On the one-hundred-year anniversary of the uprising in Georgia against Soviet annexation, the struggle for independence from Russian rule remains the chief force driving the popular mobilization that has been growing over the past several months. Yet today’s movement points to a horizon beyond the choice between Europe and Russia, two of the imperial powers contending for influence in the region. It expresses a growing social anger at both the local authoritarian regime and the grip of foreign economic powers upon the Caucasus in general.

Contrary to the dominant media discourse, this popular mobilization is not simply a demand for Georgia to be integrated into the European Union. From a distance, it may seem reminiscent of the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine, but to grasp the deep tumult that this particular struggle represents, we need to look closer.

This article was prepared by a Georgian anti-authoritarian in exile in communication with local collectives in Tbilisi, Kutaisi, and Zugdidi. The photos are courtesy of მაუწყებელი / Mautskebeli. Georgians themselves refer to the country by the name Sakartvelo.

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Introduction

In order to understand what is taking place in the streets of Georgia without falling into nostalgia or insurrectionary romanticism, we need to listen to the expression of social anger. This article is aimed at readers in the West, particularly in Western Europe, where many people are trapped in a reductive campism, which presents the movement in Georgia—as well as other struggles in the post-Soviet context, such as in Ukraine or Chechnya—as simply aligned with the interests of the Euro-Atlantic bloc, omitting the geopolitical stakes vis-à-vis Russian imperialism and internal authoritarian policies.

Others looking on from a distance are swept up in a confused exhilaration. The sudden burst of media attention—on a scale we apparently did not deserve even during the 2008 war—tells only part of the story, focusing on the insurrectionary aesthetic of gold stars and European flags waved bravely in the face of water cannon jets.

To attract the attention of the West, you need either tragedy or spectacle. We’ve experienced plenty of tragedy throughout the last few decades. But the recent history of the post-Soviet territories remains a gloomy stain in the backdrop of wars and conflicts, not close enough to really grip the media consumer, not far enough away to inspire guilt.

In our country, the spectacular is more in the mountains than in the street. This time, however, the images of protesters with fireworks, the scenes of direct confrontation with the police, faces covered in blood, have had an effect, both on the corporate media and on the insurrectionists.

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The French news network BFMTV reports on the riots live from Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi, while the Georgian Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, employs a discourse that we had already heard from the same channel during the Yellow Vest movement in France, speaking of “violent rioters” and “assailants of the forces of law and order.” European politicians are expressing shock at the police violence and denouncing the disproportionate use of the repressive apparatus, while Georgia’s ruling party, “Georgian Dream,” broadcasts scenes of police charges and raids on demonstrations in Europe in its own anti-Western propaganda.

So why all the attention now? What geopolitical and economic stakes underpin these events? We see pro-Western and pro-Russian forces, a local authoritarian regime rubbing shoulders with BRICS [the transnational alliance involving Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa] and the Euro-Atlantic far right, neoliberal progressivism employing murderous methods. But what is the Georgian population’s own struggle, what are the reasons for their anger at the government and its increasingly authoritarian policies?

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For a deeper understanding than can be gleaned from the images that reach Western Europe, we need to situate the events in their immediate local context, and at the same time, frame them in the post-Soviet period in general.

A National Protest Movement in the Context of Local Authoritarianism

Although protesters have been taking to the streets all night long for the past week and are gaining momentum in several cities, they are part of a social movement that began last spring against the “foreign agent” law.

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Against this backdrop, the parliamentary elections were clearly rigged to keep the ruling party in power: Georgian Dream, led by the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Even before the Prime Minister’s declaration suspending discussions about integrating Georgia into the European Union until 2028, people were organizing demonstrations to contest the election results and call for new elections. Police violently dispersed those demonstrations, brutally attacking and arresting people; demonstrators faced ununiformed assailants alongside the police, as well as imprisonment and other forms of legal repression. Yet strikes, resignations from the state bureaucracy, and student mobilizations in regional schools have only gained momentum, going beyond the issue of the election. People have occupied the Georgian Public Broadcaster, First Channel. Already-existing collectives are participating in these protests, including residents of peripheral regions who were already resisting environmentally destructive projects, student movements fighting for access to housing, queer and feminist collectives, and people mobilizing against evictions.

