The Last of the New Berlins

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“The people pressing around the car cannot be counted, there are too many of them; they cannot be known, there are too many of them; they cannot be predicted, they have volition.”
Donald Barthelme, Concerning the Bodyguard, first published
in The New Yorker on October 8, 1978

I have spent my life searching for “the New Berlin”. 

Weimar Berlin, the Berlin before New Berlins such as Barcelona, Berlin (again), Istanbul or Belgrade, has retained its doomed allure nearly a century after the end of German democracy. Modest places, places that are stable, organized, safe, rarely call themselves this. An atmosphere of instability, decay, is implied, even a part of the appeal. So is the tumult. These places drew intellectuals and eccentrics, self-selected for the self-important. Young people, disproportionately men, escaped the advent of adult responsibility through antics informed alternatingly by Patrick Leigh Fermor and Christopher Isherwood or the 2004 American sex comedy “EuroTrip”. These weren’t mutually exclusive.

This desire first took me to Istanbul. As a student at Boğaziçi University, the best private university in Turkey, I saw the last days of “Cool Istanbul” before the 2013 Gezi Park protests crashed the party. In 2010, we would talk about the Nationalist and Islamist AKP’s shift towards autocracy as an abstract possibility. This was the early Obama era, and our faith in the triumph of Turkish Liberalism remained unshaken by rumors of Ergenekon, the Gülen movement, and the machinations of the AKP. We threw around “the New Berlin” and used the term “Weimar Turkey” even before Claire Berlinski’s masterful Weimar Istanbul was published. During the protests, the closest I came to Turkish politics was talking to a girl while she fled incoming teargas by taking refuge in a hotel near Istanbul’s central Taksim Square. The shame that I was outside Turkey at this time has stayed with me my entire life, a feeling compounded by the fact that during the critical period I was cosplaying as a background character on HBO’s “Girls”.

Next, this impulse took me to Belgrade. I was 27, unemployed, and spent my time traveling the Western Balkans, with the Serbian capital as a base. Happy, well adjusted, financially solvent young people don’t live for prolonged periods in Balkan hostels. I stayed out of local politics, and the consolidation of a kleptocratic right-wing populist regime under Vučić and the ruling SNS party barely concerned me. I drank. I did drugs on boats. A month on mountainous, fractious Crete had revived my interest in the Caucasus, so I asked a professor who had helped me on my undergraduate thesis for advice. I was more interested in Armenia and the North Caucasus, but his advice to a lost young American was put simply: “Go to Georgia, it’s the one everyone likes.”

That my impulse for the “New Berlin” took me to Ozurgeti, a small town in western Georgia, was an irony obvious to me even at the time. I was a volunteer in “Teach and Learn with Georgia”, a Georgian teaching program modeled on the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme, JET, that brought naive young English-language speakers to obscure quarters of an obscure region. Teach and Learn, TLG, was one of the signature initiatives of the then-recently deposed government of Mikheil (Misha) Saakashvili and the liberal nationalist United National Movement, UNM.

Many of us stayed in Tbilisi afterwards, and we built relationships, learned languages, and started our careers in earnest. Ozurgeti was not Berlin, but Tbilisi seemed like it could be. The city had new clubs such as Bassiani and Khidi, new cultural venues such as the hipster compound Fabrika, populated both by tourists and young Georgians wearing the all-black outfits that became mandatory sometime before the collapse of the USSR. There were beautiful, decaying mansions in the heart of the old city, Sololaki, built for merchants, often ethnic Armenians, and officials in the dying days of the Russian Empire. Tbilisi is an easy city to fall in love with, and I did. 

The Velvet Revolution 

When the protests in Yerevan started in 2018, I was an intern at a Caucasus media organization, having only started a few months before Armenia’s Revolution changed the region. I was quiet and shy, still embarrassed by the enthusiasm of my interest in the region, and had limited experience in an office environment. Most of the work I did was editing, much of it related to either Circassian or Armenian issues. When I was 15, my icon was Kurt Severing, a left-wing journalist in Weimar Germany in Jason Lutes’ comic series “Berlin”, and my first, tepid forays in the field felt like the fulfillment of a half-abandoned adolescent fantasy.

