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BACK IN THE USSR? GEORGIA ELECTS AN OLIGARCH.
The Weekly Standard, Vol. 18 No. 6
October 22, 2012 Monday
by: Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard
Tbilisi
Citizens of Georgia did something bizarre a couple of weeks ago.
Having fought a war against Russia in 2008 over the disputed
territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, they turned around and
chose Bidzina Ivanishvili to serve as their prime minister.
Ivanishvili had been one of the richest Russian oligarchs before
returning to his native Georgia a few years ago. He will have to
rule alongside his despised rival, President Mikheil Saakashvili the
democracy reformer who had promised to bring Georgia into both NATO
and the EU and who convinced George W. Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy to
think of Georgia as a beacon of freedom between the Black and Caspian
seas. Georgians do not yet agree with Vladimir Putin, who once urged
that Saakashvili be strung up by the balls. But they have issued a
lashing repudiation of Saakashvili's United National Movement (UNM)
and voted their country back into Russia's sphere of influence.
Until Saakashvili, Georgia was a rough, tough place. Its best-known
native sons include not only Stalin but also his secret police boss
Lavrenti Beria. When Georgia's longest-serving post-Soviet leader,
Eduard Shevardnadze, tried to claim power in a rigged election in
2003, Saakashvili led hundreds of thousands into the streets, then
into parliament, in what would be called the Rose Revolution. He
sought to refound Georgia on different bases: democracy instead
of autocracy and the West instead of Russia. He established what
one Western ambassador last week called about as forward-leaning a
democracy as there is in the post-Soviet space.
Saakashvili cleaned house. He preached tolerance for Armenians,
Azerbaijanis, and gays. He built a new concert hall and a glitzy,
glassy footbridge over the Kura River, and brought electricity
to remote villages. He sent 800 troops to back NATO forces in
Afghanistan more than Belgium, and more than any non-NATO country
except Australia. He passed a plan to move the parliament from Tbilisi
to the western city of Kutaisi. He purged the old Soviet apparat,
firing tens of thousands of police, including the notorious traffic
squads who used to shake down people on the streets of the capital,
Tbilisi.
Deadwood would be one way of describing these guys. Bidzina
Ivanishvili's base would be another.
Ivanishvili thinks Georgia was freer under Shevardnadze than it
is under Saakashvili. On the night before the elections, as part
of a delegation sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United
States, I met him at his Japanese-designed compound atop a steep hill
overlooking Tbilisi. One of my colleagues asked whether he thought
Putin's Russia was freer than Saakashvili's Georgia. When it comes
to democracy Georgia has no better situation, Ivanishvili said. But
when it comes to human freedom, the main value of democracy, things
are much worse in Georgia.
According to this year's Forbes 400, Ivanishvili is worth $6.4 billion
a bit less than Eric Schmidt of Google and a bit more than Silvio
Berlusconi. He started getting rich importing primitive high-tech
items from the West into Russia, and acquired the protection of the
Yeltsin-era hardliner (and later Yeltsin rival) Alexander Lebed. He
wound up with his own bank, Rossiyskiy Kredit, which other oligarchs
used. Ivanishvili is a bit like the Dan Snyder of Georgia. Much
as the Washington Redskins' owner has tried to use his billions to
restore the team he remembers from his childhood, Ivanishvili is using
his to rebuild the Georgia he grew up in. True, he spends money on
his mammoth stainless-steel-and-glass home and on a collection of
animals (penguins, zebras, flamingos) that he keeps in the west of
the country. But he also shells out on weddings in his hometown of
Chorvila, gilt for the new roof of the Tbilisi cathedral, big stipends
for many of Tbilisi's artists and intellectuals, and much besides.
Ivanishvili says that trust from the people was the main capital he
brought to the election. But he has deployed the more traditional
kind of capital just in case. At a rally in Kutaisi in early summer,
his aides reportedly distributed Dream Cards, inviting supporters to
give their name and number and, while they're at it, to list something
they'd kind of like but couldn't afford, as long as it didn't go over a
thousand lari (about $600). Ivanishvili's willingness to spend caught
Saakashvili by surprise. Saakashvili had long used the Washington
consultants Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, but Ivanishvili shelled out
millions on Washington advisers (Patton Boggs) and pollsters (Penn
Schoen Berland) and European advisers (including former U.S. ambassador
to Germany John Kornblum, of Berlin-based Noerr) and pollsters. His
campaign warned darkly of voter fraud and issued its own polls showing
Ivanishvili winning by a three-to-one margin. Ivanishvili seemed to
be setting the stage for a popular uprising should he lose.