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Today, the threat of authoritarianism hangs over everyone, heralding the establishment of a state of emergency and a curfew to stifle the possibility of protest, as well as the reform of the state bureaucracy—a maneuver intended to inflict mass layoffs of opponents and anyone deemed critical of the regime.

At the same time, police repression is intensifying: hundreds of people have been arrested, including minors and young adults; police have sent people many people to the hospital, leaving one young man in intensive care, while carrying out mass searches and beating and humiliating people in the streets. Officers in the riot police who seek to resign are themselves repressed by their colleagues, as revealed by an officer who left the country. For several nights, it has been the “zonderebi,” the “titushkebi”—the armed plainclothes “strongmen” employed for the “dirty work”—who have been prowling the streets to brutalize demonstrators and journalists. The government has also announced a reform of the police, facilitating access to services without going through competitive examinations, in order to speed the recruitment of new personnel in order to achieve the capacity to stifle a movement that is now taking on national proportions.

If the Georgian Dream party came to power in 2012 by opposing the neoliberal government of Mikheil Saakashvili and its bloody police state, it has since come to represent the same police system. It uses police and judicial violence in a tripartite form: French-style street repression (anti-riot weapons, kettling, beatings, and the like), Russian-style judicial repression (arrests and prison sentences for activists and opponents), and mafia violence (beatings by the “thugs,” violence targeting people at their homes, threats to relatives and family members) reminiscent of the methods of the regime of Mikheil Saakashvili, who left office in 2013.

Images of people wounded during the demonstrations.

The generalized rage against the “Kotsi” and the “Natsi”—derogatory terms designating respectively the party in power and the opposition, the United National Movement (UNM), as well as their allies—is evident in the tirade of insults launched against both camps during the rallies. There is too much anger for people to use refined rhetoric; the insults fly in outbursts on television and during public speeches. For the same reason, the politicians of the UNM are driven out by demonstrators, some of whom suffered under their regime before Georgian Dream came to power. “The resistance to the police regime that allowed this government to take power will also mark its end,” activists declare during their speeches, particularly during the rallies organized for the release of all detainees.

This rejection of both parties reflects a profound defiance of the authorities and a refusal to submit to the caricatured dualisms that they promote: the Western civilizational project versus the Russian war project, progressivism versus obscurantism, subservience to Western hegemony versus subservience to territorial imperialism, ultra-liberal nationalism versus ultra-conservative nationalism. The point where these dualisms converge is also their breaking point: unbridled policing, policies that make it impossible to live, exploitation of natural resources as part of the global imperial market, the impoverishment of the population in exchange for economic and geostrategic alliances with foreign powers.

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To delegitimize the movement, the government uses rhetoric to revive the divisions associated with “polarization,” putting UNM politicians in the spotlight. The government presents itself as the guarantor of national sovereignty in the face of the threat of war from the north and the danger of a coup d’état by Western forces, constantly manipulating the example of Ukraine to sow fear. They compare the current movement to the Maidan uprising in order to argue that it is not self-managed but controlled by partisans of the Maidan and the UNM, insisting that the Ukrainian revolution led to hundreds of deaths and then, to war.

This anti-Ukrainian rhetoric minimizes both the social dimension and the form of agency specific to the Maidan movement, which cannot be reduced to neo-Nazi forces alone. It is consistent with the anti-war rhetoric deployed throughout the electoral campaign. The way that the government displayed images of the wars as election advertising proves that, behind the illusion of maintaining peace, we find the most despicable methods of maintaining power. They are exploiting the traumas of our collective memory, which remain raw—not only from the war that occurred in 2008, but also from the tumultuous years of the 1990s, which saw an independence movement accompanied by a putsch, a civil war, and inter-ethnic conflicts.

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The “Foreign Agent” Law

The current use of police brutality and legal repression was facilitated by new legislation passed last spring, which also serves as the foundation for ideological rhetoric based on anti-Western authoritarianism.

The law regarding “transparency of the influence of foreign forces” reintroduces a project that was dropped a year and a half ago after mass protests. The law was adopted last spring, a year later, after two months of demonstrations and the circumvention of a presidential veto.

