili kept his promises, for a while. In a whirlwind of frenetic activity, he swept away much of the corruption that most affected ordinary citizens. The notoriously venal traffic police force was dismissed en masse. Ministers from the previous regime were arrested and hauled off in the full glare of TV cameras, sometimes in their underwear. The irksome bureaucracy that forced people to secure, through bribes, the necessary paperwork for mundane things like driving licences was streamlined, and public service offices established. International architects were commissioned to put Saakashvili’s stamp on the city of Tbilisi. On the banks of the Kura river, mushroom-shaped concrete canopies top a mammoth Public Service Hall. A pair of steel and glass cylinders, intended to house an exhibition centre and concert hall, and universally known as ‘the tubes’, were built near the palace Saakashvili selected for himself – a neoclassical former tsarist police headquarters now surmounted by a glass dome. Mindful of the central role the building had played in political unrest, he moved the seat of parliament 140 miles out of town to Kutaisi, Georgia’s second city, housing it in another dome. Due to a poor choice of glass – they were trying to save money – MPs sweltered in the humidity. ‘There’s nothing much to do in Kutaisi,’ one of them told me. ‘So members passed the time in feasting and drinking.’

These grandiose projects predictably earned Saakashvili praise in the West, especially since they accompanied wholesale deregulation and other manifestations of neoliberal ideology. Among his demonstrations of fealty to the US, Saakashvili dispatched Georgian troops to serve in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The main road to Tbilisi airport was named after George W. Bush, who on a visit in 2005 proclaimed: ‘The American people are with you.’ Despite this, Putin appeared, initially at least, to be prepared to indulge his southern neighbour. Saakashvili’s takeover had been facilitated by the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, who persuaded Shevardnadze to accept his fate and resign, and Saakashvili’s first private meeting with Putin in Moscow went well, although he kept his host waiting for half an hour while he swam laps in the hotel pool. It even seemed possible that there might be a peaceful resolution to the problem of South Ossetia, one of the territories Georgia lost in the 1990s.

But Saakashvili soon provoked Russia by adding military police to the unarmed peacekeeping patrols in South Ossetia, sparking unease in Washington, where officials fretted that their hyperactive protégé might get everyone into trouble. ‘Can you ask Misha something for me?’ Colin Powell said to Georgia’s foreign minister. ‘Does he have to poke the bear in the eye every day? Maybe just once a week!’ By 2006, the Russians had decided that Saakashvili was both untrustworthy and a pawn of Washington. ‘They used a Russian phrase: “You can’t have a handshake with this guy,”’ Zurab Abashidze, a former Georgian ambassador to Moscow and currently the government’s senior adviser on relations with Russia, told me.

It was dangerous to fuel this mood in the Kremlin, especially since various events were bolstering Putin’s suspicions that he faced an irredeemably hostile West. Georgia and Ukraine were accepted as prospective members at the Nato summit in Bucharest in April 2008. Earlier that year the US and its allies recognised Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, a precedent that had ominous implications for Georgia. Encouraged by ambiguous messages from the White House, which he chose to interpret as promises of support, Saakashvili sent the Georgian army into South Ossetia in August 2008, where they rained indiscriminate artillery fire on civilian neighbourhoods. The Russians counterattacked, advancing to within an hour’s drive of Tbilisi. After Georgia’s defeat, Russia established military bases in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and recognised them as independent states. But the consequences of Saakashvili’s rash initiative weren’t all bad: copious aid soon began flowing from the US and EU to Georgia, now a certified victim of Russian aggression.

What was happening inside Georgia itself was of no interest to Saakashvili’s Western fanbase. With the treasury empty at the time of his takeover, his initial reforms had largely been financed through the privatisation of state assets such as the huge Rustavi metal concern, sold to a local oligarch at a knock-down price. But the money-raising initiatives had gone further than that. During my visit I talked to business figures who described the extortion practised by Saakashvili’s officials, who would often bring criminal charges that could be settled only through plea bargains and hefty payments. ‘It was kidnapping,’ a banker who himself spent six months in jail told me, ‘in exchange for ransom.’ I asked the director of a foreign-financed NGO if she supported the demands for Saakashvili’s release as a political prisoner. ‘That gangster a political prisoner?’ she exclaimed. ‘Come on!’ The extortion, she said, had extended to small businesses. She told me the story of a vineyard owner who had refused to pay off a local official. After Saakashvili promoted the official to a senior post in the ministry of agriculture, the official had taken revenge by cancelling the vineyard’s export licence, leading to the firm’s bankruptcy and the owner’s suicide. By 2012, Georgia had the largest prison population per capita in Europe, and police torture was widespread.