And as recently as mid-September, an Ivanishvili loss seemed almost
inevitable. Saakashvili's party was up by 25 percent. But two
weeks before the election, hidden-camera videos began to emerge of
prisoners being tortured at the bottom of a stairwell in a Georgian
jail. Taken by a guard who had fled to Belgium, they aired on the
television channel Ivanishvili owned. These tapes, the authenticity
of most of which the Saakashvili camp did not dispute, exposed as
false the government's claim to be moving Georgia into modernity. And
that is how Ivanishvili's triumphant supporters came to be waving the
old-fashioned (1990s) Georgian flags in Freedom Square on October 1,
while Ivanishvili's albino son, Bera, whose rap songs have become
popular among party supporters since his father's run, hopped around
on a makeshift stage.
The Saakashvili government had never looked quite so good at home as
it did abroad. In 2005, after the minister of justice and minister of
health flopped in TV debates, government officials stopped explaining
their decisions to the public. In 2006, a young banker named Sandro
Girgvliani, who had insulted some employees of the interior ministry
in a bar, was found dead on the outskirts of Tbilisi the following
morning. After months of protests, observers discovered the government
had obstructed the investigation. The government was way too eager to
raze housing units and beloved landmarks to pay for increasingly vain
development schemes. As Olga Allenova of the Russian paper Kommersant
rightly summed it up: The authorities got carried away with reforms
and forgot about the people.
An assertion heard at all levels of Georgian society was that
Saakashvili's government treated minorities and foreigners better than
it treated natives. The French superstore Carrefour got better terms
when opening a new outlet than did Georgian grocers it added prestige,
after all. The Saakashvili government, derided in some quarters as a
creature of the Bush administration, wound up governing like the Obama
administration, a coalition of new-class elites and special interests.
It mopped up the vote last week in ethnic minority areas, which
supporters attributed to the popularity of its progressivism and
detractors to fraud. Ivanishvili, meanwhile, took huge majorities
among the country's Georgian Orthodox and solid majorities in Tbilisi.
We shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that because Saakashvili was
less democratic than he looked, Ivanishvili is more democratic. On
the day after the election, before he had even been named prime
minister, Ivanishvili called on Saakashvili to resign his post as
president, a demand he later retracted. An op-ed in the New York Times
recently chalked up Ivanishvili's saber-rattling to his bad political
instincts. But Ivanishvili made billions of dollars in Russia in the
1990s, a time when it required almost perfect political instincts to
keep from getting whacked. We should assume Ivanishvili's instincts
are excellent until they're proven -otherwise. That is possibly why
he has said he will not disturb Saakashvili's goal of seeing Georgia
in the EU and NATO, although his unwillingness to rule out a strategic
partnership with Russia makes this an impossibility.
No matter how loudly he proclaimed his vision, Saakashvili had a
weak hand from the get-go. There was always something utopian about
assuming Georgia could be wrenched out of the Russian orbit. Rather
like Armenia, it is a lonely Christian country surrounded by Muslim
ones in what is one of the most perennially violent parts of the
world. Its great trump is that it has been closely allied with a
massive Christian country to the north, which has traditionally been
the biggest and most intimidating force in the region. Even in the
wake of the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, there is pretty much zero
anti-Russian feeling in Georgia. Most Georgians want more normal
relations with Russia, which is the natural market for their wine,
walnuts, canned goods, textiles, stone, and migrant labor. Ivanishvili
says he hopes to open trade relations in time to sell part of this
year's harvest.
And what did Saakashvili have to offer in return? First, an opening
to NATO, an organization that demonstrated unambiguously in 2008 that
it would not come to Georgia's aid if Russia chose to challenge it.
Western indifference to Georgia's defense needs has deepened further
in the Obama years. And, second, an opening to the EU, which since
2008 has looked more and more like a machine for dragging all member
countries into debt and bankruptcy. A proud people might decline
to sell its future to a billionaire if it has options. Clearly,
Georgians were not satisfied that they did.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
From: A. Papazian
The Weekly Standard, Vol. 18 No. 6
October 22, 2012 Monday
by: Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard
Tbilisi
Citizens of Georgia did something bizarre a couple of weeks ago.