On March 31, 2018, Armenia’s future Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan began a protest march toward Yerevan, setting off a series of events that would ultimately end in a revolution. Many of us left for Armenia in early April. When everyone else from the office went home to Tbilisi, I stayed behind. I had some connections in Armenian journalism, and was obsessive enough to pay for my own food and hostel while working for free. At some moments, we were scared that the Sargsyan government was gearing up for earnest, major repressions. Members of the opposition Way Out alliance, including the now-ruling Civil Contract, were arrested, and the co-founder of this magazine was hit by a tear-gas canister. But the old regime fell, and when it did it felt vestigial. An opposition that had withstood both the violent aftermath of the 2008 election and the 2016 Electric Yerevan protests was organized and ready to take on Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan. The country was ready to move past the politics of the conservative and authoritarian Republican Party.

Things got bad enough that the government seemed not merely antiquated, but retro. Officials wore Soviet-inspired uniforms. The party’s insignia seemed, to my eyes, inspired by 80s dystopian science fiction settings such as BattleTech, a bleak aesthetic of swords, eagles, and strong colors. It was difficult to speak of political polarization because so few people, outside the liberal opposition or the foreign-born nationalists, seemed mobilized around or even enthused about politics. The victory in the first Nagorno-Karabakh War was the defining event in Post-Soviet Armenian history, and the government’s legitimacy rested on the memory of the war. By 2018, this was far enough in the past that an entire generation was entering political life for whom the war was remembered only as shortages and power outages, or the childhood absence of fathers and uncles, and the youngest protestors couldn’t even remember that. The appeal of victory, the power of the Karabakh Clique, was fading. The center could not hold. It didn’t.

Long protests snaked around the city. There were thousands of people on seemingly every street, from every background, wearing every type of clothing, in every neighborhood, every possible social strata, as diverse as homogenous Armenia could be. Cheburashkas burned everywhere in effigy; the beloved character, a Warsaw Pact Mickey Mouse, was said to resemble Prime Minister Sargsyan and was burned in effigy. I walked past areas of Yerevan I knew I’d never see again, where every corner seemed ready to burst with tens of thousands of people. One day an old man at a car repair shop turned to me and said “Eto revolutsija, da?  Revolutsija!” (“It’s a revolution, yes? A revolution!”), on the accidentally correct assumption that anyone tall and blonde enough could speak Russian. 

When Sargsyan resigned, I was in the Pizza di Roma on Abovyan Street. Bottles of champagne appeared out of nowhere, their contents erupting freely, spilling over tables, chairs, people. At the moment, all I could think of was a short story by the American postmodern author Donald Barthelme, “Concerning the Bodyguard”. 

Set in a fictionalized Barcelona, the story was likely inspired by the assassination of Franco’s successor, Luis Carrero Blanco, during the political uncertainty after Franco’s death. The story’s titular bodyguard seems more concerned with seeing the 1977 Italian sexploitation film “Emmanuelle” in Paris than the safety of his principal, with whom he rides in a convoy of luxury cars. He is intermittently ignorant of or hostile to the people on the street, an undifferentiated and hostile mass of “young, fat, loud communists” and “young men with dark beards staring at the Mercedes.” The nameless protagonist lives his life unaware of the preparations that are already underway.

“In every part of the country, large cities and small towns, bottles of champagne have been iced, put away, reserved for a celebration, reserved for a special day. Is the bodyguard aware of this?”

The story ends the morning after a “special day”.

“Is it the case that, on a certain morning, the garbage cans of the city, the garbage cans of the entire country, are overflowing with empty champagne bottles?”

Looking back at my photos of the Revolution, I wonder how many young men in the vast thousands died in Nagorno-Karabakh. But on that day, after the revolution, there were only empty bottles of champagne.    

The Odd Man in the Odd Mansion

Georgia is supposed to be different from Armenia. Tbilisi is supposed to be Europe. You walk into a cafe, and it’s supposed to feel like Paris. You walk into a club, and it’s supposed to feel like Berlin. If you visit a vineyard in Kakheti, it’s supposed to feel like Tuscany. When you talk to a Georgian political activist, their reference points are Hungary, Poland and Ukraine, not neighboring countries like Armenia, Turkey, or Azerbaijan. Georgia’s cultural elite stressed the country’s relationship with Europe even when that relationship wasn’t a practical one, and this imagined relationship, through schismogenesis, served to differentiate Georgians from their neighbors. The country is a natural and inevitable member of the EU, while Turkey and Azerbaijan aren’t; if Armenia is included in this vision of the region, it is only as a recent benevolence. When democracy began faltering in Tbilisi, the comparison points were Trump, Putin and Orban, and not figures closer to home like Aliyev and Erdoğan. Even the decline of democracy in Georgia is somehow only explained through the country’s relationship to Europe.

