The street is pockmarked with bonfires, a live band, a dance troupe, and clusters of families and friends. A young boy takes the opportunity to busk, singing through a portable karaoke speaker. Free tea, coffee, and cake are placed on foldable trestles. Cases of bottled water are passed around. Bakeries and cafés have made large batches of Georgian cheese pastries and mushroom pies. Cans of beer are shared between breaks in marching.
One crowd moves, blocks the highway intersection of Heroes Square, strides along the cobblestones beside Tbilisi State University, and turns left onto the beginning of the main drag, advancing between blocks of concrete, glass eyesores, and shopping malls towards the glow of another crowd ribboned with European Union, Georgian, and Ukrainian flags, green lasers, and faces – some covered, others not.
Homemade banners sport cartoons of a parliament of pigs. Lines of honking motorcycles thread through the crowd. Utes with PA systems play techno, as well as contemporary Georgian rock musicians such as Irakli Charkviani. Gas masks conceal tattoos and other features so that the recently installed state CCTV cameras cannot identify them. The air smells like dust from a heater. The streets teem with spectacle.
Bidzina Ivanishvili is the richest man in Georgia. His wealth was estimated at $7.6 billion in 2024, a figure equivalent to almost twenty-five per cent of Georgia’s GDP in 2023. Ivanishvili collects rare trees and exotic animals: flamingos, sharks, zebras. His lavish wealth is clichéd and notorious. More obscure is the source of his fortune, other than trading ‘computers and assets’ in Russia during the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Returning to his native Georgia in the mid-2000s, he became involved in Georgian politics in 2011.
One year later, Ivanishvili’s party, Georgian Dream, named by the oligarch’s albino rapper son, Bera, won elections and took over from Mikhail Saakashvili’s United National Movement party. Seen at first as centrist, pro-Western, Georgian Dream has become increasingly authoritarian over the course of its thirteen years in power. Ivanishvili, neither the current president nor prime minister, is widely regarded as the party’s de facto leader.
This situation is not without antecedents. The 2003 Rose Revolution and Saakashvili’s subsequent rise to power marked an expeditious departure from the former Soviet-styled guard of Eduard Shevardnadze. Transforming Georgia from a rogue state to a police one, Saakashvili’s term was distinguished by its reforms as well as by its human rights violations, extortion, and the Russo-Georgian War over South Ossetia Alania/Samachablo in August 2008. Saakashvili is currently serving a twelve-year prison sentence for embezzlement and abuse of power.
The controversial ‘foreign agents’ law’ was the stimulus for Georgia’s current unrest. Enacted on 1 August 2024, the law requires NGOs receiving twenty per cent or more of their funding from donors abroad to officially register themselves as ‘pursuing the interests of a foreign power’. Given the exigencies of funding in general, and especially for any organisation that does not toe the Georgian Dream party line, the law poses a fundamental threat to the civil liberties Georgians have been fighting for since gaining independence in 1991. Ninety per cent of the 20,000-plus NGOs based in Georgia receive their funding from abroad. Echoing a law enforced by the Kremlin to quash dissent and foreign influence, the legislation undermines freedom of speech and expression while jeopardising Georgia’s vast ambition of becoming part of the EU. It sets the country on the path to political oppression under the yoke of an expansionist dictatorship. The law portends a Putinesque dominance of state media and administration intended to suppress opposition and to silence dissidents.
Outraged by these despotic tendencies and sympathies, especially in the face of Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, demonstrators launched a ‘second wave’ of protests in Tbilisi on 28 November 2024. This followed a rigged parliamentary election, as well as Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s suspension of discussions about EU membership until 2028. The peaceful protests have drawn crowds of up to 200,000 in a city of approximately 1.6 million people. Despite police brutality, military force, and institutional violence, the demonstrations have not let up a single night since.
