Mobilization Under a Dissident Nationalist Discourse

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. GEORGIAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE POST-SOVIET GEORGIAN STATE: MOBILIZATION UNDER A DISSIDENT NATIONALIST DISCOURSE

Courtney M. Nero

Submitted to the

Faculty of the School of International Service

American University

In partial fulfillment of

The Requirements for the Degree of

M aster o f Arts

International Affairs

Comparative and Regional Studies, Russia and Central Eurasia

ineider. Chair

M ark C. W alker ImlQ) M Louis W. Goodman, Dean Randolph B. Persaud

Sr r r iA A - f cX jQ o * Date

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Courtney M. Nero

2000

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. GEORGIAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE POST-SOVIET GEORGIAN

STATE: MOBILIZATION UNDER A DISSIDENT NATIONALIST

DISCOURSE

Courtney M. Nero

ABSTRACT

This thesis explores how the combination of the Soviet Communist legacy and an

ethnic nationalist discourse produced a volatile political society, unstable social

movements, and an imploding state system in post-Soviet Georgia. Specifically, the

dissident experience under the Soviet system nurtured organizational skills and

networks that were not suited to overt social movement mobilization. The thesis also

examines the mobilizing power of the ethnic nationalist discourse in the Georgian

context, borrowing Kathryn Manzo’s elaboration of “nationalism as religion” and

introducing insights on the teleology of nationalism. These elements together

highlight what I call the “messianic teleology” of ethnic nationalism. The thesis

elaborates how the personalized politics and distrust engendered from the Soviet

experience and the “messianic teleology” of ethnic nationalism were antithetical to

the necessary acceptance of “uncertain outcomes” that characterize democratic

consolidation (according to Adam Przeworski (1991)).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE

This thesis is the culmination of a program of graduate study focused on two

major topics. First. I have an abiding interest in how the embedded Soviet state and

social system affects different spheres of life in the post-Soviet context. Scholars

must rely on the social and political experiences of the Soviet era to gather clues to

illuminate the multiple paths of post-Soviet transitions.

Second. I have an equal interest in applying the growing social movements literature

to the unique Soviet and post-Soviet context. Social movements, in Michael Urban's

words, occupy the “seam between civil and political society” (Urban, 1994: 128).

The engaging questions of the social movements literature—on protagonists and

antagonists, on free-riding, on mobilization strategies, on tactical innovations and

adaptations, on political opportunity structure and framing—become truly fascinating

when applied to a region in which the authoritarian state did its best to keep the

"social" from "moving.” In this context, Georgia presents an interesting object of

study.

This Master's thesis therefore seeks to use the literature on social movements as a tool

to assess the course of political and social transition in Georgia during the late-Soviet

and Post-Soviet periods. I hope to add value to the study of Georgian social

movements by assessing their behavior under the unique conditions of the Soviet

implosion. In addition, the insights offered on “nationalism as religion” should add

another tool to the arsenal of those seeking to grasp how and why certain

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. communities mobilize. This perspective views nationalism as a sacred identity, with

the appearance of immutability, from which a political community glorifies its past

and justifies its future.

Future research will be able to improve upon this Master’s thesis in several ways. To

assess Georgian social movements into the 1990s and up to the present requires field

study in Georgia. In addition, the academic works with the most information on

individual Georgian social movements were published in the early 1990s (Aves.

1992: Suny, 1988: and Jones, 1993) and lack information on the movements'

membership composition, resources, the conditions of their emergence, and their

objectives. As I and other scholars continue to research Georgia’s political

experience, and as the World Wide Web puts more information at the disposal of the

academic community, many opportunities will become available to improve upon this

w ork.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my wife Sabrina, my parents and siblings, and all my family for

the support, forbearance, and encouragement extended to me throughout my graduate

study. Pursuing the Master’s program on a part-time schedule while working full

time has meant that some aspects of family and social life have been cut short, if not

curtailed. I appreciate your understanding and constant confidence in the end-time

rewards of this endeavor. I’d also like to thank my first child, who. as of this date, is

still in the womb but nonetheless provided a significant incentive to finish this thesis

during the Spring 2000 semester.

My thesis committee of Dr. Cathy Schneider (chair). Dr. Mark Walker, and Dr.

Randolph Persaud provided encouragement, guidance, and intellectual challenge in

equal amounts and to them I am very grateful. Dr. Schneider’s “Comparative Social

Movements" course in the Spring 1997 semester exposed me to the social movements

literature. Her course and subsequent guidance have played a primary role in honing

my academic research agenda. Dr. Walker’s white board has hosted many of my

incomplete thoughts and concepts; his guidance helped to sharpen the ideas presented

here (though any errors are completely my own). Dr. Persaud's dedication to critical

thinking challenged me toward more dynamic interpretations of history, systems, and

society during my graduate study. For collaborative guidance and probing theoretical

challenges. I thank Larry Markowitz. Your questions have helped me form many,

many answers. Thanks also to Sheila Wise and the SIS graduate office.

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I'd also like to thank the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, DCI

Counterterrorist Center, the Directorate of Intelligence Council of Intelligence

Occupations, and the Office of Transnational Issues, who, each in turn, provided

funding for me to pursue the American University graduate program. I am eternally

grateful for this crucial support, without which I could not have completed the

program .

Last but certainly not least, I must thank Deborah, Fran. Larry, Karen, and all the

staff of the Office of Support Services. Your dedication to maintaining a truly first-

rate Library, in addition to your cheerful greetings, have played a significant role in

this final product. I can not overstate how much you all have helped me through

almost five years of study.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... ii

Preface...... iii

Acknowledgments ...... v

C hapter

1. Introduction ...... 1

Why Study Post-Soviet Georgia?

Organization of the Study

2. W hat Is A Social M ovem ent? ...... 8

What Is Not A Social Movement?

3. The Soviet Legacy and Its Implications for Post- Soviet Social Movements ...... 14

The Soviet Legacy Manifest in Post-Soviet Georgian Movement Leaders

4. The Doctrine. Use, and Abuse of Nationalism in the Soviet Context ...... 23

The Nationalist Frame and Georgian Social M ovements

5. Social Movements in Late- and Post-Soviet Georgia ...... 35

The Structure of Social Protest in Georgia

Analysis of Social Movements in Georgia

The Character of the Post-Soviet Georgian State

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6. Post-Communist Nationalism and Democracy in G eo rg ia ...... 49

7. Conclusion ...... 55

Appendix One: Map of G eo rg ia ...... 61

Appendix Two: Prominent Georgian Social M ovem ents ...... 62

Appendix Three: Factionalization Among Georgian Social M ovem ents ...... 65

Bibliography ...... 66

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1. INTRODUCTION

The history of Georgia has been one of struggle for many centuries. Considered a

bridge between East and West, Georgia has fought to maintain its integrity in the face of

several challenges. As a southern outpost of Christianity among Muslim neighbors,

Georgian leaders reluctantly allied with the Russian Empire during the 19th century.

Independence in the early 1900s was eclipsed as Bolshevik Russia captured the

Transcaucasus region. Georgians maintained a strong sense of identity throughout Soviet

rule. Observing political opportunity in Mikhail Gorbachev's revolutionary reforms.

Georgia launched one of the most outspoken nationalist independence bids among the

Soviet republics.

Social movements in late-Soviet and early Post-Soviet Georgia were numerous and

unstable aggregations, dedicated toward the ouster of the Communist monopoly and

Soviet hegemony over Georgian territory. Soviet troops used sharpened shovels and

toxic gas to violently repress peaceful pro-Georgian demonstrations in April 1989.

Twenty protestors were killed and around 200 were seriously injured. This event

radicalized many of Georgia’s social and political movements.

Movement activists became a part of the Georgian institutional political structure

after contesting elections in October 1990. The activists successfully ousted the

Communist Party apparatus and gained independence for the Georgian state in April

1991. These developments, however, brought little overall stability.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In 1991-1992, the newly independent Republic of Georgia, a republic slightly

smaller than South Carolina but with almost 1.2 million more inhabitants, had many

challenges to its democratic consolidation. Georgia's democratically elected president

Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a former dissident and leading pro-independence activist in

Georgia, was ousted by a coalition of oppositionists. Two of Georgia’s autonomous

regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, were in the throes of secessionist mobilization

themselves, and two other regions, Javakheti—populated with ethnic Armenians—and a

northeast corner of ethnic Azeris, seemingly were not too far behind. Georgia seemed on

the verge of collapse.

What determined the tactics adopted by Georgia's anti-Communist, pro-independence

movements? What experience did the movement leaders bring to the table, for better or

for worse, to mobilize Georgia's citizenry against the Communist establishment? Why

were Georgian social movements so factionalized even in the presence of the common

goal of gaining Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union? What factors

contributed to the utter failure of the independent Georgian state under Soviet-era

dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia?

This thesis will argue that the character of Georgian social movements was a product

of two dominant factors. First, an ethnic nationalist discourse served as the focal point of

opposition in Georgia. Second, the nationalist-based opposition operated in a unique

Post-Soviet. Post-Communist environment. These two factors combined to produce a

volatile political society that would not be disposed toward the democratic principles that

these movements espoused.

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First, the Soviet system sought to proscribe independent civic initiative and preserve

the state as the soie mechanism for the alleviation of grievances. The Soviet era nurtured

a state and social system that discouraged social movement development. Michael Urban

notes that, by the end of the 1930s, the Soviet state had consolidated its totalitarian

character by penetrating society and establishing an order that “for generations had

sustained itself at the ideational level by denying the permissibility of each and all of

those conceptions of identity— religious, national, not to mention, political— that might

rival its own constructs” (1997: 27). The clandestine networks, among other factors,

necessary for dissidents to operate in the Soviet environment did not serve them well in

the Post-Soviet environment, which demanded open networks, mass communication, and

broad mobilization.