In the center of Tbilisi, Sololaki, it is easy to see why anyone would immediately feel that Tbilisi is somehow fundamentally European. There are leafy streets and Art Nouveau mansions in states of disrepair, similar to those in Budapest or Barcelona. Above Sololaki, there, straddling a hill near the Narikala fortress which overlooks the city, is a mansion that stands out. The concrete grays and electric blues of the structure make it look like the residence of a villainous megalomaniac in a 90s action film, all the more outlandish set against the ornate stonework and modest bricks of Sololaki. This one mansion was designed by Shin Takamatsu in a style reminiscent of his high-tech and postmodern work in Japan, and is every inch a product of the late twentieth century. This misplaced fragment of Tokyo at the top of Tbilisi belongs to Bidzina Ivanishvili, the odd man who runs Georgia.

When I discuss Bidzina with those unfamiliar with Georgian politics, I usually have to stop mid-sentence to assure the listener that I am serious. 

“He has a pet penguin; maybe multiple, I’m not sure….I don’t think I know why. I’ve heard theories.”  

“He imports trees, I’ve heard he believes they have….healing powers?”  

“Two of his sons are Albino, and one of them is a rapper – I, well, I hear that one is in Brazil now – Bera, I think – he’s managing the family interests there…because he’s very physically fit he looks a bit like Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Dune.”

“The rapper-son once posted an Instagram reel where he’s shirtless and walking next to a white horse and they both turn into… anime beings? I’m not sure if it’s something specific, I’m too old to know that kind of anime.” 

The rumors grow more surreal from here, but whatever the truth of them, Bidzina’s life started modestly.

Born to real poverty in the Imereti region of western Georgia, Ivanishvili found his way into the emerging Perestroika-era Soviet private sector. He made millions which, after the collapse of the USSR, quickly became billions. Georgia had no such opportunities; immediately after independence, the country had been run by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a late Soviet nationalist dissident turned national savior in the mold of Azerbaijan’s Abulfaz Elchibey or Croatia’s Franjo Tuđman. As in Azerbaijan, the chaos, messianism, unrealistic policies, and violence of Gamsakhurdia’s nationalist rule led to the restoration of elements of the old Soviet elite, here under former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who was in turn overthrown by Saakashvili in 2004, an event called the Rose Revolution. Mikheil Saakashvili, the Neoliberal Garibaldi, looked on the remnants of the old intelligentsia with scorn, leaving an opening. The beginning of Bidzina’s influence in Georgia is murky, but he cultivated patron-client relations with the remnants of the beleaguered Soviet cultural elite and post-2004 politicians.  

While he initially had friendly relations with Saakashvili and his UNM party, Bidzina broke with them in 2008 after defeat in the Russian-Georgian war, then subsequently entered politics in 2011 as Georgia descended into near-chaos. Saakashvili’s personal instability and the UNM’s weak hold on power led to increasingly desperate measures. The police force became synonymous with torture and the violent repression of protest, the UNM itself with fanaticism and unrealistic politics as the party hardened into a cult of personality around Misha.  

Georgian Dream, the party that now rules the country, was founded in 2012, reportedly named for a lyric in one of Bera Ivanishvili’s rap songs. It took power as the center of a coalition (unhelpfully also named Georgian Dream) of both liberal but anti-UNM elements and conservatives. All of this was headed by Ivanishvili, and united around a platform of simultaneous detente with Russia and integration with Europe, increased social spending, and a more restrained police force. Ivanishvili served as Prime Minister for a brief period between 2012 and 2013, but this brief period of formal power pales in comparison to his informal role in the country; he served as Chairman of Georgian Dream, then the title of Honorary Chairman was invented for him.  

