Revolution Redux

On November 7, 2007, nearly four years after now-President Mikheil Saakashvili, rose in hand, famously led Georgians in the storming of their country’s parliament and the start of the Rose Revolution, thousands again descended on the Georgian parliament. They came in haste, just as they had four years earlier, in response to friends’ urgent cell phone calls and upon hearing the news: that morning – on the fifth day of massive anti-government rallies in front of the parliament – riot police struck the remaining clutch of protesters as they began to trudge home and as the demonstrations finally started to dissipate.

By that afternoon 15,000 demonstrators had freshly converged on downtown Tbilisi to demand, among other things, President Mikheil Saakashvili’s – the same man who led them in protest against their government four years earlier – resignation. But events only turned worse. Before long, impatient and poorly trained riot police dispersed the crowd. Pictures of indiscriminate police beatings, clouds of tear gas, and rubber bullets flickered across Western TV screens. Not content to stamping down opposition in the streets, the government foolishly displayed its “strength” by declaring a state of emergency and closing down major TV stations, including the popular channel Imedi (Hope), which is owned by a major government critic.

The West was stunned. Up until that point most foreign observers had enthusiastically supported Mikheil Saakashvili as a reformer and champion of democracy. Suddenly, however, the image of Saakashvili as a courageous pro-Western and anti-Putin liberal was replaced with another – that of a young, ambitious, and illiberal Putinesque president who cared little about the ideals of democracy.

However, neither of these images was entirely accurate. Rather, what the debacle on Tbilisi’s streets showed, yet again, was the West’s ability to be shocked by the actions of its own illusory creations. The assumption that Saakashvili’s youth, his education at Columbia University, and the non-violent nature of the Rose Revolution in 2003 would lead to the uncomplicated unfolding of democracy was another example of the West’s faith in hope over experience. Seventeen years earlier, the dissident President Gamsakhurdia inspired the same optimism, and in 1992, the return of the Berlin Wall-smashing Shevardnadze brought confidence that Western democracy would find its foothold in the eastern periphery of the European continent. It is time to come to the West’s analytical senses, burrow under the rhetoric, and listen to the citizenry rather than journalists residing in the Hilton.

To many, the mass protests in November 2007, the first of any significance since President Saakashvili’s euphoric victory against the corrupt regime of Eduard Shevardnadze (in the January 2004 presidential election, Saakashvili received over 96 percent of the vote), looked like a reprisal of the November 2003 events that led to the Rose Revolution. The cast was different, of course, but the drama was the same. Once again the favorite rallying spot outside parliament was filled with megaphones, banners, tents, and T-shirts with the words gadadeki (resign) emblazoned across the chests of protesters and scrawled on walls. The demands were more or less the same as those of the Rose Revolutionaries: honest and transparent elections, specifically the restitution of parliamentary elections originally set for the spring of 2008 but postponed by constitutional amendments until the fall – a reformed Central Election Commission to represent all major parties, an end to corruption including opaque privatization deals and a biased criminal system, and an end to intimidation of the media.

At their core, both anti-government movements in 2003 and 2007 resembled in milder form what Ken Jowitt has called “movements of rage,” or frustrated and perplexed responses to failure. Protesters in both cases were animated not so much by a desire for constitutional change or even elections, but by an inchoate sense of desperation connected to unchanging or even worsening conditions of poverty, unemployment, and government indifference. Unemployment in 2007 was officially 12 percent and would be much higher if the 995,000 self-employed (mainly subsistence) farmers, were not counted as employed. In 2007, around 25 percent, or one million people, were still living below the poverty line.

Yet despite unlearned lessons by both governments and a distinct sense of déjà-vu, there were stark differences in the way both movements ended that can tell us much about the character and contradictions of the Rose Revolution over the last four years. In 2003, Shevardnadze’s refusal to negotiate renewed elections ended with his overthrow. The Rose Revolution was peaceful – no one was hurt and the old regime put up no resistance. It ended in a fundamental change in government: a turnover from the older Soviet-trained elites to younger Western-educated, post-Soviet ones. The events in 2007, however, did not topple a government but rather ended in violence and a reassertion of state power. Though it demonstrated popular disillusion with Saakashvili (he lost almost half the 96 percent of the votes he gained in January 2004), the snap presidential election that followed on January 5, 2008, still gave him and the Rose Revolutionaries a second chance.