Soviet scholars are apprehensive to embrace their Soviet-era tools of analysis.

Scholars, with some exceptions (e.g. Taras. 1997; and Fish, 1995). have been prone to

jettison baby and bath water following allegations that Sovietology missed the indicators

of Soviet collapse. Other scholars dismiss the Soviet era and seek insights on

contemporary state-society interaction in pre-Soviet power relations (e.g.. Petro. 1995);

this approach is equally shortsighted.

It is instructive in this situation to consider Robert Cox’s guidance that, in every

transition, the dominant tendencies present in a given structure will be dialectically

negated,

“Aufhebung in Hegel’s usage, i.e. in which the past state is both annulled and preserved in the succeeding stage. This sense of transition away from known structures towards an as yet unnamable future accounts for the large number of approaches in different Fields of study that begin with post— post-industrial, post modern, post-structural, post-capitalist, post-Marxist, etc.” (Cox, 1992: 139).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In keeping with Cox’s view, the thesis expects to find that the Soviet legacy, specifically

the dissident experience under the Soviet state system, remained an active influence on

those same dissidents when they began to mobilize on behalf of nascent anti-Communist

and pro-independence movements. Further, since many of the movement leaders in

Georgia became state officials after 1990 and 1991. the degenerative movement

characteristics, emanating from the leadership styles of the dissidents-tumed-activists.

were transferred to state power.

Second, the nationalist “frame" on which the Georgian movements were based was.

at once, messianic and teleological.1 The nationalist frame built a glorious history to

justify its destiny as a sovereign nation-state. An approach centered on “nationalism as

religion," borrowing from Kathryn Manzo (1996), may offer some insights on the why

and the how of nationalism's mobilizing power. In addition, an argument will be made

that, once the powerful nationalist frame is canonized for a political community, it forms

an ideational guideline for that community’s future behavior. That is. the community’s

goals are oriented toward the preservation of that, canonized, national heritage. In a

word, the nationalist frame attains a teleological character.

These two discourses, the Post-Communist environment and the nationalist frame

working together, were antithetical to the acceptance of “uncertain outcomes" that

precedes democratic consolidation (Przeworski, 1991: 19). Thus, while the unstable

opposition successfully toppled the Communist regime in Georgia and achieved

1 According to the social movements literature, social movements and their activists "frame, or assign meaning to and interpret, relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists" (McAdam and

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independence, its underlying character, based on the Soviet experience and the exclusive

nationalist discourse, caused the movements, and eventually the new Georgian state, to

im plode.

Why Study Post-Soviet Georgia?

This study will focus on social movement development in Post-Soviet Georgia for

several reasons. First, the study of the experience of Post-Soviet Georgia in the Caucasus

region provides scholarly relief from the well-documented Post-Soviet development of

the larger. Slavic republics, mainly the Russian Federation and Ukraine, and, to a lesser

extent. Kazakhstan, a non-Slavic state with a sizable ethnic Russian minority (Fish. 1995:

Urban. 1997; Prize!. 1998; Kolsto, 1999; Petro, 1995; and McFaul. 1993). Nevertheless,

the thesis will review literature of the state and civil society in Russia, among other

sources, because many scholars have examined Post-Communist state-civil society

interaction from the Russian perspective. While this study presumes Georgia will prove a

distinctive case, the broad similarities of experience among the former Soviet states

during the Soviet era should allow this thesis to benefit from literature on Russia.

Second. Georgia's independence struggle was unique among the pro

independence struggles in the late Soviet era. The “Popular Front.” the common

umbrella under which the titular nationalities in many Soviet republics gathered to press

for independence, developed very late in Georgia's pro-independence struggle and played

only a moderate role in political events. In addition, while tensions flared in virtually all

Snow. 1997: 232). The terms “frame, framing." and “master frame" are used in this thesis according to the preceding definition.

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the Post-Soviet states, Georgia was the only state to feature a leading opposition activist

elected to the national presidency and then ousted by many of those who put him in

office. These and other factors make Georgia an interesting object of study.

Organization of the Study

Those aspects of the Soviet system’s legacy that are especially pertinent to the

formation and behavior of social movements in the late- and Post-Soviet conjuncture will

be the first to be examined. The bureaucratic mechanisms left over from the Soviet era

are obvious and not the center of analysis here. This research will focus on traits within

society that affect mobilization, e.g. covert organizational skills, distrust, and personalism

among activists and movements. The Soviet-era state system will be discussed to the

extent that it illuminates the effect of the dissident experience on social movement

development in the Post-Soviet era.

Next, the doctrine, use. and abuse of the nationalist frame for social mobilization

in the Georgian context are considered and the “messianic teleology" of the nationalist

frame will be elaborated. The development of Georgia’s social movements will be

discussed, with an analytic eye toward explaining the volatility of the social movement

sector and the Post-Soviet Georgian state, which was based on the movements and

movement activists that dominated the late-Soviet social movement sector.

Finally, the study’s observations on Georgian social movements in a post-

Communist nationalist frame will be married with Adam Przeworski's discussion of

democratic consolidation and his emphasis on “uncertain outcomes." The objective of

Georgian social movements' anti-Soviet opposition was a democratic post-Soviet society.

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based on the movements* demonstrations and platforms. The analysis in chapter six

highlights that the Soviet legacy and nationalist discourse together produced a difficult

environment for democratic consolidation in Post-Soviet Georgia. The conclusion offers

observations for future research on social movement transitions from authoritarian rule.

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2. WHAT IS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT?

Before launching into a study of social movements in the Post-Soviet sphere, it is

necessary to establish a tentative definition of a social movement organization. This

process of conceptualization fully recognizes that the results of this study may alter our

working definition of social movements. The social sciences should not be captive to

static categorization: categories should be open to change at the behest of empirical

evidence.

Embracing the conceptualization of social movements as the occupant of the seam

between civil society and political society (Urban. 1994: 128). a social movement is aptly

defined as "a collectivity acting with some degree of organization and continuity outside

of institutional channels for the purpose of promoting or resisting change in the group,

society, or world order of which it is a part” (McAdam and Snow. 1997: xviii). Other

scholars (e.g. Tarrow. 1994: 6) omit the factor that social movements operate outside

institutional channels, but this factor is crucial to understanding movements and their

particular place in politics.2 From these and other sources on social movement theory,

this study accepts social movements to be “collective challenges outside of institutional

channels by people with common purposes and solidarity in sustained interaction with

Tarrow defines social movements as “collective challenges by people with common purp°ses and solidarity in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities" (1994: 6).

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elites, opponents, and authorities." For the sake of clarification, a brief discussion will

follow of forms of collective action that do not constitute social movements.

Political Parties. Interest Groups

Social movements differ most notably from political parties, given our tentative

definition of the former, in that social movements operate outside institutional channels.

When a social movement organization promotes one of its leaders to contest a public

office, the social movement becomes beholden to the accepted rules and procedures of

the political-institutional realm. Within the political-institutional realm, the social

movement, now a political party, loses many of the repertoires of disruptive contention

that arc common to social movements. Also, political parties and interest groups often

have access to relatively stable resources that social movements lack. These resources

include money, such as government funding or subsidies, organization, and access to the

state elite (Tarrow. 1998: 4).

Riots. Spontaneous Uprisings

Social movements must involve ‘"sustained interaction” with the issue-antagonist.

Our working definition does not imply that social movements will not sponsor uprisings

that appear spontaneous to the antagonist. However, uprisings that in their origins are

spontaneous, with no apparent leader or single, common purpose, are not social

m ovem ents.

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Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs)

As prevalent as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are in society, an agreed

definition of the NGO remains elusive. Alan Heston notes that the term NGO has been

applied widely since it was first used in the United Nations in 1949 (Heston. 1997: 8).

Some social movements scholars, including Francis Fox Piven, Richard Cloward. and

Suzanne Staggenborg (1997: 421-439), refer to the NGO as a "formalized social

movement organization,” with many of the same pitfalls as political parties and interest

groups. Staggenborg highlights Piven and Cloward's assertion that formalization of the

social movement organization “leads to a decline in militant direct-action tactics,” in

favor of institutionalized tactics, such as legislative lobbying (1997: 432).

Institutionalized tactics also favor the schedules and structure of social movement

professionals, who often are called upon to provide stable leadership to the formalized

movement. Career activists, for example, tend to seek financial stability and a consistent

division of labor through formalization of a movement organization (Staggenborg, 1997:

436). Heston also notes that NGOs generally function "within the boundaries set by the

state and are subject to various laws and regulations” (Heston. 1997: 12).

Staggenborg\s portrayal of NGOs as “formalized social movements" underscores

a continuum within which movements operate according to their tactics. A social

movement is not always a social movement: at its organizational zenith, a social

movement may resemble an NGO; at its organizational deficit, it may resemble a

spontaneous uprising or inchoate form of protest. Sidney Tarrow highlights that social

movements implement a repertoire of action that includes violence, disruption, and

convention, each combining different degrees of “challenge, uncertainty, and solidarity"

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to achieve their goals and preserve their cause in the public arena (Tarrow. 1998: 116).

These various tactics circulate the movement in "a hazy area between institutional

politics and individual dissent” (Tarrow. 1998: 101). In sum, social movements are

“multiform.” able to combine a variety of forms of collective action. The exact

combination of action— in other words, a movement’s place on the spectrum of violence

and convention— will judge its manifestation as social movement or NGO.

For the purposes of this study, however, the argument is that NGOs have an

organizational stability that transcends the grassroots nature of social movements.

Further. NGOs often nurture institutional contacts that subvert their willingness to engage

in extra-institutional, direct-action tactics, which are the essence of the social movement.