Initially, much of the actual work of governing was done by liberals who had defected from the UNM, but the social conservatism and patrimonialism that have come to the fore in the last five years were always present. This shift is similar to the trajectory of Turkey’s AKP and Hungary’s Fidesz, but comparisons with Erdoğan and Orban undersell how odd the Georgian Dream government is, and how strange the political atmosphere here in Tbilisi has become.  

Prime Minister after Prime Minister is replaced, as Bidzina fears that talented figures such as Gakharia or connected ones such as Garibashvili could form their own political base that could threaten the power of the Odd Man in the Odd Mansion. The current Prime Minister, Kobakhidze, whose hyperfixation is “doing whatever Bidzina wants,” an incongruity in a country famous for producing an exportable surplus of talented, charismatic politicians. Major development projects are drawn up and then abandoned or given to different players, seemingly on a whim. The government and allied media seem to rush, at every opportunity, towards rhetoric premised on the belief that the threat the opposition poses to Georgia is near-cosmic. The entire opposition is the “collective UNM,” and those who wish to maintain Georgia’s orientation towards NATO and the EU are the “Global Party of War”, which may or may not be headed by the Freemasons and certainly attempted the assassinations of Trump and the Slovak Prime Minister Fico. It’s worse than in Turkey, a much larger country with a longer history of both real conspiracy and conspiracy theory, and a more recent history of political violence.  

Before 2019, it was easy for Europe-oriented democrats to be a soft supporter of Georgian Dream. Common sense dictated Georgia’s detente with Russia and a more restrained foreign policy. Bidzina was eccentric, but this seemed secondary to peace and development. He had obvious talents. Relations with Russia and Europe seemed to improve simultaneously. That was what seemed to matter.  

The situation used to be genuinely ambiguous, but the last two years have impacted Georgia and Armenia in dramatically different ways. The wartime wave of Russian migrants in Yerevan are now relatively well integrated, economic growth has stabilized the political situation in Armenia amidst major shocks, and the decline of Russian power has left room for Armenia to move towards the West. Conversely, Georgian Dream has moved the country towards a neutral, self-interested position that is open to Russia, Iran and China. A new class of well-connected compradors has become rich by dominating the murky commercial links between wartime Russia and the rest of the world, and the Russian migrants keep to themselves and are not liked. The rule of law is collapsing, replaced by a new patrimonialism and street violence. Both the increased Russian presence and the new compradors are widely resented, especially by the young, who have seen their rents rise, their incomes stagnate, their rights threatened, and the future of their country thrown into question.  

Gradually, my conversations in Georgia began to resemble conversations I had with friends in Turkey. “Is Tbilisi past its prime?” “Do you think most people actually like the government?” “What do you think the future will look like?” “Do you feel safe here?”

“Do you think it’s time to leave?”

Black-clad Zoomers and Polarization

The last decade has seen a profusion of coverage on polarization and cultural and generational conflict in Georgia. In 2016, an attack on the vegan Kiwi Cafe by sausage-wielding nationalists gained international press attention. A spate of protests in 2018 in response to the closure of two clubs were nauseatingly called “the Raveolution.” Images of young protestors are everywhere likely to gain attention, but the specific focus on protestors here seems tied to local idiosyncrasies and Georgian Dream’s tactics. It benefits both the ruling party and the foreign media to portray the protestors as fresh from the floor of Horoom Nights, the queer night at Bassiani, because the international media gets to talk about “Raveolution” and the government is able to portray the youth in a way maximally terrifying to grandmothers in places like Ozurgeti. Young people with the concerns of young people the world over are depicted as rave-obsessed, drug-addled, queer, atheistic, Black-Clad Zoomers.

I have known Georgians the same age as those going out onto the street for much of their lives; I have run into my old TLG students from Ozurgeti several times during protests. Georgians younger than myself have no clear memory of the Soviet Union, let alone a stable one, and only a vague sense of the chaos of the 1990s, but have come of age at a time of increased prosperity and integration with the West. They hate Russia because they were raised around refugees from Abkhazia and South Ossetia and they were children during the 2008 War, all conflicts they blame on Moscow. Contempt for an elite they correctly understand to be working with Russia (even if concerns of direct control are exaggerated) and benefitting from the Ukraine War is at once broadly shared and deeply felt. By contrast, Europe and the specific institution of the EU have come to represent a positive future for younger Georgians.