For a while, the richest Georgian of all remained immune from regime exactions. Bidzina Ivanishvili, a poor village boy from western Georgia, made billions in Russia in the turbulent 1990s. Nicknamed ‘Python’ in business circles there, he prospered in commodities trading and banking while prudently keeping his distance from high-profile (and bloodstained) industries such as oil and aluminium. He moved into the inner circle of the oligarch elite after helping out Yeltsin in the 1996 Russian presidential election, and was rewarded by being allowed to participate in the ‘loans for shares’ scheme that propelled a select few to untold wealth. Many of his fellow oligarchs moved to Western Europe, but Ivanishvili came home to Georgia, investing in hotels and real estate. In the most literal sense he remained aloof from his countrymen, building himself a glass castle perched on the ridge high above Tbilisi. Another landmark contributed by the reclusive billionaire came in the form of a vast new Georgian Orthodox cathedral, its gold cupola visible across the city. It was an astute investment. The church, long repressed in the Soviet years, rebounded in popularity and wealth after independence, a position that endures to this day. Ilia II, the deeply conservative patriarch, remains the country’s most popular figure according to polls, even though he has warm and supportive relations with his counterparts in the Putin-friendly Russian Orthodox church.

As Saakashvili’s expropriations gathered force after 2008, Ivanishvili came to believe that he too was under threat. He took decisive action by founding a political movement, Georgian Dream, to contest the elections due to be held in 2012, and deftly assembled a coalition of opposition parties under its auspices. Running on a platform of reform and lavish welfare promises, including free healthcare for serious operations and free washing machines for all (every house in his home village got a new roof), Ivanishvili transformed himself into an effective stump speaker and politician. ‘He actually listened to what you had to say,’ Stefan Tolz, a Tbilisi-based filmmaker who covered the race told me. ‘Saakashvili, on the other hand, was only interested in what he had to say. He reminded me of Donald Trump.’ Two weeks before the elections, a TV station owned by Ivanishvili broadcast a dramatic video of police officers beating prisoners. Despite Saakashvili’s protests that it had been staged, Georgian Dream swept the polls and Ivanishvili became prime minister. Emissaries from Washington, where faith in Saakashvili still ran high, asked him nervously how he intended to rule Georgia. ‘I am not going to rule Georgia,’ he said, winningly. ‘I am going to govern an institutionalised democracy with a full-scale engagement of civil society.’ Reassured, the visiting US senators instructed Saakashvili to accept his defeat.

His work accomplished, Ivanishvili soon retired back into the shadows, resigning the premiership in November 2013. But he didn’t give up power. The current minister of the interior, Vakhtang Gomelauri, is his former chief bodyguard. The prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, is his former secretary. An ex-minister of health was reportedly the family dentist. Such connections mean that Ivanishvili doesn’t need to have direct control, or even to be in regular contact with senior functionaries. ‘I haven’t spoken to him in years,’ one official in a sensitive post said. ‘And the minister of the interior, an old friend, told me he hasn’t spoken to him in a year.’ As far as I could tell, he conveys his desires through assorted employees, including a close relative, who pass them on to the government.

Despite this apparently laid-back approach, he has much to occupy his mind. ‘Ivanishvili’s number one concern has to be personal security for himself, his family, and his fortune,’ an American official told me. ‘He may be conscious of what happened to others who’ve been in the same position.’ He is apparently of the belief that assaults on his fortune are politically motivated. In 2005 he entrusted more than a billion dollars to Credit Suisse’s wealth management division – an error of judgment, since his was one of the accounts pillaged by Patrice Lescaudron, a senior bank official, while the bank blithely ignored warning signs of the thievery. It then refused to repay Ivanishvili, claiming that it bore no responsibility for its employee’s depredations. Ivanishvili sued, eventually being awarded at least $900 million. But after the Russian invasion of Ukraine he began to encounter new difficulties in extracting his money from the Swiss. He put this down to ‘informal sanctions’ intended to change Georgia’s policy on the war, which has been to refrain from any involvement beyond rhetorical denunciations of the invasion. Combined with EU demands for the ‘de-oligarchisation’ of Georgian political and economic life before the country’s application for membership can be considered, Ivanishvili sees ample confirmation that he is the target of a campaign orchestrated from Washington.