Despite the growing social movements literature, movements still are overlooked

in some discussions of political society and political process. Przeworski’s discussion of

transition to democracy (1991). for example, can be faulted for insufficient discussion of

the significant role of social movements in transitions. Discussion of “civil society" in

Przeworski’s argument is conspicuously absent, and his argument otherwise leans heavily

on the framework of political institutions. He identifies social movements as “ambiguous

actors" in democracies, contends that social movements “have no institutions to direct

themselves to," in comparison with parties, which have legislatures, and lobbies, which

have bureaus. Przeworski’s analysis leaves the role of social movements to inference.

In fact, social movements necessarily multiply the uncertainty of democratic

regimes. Przcworski rightly notes that social movements have no dedicated institutions

within which to act. This fact of life, however, is a product of the limits of political

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institutions. Institutions seldom will be able to represent every community and every

grievance existing in the society. When their grievances are not represented, social

movements have the option of using a repertoire of greater or lesser “violence, disruption,

and convention” to achieve their goals and preserve their cause in the public arena

(Tarrow. 1998: 104). Just the right mix of violence, disruption, and convention may help

to alter the institutional structure of political opportunities, opening a crack within which

the social movement can insert itj grievances into the realm of institutional politics (see

Tarrow, 1998. chapter five, pages 71-90).

For Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, authoritarian transitions are like

a multi-layered chess game, while social movements represent the "kicking or even

pounding on the table”— actions that they view as potentially "counterproductive" (1986:

67). O'Donnell and Schmitter’s evaluation, however, is in sharp contrast to that of those

who study social movements. Social movement scholars argue that it is precisely such

extra-institutional activityJ that can bring t-about s the beginning C of c - the end of a regime.

In the Soviet context, the Communist Party state created and maintained greater

or lesser control over every shade of social organization (Bamer-Barry and Barry, 1991:

176). The state established unions of writers to give voice (and to monitor) the poetry

and prose of its citizens. S. Frederick Starr, in Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the

Soviet Union, noted that amateur music groups on the Leningrad scene "were prevented

from performing in public until they had passed censorship at the House of Public

Creativity (Dom narodnogo tvorchestva).” Underscoring the point, after a few local rock

concerts got out of hand in 1967. Starr documents that "a special session of the City

Committee of the Communist Party was held and a decree issued asserting official

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control over all vocal-guitar bands in Leningrad” (Starr, 1985: 300). It is in this context

that the Soviet press began to use the nickname, nveformalv. “informals” or

“unofficials.” to describe those social and political associations genuinely autonomous of

state management (Alexeyeva, 1985: 1). The thesis will examine precisely these

autonomous social and political movements in Georgia.3

It is worthy of note, however, that, after the establishment and proliferation of such “informal" groups, the Party state often would establish similar organizations in an attempt to draw attention from the informal and coopt its objectives. The establishment of the Shota Rustaveli Society in Georgia in 1988 is an exem plar.

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3. THE SOVIET LEGACY AND ITS

IMPLICATIONS FOR POST-SOVIET SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

The Soviet literature is replete with categories and nodal points on which to

observe the Soviet legacy in post-Soviet social and political life. Steven F. Jones (1993:

298). citing Giuseppe Di Palma and Robert Dahl on democratic transitions, notes that

factors comprising the Soviet legacy— “official nationalism, distrust of one's opponents,

paternalism, hegemonism, censorship, the personalization of politics, and a corrupt and

unaccountable bureaucracy”— all endure in post-Soviet Georgia. Moshe Lewin asserts

that, despite momentous changes in Soviet society from the 1960s through the 1990s.

"the state system itself still clung to strong vestiges of an age-old agrarian despotism" and

"anachronistic autocratic features” (1991: 145). These features included "the monopoly

of power, tight controls over information, an elaborate censorship system, and monopoly

of the media" (122). To put the Soviet state's "determinative power" over social and

political mobilization in perspective and to assess the effect of these conditions on social

movement development, it may be useful to take look at the Soviet experiment

historically.

The monopoly of authoritative power in the Soviet Union was a foundational

principle of the Soviet state; this trait of the Soviet state system is well known and well-

documented (Riasanovsky, 1984; Suny, 1993; Bamer-Barry and Barry, 1991). The

Bolshevik claim to leadership as the "vanguard” of the people by itself portrays a vision

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that the Party was the primary authority and sowed the seeds of a paternalist Soviet state

(Alexeyeva and Fitzpatrick, 1990: 3-4).

During Josef Stalin’s rule (1922-1953), terror was an organized system of power

and a political weapon to liquidate actual and potential competitors to state power.

Stalin's terror system was implemented through the secret police, the People's

Commisariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), predecessor to the Commission for State

Security (KGB). Merle Fainsod in How Russia Is Ruled (1967) elaborated on the

complex and comprehensive mission of the NKVD within Soviet society:

“It must not only hear what people say: it must also be prepared to diagnose their souls and plumb their innermost thoughts. It must transform every citizen into a potential watchdog and informer to check and report on his friends and neighbors. It must sow distrust, for distrust will discourage organization and revolt" (1967: 162).

The legacy of Stalinist totalitarianism fomented a general distrust even after the post-

Stalin leaders curtailed the secret police's power over the Soviet citizenry.

General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964) also nurtured institutional

controls over independent civic initiative within Soviet society. Some scholars are quick

to gloss over Khrushchev's actual role in the restriction of independent initiative.

Though Khrushchev’s rule often is characterized generally as a “thaw." or a relaxation of

controls, in fact anything compared to the tyrannical Stalin could be considered a

relaxation. Mark Hopkins, in Mass Media in the Soviet Union (1970), clarifies that

Stalinist terror was replaced with more subtle social controls. The press, for example,

operated during the Khrushchev period with a "new orientation" in the political system,

“relying more on manipulation and persuasion than on massive brute force." Hopkins

also notes that “the old Marxist critique of the private versus government press survived

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in Khrushchev’s mind” (104), and quoting Khrushchev: “As an army cannot fight

without weapons, so the Party cannot successfully carry on its ideological work without

this sharp and militant weapon, the press” (105). Even without undertaking a

comprehensive study of the press,4 we can infer from Hopkins’ argument that Soviet state

institutions, even in the post-Stalin period, made an imperative of nurturing

"determinative power” over Soviet society. M. Steven Fish concludes that, by the end of

the Stalin era, official repression did not have to take the form of mass terror because by

that time the Soviet state's mechanisms of repression had become “automatic, reflexive,

and institutionalized” within the bureaucracy as a response “to any organized expression

of social autonomy” (1995: 31).

General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure (1985-1991) brought significant

changes to the Soviet state system, but we must recall that even his reforming vision was

bounded within socialism and did not prescribe jettisoning the seventy-year-old system of

state control. Gorbachev called for openness/publicity (glasnost’, in Russian), a call that

formed the basis of a new Party program: “We want more openness about public affairs

in every sphere of life. People should know what is good, and what is bad, too. in order

to multiply the good and to combat the bad. That is how things should be under

socialism. Truth is the main thing" (Gorbachev, 1987: 75). That said. Gorbachev's

vision for democracy was limited and did not necessitate a multi-party system (Buckley.

1993: 185). One can infer that Gorbachev’s prescription that people should know “what

1 Of course, such a comprehensive study of the press as a measure of the Soviet state’s determinative power over Soviet society would start with the fact that all “legal" media (as opposed to underground publications, or samizdat) were state-sponsored and -supervised.

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is good and what is bad’" caveated that the state should remain the authority that defines

"good" and "bad" for the people.

The Soviet Legacy Manifest in Post-Soviet Movement Leaders

How does the Soviet history of movement proscription explain the actions of

post-Soviet social movement organizations? The argument here is that the Soviet legacy

of social and political control molded movement leaders who were unaccustomed to mass

mobilization and the “loose fit” of overt social movements over more clandestine

networks of dissident activity.

The environment in which Soviet dissidents had to operate was very different

from the environment available in the post-Soviet conjuncture and even in the late-Soviet

era under Gorbachev. Dissident and other clandestine networks, like terrorist groups,

must manage secure communications, usually with tight-knit, small cells of activists.

For example, the production of samizdat (literally, "self-publishing" in Russian)

materials, regular fare for Soviet-era dissidents, was an inherently risky activity.

Activists often typed or wrote the samizdat articles or pamphlets. Those who received

the materials were requested to make an additional copy before distributing the original

copy. The state controlled virtually all photocopying facilities, and the use of state

facilities to copy samizdat materials was especially dangerous (Holmes. 1997: 274).

Human rights and other activists often were arrested for possessing or distributing

samizdat materials in Georgia. The underground pamphlets often documented corruption

among Georgian Communist Party officials, torture in Georgian prisons, discrimination

against deported peoples by the Georgian and Soviet authorities, national and social

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problems of Georgia, and works of fiction that did not meet the ideological standards of

the state (Alexeyeva, 1985: 112-116).

Covert dissident-type work habits, therefore, had an adverse effect on some

movements, as Donatella Della Porta describes:

What factors determine the route a social movement organization will take? The actual organization design a social movement organization adopts is a function both of the resources and skills available to it and of environmental conditions. The more institutional channels, intellectual skills, and material resources a movement organization has access to, the more likely it will resemble a voluntary organization. The more extensive its environment— the larger the mobilization and the less isolated the individual members of the movement family— the less likely it is that a movement organization will become sectlike, emphasizing internal concerns over extrinsic goals. (Della Porta. 1995: 201).

Georgia's social movement leaders suffered precisely the converse of Della Porta’s

argument. The leaders of Georgia’s movements were active at a time when the Soviet

system offered them no institutional channels and few material resources.

Therefore, even when these activists mobilized during the more permissive

Gorbachev era and post-Soviet period, the experiences that fed their post-Soviet

movement tactics were grounded in Soviet-era conditions. These conditions were

marked by small mobilization, underground activity, a penchant for unilateral actions

(because gathering everyone in one place to make collective decisions could risk arrest).

and isolation for most activists. Jonathan Aves (1992) affirms in the Georgian context

that "the experience of dissident activity proved to be a poor preparation for more open

politics."