The anti-EU or NATO politics seen in Hungary, Serbia or Turkey have little purchase here.  Whatever the pretenses of Georgian Europhile intellectuals, a generation of middle class Georgians has now come of age with a practical, daily relationship with Europe. They have a mother working at a hospital in Apulia, a brother who owns a hotel in Crete, they’ve gone to school in Sweden, they’ve done seasonal agricultural labor in Poland or Denmark. The Black-Clad Zoomers know how much higher living standards are in Western and Central Europe, meaning that migration is always a possibility, but also that nations such as Spain and Italy serve as inspirations for what a better Georgia could look like. Mobilizing a large segment of the Georgian population against twentysomethings whose politics can be summed up as “make Georgia as much like Italy as it pretends to be” has required effort on the part of Georgian Dream politicians and aligned media.

What we see in Georgia, often misdiagnosed as polarization, is not an accident of cultural geography, or an organic outgrowth of different class or ethnic interests. It is not even clearly related to differences in policy. Georgian Dream believes it benefits from polarization, from the local culture war, and does everything possible to exacerbate it. The crisis is the government’s doing, and is easily recognizable to anyone familiar with a country warped and bent by the black hole gravity of a right-wing populist regime.   

The logic at work here in Tbilisi is essentially Nixonian; find a silent majority and mobilize their resentment against a minority. A generational conflict works for them, because this is an old country. Homophobia works, because the LGBT community’s activism is hostile to their power—most Georgians are homophobic by Western standards—and a sufficiently intolerant environment will help motivate the queer community to emigrate. Emigration works for them, because the young and restless leave for Europe, and send remittances to their parents, who vote for Georgian Dream. Last year, 250,000 people left Georgia. The Mercedes won’t be stared at by angry young men with dark beards, or even the young, loud, fat communists, if there are no young people in the country left.  

The struggle against the UNM is used as an excuse to attack every independent institution in this country. Ilia and Tbilisi State Universities are under attack by the government because they preach a “Pseudo-Liberal ideology” and their faculty and administration will be replaced with reactionary toadies, like many major cultural institutions in the country. At every step the threat is exaggerated to suit the next draconian measure, be it Anti-LGBT legislation or the Foreign Agent Law designed to target NGOs.

Local NGOs, many of them entirely foreign funded, have been at the forefront of political, economic and cultural developments in the country since before the Rose Revolution, but the last five years has seen growing conflict between the NGOs and Georgian Dream. Bidzina Ivanishvili appears to have grown more paranoid, possibly related to his belief that the CIA or some other shadowy force was behind his personal dispute with the bank Credit Suisse. A law intended to target foreign-funded NGOs, which many believe to be inspired by a similar law passed in Russia in 2012, was proposed last year, only to be rescinded when met with widespread disapproval by the West and days of protest. The law was brought up again in April of this year, and was met with the largest protests in recent Georgian history.               

The Organic Crisis

My apartment is in the old city, near several of the most important government buildings in the country. When Tbilisi erupts in protest, I hear it from my balcony. The chants started in April.

“Monebo!” ”Slaves!”

“Ara rusul k’anons!” “No to the Russian law!”

“Sad mivdivart? Evrop’ashi!” “Where are we headed? To Europe!”

“Rusets ra? Dedis t’q’vna!” “To Russia, what? Fucking her mother!” (This translation is inexact.)

The last one struck me. There’s a functional diglossia to Georgian swearing, where Georgians will use Russian language or even English insults for less intense matters. A Georgian insult is serious; a Georgian insult regarding someone’s mother is dramatic. Even “Sheni deda!” “Your mother!” can start a real fight. And here, on Shota Rustaveli Avenue, the major artery of the city, were thousands of Black-Clad Zoomers shouting sexual insults at an increasingly unhinged police force.

Most of those who followed Georgian politics were confused. There was an election coming in October, and Georgian Dream seemed poised for an easy victory after the country was granted EU candidate status. Suddenly, various European MPs as well as Anthony Blinken himself were criticizing the law, and the EU was “ready to play hardball.” 