Modeled on a Russian original, this law requires any nonprofit organization receiving 20% of its annual income from foreign sources—whether those are grants or individual funding—to register as an “entity representing the interests of a foreign force.” In a local economy marked by the absence of public subsidies and alternative sources of income, contrary to the official rhetoric, this law does not endanger the large NGOs as much as small associations, unions, and independent media, as well as local and self-managed collectives.

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze openly stated that this law is primarily aimed at silencing the centers of resistance and struggle during his briefing on December 3: “We will build the Namakhvani Dam.”¹ The implication was that with this law in place, nothing will prevent the implementation of hydroelectric mega-projects, considered the pinnacle of economic development. Kobakhidze was referring to the Rioni Valley movement, which is now labeled pro-Western, despite being labeled pro-Russian three years ago. This movement, a self-managed environmental struggle led by locals which managed to force a Turkish company to back down from building a mega-hydroelectric dam, has become one of the main targets in the government’s rhetoric; they frame it as a threat to so-called energy sovereignty and independence. In response to the prime minister’s statement, residents of the valley held a banner at a rally in Tbilisi: “The Namakhvani Dam will not be built.”

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In addition to the Rioni Valley movement, many local resistance movements are fighting against the social and environmental injustices caused by large-scale economic projects, including the exploitation and extraction of natural resources.

In Mingrelia, in western Georgia, residents of the village of Balda are mobilizing to prevent the beginning of construction work on an ecotourism development project involving the privatization of the river, land, and living spaces, as well as significant damage to mountain slopes.

In Shukruti, residents are fighting against the exploitation of the soil for manganese extraction by the Georgian Manganese company, a British holding company of Stemcor. Due to the explosions, the village is sinking into the ground, taking the houses of its inhabitants with it. The usual vigils occupying the construction site were moved this autumn to the Parliament in Tbilisi, with more radical forms of protest: hunger strikes and lips sewn shut.

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Energy Geopolitics

But behind these small popular struggles are the stakes of the big economic players: China, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran and, of course, the European Union. Their power struggles are translated into inter-imperialist alliances, conflicts, and wars in which energy is a weapon par excellence.

The war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia have strengthened Georgia’s geostrategic position within economic infrastructure projects like the gas and oil corridor, hydroelectric resources, and maritime and land transit routes. The law on foreign agents presents itself as a guarantor of the realization of such projects. At the same time, the government has adopted the offshore law, the anti-LGBT law, and amendments to the law on pensions, as well as signing energy and economic memoranda with Turkey and China.

All of this seems to be part of a strategy of rapprochement with BRICS, particularly with China and Azerbaijan, to strengthen trade by expanding its role as a transit corridor. Georgia plays a strategic role in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s initiative to create a “new silk road” by integrating the China-Central Asia-West Asia economic corridor. Georgia’s involvement is based on two key projects: the construction of a new port in Anaklia, which is intended to become a major hub, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway line, intended to strengthen logistical connections between Asia and Europe.

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This strategic position enables the Georgian government to exert pressure on the European Union, in particular because of its involvement in the colossal project to build an extensive undersea electricity cable, which would transport electricity supplied by Azerbaijan to the European Union, passing through the Black Sea in Georgia. A significant amount of energy transit already takes place through pipelines crossing Georgia, including the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) oil pipeline and the SCP (South Caucasus Pipeline) gas pipeline, which connect the Caspian Sea to Turkey via Georgian territory.²

Considering these geostrategic alliances for the conquest of resources, we can see that the simplistic division of the world into two major blocs—on one side, the Euro-Atlantic bloc and on the other, Russia—no longer makes sense. Now, we must understand the geopolitical chessboard as a multipolar space. Similarly, geopolitically speaking, the Georgian Dream party allies itself as much with the governments of the Euro-Atlantic extreme right (Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán) as with regional powers on the basis of a populist, sovereignist, and conservative discourse. Economically speaking—in terms of its rapacious extraction policies and intent to dispossess and impoverish populations—it is fully in line with the globalized capitalist market alongside the progressive camp.