Inevitably it favoured stubbornness and unwillingness to compromise. Understandably ex-dissidents were liable to suspect their collaborators of being agents provocateurs and to distrust every communist initiative as a mere smoke screen behind which large-scale repressions were being prepared. All these

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phenomena were displayed in abundance by the new Georgian nationalist movement. (1 9 9 2 :1 5 8 )

In this environment of clandestine and underground activity, Leslie Holmes (1997)

questions the validity of scholarly references to dissident movements, such as Alexeyeva

(1985), despite the success of individual activists in producing and proliferating samizdat

materials within the Soviet Union and abroad (Holmes, 1997: 275).

Lynn Kamenitsa underscores the difficulty of social movement transitions from

authoritarianism in her 1998 article on the development of citizens' movements, the

Biirgerbewegungen. in East Germany in the autumn of 1989. She observed that previous,

more restrictive, political opportunity structures could continue to influence movements.

In the East German context, the legacy of state socialism was evident "in the movements'

ideologies, goals, and priorities, organizational structures, and interactions with each

other" (1998: 322). The East German movements' inability to "shift gears" and compete

with West German political actors resulted in a resounding loss at the polls. In the

autumn of 1989, the citizens’ movements appeared poised to dominate political

leadership in East Germany, but the East German movements lost out to the Christian

Democratic Union (CDU), which won a substantial plurality of the vote (Kamenitsa.

1998: 313). The citizens’ movements had to undertake a dual transition, from an

authoritarian to a transitioning political environment and from a movement organization

to a political party contesting institutional seats. It appears the citizens' movements were

unsuccessful on both counts.

The dissident penchant for clandestinity may have contributed to overwhelming

pcrsonalist motivations guiding movement activists’ actions more so than response to the

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constituency. The “cult of personalism” can be interpreted as a strategy governed by

vested interests, which are at odds with, or never approved by, the political community.

This condition may be analogous to the “cult of personality” often formed around the

Soviet Union’s leaders.

Furthermore, post-Soviet society was not ready for activity in an impersonal,

political society, according to Ken Jowitt. Jowitt highlights that Communist regimes very

seldom attempted to carry their political structure toward impersonal interaction with

society:

What no Leninist regime ever did under Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev; Gheorghiu-Dej or Ceausescu; Bierut, Gomulka. or Gierek. was to create a culture of impersonal measured action. The result is an East European (Soviet, Chinese . . .) population that in its majority has very little experience with regular, deliberate economic and political activity in a context of impersonal procedures: a population that in its authoritarian peasant and Leninist personas is more familiar with sharp distinctions between periods of intense action and passivity than with what Max Weber termed the “methodical rational acquisition” (of goods or votes). (Jowitt, 1992: 213)

Late-Soviet and post-Soviet society was especially vulnerable to an increasing

personalism of movements around the leading activists in each republic. The novel

movements that emerged rapidly after the Communist Party-state’s hegemony over

associational life evoked a society—a “movement society” in M. Steven Fish's terms—

characterized as “a myriad of complex, interacting, apocalyptic political campaigns"

representing "social categories that lacked an established political position” (Fish 1995.

61-62). The movement activists, former dissidents, of the latc-Soviet period were in a

perfect position to carve out a political position where there was none and to mold that

position around their personal leadership style. Martha Merritt, in her review of Fish’s

Democracy From Scratch, affirms that the emergence of autonomous interest advocacy in

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the late-Soviet and post-Soviet era as a process that included "declaring one's own

affiliation, naming one's group, creating a common language, and reaching agreement on

sharing principles." Merritt notes that this process involved "few if any givens.” such

that much of the movement society was (affirming the title of Fish's book) created from

scratch (Merritt 1997: 355).

By some accounts, the “culture of vanguardism” through which the Lenin and the

Bolsheviks claimed power over Russia spread into the social and political movement

sector even in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Fish attests that this extremist

"culture of vanguardism" which now hinders democratic institution-building:

The DPR’s [Democratic Party of Russia] leaders regarded full pluralism and democracy within opposition organizations as antithetical to advancement of these same values in society as a whole. Party discipline, according to Deputy Chairman Tolstoi, “is dangerous and undesirable only when there is only one party." In any polity, he argued, only hierarchical organizations, run by professionals, can effectively mobilize citizens, structure political competition, and offer the public real choice. Travkin never tired of attributing the collective impotence of progressive deputies in the legislatures ... to the absence of strong disciplined parties. (Fish 1995. 116)

Kenneth Roberts observes that “vanguardist parties” in Chile and Peru “thrived under

authoritarian conditions” because the lack of access to institutions made the

organizational integrity of movements more important (Roberts, 1998: 271).

These “vanguardist" and personalist motivations restricted the movement leaders'

openness to compromise. In the Post-Communist transition, compromises among

political coalitions were key to progress toward stability. These compromises often were

manifest in pacts. A pact can be defined as an

“explicit, but not always publicly explicated or justified, agreement among a select set of actors which seeks to define (or better, to redefine) rules governing

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the exercise of power on the basis of mutual guarantees” (O’Donnell and Schmitter. 1986: 37).

Pacts are established to secure vital interests for each party to give them an incentive to

abide by the new rules of the game, according to the transitions literature. Many post-

Soviet social movements, using the perceptions and misperceptions of the Soviet era.

were prone to consider pacts, especially with Soviet holdovers, as a nonstarter in Post-

Soviet politics.

Georgian social movements, in similar fashion, nurtured a "vanguardist” strategy

of movement organization. This vanguardist strategy, part of the Soviet legacy affecting

post-Soviet social movements, contributed to Georgia’s volatile political society. This

point will be elaborated in greater detail in chapter five.

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4. THE DOCTRINE, USE, AND ABUSE OF NATIONALISM IN THE

SOVIET CONTEXT

Ethnicity and nationalism played crucial roles in the life of the Soviet Union, an

imperial mosaic of people. The Soviet elite used the nationality issue to dominate the

Soviet space. Ultimately, however, they were unsuccessful in repressing opposition:

people rose up. taking their cue from the liberalization policies during the Gorbachev era.

and used nationalism as a basis for mobilizing their campaigns of independence from the

USSR.

Ethnicity, according to Ronald Suny, is a communal sense of identity among

populations, which include a nostalgia for past traditions, a common myth of descent, a

belief in shared history, common language and religion, a sense of solidarity or kinship,

and often an association with a specific territory. Nationalism holds that humanity is

divided into nations, that loyalty to nations overrides all other loyalties, that political

power lies in the nation, and that nations are fully realized only in sovereign states (Suny.

1993: 12). In order to understand the effect of nationality and nationalism on post-Soviet

Georgia, it is instructive to consider how nationality has been used, and abused,

historically in the Soviet conjuncture.

Vladimir Lenin took a conciliatory' approach to nationalism. Lenin understood

the "power of nationalism” and secured for each nationality the right of self-

determination. Lenin’s conciliation to nationalism was in part effected with the motive of

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harnessing nationalism's mobilizing power for the proletarian revolution, that “the self-

determination of nationalities would aid the self-determination of the laboring classes”

(Suny. 1993: 89). The outcome of Lenin’s policy was called korenizatsia. or nativization:

support the native language, creating a national intelligentsia, and institutionalizing

ethnicity in the state apparatus. However, Lenin’s nativization efforts never were

reconciled with the official Soviet doctrine of merging all Soviet peoples and creating a

single Soviet culture.

Josef Stalin disagreed with Lenin and, after Lenin's death, reversed Lenin’s

efforts at securing self-determination for nationalities. During his rule. Stalin sought to

produce the single Soviet culture and merge all Soviet peoples by adopting Russian as the

de facto official Soviet culture. He embarked on a Russianization effort for all the Soviet

Union, requiring Russian as the official state language, purging the republics of some of

their native elites and intelligentsia, and installing Russians in top political and

administrative posts throughout the USSR.

During the years of Khrushchev's and Brezhnev’s rule, stability was maintained

by again allowing nationalities a certain degree of local independence of action from

Moscow. Moscow maintained ultimate sanction on the use of armed force if the

republics were too unruly. Many national elites were able to circumvent Moscow’s

control as long as economic growth continued and the worst excesses of nationalism were

contained. This “thaw” in nationality policy prompted nationals to become more

frustrated with Moscow's central control.

The political and social liberalization policies during the Gorbachev years

prompted activists to mobilize in a national idiom. The pro-independence campaigns of

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the Soviet republics during the latter Gorbachev years were mobilized on the basis of

nationalism and demonstrations increased. Mobilization on the basis of nationalism

prompted a domino effect that soon threatened the integrity of many post-Soviet states.

Ethnic minorities, those communities that did not have national republic status during the

Soviet era. in many states began to clamor for national independence and eventually

prompted civil wars or armed clashes. Abkhazians in Georgia, Chechens in Russia, and

residents of the Transdneister region of Moldova have prompted civil wars or armed

clashes in those states. The threat that the ethnic Russian majority in northern

Kazakhstan would move unilaterally to annex themselves to Russia prompted

Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev to move the national capital from Almaty in

southeastern Kazakhstan to Astana in the north.