There were a variety of attempts at explaining the logic behind this turn. Numerous articles, most prominently a lengthy piece in the left-wing Jacobin, have taken the same line as Bidzina Ivanishvili’s court philosopher, the Postliberal Zaza Shatirishvili: Georgia’s sovereignty and self-determination are threatened by politicized NGOs who push a “Neoliberal” or “Psuedo-Liberal” ideology on the country. Some have gone so far as to claim that the protest movement here represents an attempt at a “Color Revolution,” with the protestors as an uncomprehending core of shock-troops, at once liberal and radical and bohemian, for the establishment of a cosmopolitan society hostile to local culture, inflamed by NGO propaganda.    

The absurdity of these claims is best paraphrased in an interview with a group of Georgian leftists for Tempest; there are simply not enough young urban haute bourgeoisie to flood the streets of Tbilisi, and most of the students are from the “precarious working class.” Besides that, the simple reality of the situation is that it is not only the NGOs that depend on foreign funding; entire regions of the Georgian countryside do, and the Georgian military and government more broadly receive direct funds. Georgians know this. They know that these funds won’t be replaced, and that these areas will be devastated if the EU cuts back programs because of political developments here. They know that the government is effectively abandoning a decades-long attempt at moving towards the EU, mere months after officially gaining candidate status. They know that the entire Georgian Dream elite is attempting to transform the country, abandoning all progress made in the last 25 years in favor of a return of the naked patrimonialism, enfeebled institutions, administrative incoherence and incompetence, and Eurasian orientation of the Shevardnadze era.

This is what Antonio Gramsci would call an “organic crisis.” Gramsci, an Italian-Albanian Marxist, theorized that a specific kind of crisis occurs “because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses.” In such moments the bare edifice of power, the “class nature” of the state become apparent, and those who are not normally actively engaged in politics become players. All political certainties are lost in the maelstrom, entire identities and forms of politics are abandoned or emerge inchoate.   

I saw this on the streets. During the spring protests, tens of thousands of people came out. I did not see Freemasons. I did not see pro-NGO janissaries clamoring over each other for the sacred honor of being the first to die climbing the barricades. I saw new actors in Georgian politics, young people who were mad not only at the government and the police, but at the successful middle class millennials who were supposed to be the vanguard of liberalism in this country but seemed more concerned with their tacky Saburtalo apartments and Turkish hair plugs than the protests. There was public anger at all of the opposition political parties because they weren’t doing enough. Defenders of the government, let alone members of it, became not only disliked, but publicly despised.  

Concerning the Bodyguard

For the third time in 40 years, the fate of Georgia lies in the hands of an erratic and hated coterie which has, contrary to all evidence, convinced themselves that their faltering and chaotic rule, their unrealistic and unwise policies, are the only route to national salvation. Zviad brought this country chaos, Misha brought this country chaos, and this new generation of leadership is in the process of doing the same thing. Georgian Dream’s response to the protests and their rhetoric during the subsequent election campaign has been tantamount to gaslighting, simultaneously insisting that an opposition victory would lead to war with Russia and that the country’s authoritarian turn is nothing of the sort. Prime Minister Kobakhidze is lying when he suggests that the Foreign Agent Law has brought Georgia “closer to the EU,” an obvious deceit all the more surreal for the certainty and consistency with which it is repeated. The resumption of the protests after the election are, as of this writing, near-inevitable.  

The protests here have gone on and off for years, in patterns recognizable to long-time residents. The streets of central Tbilisi resemble more the narrow, winding illogic of old Istanbul than the clean European order of Tamanian’s Yerevan. I text or call my young friends at the protests, and they find themselves in random alleyways with the police (dividing and limiting protest by riot police forming defensive lines) kettling them in pockets near the Parliament or near the Mtkvari River. Armored riot police, called “robocops,” would form lines while the plainclothes boys in the Ministry of the Interior’s Department of Special Tasks target individual protestors for special attention. This exact scenario happened to Guram Adamia, who was picked up, thrown in a van, and beaten by officers who called him “Amerik’is shniri,” “American lapdog”, “p’idarast’i,” a homophobic slur, or “nark’omani,” “drug addict.”  

The Ministry of the Interior has fared no better than any other institution in the country during the last two years. Reactionary radicalization, the spread of conspiracy theories and an increased comfort with the extrajudicial usage of force against political enemies have become routine. The position at the MOI was taken over by Bidzina Ivanishvili’s former bodyguard, Vakhtang Gomerlauri, together with his ally Zviad “Khareba” Kharazishvili, another former bodyguard. According to an article by Will Neal, the two men have known each other for decades, starting out when they met selling fuel part-time. Both have dark reputations, but Khareba is likely the standout figure of the last nine months, after he told a reporter for TV Pirveli: “I don’t beat young people, I beat scoundrels… We have a list, I’ll show it to you. Get out, don’t film.”  