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The Anti-LGBT Law

In order to reinforce the social conflict already initiated by the establishment of Western hegemony in this country, in particular through the interference of institutions and NGOs in the economic and cultural spheres, the government has skillfully appropriated an anti-Western discourse, arousing the sympathy of a part of the population despised by the “pro-Western” part. This rhetorical masquerade allows it to set up certain “social groups” as scapegoats in order to justify the establishment of an authoritarian regime for the defense of “peace, tradition, and economic sovereignty.” In addition to those “blocking” energy independence, it is “the LGBT group” that supposedly represents one of the chief threats to our cultural and religious identity.

This is the context in which the new anti-LGBT law, called the “Law on family values and the protection of minors,” came into force on December 2. The law, which equates homosexual relations and gender identity with incest, criminalizes queer people themselves as well as access to healthcare that the law deems “medical manipulation.” In addition to the queer community, the law also criminalizes any form of support, demonstration, public gathering, or public stance that could be labeled as “pro-queer propaganda.” The collective Queer Resistance wrote about the law’s application in its “anti-fascist manifesto”:

“In Georgia, where nearly a million people have left the country to migrate in search of work over the past five years, one in three children lives in extreme poverty, while the education and healthcare systems are in ruins, the greedy oligarch has based his election campaign on false promises of peace and the propagation of artificial hatred.

“By criminalizing a part of the population—queer people—and legalizing hatred and censorship to establish totalitarian control, the law also designates as criminals all those and everything that opposes the legislation of this evil.”

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Confronting the impoverishment and widespread indebtedness of the population, a situation in which banks and private services hold absolute power while the question of national identity still remains to be defined, it became necessary to create a new image of the enemy. This enemy is not far away in Russia or Turkey, but right before our eyes, forcibly imported by the West: the enemy whose very life itself, as well as appearance in public, threatens our morals and traditions and contributes to demographic problems. This is part of an operation to redirect anger over social problems, aiming to replace an old archetype of the enemy with a new one as a catalyst for the construction of identity.

However, if the responsibility for criminalizing queer people lies with the government, Western sexual imperialism bears some responsibility for instrumentalizing the queer question. While the missionaries of “human rights” were supposed to protect oppressed minorities, the ultraconservative response made them one of its first targets, using the anti-Western argument. Queer-washing only reinforced the social and cultural divide, separating “religious obscurantists” from liberal progressives. The government exploits the LGBTQ issue with such vigor because it knows how to provoke a strong cultural and existential tension by reproducing this opposition and defending the anti-progressive camp that is scorned by “civilizational” policies.

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The Desire for the West?

This massive protest movement, which has been represented merely as pro-European rallies, has its own specific forms of organization, sociality, and mutual aid.

This is something you would never find on the streets of Europe. During the rallies on Rustaveli Avenue, traditional dances, folk songs, and religious songs take center stage; the cool kids of Gen Z shout slogans—the “Gaumarojos Sakartvelos”—that could just as easily be heard from the mouths of the “obscurantists” as a toast to the fatherland, freedom, and the church; mothers accompany their children.

Mothers accompany their children—in the vain hope of protecting them from police abuse. A mother’s cry—“Let go of her, she is my child”—has become the watchword of the protest, now inscribed in graffiti. Grandmothers, when they still have the strength to move, are surrounded and protected by demonstrators against water cannon fire; priests come out of the Kashveti church to shelter persecuted demonstrators.

Behind the gas masks, the shields painted with the numbers “1312,” there is also the idea of the common, which expresses itself first and foremost as a sense of collective belonging, crushed throughout the history of its existence, and adds a strong cultural, even existential dimension to political resistance.

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Rustaveli Avenue has seen many police, military and paramilitary raids since the independence movement of the 1990s. Protesters from the “parents’ generation” evoke the memory of April 9, 1989, the date that marks the tragic beginning of the independence movement with the deaths of young protesters crushed beneath Russian tanks. The use of ununiformed forces and the manipulation around the question of war invoke collective memory: the war crimes of the Mkhedrioni paramilitary group, particularly in the regions of Mingrelia and Abkhazia, a collective trauma arising from the destruction of both bodies and souls following the massacres of Ossetians and Abkhazians, the ethnic cleansing of Georgians and forced displacements, as well as the rupture of inter-ethnic and family ties.