Curiously, Ivanishvili’s continued rule, via the Georgian Dream party he controls, is in part dependent on the man he displaced. After his rejection by Georgian voters and a spell of comfortable unemployment in an upscale Brooklyn neighbourhood, Saakashvili found a new home: in 2015, Petro Poroshenko, then president of Ukraine and a friend from university, made him a Ukrainian citizen and appointed him governor of Odesa. But the pair soon fell out. Saakashvili began campaigning against his former ally, denouncing him as the font of Ukrainian corruption. Stripped of his new citizenship by an irate Poroshenko and accused of corrupt dealings with Russian ‘criminal elements’, he was dragged by the police from a rooftop where he was threatening to commit suicide. When Volodymyr Zelensky replaced Poroshenko as president in 2019, Saakashvili saw the chance of a return to power in Georgia. Zelensky’s administration includes associates of Saakashvili’s from his Georgian government, and in October 2021, with their support, he smuggled himself back into Georgia in a refrigerator truck. He clearly expected to be greeted by a flood of popular support, but he was arrested within days, then tried and sentenced on charges stemming from scandals involving beatings and deaths during his years in power. He has been incarcerated ever since, but a well-financed campaign in Washington portrays him as the victim of a plot orchestrated by Putin.

Asked if it would save trouble simply to put Saakashvili on a plane out of the country, Georgian officials tend to reply that they would never be forgiven for freeing a justly convicted criminal. More to the point, he provides an eminently useful political asset for the regime, which uses him as a reminder that the alternative to their rule is a return to the corruption of the old days. And international support for Saakashvili bolsters the regime’s message that the West plans to embroil Georgia in the Ukraine war. ‘The Georgian Dream government is not a “war-minded government”,’ Garibashvili said in March. The Ukrainian authorities ‘wanted Saakashvili to be in power’, so that he would ‘start a war against Russia and join Ukraine, involving Georgia in the war’. The opposition calls this scaremongering, but the message still resonates. As an American resident in Tbilisi pointed out, the government ‘is panicked that if Putin wins in Ukraine, they’re next. And if he loses, he’ll need a quick win somewhere, so they’d be next.’

However, to Biden, sovereignty properly understood does not include resisting America’s wishes. He explained that “we remain committed to the Georgian people and their Euro-Atlantic aspirations [emphasis added].” He sharply criticized the “Georgian government’s anti-democratic actions, exemplified by the Kremlin-style ‘foreign agents’ law and Georgian government officials’ false statements, which are inconsistent with EU and NATO membership norms [emphasis added].”

This was further amplified last week when the U.S. announced a raft of sanctions on two Georgian officials and more than 60 individuals in the former Soviet state over human rights abuses and anti-democratic actions — all stemming from the fallout and protests of the government’s passage of a controversial foreign influence law.

“The United States remains deeply concerned by the ongoing anti-democratic actions of the Georgian government, which are incompatible with membership norms of the European Union and NATO,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Monday.

“In addition to the passage of the so-called ‘foreign influence law,’ we have also seen the Georgian government repeatedly violently crack down on Georgian citizens who protested that law.” Politics has been unsettled since the October 2020 parliamentary election, which the opposition refused to accept despite observers finding it to be basically free and competitive. Although demonstrators hoisted the banner of democracy, Georgia Dream has won three straight elections going back to 2012.

Nor is passage of a “foreign agents” bill inherently undemocratic, let alone “Russian inspired,” as the Biden administration charged. The new law only requires groups to disclose foreign funding if the contribution accounts for a fifth or more of their budget. By its own terms “this Law regulates the registration of an entity as an organization pursuing the interest of a foreign power and other issues related to the transparency of the activities of an organization pursuing the interest of a foreign power,” and “may not restrict the activities of an entity registered as an organization pursuing the interest of a foreign power on the basis of this Law.”

However, the State Department insisted that, “The draft legislation poses a threat to civil society organizations whose work benefits the lives of everyday citizens of Georgia.” The European Commission’s “Venice Commission” concluded: “Being designated as an entity pursuing the interests of a foreign power under the Law has serious implications as it undermines both the financial stability and credibility of the organizations targeted as well as their operations. … The persistent and stigmatizing obstacles concentrated in the hands of the state create a chilling effect.”

Alas, allied accusers have little credibility. Noted Serge Schmemann of the New York Times: “while Americans and Europeans are ramping up the pressure to take down Georgia’s bill, they might take a look at their own ‘foreign agent’ legislation to ensure that it never becomes weaponized for political reasons.”

But it is too late, at least in the US. The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires agents of “foreign principals”— defined as foreign governments, political parties, entities, and people — to register. Engaging in political or PR activities, collecting or spending money, and representing foreign principals to the U.S. government make one a foreign agent, subject to FARA’s registration, disclosure, and record-keeping requirements.

The law firm Covington & Burling warned: “FARA is written so broadly that, if read literally, it could potentially require registration even for some routine business activities of law firms and “FARA has no de minimis threshold. It can be triggered by even the slightest activity that means any one of the statutory triggers.”

As for Georgia, one suspects Tbilisi’s target is U.S. and European support for de facto regime change. Of course, Washington doesn’t put it that way. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller echoed Biden: “We are deeply concerned that draft legislation introduced into Georgia’s parliament will derail Georgia from its European path and harm civil society organizations improving the lives of Georgian citizens. We urge the government of Georgia to advance its EU aspirations.”