The “Messianic Teleology” of Nationalism

Characterizing nationalism as having a messianic teleology involves two

elements. First, the messianic character of nationalism is an historiographical element

that exalts the nation. Second, the teleological character of nationalism can be inferred

from its messianism: if the nationalist discourse is exalted and is significant, then that

discourse intrinsically is worthy of preservation. The messianic character of nationalism

also demands such preservation in a “covenant” with the national community. Hence,

nationalism as a mobilizing frame involves both the recognition of the community's

historical past and the community's orientation around the goal of preserving that

national character in the face of actual or perceived threats from other communities.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As the “messianic” rubric implies, this approach considers “nationalism as

religion." an analogy convincingly presented by Kathryn Manzo (1996) in Creating

Boundaries: The Politics of Race and Nation. In explaining nationalism as religion,

Manzo views in nationalism a parallel with the power of religion to re-invent the past,

creating new structures of meaning for a political community. She contends that

nationalism “creates boundaries separating sacred kin and alien kind" (1996: 3) and

invests the nation-state and its laws with “sacred qualities" (1996: 15). Nationalism treats

the nation as sacred and creates “myths” by “looking back to the original moment when

the idea (and ideal) f the nation was supposedly bom and spread" (1996: 4).

Nationalism, indeed, can take on the preeminence in social and power relations of

a religion. A certain account of the national history, for example, becomes accepted and

unquestioned for the community. In a word, it becomes sacred. Benedict Anderson, in

his book. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,

portrays the museum as a tool to justify colonial power (1991: 178-184). In the post

colonial period, however, the museum becomes a “temple." an institution of the nation,

highlighting that sacred history as an archive of a nation's ancestors:

It is probably not too surprising that post-independence states, which exhibited marked continuities with their colonial predecessors, inherited this form of political museumizing. For example, on 9 November 1968. as part of the celebrations commemorating the 15,h anniversary of Cambodia’s independence. Norodom Sihanouk had a large wood and papier-mache replica of the great Bavon temple of Angkor displayed in the national sports stadium in Phnom Penh. He replica was exceptionally coarse and crude, but it served its purpose— instant recognizability via a history of colonial-era logoization. 'Ah, our Bayon’—but with the memory of French colonial restorers wholly banished (Anderson. 1991: 183).

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An example of the exaltation of history lies in Georgian Military Council's restoration

of the 1921 Constitution of Georgia.5 In this act. the Georgians reached back to their

glorious history. The late 1910s and early 1920s were the years of Georgia's modern

heyday, when the state had achieved independence before Bolshevik imperial dominance.

Membership within the community becomes a tie that appears to be grounded in

blood, as Georgians trace their roots back to those individuals in history that fought for

the integrity of the Georgian state. In addition, membership in the community that is the

Georgian people is nurtured and reinforced from generation to generation through

familial preservation of language, religion, and other national symbols. Hank Johnston

affirms this point:

That nationalist sentiments survived in virtual dormancy to burst forth once repression was eased suggests an analytical focus on those aspects of social life where ethnic identity can be nurtured out of the view of the state, the inner recesses of primary relations with family and friends (Johnston, 1994: 269).

Johnston's observation underscores that the solidarity in nationalism is deeply rooted and

is embedded within the context of family relations and kinship ties. The connection to

kinship especially helps nationalism to achieve a “primordial” sense, a “natural” tie that

is part of one's being. Georgian nationals, then, become “true believers,” full of an

emotive and deep-seated faith that their goal, a sovereign Georgian nation-state, is

attainable.

It is the teleology, or “future focus,” of nationalism that makes an opposition

movement based on a nationalist frame, such as Georgia' pro-independence movement,

so potentially dangerous. While Manzo’s research alludes to the teleology of

* The Military Council was the coalition of oppositionists that ousted Gamsakhurdia from power in 1992.

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nationalism, the “goal-oriented” character of the nationalist frame does not have the

emphasis in her work of “nationalism as religion” and is left underdeveloped. She notes

that nationalism:

treats the immortality of the collective body and soul as the highest human ideal (develop and defend the nation; to thine own kin be true; lay down your life for your country). And it offers multifaceted justifications for the behavior and practices of the nation in terms that vary from one narrative to the next but that couch racial and religious precepts in the language of moral respectability (Manzo. 1996: 7).

She also asserts that the immortalized nation is presented “as an entity worth dying for. as

the ultimate object of individual loyalty," and therefore, “demands sacrifice in its name"

(Manzo. 1996: 7).

The several ways in which the nation mobilizes the community for its

preservation will take Manzo's remarks one step further. Benedict Anderson devotes an

entire chapter of Imagined Communities to “memory" and “forgetting" (Anderson. 1991:

187-206). Here, Anderson contends that the process of nation-building is not necessarily

a historically determined process, but rather historiographicallv determined. The

community under observation will maximize certain aspects of its historical experience

and minimize others to justify its “right" to be a nation. The argument here is that most

nations share a desire for longevity. After constructing the glorious histories of suffering,

sacrifice, and endurance against all odds of historical circumstance, and canonizing them

in museums, nationals are dedicated to preserving their nation for the future.

To take the approach of nationalism as religion a bit further, one may argue that,

at an ideational level, inclusion in a national community requires a “covenant." The

“covenant" obligates the members of the national community to preserve the symbols and

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the historical past of the nation and to sacrifice in order that the nation may prosper and

withstand actual and perceived threats.6 The tools used to withstand those threats include

both physical force, such as military and other means, and ideational force, that is

recognition of the “staying power’* of the Georgian state and the longevity of its heritage.

We find that “covenant” manifest in the preamble of the Georgian Constitution, adopted

on 24 August, 1995:

The people of Georgia whose strong will is to establish a democratic social order, economic independence, a social and legal state, to guarantee universally recognized human rights and freedoms, to strengthen the state independence and peaceful relations with other countries, announce to the world this Constitution based upon many centuries of state tradition and the main principles of the 1921 Constitution [emphasis added].7

Under these circumstances, it is not hard to imagine mobilization on a nationalist

frame risking the emergence of the specter of chauvinism. The development of national-

chauvinist movements flourished in the early 1990s in some post-Soviet states. Some

Russians, viewing themselves as inheritors of the Soviet mantle, look upon other former

Soviet nationalities as inferior and look with fondness toward a future where Russia again

has unquestioned hegemony over the former Soviet space. In addition, many of the pro-

independence claims during the late 1980s and early 1990s demanded that the national

republics were the exclusive domain of the republic's nationals, manifest in slogans like.

"Georgia for the Georgians” and “Ukraine for the Ukrainians.” Extremists of that view'

began to carry out acts of brutality against ethnic minorities resident in their republics.

'' For further discussion of nationalist “covenants." see Anthony D. Smith. 1999. Sakartvelos Parlamenti. 18 October 1995. pages 7-14. The full text of the Georgian Constitution (in English) can be found at the Georgian Parliament Web site (www.parliament.ge/LEGAL_ACTS/CONSTITUTION/consen.html).

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The Nationalist Frame and Georgian Social Movements

Nationalism as a unifying theme for mobilization can easily become unstable,

especially in the Soviet and post-Soviet context. Nationalism as a frame for mobilization

underscores an inherent distinction of self and Other. Manzo affirms that nationalism

“privileges monoculture over diversity” (1996: 6). The Georgian nationalist pro

independence campaign, for its part, marginalized citizens of other ethnicities, even

though those ethnic minorities shared the Georgians' objective of achieving an

independent Georgian state. The support and resources of Abkhazians, Ossetians,

Armenians in southern Georgia, and Azerbaijanis in northeastern Georgia, were,

therefore, unavailable to support the Georgian campaign because the nationalist frame

excluded those groups from participation.

This point is highlighted in Gamsakhurdia's statements and policies before and

after Georgia's independence. For example, during mid-1990 negotiations with the

Communist Party of Georgia over the republic's new electoral law, Gamsakhurdia had

demanded that voters should demonstrate a minimum literacy in Georgian language to

qualify to vote. In addition, presumably at Gamsakhurdia's hand (at least in part), the

final version of Georgia’s electoral law stipulated that organizations contesting elections

must be active over the territory of the entire republic. This move barred most ethnic

minority-based movements, including the Abkhazian Popular Forum (Aidgylara) and the

Ossetian Popular Shrine (Adaemon Nykhas), from national government institutions

(Aves. 1992: 169).

Georgia’s exclusive nationalist frame also constructed a historiography that

disenfranchised Georgia’s ethnic minorities from the territory. The Georgian nationalist

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outcry of “Georgia for the Georgians" was a harbinger for ethnic minorities that

Georgia's independence would replace Soviet authoritarianism with another

authoritarianism based on Georgian national-chauvinism, as is evident in Gamsakhurdia's

statements below. The first Gamsakhurdia quote is a response to a journalist's assertion

that Gamsakhurdia's past comments— some favoring a prohibition of foreign residents in

Georgia and others decrying ethnic hatred— were contradictory:

I see no contradictions in my statements. When certain of the newcomers from Azerbaijan and Ossetia and other foreigners behave aggressively and flout the rights of the indigenous Georgian population, discriminating against it. and also when they attempt to encroach on the territorial integrity of the Republic of Georgia and the life of the citizens, all this is then seen as an act of aggression and discrimination. The oppression of the Georgian population on its own land could be evaluated in accordance with all international rules of law as an international crime. Respect for the law is required not only of Azerbaijanis, but also of the representatives of all nations. Land that is unlawfully occupied should be liberated by all, among them also Georgians. However, in Georgia the illegal homes of Georgians are being demolished while the homes of the non-Georgian population are inviolable. We are opposed to such discrimination. As far as separatists of all stripes are concerned, we will fight them since their claims to the breaking up of Georgia into parts are illegal. As far as the Helsinki Accord is concerned, it does not call on states to admit unchecked to their territories hundreds of thousands of foreign citizens for permanent residence. All democratic countries have a citizenship law, Georgia as yet does not. For this reason we cannot prior to the enactment of this law admit foreigners in such enormous numbers to our small, land-hungry country, where foreigners constitute 35 percent of the population as it is. (Zarya Vostoka. 8 December 1990)