Why would Khareba say this? The man’s entire life has been violence or the threat of violence, and now he has no need of pretense. Kharazishvili upped the greasy pole of post-Soviet security work, from selling gasoline to making ends meet with the future Ministry of the Interior all the way to boasting of extrajudicial beatings to the press. Like Barthelme’s bodyguard, he derives meaning in life from his relationship with his primary, and the trappings of wealth and power that come from it. He’s proud of himself, his work, his superiority over everyone else, and newfound ability to talk about it openly.

A feeling of openness has been one of the few positive developments in Georgia since the end of the spring protests. Now that Georgian Dream is publicly broadcasting saying that they intend to ban the opposition parties, it has become more difficult for the defenders of the government, both here and abroad, to continue to claim that there is no danger of authoritarianism. Anatol Lieven defended the government in “Responsible Statecraft”, an argument more difficult to make now that Bidzina Ivanishvili has gone so far down the right-wing populist hole that he went on national television and ranted about the horrors of Barcelona Pride and “men’s milk,” a phrase which, I am reliably informed, does not make more sense in Georgian than it does in English.  

When describing the American hysteria about Vietnam PoWs, the historian Richard Slotkin referred to a shared “lunatic semiology” in which “sign and referent have scarcely any proportionate relation at all.” The non-existent bridge between sign and referent is at work at every level of Georgian Dream’s electoral messaging.

“Gaining EU Candidate status is a major accomplishment of our government, and we use the European Union flag in much of our campaign art. Also, Europe is the land of sin, sodomy, and man-milk.”

“Georgia is a confident nation, able to work with partners, and Bidzina Ivanishvili is not a vengeful, conspiracy-minded, impenetrably eccentric penguin-enthusiast who dominates every aspect of political and economic life in this country. Also, have you considered that it is a plot by the Freemasons and the CIA that Bidzina Ivanishvili cannot access his Credit Suisse account?”

I’m not sure how many people believe these baroque absurdities, but the unpleasant reality of the situation is that those whose future depends on continued Georgian Dream power have every incentive to convince themselves of them. This is true entirely independent of Russian influence; it is a sad irony that the present situation, the work of the same Georgian generation that proved crucial in ending Soviet power, has begun to resemble a reimagined late Soviet Georgia. An alternatingly hated or ignored elite in Tbilisi has wedded itself to paranoid, incoherent, obscurantist beliefs. Those who depend on government largess, perhaps as bureaucrats or schoolteachers in places like Ozurgeti, mouth stale nostrums whenever it is expected of them and vote in the thousands for a system that leaves them in poverty. Outside of the major cities, Georgia is now nearly a one-party state, a form of revenant Brezhnevism. If the government survives this crisis, it will be because of the work of men like Gomelauri and Khareba, recognizable creatures of the chaos of the 1990s, who are heirs both to Georgia’s mkhedrioni (90s paramilitary units), as well as the Afghan veterans in Russia, permanent denizens of crumbling Soviet gymnasia, who were hired for violence and security work by Russian oligarchs such as Bidzina Ivanishvili.    

What hope there is comes from the fact that this right-wing populist self-coup is, bluntly, slipshod. Nixon came up through the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy, and both shaped and reflected a broadly shared right-wing anticommunism that transformed America. Erdoğan drew on a religious-nationalist fusionism that tied back to Adnan Menderes and Necmettin Erbakan. The Georgian Dream elite are still new to this right-wing conspiracism, and the countryside’s support of the party does not reflect grassroots enthusiasm for the ideology; the lunatic semiology is still a novelty, and in few places is it deeply felt. Bidzina Ivanishvili’s paranoia has already progressed to the point where he is unable to allow for genuine talent in his government. Even Khareba appears to have an enthusiasm and appetite for violence but his practical skills remains in question; he’s perfectly fine “beating scoundrels” but during his time at the Georgian State Security Service, SUSI, his team bungled a “simple sting operation” on a group of Chechen Islamists in the Tbilisi neighborhood of Isani, resulting in a 20-hour siege and the direct involvement of a different unit of US-trained special forces.    