To understand what is at stake behind what can be interpreted as the desire for the West, we must bear this history in mind. First the Tsarist empire, then the Soviet empire made Russia one of the chief colonial powers ruling Georgia, following the Ottoman empire.

To recall the course of the recent history of liberation, Georgia and then Chechnya proclaimed their independence in 1991, before the fall of the USSR. All this took place in a landscape marked by the intensification of both nationalist and ethno-nationalist struggles, calling for the secession of minority ethnic groups under the protection of the USSR (Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Ossetia).

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Following a coup d’état, civil war broke out in the capital between Georgian separatists, led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and the putschist opposition, which became the State Council led by former communist leader Eduard Shevardnadze. This war degenerated into a so-called inter-ethnic conflict from 1991 to 1993 in Abkhazia.

The 2008 war with Russia, although it took place in a different context than in the 1990s, revived the same wounds related to ethnic and territorial conflicts. This time, it was South Ossetia, another region mostly populated by ethnic minorities, that ended up being occupied by the Russian Federation.

But let there be no mistake: although the question of the autonomy of ethnic minorities in a territory where a multiplicity of languages, religions, and traditions coexist is a crucial issue, Russia remains an external superpower that uses ethnic tensions as leverage in a power struggle with the sole aim of expanding its territorial reign. Just as in Ukraine, Russia has always known how to associate the violence of its imperial regime with the conflicts over ethnic identity in the Caucasus, setting itself up as the “savior of oppressed ethnic minorities.”

This is why, behind the European flags, we find the hope for a better world, and behind the desire for the West—the desire for independence. But the idea of Europe as a horizon does not only arise in opposition to Russia. It also emerges from the propaganda and soft power of Euro-Atlantic neoliberal hegemony, which has continued to extend its zone of influence over post-Soviet territories since the collapse of the USSR.

For us, the generation of the 1990s, who grew up in the post-war period following the decline of the independence movement, the promise of the pro-Western path represented the dream of a better world that had been on the other side of the Iron Curtain: peace, bread, electricity, hot water, education, and health. Today, even if Europe continues to embody some kind of promise for a part of the population, no one is fooled.

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Since the liberalization of visas in 2017, Georgia remains on the list of countries with high asylum demand, alongside Afghanistan and Bangladesh. This statistic shows that, in a population of 3.5 million inhabitants, each family has at least one member in exile and migration, seeking protection and subsistence conditions, in order to gain access to free health care or sufficient financial resources to support the relatives who have remained in the country, or else to repay the loans of a family that is deep in debt. Labeled as “bad exiles” because they are “economic migrants” or migrating “for health reasons,” not only are they denied the right to travel freely, but, in addition, they are subjected to all kinds of institutional and police violence, ranging from hundreds of illegal expulsions to the deaths of detainees in detention centers following police violence.³

While Europe would like to map Georgia under its sphere of influence, its treatment of the Georgian population in exile and economic migration has revealed its deception and duplicity.

Consequently, for the emigrant population, particularly in the context of growing racism and the rise of the extreme right, Europe no longer represents a mythical power that could save us from warlike imperialism and guarantee better social policies in a country prey to private predation. For the population of Georgia, insofar as geopolitical issues are mixed with questions of identity, if turning towards Europe represents a survival strategy for some, the chief concern, now even more so than before, remains the authoritarianism of the local government.

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For Internationalist Solidarity

To conclude, I’d like to share the message of support sent to comrades in Georgia from Paris:

“From the gathering of Syrian comrades celebrating the fall of dictator Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, and of Georgian comrades organizing in support of the current protest movement, we want to bring the message of internationalist solidarity to peoples in struggle against imperialism, local authoritarian regimes, and social injustice.

“At a time of genocide in Palestine, wars in Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, the rise of authoritarian regimes in Georgia, Iran, and Russia and the extreme right in Europe, the only hope lies in building alliances and solidarity between oppressed peoples. Only the people can save the people!

“From Syria to Georgia, may the regimes fall everywhere!

“Freedom to all the prisoners in Georgia!

“Love and rage,

“Internationalist comrades from Paris”

A solidarity demonstration in Paris. “From Syria to Georgia, may the regimes fall everywhere!”

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