Georgian Parliament President Zviad Gamsakhurdia has rejected a protest by the parliament of the North Ossetian autonomous republic at ending the autonomy of the South Ossetian region b the Georgian Parliament. [Gamsakhurdia’s] reply alleges that the decision by the Georgian Parliament on December 11 “is legitimate both from a moral-political viewpoint and on legal grounds." In Gamsakhurdia's opinion, a decision to establish the South Ossetian autonomous region was illegally made in 1922, and it was “artificially established on primordial Georgian territory.” (Tass (Russian News Agency), 27 December 1990)

At the same time, one of the most important aims of our meeting [with then Russian Supreme Soviet chairman Boris Yeltsin] was to stabilize the situation in

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Shida Kartli [the Gamsakhurdia’s Government’s new name for the South Ossetian autonomous region, which was abolished after the Ossetian independence movement em erged]...I explained that neither has there ever been a South Ossetia, nor is there such a place today. (Sakartvelos Respublika, 26 March 1991)

Press commentaries, in Georgia and abroad, were keen to highlight the exclusionist

character of Georgian nationalism:

And. finally, the question of impending citizenship in a free Georgia. Zviad Gamsakhurdia had already in advance divided all inhabitants of the republic into 'citizens’ and ‘subjects.’ Residence qualifications and also knowledge of Georgia have been declared a barrier in the way of obtaining the title of citizen. Ossetians cannot, it turns out, count on becoming equal people in Georgia— their language belongs to an entirely different group from Georgian. ‘Subjects,’ however, according to Gamsakhurdia, will unfailingly be hurt when it comes to political rights. (Nedelya, 18 March 1991)

Dr. Gamsakhurdia also said that the other minority nationalities in Georgia—over a quarter of the republic’s population—were ‘not concerned’ by what was happening in South Ossetia. But he also repeated that a proposed citizenship law would set “very strict criteria” for non-Georgians becoming citizens. He said that these would include the question of when their ancestors settled in Georgia, and he has suggested that perhaps only those whose ancestors arrived before the first Russian annexation of 1801 would be given citizenship. A subsequent law will strip non-citizens of the right to own or inherit land. Dr. Gamsakhurdia said yesterday that “most of the national minorities were occupying forces in Georgia, and their ancestors came here as conquerors. All people can live here in peace, but those who do not want to live in peace with us must leave Georgia and return to their own homelands.” (The Times (London), 11 January 1991)

The Georgian Government elaborated a theory of minority rights “based on the

assumption that members of minorities with a relatively recent history of settlement in

Georgia, such as the Ossetians or Azerbaijanis, qualified neither for an inalienable right

to residence in the republic nor to equal status with the dominant ethnic group" (Jones.

1993: 295). Gamsakhurdia's Round Table-Free Georgia movement dominated the

Government after winning a strong parliamentary majority in 1990. In 1991,

Gamsakhurdia, as Georgian President, visited Javakheti, the Armenian enclave of

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Georgia, and stated that Armenians are “guests” in Georgia, reinforcing his wholesale

policy of minimizing the rights of ethnic minorities on Georgian territory (Guretski.

1998).

The nationalist frame also appears to have precluded the convergence of Georgia's

pro-independence moves with similar movements in the other Soviet republics. While

one might have expected the various pro-independence movements around the USSR to

ally themselves and pool their resources against the Soviet center, this did not happen.

Paul Goble (1991) notes that virtually all nationalist “fronts” and issue-oriented interest

groups, with the exception of certain environmental groups, restricted their activity to

particular republics. Goble also contends that we should not be surprised, given the

centrality of the nationality question during the Soviet era. that virtually all institutions

are organized along ethnic lines in the late-Soviet and immediate post-Soviet period

(Goble. 1991: 168-169). Tarrow (1998: 5) notes that “deep-rooted feelings of solidarity

or identity." such as nationalism, ethnicity, or religion, have been “more reliable bases of

movement organization in the past than social class.”

It appears in the Soviet case that the “deep-rootedness" of the nationalist frame

precludes collaboration among nationality groups toward the goal of independence.

Nationalist movements in the USSR did mold their strategies in many cases on the Baltic

model—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were among the first to push the envelope of

independence with the Soviet center. Nonetheless, Moscow was pressured by several

individual independence bids from the Soviet republics and not one alliance of Soviet

republics in a unified front promoting secession and dissolution of the Soviet empire.

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To summarize thus far, the Soviet legacy on movement leaders and the nationalist

frame in which the pro-independence movement was set combined to produce a volatile

political society in late-Soviet and post-Soviet Georgia. The conditions of activism

during the Soviet era left dissidents with a repertoire of mobilization that emphasized

clandestine organizational skills, encouraged the personalization of movement

organizations, and a “culture of vanguardism” that may have minimized the movement's

attention to its constituency. The nationalist frame, for its part, exacerbated distinctions

between Georgians and ethnic minorities on the same territory and isolated the front,

precluding alliance with others against the Soviet center. The next section will discuss in

detail the effect of this environment on the character and activity of Georgian social

movements in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods.

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5. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN LATE-SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET GEORGIA

Social movements became active in Georgia in the late 1980s.8 Georgia's social

movements, like those in other Soviet republics, cautiously attempted to mobilize

communities after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as General Secretary of the Soviet

Union and began to implement his reformist vision for Soviet socialism. Until that time.

Georgian dissidents worked mostly underground. Georgian movements, like the

Georgian Helsinki Watch Group, were stymied following repression and arrests in the

late 1970s and early 1980s (Alexeyeva, 1985: 115-116). Before the analysis of Georgia's

social movements, it will be helpful to highlight the structure of ethnic-political

communities in Georgia and how that structure emboldened ethnic Georgians, as the

titular nationality of that republic.

The Structure of Social Protest in Georgia

Historical evidence suggests that social mobilization in Georgia was especially

difficult because of Josef Stalin's oppressive hand in Georgian politics. Stalin's purges

hit Georgia harder than most republics, such that many Georgians who grew up under

Stalin “lost the spirit of anti-Bolshevism” (Alexeyeva, 1985: 106). The repressive

brutality of Stalin's rule left a black mark on Georgian society. Historian Robert Tucker

maintains that purge victims were subjected to the most atrocious treatment in Georgia.

* As noted in the preface, the academic works with the most information on individual Georgian social movements (Aves. 1992; Suny. 1988; and Jones. 1993) lack information on the movements' membership

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Secret police and party leaders in Georgia purged one-fourth of Georgia's Communist

Party membership in the mid-1930s. Victims included Stalin's former political

opponents and the brother of Stalin's Georgian first wife (Tucker. 1990: 488). Kostantin

Gamsakhurdia. father of nationalist leader and Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

was expelled from the Georgian Writers’ Union in the 1930s for ignoring party guidance

for writing Georgian history (Ekedahl and Goodman, 1997: 261).

Though Stalin was an ethnic Georgian, he developed a strong “sense of

membership in Russia as a nation” and his learned identification with Russia may have

fueled the harsh subjugation of Georgia during his rule. Stalin was bom in Gori. a small

town in Georgia. He learned Russian at an early age and matriculated through a Russian

Orthodox theological seminary in Tiflis.9 Robert Tucker implies in his analysis that

Stalin jettisoned his Georgian roots in favor of a Russian self-consciousness (Tucker.

1990: 4). Tucker writes that Stalin sought an “idealized self as his true identity" in an

effort to disavow his troubled childhood, his physical deformity, and the peripheral status

of Georgia and the Georgians vis-a-vis the Russian center. Stalin's “ideal" was found in

Lenin and his Bolshevik faction of the Russian Empire's Marxist Party.

Ironically, many ethnic Georgians remained faithful to Stalin as a national hero.

Georgians' anger and resentment was focused upon the center in Moscow and Russian

oppression. In 1956, several thousand students protested against Nikita Khrushchev's

"cult of personality" speech against Stalin during the Twentieth Party Congress. Soviet

tanks and troops dispersed the demonstrators, and. according to Alexeyeva, no mass

composition, resources, the conditions of their emergence, and their objectives. The research herein presents the information available for analysis, mainly from these secondary sources.

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actions occurred for some twenty years (Alexeyeva, 1985: 106). This demonstration

highlighted the endurance of Georgians’ national spirit, which was strong enough even to

embrace a Georgian who, arguably, repressed the country more brutally than any

Russian.

In this manner, Georgian social movements of the mid- and late-1980s were

founded on distinctly national themes. The Ilia Tchavtchavadze Society, for example,

used the slogan. “Language, Faith, and Fatherland." Other groups focused on cultural

revival in Georgia, and later, Georgian independence. The movements’ strong national

consciousness also was manifest in the veneration of Georgia's leading Figures. Ilia

Tchavtchavadze (1837-1907). for example, was one of Georgia’s greatest poets. He

advanced Georgian national consciousness, writing a rich body of poetry and prose in a

style of critical realism that overshadowed earlier patriotic romanticist styles (Suny.

1994: 127). The Society of Saint Ilia the Righteous, founded in 1988. also honored

Tchavtchavadze. Shota Rustaveli’s medieval literature helped to standardize the spoken

Georgian language and his epic poem vepkhistiqaosani (“The Knight in the Panther's

Skin") became the best-known verses in the Georgian language (Suny. 1994: 39).

Georgia’s social structure exacerbated the ethnic Georgian nationalism and

tensions among the ethnic minorities. During Georgia’s pre-Soviet independence, ethnic

minority quotas in the Georgian parliament were removed. The Georgian Government

launched a “Georgianization" program in schools and government administration. In

response, ethnic minority communities, like the Armenians, Ossetians, and Abkhazians,

1 Non-Georgians often referred to Georgia’s capital as Tiflis and this name was common during Russian and Soviet domination of the territory. Georgians refer to the capital as Tbilisi.

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formed national congresses as coordinating bodies to compensate for their lack of access

in state institutions (Jones, 1993: 290).