Having fought a war against Russia in 2008 over the disputed
territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, they turned around and
chose Bidzina Ivanishvili to serve as their prime minister.
Ivanishvili had been one of the richest Russian oligarchs before
returning to his native Georgia a few years ago. He will have to
rule alongside his despised rival, President Mikheil Saakashvili the
democracy reformer who had promised to bring Georgia into both NATO
and the EU and who convinced George W. Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy to
think of Georgia as a beacon of freedom between the Black and Caspian
seas. Georgians do not yet agree with Vladimir Putin, who once urged
that Saakashvili be strung up by the balls. But they have issued a
lashing repudiation of Saakashvili's United National Movement (UNM)
and voted their country back into Russia's sphere of influence.
Until Saakashvili, Georgia was a rough, tough place. Its best-known
native sons include not only Stalin but also his secret police boss
Lavrenti Beria. When Georgia's longest-serving post-Soviet leader,
Eduard Shevardnadze, tried to claim power in a rigged election in
2003, Saakashvili led hundreds of thousands into the streets, then
into parliament, in what would be called the Rose Revolution. He
sought to refound Georgia on different bases: democracy instead
of autocracy and the West instead of Russia. He established what
one Western ambassador last week called about as forward-leaning a
democracy as there is in the post-Soviet space.
Saakashvili cleaned house. He preached tolerance for Armenians,
Azerbaijanis, and gays. He built a new concert hall and a glitzy,
glassy footbridge over the Kura River, and brought electricity
to remote villages. He sent 800 troops to back NATO forces in
Afghanistan more than Belgium, and more than any non-NATO country
except Australia. He passed a plan to move the parliament from Tbilisi
to the western city of Kutaisi. He purged the old Soviet apparat,
firing tens of thousands of police, including the notorious traffic
squads who used to shake down people on the streets of the capital,
Tbilisi.
Deadwood would be one way of describing these guys. Bidzina
Ivanishvili's base would be another.
Ivanishvili thinks Georgia was freer under Shevardnadze than it
is under Saakashvili. On the night before the elections, as part
of a delegation sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United
States, I met him at his Japanese-designed compound atop a steep hill
overlooking Tbilisi. One of my colleagues asked whether he thought
Putin's Russia was freer than Saakashvili's Georgia. When it comes
to democracy Georgia has no better situation, Ivanishvili said. But
when it comes to human freedom, the main value of democracy, things
are much worse in Georgia.
According to this year's Forbes 400, Ivanishvili is worth $6.4 billion
a bit less than Eric Schmidt of Google and a bit more than Silvio
Berlusconi. He started getting rich importing primitive high-tech
items from the West into Russia, and acquired the protection of the
Yeltsin-era hardliner (and later Yeltsin rival) Alexander Lebed. He
wound up with his own bank, Rossiyskiy Kredit, which other oligarchs
used. Ivanishvili is a bit like the Dan Snyder of Georgia. Much
as the Washington Redskins' owner has tried to use his billions to
restore the team he remembers from his childhood, Ivanishvili is using
his to rebuild the Georgia he grew up in. True, he spends money on
his mammoth stainless-steel-and-glass home and on a collection of
animals (penguins, zebras, flamingos) that he keeps in the west of
the country. But he also shells out on weddings in his hometown of
Chorvila, gilt for the new roof of the Tbilisi cathedral, big stipends
for many of Tbilisi's artists and intellectuals, and much besides.
Ivanishvili says that trust from the people was the main capital he
brought to the election. But he has deployed the more traditional
kind of capital just in case. At a rally in Kutaisi in early summer,
his aides reportedly distributed Dream Cards, inviting supporters to
give their name and number and, while they're at it, to list something
they'd kind of like but couldn't afford, as long as it didn't go over a
thousand lari (about $600). Ivanishvili's willingness to spend caught
Saakashvili by surprise. Saakashvili had long used the Washington
consultants Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, but Ivanishvili shelled out
millions on Washington advisers (Patton Boggs) and pollsters (Penn
Schoen Berland) and European advisers (including former U.S. ambassador
to Germany John Kornblum, of Berlin-based Noerr) and pollsters. His
campaign warned darkly of voter fraud and issued its own polls showing
Ivanishvili winning by a three-to-one margin. Ivanishvili seemed to
be setting the stage for a popular uprising should he lose.