Allied governments are funding groups to attain a particular policy end. This is not new: U.S.-backed groups active in the Balkans have studiously favored liberal and Eurocratic parties over traditional and nationalistic ones, no matter how democratic the latter.

Is the Georgian legislation overly broad and badly designed? Perhaps, but many of the arguments against the legislation are self-serving. Contended a European analyst: “If the government claims to be concerned with how dependent much of Georgian civil society is on foreign funding, it could make more local funding available.” So Tbilisi is to blame for not subsidizing its critics?

In any case, legislative imperfection hardly justifies cutting off aid and restricting visas, and halting EU accession discussions, as the U.S. and EU have done, respectively. One could make the same critique of plenty of laws in Washington, Brussels, and capitals of the EU’s 27 member states. Could the law be misused, as it is, apparently, in the U.S. as well as Russia? Certainly.

Indeed, the Georgian Dream government deserves criticism, having forcefully cracked down on protests. Last month Human Rights Watch warned: “Georgian authorities have yet to demonstrate that they are conducting effective investigations into a spate of violent attacks on civic and political activists over recent months …. Impunity for these attacks risks encouraging further political violence and instability in the run-up to the country’s parliamentary elections in October 2024.”

Moreover, the government is threatening to ban the major opposition party, Saakashvili’s United National Movement, and other opponents as well.

For these actions, as well as abuse of any other laws, Tbilisi should be held accountable. Nevertheless, Western states should stop attempting to dictate other nations’ internal politics. Biden’s paean to Georgian sovereignty is disingenuous. Washington respects the independence of other governments to the extent that they act as Washington desires.

Indeed, the U.S. has been the world’s busiest election meddler: a Carnegie-Mellon study detailed how America had intervened in other nations’ elections 81 times between 1945 and 2000.

And despite the attacks on the Georgia Dream government for not joining Kyiv in adopting an anti-Moscow position, the former has successfully defended Georgian sovereignty. Observed the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven: “Rather than a desire to follow Moscow, Georgian policy in fact reflects what CIA Director William Burns has called the ‘hedging middle,’ subservient neither to Russia nor the West, and determined by the official view of what constitutes Georgian national interests.”

The opposition complains that the government might make concessions to Russia. However, Tbilisi’s policy has been far more effective than Ukraine’s. Georgia remains free, even profiting from business with its overweening neighbor. Adapting to reality seems a small price to pay for not just survival, but independence, peace, and prosperity.

Obeying allies’ demand to help contain Moscow would leave Georgia to pay the price, as it did in the 2008 war, when it forlornly waited for American support. And as has Ukraine, with allied governments refusing to enter the conflict despite having rejected accommodation and compromise that might have forestalled the ongoing war.

Ultimately, the solution to improper behavior by the Georgian government lies with the Georgian people. With an October election pending, even one of Tbilisi’s sharpest critics says that the opposition should make its case to domestic voters, not foreign governments. Washington should remember John Quincy Adams’ admonition for a young America to avoid becoming “the dictatress of the world,” when “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He previously was affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute. He writes a weekly column for the American Conservative online and Antiwar.com.

Anything that takes NATO membership for Georgia off the table is a good idea, but why is the United States so opposed to a transparency requirement that it is willing to bring out its big diplomatic sticks to get Georgia to drop it? 

Opponents of the bill call it the “Russian law” and imply that the ruling Georgian Dream party is throwing in its lot with Vladimir Putin by cracking down on foreign interference in domestic politics. That lazy slur gives Georgian Dream too little respect and also ignores the party’s record of pursuing membership in the European Union and rejecting membership in the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union.

The Georgian ruling party isn’t pro-Russian. They are pragmatists genuinely worried about preserving their small nation’s sovereignty. And their worries about NGOs operating as instruments of foreign influence are hardly far-fetched. 

According to Almut Rochowanski and Sopiko Japaridze, there are 25,000 registered NGOs in Georgia today and “the vast majority of Georgian NGOs have no local funding at all.” Instead, their funds come from the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, or George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

These NGOs do not confine themselves to humanitarian work. Many of them freely engage in partisan activity and vocally oppose the ruling party.

The bill would not prevent foreign-funded NGOs from treating sick children or operating battered women’s shelters. It would simply require groups to disclose foreign funding so that their ventures into domestic politics can be seen in the proper light. Foreign interference in elections has been a sore spot in our own politics recently. We can hardly begrudge the Georgians their similar concerns.

Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative, and the author of BOOMERS: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (Sentinel, January 2021). She has worked at the Washington Examiner and National Review, and as a think tank researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, Hedgehog Review, and many others. You can follow her on Twitter at @herandrews.