My friends and I walk past flashing ambulances, paramedics treating the injured, news reporters and a burnt, abandoned car, before reaching the epicentre of the demonstration in front of Parliament. Demonstrators bang rocks against the ten-foot-high steel wall the government has erected outside Parliament. Groups grab dumpsters and ram them through the barricades, straight at the armoured police who stand side by side, shields raised. Encircling Parliament, the demonstrators chant. Some sip local brandy to keep warm and stay awake until sunrise. The charged atmosphere mounts with anger, frustration, outrage, defiance. PVC piping is stuffed with Roman candles and fired into the air by the parliament’s colonnade. A frenzy of multicoloured light sizzles and explodes. Then the assault begins again. From side streets, cannons atop armoured vehicles bombard the crowd with ice-cold water. Teargas fills the air. The cans twist and spray all over the ground; one squirms between my legs. The gas makes you feel as though nails are being pressed into your eyes while the cords of your throat are being braided.
‘Scott, I know you can’t see right now, but you have to run,’ says my friend Tina. A stranger hands me slices of raw onion. Sniffing them, supposedly, eases the sting. ‘Forget water. Doesn’t do anything.’ Words turn in the commotion as I scuttle past bodies to evade the gas. Rubber bullet shots ring out. Batons hit ribs and heads, break noses, blacken eyes, beat ears into cauliflowers. Among the dozens injured, many have been left permanently disabled, vision impaired, wounded and scarred. Victims need reconstructive surgeries, occupational therapies for brain injuries, psychiatric counselling. Hundreds have been arrested.
Back at my apartment less than a kilometre from Parliament, I turn on the news on my laptop and see my friend Vakho being elbowed in the face while handcuffed. He is arrested along with my housemate, Levan. Two days later, Levan returns from a holding cell. I step into the kitchen to find him sipping coffee with splitting lips and sporting swollen black eyes.
Before heading out for another night of demonstrations, I visit a friend’s nightclub where a group of young men make small splatter projectiles out of Christmas tree decorations. They wear surgical gloves and smoke cigarettes while mixing acetone into a can of black oil-based paint. They take thick syringes and plunge the black mixture from the can into the Christmas bulbs.
The noose over the city has tightened. President Salome Zourabichvili, a vocal opponent of her own party’s direction and legislative program, is replaced by political newcomer and former professional soccer player, Mikheil Kavelashvili. He is the sole candidate on the ballot – the first time this has happened in the history of independent Georgia.
Kavelashvili’s swearing-in is opposed by much of the international community. His bogus election leads to more boycotts, more dissent, more riots. The government has shamelessly exposed its political expediency. The public is tired of corruption, censorship, and capitulation to Russia. When Zourabishvili is introduced to the podium to speak at the protests, she is still introduced as the president.
Apathy, presaged by restlessness, has engulfed many disillusioned demonstrators. It may just be fatigue, exhaustion; people still have to work, study, support their family, enjoy life. A sinking sensation and lack of strategy are inevitable in the face of such brute power.
‘But who will replace the government if you overthrow this one?’ I ask several people in the crowd.
‘We’ll figure it out once we do it’ is a common response.
On New Year’s Eve – a major event in Georgia and other former Soviet republics due to religious holidays being largely banned during the communist era – the protestors set up a one-kilometre white-clothed table to share a supra, a traditional Georgian banquet.
As midnight approaches, I picture the black underbelly of an ouroboros endlessly swallowing itself. Georgia is seemingly rehearsing the pattern it has tracked since independence.
Revolution, renewal, repression, repeat.
Protests grind on. The government keeps granting itself more power. The ramifications set in. Donald Trump’s slashing of USAID represents just another proverbial nail in the coffin for media outlets and organisations.
The majority of Georgian society is at loggerheads with an establishment that is devastating civil liberties and livelihoods. Decades of corruption in free-trade profiteering have generated inflation and deeper socio-economic disparities. Such unbridled mass privatisation and power asymmetries are unrelenting in a system of helpless verticalism. The ruling élite utilises the immiseration and desperation of its citizens to reinstate itself. This is evident in the way Georgian Dream pays transport and food costs, as well as a small fee, for people from rural areas, enabling them to travel to the capital to attend their rallies. It buys their votes.