And as recently as mid-September, an Ivanishvili loss seemed almost
inevitable. Saakashvili's party was up by 25 percent. But two
weeks before the election, hidden-camera videos began to emerge of
prisoners being tortured at the bottom of a stairwell in a Georgian
jail. Taken by a guard who had fled to Belgium, they aired on the
television channel Ivanishvili owned. These tapes, the authenticity
of most of which the Saakashvili camp did not dispute, exposed as
false the government's claim to be moving Georgia into modernity. And
that is how Ivanishvili's triumphant supporters came to be waving the
old-fashioned (1990s) Georgian flags in Freedom Square on October 1,
while Ivanishvili's albino son, Bera, whose rap songs have become
popular among party supporters since his father's run, hopped around
on a makeshift stage.
The Saakashvili government had never looked quite so good at home as
it did abroad. In 2005, after the minister of justice and minister of
health flopped in TV debates, government officials stopped explaining
their decisions to the public. In 2006, a young banker named Sandro
Girgvliani, who had insulted some employees of the interior ministry
in a bar, was found dead on the outskirts of Tbilisi the following
morning. After months of protests, observers discovered the government
had obstructed the investigation. The government was way too eager to
raze housing units and beloved landmarks to pay for increasingly vain
development schemes. As Olga Allenova of the Russian paper Kommersant
rightly summed it up: The authorities got carried away with reforms
and forgot about the people.
An assertion heard at all levels of Georgian society was that
Saakashvili's government treated minorities and foreigners better than
it treated natives. The French superstore Carrefour got better terms
when opening a new outlet than did Georgian grocers it added prestige,
after all. The Saakashvili government, derided in some quarters as a
creature of the Bush administration, wound up governing like the Obama
administration, a coalition of new-class elites and special interests.
It mopped up the vote last week in ethnic minority areas, which
supporters attributed to the popularity of its progressivism and
detractors to fraud. Ivanishvili, meanwhile, took huge majorities
among the country's Georgian Orthodox and solid majorities in Tbilisi.
We shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that because Saakashvili was
less democratic than he looked, Ivanishvili is more democratic. On
the day after the election, before he had even been named prime
minister, Ivanishvili called on Saakashvili to resign his post as
president, a demand he later retracted. An op-ed in the New York Times
recently chalked up Ivanishvili's saber-rattling to his bad political
instincts. But Ivanishvili made billions of dollars in Russia in the
1990s, a time when it required almost perfect political instincts to
keep from getting whacked. We should assume Ivanishvili's instincts
are excellent until they're proven -otherwise. That is possibly why
he has said he will not disturb Saakashvili's goal of seeing Georgia
in the EU and NATO, although his unwillingness to rule out a strategic
partnership with Russia makes this an impossibility.
No matter how loudly he proclaimed his vision, Saakashvili had a
weak hand from the get-go. There was always something utopian about
assuming Georgia could be wrenched out of the Russian orbit. Rather
like Armenia, it is a lonely Christian country surrounded by Muslim
ones in what is one of the most perennially violent parts of the
world. Its great trump is that it has been closely allied with a
massive Christian country to the north, which has traditionally been
the biggest and most intimidating force in the region. Even in the
wake of the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, there is pretty much zero
anti-Russian feeling in Georgia. Most Georgians want more normal
relations with Russia, which is the natural market for their wine,
walnuts, canned goods, textiles, stone, and migrant labor. Ivanishvili
says he hopes to open trade relations in time to sell part of this
year's harvest.
And what did Saakashvili have to offer in return? First, an opening
to NATO, an organization that demonstrated unambiguously in 2008 that
it would not come to Georgia's aid if Russia chose to challenge it.
Western indifference to Georgia's defense needs has deepened further
in the Obama years. And, second, an opening to the EU, which since
2008 has looked more and more like a machine for dragging all member
countries into debt and bankruptcy. A proud people might decline
to sell its future to a billionaire if it has options. Clearly,
Georgians were not satisfied that they did.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
From: A. Papazian