Soviet nationality policy, since the 1920s, was based on a “divide and rule”

strategy aimed at minimizing collaboration among ethnic communities for leverage over

Moscow. Soviet elite determinations of which communities were entitled to territories

with varying degrees of autonomy were often arbitrary and stoked resentment and

competition at the ground level (Khazanov. 1995: 98). This resentment was held in

check only by the authoritarian methods of Soviet state power. Ian Bremmer elaborates

in his discussion of titular and non-titular Soviet nationalities that center-imposed

hierarchy imposed relationships of dependency for certain communities and implicitly

justified the domination of some ethnic communities by other ethnic groups (Bremmer.

1993: 11-18).

The titular nationality, thus, held control over political, economic, and cultural

resources, while the ethnic minorities were left subservient both to the Soviet center in

Moscow and to the dominant nationality of the Soviet republic. Under this logic. Andrei

Sakharov described Georgia as a “little empire.” In this “imperial” environment.

Georgia's social movements formed and pushed a nationalist agenda against Soviet

power and the Communist monopoly.

Analysis of Social Movements in Georgia

Georgian social movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s exhibit several

characteristics that probably have an origin in the political system from which Georgia.

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and indeed the Soviet Union, was drifting. Please see the appendix for a matrix of

Georgian social and political movements.

First. Georgian social movements appear to be very personalized, grounded and

molded around the charisma of the movement leaders. Many of these leaders, including

Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Merab Kostava, and Giorgi Tchanturia, were known in Georgia for

their bold anti-regime activities, and subsequent arrests, over human rights issues in the

1970s (Gamsakhurdia and Kostava) and over nationalist issues in the 1980s (Tchanturia).

By comparison. Fish noted that Russian movements and political parties, notably the

Democratic Party of Russia, capitalized on the name recognition afforded by its leader

Nikolay Travkin. Travkin, unrepentant for his part, asserted that sometimes personalism

is necessary to spawn participation (Fish 1995: 104).

It also may be instructive that some Georgian movement activists were leading a

few movements simultaneously. Gamsakhurdia. for example, played a leading role in the

Georgian Helsinki Union, the Ilia Tchavtchavadze Society-4Ih Group, the Society of St.

Ilia the Righteous, and the Round Table-Free Georgia movement. Kostava was a leader

of both the Ilia Tchavtchavadze Society-4,h Group and the Society of St. Ilia the

Righteous. All these movement organizations shared the same broad objective of

Georgian national revival and independence. It seems intuitive that, if the movements

had any significant followings, that Gamsakhurdia and Kostava would have merged the

organizations and pooled their groups' resources for maximum mobilizational

effectiveness. Gamsakhurdia's and Kostava’s membership and leadership of the

organizations separately, then, leads one to speculate that the groups were kept separate

so that the leaders could maintain an influence on movement politics through several

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mechanisms. Perhaps this, too, was a by-product of the leaders' dissident past: their

thinking may favor leading several groups so that, if one group is repressed or banned,

they had other groups in which to participate.

Second. Georgia’s social movements were very unstable and prone to

factionalization. Gamsakhurdia and a portion of his supporters split away from the Ilia

Tchavtchavadze Society (ITchS). which was focused on human rights issues and

Georgian national revival, to form the Ilia Tchavtchavadze Society-Fourth Group (ITchS-

4) in 1988. focusing more intensely on Georgian independence. Later in 1988.

Gamsakhurdia and fellow ex-dissident Merab Kostava broke with the ITchS-4 because of

strains with their co-leaders and formed the Society of Saint Ilia the Righteous, a

movement with the same focus as ITchS-4. Following the April 1989 massacre of

peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi by Soviet troops and the arrest of radical oppositionists,

the imprisoned Gamsakhurdia and Giorgi Tchanturia unified the splinter radical factions

into the Main Committee for National Salvation (MCNS). The MSNS put forth a unified

call for acts of civil disobedience in the name of Georgian independence, but the

Committee broke apart by early 1990 (Aves, 1992: 158-163). One possible explanation

for the frequent factionalization could be the personalism of the various groups (see

Appendix Two).

That said, some may argue that the splits among the groups are more or less

typical of the cycle of social movement mobilization and decline, the “cycle of

contention" in Tarrow’s words (Tarrow. 1998: 141-160). Tarrow specifies that the “cycle

of contention" is a broad process and an underutilized object of study in social movement

research, playing second fiddle to assessments of leaders and of individual movements

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(142). In his analysis, he includes the “rapid diffusion of collective action from more

mobilized to less mobilized sectors'* and “a combination of organized and unorganized

participation” as indicators of heightened conflict of a cycle of contention. Arguably, the

factionalization among Georgian social movements could fit into Tarrow’s framework for

cyclical heightened conflict.

The argument here, however, is that the factionalization of the Georgian

movements does not quite fit into Tarrow’s framework. Tarrow, for example, makes the

distinction that the resonant claims of the “early risers”—those movement leaders who

first challenge authorities— will be followed by other activists— some, normally

quiescent— who will emulate the former’s strategy and tactics. As highlighted earlier, the

Georgian social movement sector, however, was dominated by a close circle of the same

activists. Gamsakhurdia leads both the Georgian Helsinki Union of 1987 and the Round

Table-Free Georgia bloc of 1990. Tchanturia played a leading role in the Ilia

Tchavtchavadze Society and in the Georgian National Democratic Party. The diffusion

of movement organizations around the same clique of movement leaders suggests that

personalized politics was the catalyst more so than elements of cyclical contention.

The overwhelming use of nationalism as a unifying theme for the mobilization of

this time period is a third characteristic of Georgian social movements, but not a

characteristic unique to the Georgian context. Hank Johnston, Enrique Larana, and

Joseph Gusfield offer that “new social movements” often involve the emergence of “new

or formerly weak dimensions of identity...associated with a set of beliefs, symbols,

values, and meanings related to sentiments of belonging to a differentiated social group”

(Johnston. Larana, and Gusfield 1994: 7).

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Several Soviet scholars have documented how nationalist frames, held in

abeyance during years of Soviet repression, were awakened and thereby increased

mobilization in some cases during the late Soviet period (Suny, 1993: Beissinger. 1998a:

Beissinger. 1998c; Hank Johnston 1994: 269). Johnston further states that the titular

nationalist subcultures “embody an alternative to the official reality endorsed and

promoted by the state”— in the Soviet case, the official reality was Union-wide

Russification. Therefore, “the subcultures convey the illegitimacy of the state at a very

basic level” and are well suited for the anti-regime protests so common in the late Soviet

period (Johnston 1994: 270).

Social movements focused on other issues even adopted the nationalist frame as

part of their agenda to increase support to their own causes. The Georgian Green

Movement, for example, was established in 1988 as a subsection of Georgia's Rustaveli

Society, a state-sponsored movement pushing a Georgian cultural and language revival

(Aves 1992: 164). The Green Movement was able to ride the nationalist wave as an

outreach medium to increase public consciousness of ecological issues and, eventually,

created a Green Party in early 1990. Similarly, the Lithuanian Sajudis movement

subsumed several smaller dissident movements such as the Greens and feminists,

underscoring the wide utility of the nationalist frame as a banner for diverse grievances

(Johnston 1994: 281).

A fourth characteristic of Georgian social movements is that the nationalist focus

of these movements promoted the exclusion of ethnic minorities. The call for Georgian

independence was combined with the rallying cry, “Georgia for the Georgians,” which

effectively excluded the minority Abkhazians, Adzharians, Armenians, and Azerbaijanis

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also living on Georgian territory. Radical uses of the nationalist frame can quickly

degenerate into a chauvinism that inevitably will favor the alleviation of grievances for a

portion of the political community. In the Georgian case, radical activists for Georgian

independence protested with equal fervor against increased autonomy for ethnic regions

in Georgia's territory— Abkhazia, Adzharia, and South Ossetia— and these strains ripped

the post-Soviet country apart in civil war.

A fifth characteristic of Georgian social movements was that many of the

movements could muster relatively meager numbers to their membership rolls. Georgia's

Popular Front at its zenith claimed only 15,000 members; the Georgian National

Democratic Party. 4.000; Gamsakhurdia’s Helsinki Union, 2.000; the Georgian Social-

Democratic Party, 780 members in March 1990; the Green Movement claimed 5.000

members while the later Green Party reached only around 70 members (Aves 1992: 164-

165).10 Many of Georgia's movement leaders, again, were active in dissent and more

accustomed to the clandestine networks necessary for dissidence in the Soviet era. The

Sovict-era dissident experience left the ex-dissident movement leaders ill-prepared for

open politics and popular mobilization. At a broader level, the social movements

literature documents that repression in most, but not all. cases raises the contender's cost

of collective action (Gamson, 1997; Kreisi et. Al, 1997). Repression, such as the arrest of

movement leaders and Soviet troops’ violent suppression of peaceful pro-Georgian

demonstrations in April 1989, underscores mobilization as high-risk activism and

Aves used samizdat sources, other Soviet archives, and interviews with movement leaders to compile these membership estimates.

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probably discourages mobilization among moderates who do not have the solidarity

networks in place to endure the repression.

These characteristics of Georgian social movements, personalism,

factionalization, mobilization under a nationalist frame, alienation of other ethnic

minorities outside the nationalist frame, and low membership, are a collective outgrowth

of the environment in which they operated. The environment, as detailed in the previous

chapter, featured a nationalist frame and the movement leaders used organizational skills

learned under the mobilization-suppressing Soviet Communist regime. These conditions

produced a volatile political society, in which progress toward the movements' goals was

hindered by personal attacks, distrust, low popular organization, and frequent splits.

When the Georgian nationalist movement finally was successful in obtaining a strong

position in the institutional political system, the movement community’s dysfunctional

traits and the volatile political society would translate into an equally volatile post-Soviet

Georgian state system that ultimately would collapse into anarchy.