Another factor is provincialism and the rural-urban divide. I walk along the periphery of a Georgian Dream rally to sense the rhetoric, demographic, and dogma, to gauge the response of their supporters, to gain a more rounded perspective. While I am there, a friend, Gio, asks me via a text what I am up to. When I tell him, he replies: ‘No, man. Get out of there. You can’t be seen there!’ This raises another concern. Social media – though it has generated much political attention domestically and internationally – creates a paragon where ‘being seen’ protesting becomes a matter of social clout and cool. Of course the demonstrations can be joyous and exhilarating, but once it becomes a matter of entertainment, the question as to why one is there is complicated.
Does any political mobilisation comprehend where it’s going? Should it? Is it enough to have a sense of movement, a belief in progress, rather than a clear plan of where it’s going?
Tapping into a reservoir of nationalist fervour, Ivanishvili and his cabinet are clearly aware of, and invested in, dividing and isolating the population. Employing patriotic rhetoric, Georgian Dream underhandedly shifts the country’s geopolitics and policy northward instead of westward. Instead of inciting self-determination or sovereignty, such spin and coercion unmasks Georgian Dream’s deliberate return to Russia’s orbit.
If Georgian politics can be seen as a circle, as an interlocking series of narratives hurtling from one reckoning to the next, what is the hole it is sinking into?
Day 90 of the Tbilisi protests – 25 February 2025. Outside Parliament a masked protester holds EU and Georgian flags beside depictions of Bidzina Ivanishvili as a snake and Vladimir Putin in a garbage bag. Photo courtesy of Jan Chudožilov
Day ninety of the protests takes place on February 25, or Soviet Occupation Day, a memorial to commemorate the Red Army invasion of Georgia in 1921. The previous day marks the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Georgia enters its fourth month of protests; Ukraine its fourth year of war. Today the demonstration is at its most peaceful, despite the fact that Georgians face their society deteriorating daily.
How long will it be until the resilience breaks? Has Georgia already crossed the brink? Has it gone too far to turn back?
The regime’s matrix of political blunders – the foreign agents law, the rigged parliamentary election, the dismissal of talks on EU membership, the change in presidents – and the subsequent response from the public, prompts a series of spasms within the body politics of Georgia. Spurious and contagious, the law is a symptom of a wider sickness. The government’s deepening ties and backdoor dealings with Russia, along with its slashing of foreign aid over the past year, is becoming a premature elegy of a greater internal regression for Georgia. A menacing exemplar of inequality, other states, particularly those of the former USSR, will also suffer as corporate feudalism tightens it grip, and for as long as citizens live under horizons of kleptocracy and fear. Many Georgians, of course, do not believe that joining the EU will solve all (or many) of the country’s struggles or guarantee security. Rather, they see EU membership as a way to escape the influence of an unpredictable, occupying power.
It is difficult to convey the multidimensionality of this crisis, but what is palpable is the discord between the streets of Tbilisi and its oligarchy. Sanctioned by the Biden administration in December 2024 for eroding democratic institutions, with the United Kingdom likely to follow suit, Ivanishvili claims to be rebuilding a country destroyed by the political class of fiefdoms he himself represents. As such, the demonstrations are a response to the destructive nature of Georgian Dream; to their impunity, repressions, and contemptuousness.
Despite incorporating the EU stars into their logo, Georgian Dream continues to shift the political centre of gravity of Georgia, leading its populace into deeper turmoil and upheaval. The demonstrations and the deep-seated desire to uproot and topple persist, proving that the circle is far from unbroken. Yet as poet Besik Kharanauli contends: ‘I’m not bending down for roses, / I’m pulling out the stakes.’
N.B. some names have been changed to protect some people’s identities.
This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