Berlin

It was the night of May 13, and I had two different groups of friends visiting Tbilisi. Two women, one a writer and one a costume designer, were visiting together, and a younger man, a Circassian raised in Istanbul, was in town. My young friend was raised in Istanbul, although as the grandson of a famous Turkish Circassian Nationalist who advocated for a return to their North Caucasus homeland, he was born in the Russian Federation, and is a citizen of both countries. We discussed at length the latest development in Turkish politics; municipal elections, only a few months prior, had dealt the ruling AKP the greatest blow the party had received in 20 years. When the election results began coming in, the only response I was able to coax from him was “we’re already drunk as fuck.”

A large group of Black-clad Zoomers was camping outside the Parliament on Rustaveli, intending to stay overnight to protest the final vote of the Foreign Agents Bill. I tried to convince my three friends to spend most of their time at the protest, but it was everyone’s final night and they insisted on a traditional Georgian meal. Georgia is beautiful, Tbilisi is beautiful, and even the clubs, cafes and restaurants are beautiful, and we enjoyed ourselves. At a long table in a basement restaurant in Sololaki, we fell into the pattern of Caucasian toast-giving, led by the owner. I did my time as tamada, toast-master, and was uncertain what to do with my intense emotional response. I felt a profound sense of acceptance by artists and intellectuals whose opinions and work I valued, but something terrible gnawed at me. 

I wanted this. I’d wanted all of this, my entire life. Not just the recognition or acceptance, but the drama, the tumult.  

When I was 15 years old, I would, nearly every month, check the Comix Revolution in Evanston, Illinois for new issues of Jason Lutes’ “Berlin”. Kurt Severing, a melancholic mid-30s bohemian writer in a collapsing democracy, was my icon. Even the surrealism of the politics of the situation was something I knew I was interested in from a young age—I was 17 when I read Gary Shteyngart’s “Absurdistan”, a postmodern satire about an over privileged, awkward, American-educated man in an amalgamation of Georgia and Azerbaijan. I had everything I’d wanted when I was a teenager.  

Was this what Isherwood felt? Was I now a Shteyngart character? Was I a character in Whit Stillman’s “Barcelona”? Was this always what I wanted? Why did I end up in all of these cities compared to Berlin? Was I smart enough, brave enough, to live up to my adolescent ideal of a fictionalized German journalist? If this protest was similar to Gezi, in Istanbul, would I find myself talking with friends fleeing teargas while I did my best to ignore the situation, a continent away? Was this what the entire world was, now that Trump might return and Bidzina Ivanishvili will likely retain power in some fashion? If every city was Berlin, was there no Berlin?      

I realized that the time when Tbilisi could plausibly claim to be “the New Berlin” was coming to an end. Maybe it never truly happened, or was about to happen, but never quite arrived in the same way that Belgrade or Istanbul did. We were never on the cover of “Newsweek”, and our lives as politically engaged expats, writers and journalists in Tbilisi, were likely coming to an end. Maybe for everyone else there would be New Berlins, but I was done. What mattered to me at that moment was that there were people I loved in the city I called home who were protesting in front of the Parliament. My regrets must not be those of omission, and I would not spend another decade burdened by this guilt.         

When my Circassian friend joined me in front of Parliament, I looked at the crowd and asked “it’s like Gezi, isn’t it?” He nodded, solemnly. He was an adolescent during the Gezi protests, and talked of them often, as anyone who was in Istanbul at the time does. He knew that there were long, difficult years after Gezi, and that the AKP had used paranoid lies and conspiracies about the young activists, the Turkish Black-clad Zoomers, to fuel the flames of their own culture war. If the protests failed, I saw Georgians sharing the same fate as my friends from Turkey, thousands entering the diaspora, living lives, like mine, in exile. Brothers away from sisters, sisters from brothers, children absent from the lives of their parents and the deaths of their grandparents.

As of this writing, I do not know what is going to happen after the elections on October 26. What I do know is that one day, on a certain morning, the garbage cans of Tbilisi, of Istanbul, the garbage cans of all of Georgia and Turkey, will overflow with empty champagne bottles.  

*Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Boğaziçi University as a private university in Turkey. It has now been corrected to reflect that it is a public university.

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