Tbilisi’s polyphonic carnival

Georgian flags and supporters. Photo by Alexander Klimchuk

On my Tbilisi street, a group of teenagers were trying out their home-made flag for size. It looked as if they’d painted the red-and-white logo of the opposition National Movement on a bedsheet with vermilion nail varnish. They were preparing to walk the short distance to join the thousands of people gathering outside parliament. It was then about six hours before Eduard Shevardnadze resigned as president on Sunday 23 November and the atmosphere already struck me as carnival.

There were moments when it could have turned ugly, such as when the opposition demonstrators met the Revival demonstrators, summoned from the thriving, semi-autonomous region of Adzharia in the south-west in support of Shevardnadze. The civil war of 1992 was in the back of most people’s minds over the three weeks of protests since the fraudulent elections of 2 November that led directly to Shevardnadze’s overthrow. The political opposition also remembered this and insisted that protest should be peaceful.

Read in our forums the moving email correspondence about Georgia’s political transition between Wendell Steavenson, acclaimed author of Stories I Stole and openDemocracy columnist, and her friend Lela Gabunia

The atmosphere was never aggressive. It was quite possible to go about one’s business as usual. The day before the ‘revolution’, I bypassed the demonstrators to go to an exhibition which opened as scheduled; fifteen minutes later, supporters of opposition leader Mikhail (“Misha”) Saakashvili stormed parliament, and Shevardnadze was bustled out by a bunch of “black leather jackets” in the middle of his speech declaring a state of emergency.

After hearing the news celebrations break out. Photo by David Khizanishvili

After the crowd heard that their thirty-hour vigil outside parliament had succeeded and the president had agreed to go, Tbilisi’s main avenue turned into an all-night dancing-and-singing disco. Are Georgians the only nation whose people sing polyphonic songs during a coup? Incredibly, not one stick or stone had been thrown. Cars waving flags and tooting horns screeched all over town and the crowd didn’t disperse until the early hours. “I’ve never seen such happiness on people’s faces,” said one avant-garde artist.

It reminded me of New Year. “No”, said the artist, “get real – at New Year you have a hangover…”. Another artist added that New Year is more of a hassle than a joy, what with worrying about how you’re going to get hold of enough food to load the table for the seasonal feast. This artist had taken his golf umbrella to the demonstrations – its logo Msvidobit Shevardnadze (meaning both “Goodbye” and “Go in Peace”) had joined the rougher demands of Tsadi (“Go”) and Kmara (“Enough”).

Tribunes of the people

It certainly seemed a well-orchestrated ‘revolution’. Its most prominent figure, Mikhail Saakashvili – now famous for having flung roses over the crowd – had presented Eduard Shevardnadze with a stark choice: resign, or face the wrath of the people. Saakashvili had formed a quadruple alliance with the Burdzhanadze-Democrats, the activist civil-disobedience student group Kmara and the most popular TV channel Rustavi-2, which ran biased coverage in favour of Saakashvili throughout. Kmara is widely believed to be sponsored by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, though this is denied by the head of its Georgian branch. However, people have pointed out that their fist flag bears the same logo as the similarly active Otpor did in Yugoslavia, though Kmara seem to be much rougher material and more aggressive. Many refer to Yugoslavia as the western experiment which laid the groundwork for this three-week ‘revolution’.

What of the other leaders? The people are lukewarm about Zurab Zhvania, remembered as an ineffectual former speaker but recognized as an able politician. The current speaker Nino Burdzhanadze inspires respect. But it is Mikhail Saakashvili who has become the object of mass adulation; in this he has been compared with Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the charismatic ultra-nationalist who led Georgia to independence from the Soviet Union and into a chaos of war and economic collapse. “Misha” has acquired the iconic, first-name status of the “Zviad” of old.

However, now that the ‘revolution’ has been accomplished and with roses too, Misha seems to be calming down. The head of Georgia’s Open Society Foundation described him as having “core leadership qualities…the ability to calculate all his steps precisely in advance.” Was copying Gamsakhurdia just one of these steps – to incite the crowd with frenzied nationalist rhetoric, to make sure they would stand and chant for hours on end?

A newspaper editor said that the people were certainly “committed to the idea of getting Shevardnadze to go”. He himself remained both calm about the whole process and happy for the newly-hopeful man-on-the-street. But even if Saakashvili is the popular choice, and if he manages to control his apparent volatility, is he mature enough in judgment or in age (35) for the presidency?

After the fall

Eduard Shevardnadze himself said after his resignation that the opposition were clever but lacking in experience. Few are listening to him now. Pensioners are happy to see the back of him and look forward to Saakashvili’s promised pension-rises. Schoolkids think the former president too old and too compromised by his Soviet and Russian allegiances. Many of his former political allies have now changed sides.

It is true that Saakashvili is younger, better dressed and much better at languages (speaking fluent French and English, while Shevardnadze struggles with Russian and mispronounces his own native tongue). More importantly, Misha is western-educated, whereas Eduard made his career in Russia. But the former president has something Saakashvili most definitely does not: dignity.

He rose above the mob’s burning of his chair inside parliament; he didn’t rise to the continual cries of ‘dictator’. As even President Putin of Russia remarked, Shevardnadze was never that. If he had been, the opposition would not have been able to express their opinions so freely and so often on Freedom Square. Calmer members of the population acknowledge this and recognise him as a great politician. One history teacher, saddened by the degrading way he had been hounded out of office, said: “He did a lot for us.”

If the parliamentary elections had been conducted fairly Shevardnadze would doubtless still be president. “I cried”, said one young philologist, when she saw his shock and his shaking hands in the face of mob hatred and forced resignation. Either Shevardnadze refused to give the order for internal forces to break up the demonstrators, or he knew the troops simply would not use force against their own people. However, as my artist friends remarked – if anybody had been wounded, Shevardnadze would not still be living in Georgia today. He would have had to flee, or the mob would have ‘kebabed’ him. Four days later the public mood is still buoyant.