The Character of the Post-Soviet Georgian State

By 1992. the fractious and charismatic Georgian social movement sector

ultimately obtained a popular mandate for control of the Georgian Government, ousted

the Community Party leadership, and secured an independent Georgian state. The new

Georgian Government, built on the volatile circle of Georgian movement organizations,

proved equally unstable and, in time, imploded with the ouster of Georgian President

Gamsakhurdia by a coalition of oppositionists.

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Gamsakhurdia”s Round Table-Free Georgia coalition won a solid majority in the

parliamentary elections of October 1990, receiving 155 of the 250 Supreme Soviet seats.

The Georgian Popular Front came in third and added twelve seats to the Georgian

nationalist pot in the parliament (Jones. 1993: 297).'1 Shortly after, Gamsakhurdia was

elected chairman of the parliament and formed a non-Communist government, headed by

Tengiz Sigua. By December 1990, the government under Gamsakhurdia was sending

protestors and troops to the South Ossetian autonomous region to block that region’s

demands for more autonomy. Gamsakhurdia declared that the Ossetians were free to

leave Georgia if they “did not wish to live peacefully with us” (Suny. 1994: 325).

Gamsakhurdia even denounced “mixed marriages” of Georgians and non-Georgians,

claiming that they were “fatal for the Georgian family and the Georgian language"

(Ekedahl and Goodman. 1997: 262).

Centralization of the government continued apace and seemed to approach Soviet

standards. In response both to the increasing radicalism among the ethnic minorities and

within the coalition of pro-Georgia movements who opposed the new Georgian President.

Gamsakhurdia supported the formation of a National Guard, which by May 1991

answered directly to Gamsakhurdia. The legislative agenda pushed through by

Gamsakhurdia’s allies was vague and easily allowed the government to maintain tight

control of mobilization. It was relatively easy, for example, for the Ministry of Justice to

refuse to register political organizations because of strict rules on providing information

of expenditures and internal organization (Jones, 1993: 301). Georgian television, also

indirectly under Gamsakhurdia’s control, cancelled broadcasts that criticized the

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Gamsakhurdia government, leading television journalists to protest. Movement

activists, including the leader of the South Ossetian autonomy movement and Georgian

activists who protested alongside Gamsakhurdia against Soviet power, were imprisoned,

many without trial (Aves, 1992: 175). Economic decline paralyzed the country.

Opposition to Gamsakhurdia, alleging that the government was descending into

the authoritarianism they just left under Soviet power, rallied after Gamsakhurdia*s

lukewarm support to Boris Yeltsin’s forceful stand against the Soviet coup-plotters in

August 1991. Demonstrations mounted on the steps of the Supreme Soviet building.

Tbilisi became the sight of frequent skirmishes between oppositions and Gamsakhurdia

loyalists until Gamsakhurdia fled in January 1992, First to Armenia and later to Russia’s

secessionist Chechen republic (Aves. 1992: 176).

The factors outlined in the previous chapters appear to explain in part the

implosion of the Georgian Government under Gamsakhurdia. Activists in Georgia's

social movement sector took hold of the Georgian Government after the October 1990

election, and by August 1991 even those Communist party officials popularly elected to

government positions were isolated from political participation by government Fiat.

Personalized politics and distrust dominated the Georgian political sphere as

Gamsakhurdia marginalized his political competitors. The opposition to Gamsakhurdia

was virtually impotent, failing to push a unified front against the president.

Gamsakhurdia’s equivocal response to the August 1991 coup proved to be the catalyst for

the opposition to act against Gamsakhurdia. Popular political participation continued to

11 The Communist Party came in second-place with sixty-four scats.

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wane, as it did in the social movement sphere before October 1990. The Round Table-

Free Georgia movement took a majority in the October 1990 election and 86 percent of

Georgia's population elected Gamsakhurdia the First President of an independent Georgia

in April 1991. Georgia's opposition power brokers nonetheless were able to oust

Gamsakhurdia by January 1992— a move that may have been justified by

Gamsakhurdia's dictatorial policies but stands out as an undemocratic measure, all the

sam e.

It took less than a year for the personalized politics, distrust, and exclusionary

tendencies of Gamsakhurdia’s power base to erode his significant popular mandate to

govern Georgia as an independent nation. His political decline began almost

immediately. “Slanderous campaigning, harassment of opponents, and even physical

violence" during the April 1991 presidential election overshadowed his overwhelming

lead in the polls (Ekedahl and Goodman, 1997: 262). As noted earlier, centralization of

the government continued and the new government accelerated the restriction of civil

liberties and media freedoms.

Gamsakhurdia’s decline can be attributed to his failure to uphold the ideational

covenant between Georgian nationals and Georgian national heritage. The historical

record seems to suggest that Georgia's majority population (of ethnic Georgians) agreed

that the Gamsakhurdia government's pursuit of pro-Georgian goals, even to the exclusion

of ethnic minorities, was worthy of popular support. It was only when Gamsakhurdia's

actions began to isolate Georgia in the international community, lead to increasing

economic calamity, and silence those who fought alongside Gamsakhurdia for Georgian

independence that Gamsakhurdia was overthrown. Those developments— isolation.

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economic calamity, and suppression of national sentiment (among others)— endangered

the durability of the Georgian state itself. In other words, to pull from previous chapters,

the Gamsakhurdia government was overthrown when its actions broke the ideational

covenant that calls for the preservation of the Georgian nation-state and heritage.

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6. POST-COMMUNIST NATIONALISM AND DEMOCRACY IN GEORGIA

By most accounts, newly independent Georgia was imploding as a state by late

1992. Its factionalized nationalist movement organizations contributed to an unstable

Georgian Government, while the non-Georgian movement organizations were

marginalized from national state institutions. The virtual elimination of institutional

access for non-Georgian movement organizations and the perceived threat of Georgia's

national-chauvinism prompted the non-Georgian ethnic minorities in many cases to form

paramilitary wings to protect their respective communities. The ethnic Armenians of

southern Georgia's Javakheti region, for example, formed Parvents. the paramilitary' wing

of the political movement Javakh (Guretski, 1998), and Abkhazians and South Ossetians

formed military partisan groups, which attacked Georgian military targets. Specifically.

as has been argued in previous chapters, the personalized politics and distrust engendered

from the Soviet experience and the “messianic teleology" of the nationalist frame were

working against the formation of a solid base for the consolidation of democracy.

Based on movement programs and the comments of Georgian activists, the

objective of Georgian social movements' anti-Soviet opposition in the early 1990s was a

democratic post-Soviet society. In the October 1990 elections, Gamsakhurdia's Round

Table Free Georgia coalition presented a program,

calling for independence, a multiparty system, the sanctity of law, a market economy, and guarantees of civil rights such as freedom of religion and the independence of the media (Jones, 1993: 297).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Further, the Round Table’s program hardly differed from those of other contestants in the

election, according to Stephen Jones (1993: 297). These electoral platforms prompt

questions on why the government adopted such authoritarian measures in the year after

the election. The analysis here highlights that the Soviet legacy and nationalist discourse

together undermined the potential for democratic consolidation in Post-Soviet Georgia.

How was the potential for democracy undermined during this critical juncture in

Georgian history? The argument is grounded in Adam Przeworski’s (1991) elaboration

of democracy and its essence, namely the acceptance of “uncertain outcomes."

Przeworski's elaboration of democracy (1991: 1 -50) underscores that

“democratization is an act of...institutionalizing uncertainty” (14). Democracy, in

Przeworski's words, must become the only game in town, and political actors must

subordinate themselves and their interests to the democratic system. In so doing, the

actors realize that there is a possibility that their interests will not rise to prominence

through the political process. Their consolation, however, is that the rules of the

democratic game ensure that the institutional framework will provide other opportunities,

according to a set schedule, as of elections, for the present losers to advance their

interests in the future (19).

The post-Communist nationalist frame, on which the Georgian movement was

built, was not open to the prospect of “uncertain outcomes." The ideational nationalist

covenant among Georgians to preserve their national symbols, heritage, and territory

dictated that the Georgian pro-independence movement prevent conditions in which any

outcome could occur and establish conditions in which a Georgian nation-state would be

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a certain outcome. After nearly a century of suffering and sacrifice under the Soviet

yoke and foreign invasions before that, the preservation of "centuries of state tradition,"

to quote again from the Georgian Constitution, would not be left up to chance or

uncertainty.

Leslie Holmes (1997) explains nationalism as the “ideology of a nation" with

some caution, because, “unlike most ideologies, it does not per se provide guidelines on

several key aspects of social organization, notably on how to structure and manage a

political or an economic system" (1997: 283). However, the salience of nationalism lies

in the fact that, while it does not provide the means (Holmes's “guidelines") of social

organization, it does provide the end of social organization. The end of nationalism

necessarily is preservation of the community so defined as a nation. The ideology of

nationalism, therefore, can plausibly and confidently infer also the dedication of

resources for those in that community.12 The ideology of nationalism is also prone to

interpret other nationalisms, particularly those on the same territory, as inherent threats.

In sum. Georgian nationalism dictated that the end of social organization—the

goal of the political and economic system—on Georgian territory would be the

preservation of the culture, history, and security of the Georgian people. This end was

validated in Georgia's ancient culture and the desire to see that culture and history

survive into the future. This end also justified any means necessary, even the

disenfranchisement or exclusion of those citizens of Georgia who happened not to be

ethnic Georgians.

These resources include material resources, such as budget funds, housing, land, and goods and services, as well as ideational resources, such as citizenship and recognition of cultural traditions.

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The post-Soviet, post-Communist conjuncture in which the latest cycle of

Georgian nationalist mobilization emerged compounded the nationalist discourse with an

aura of distrust and personalized politics. Distrust and personalized politics both were

byproducts of the clandestine environment in which the movement activists, former

dissidents, gained their formative experience. The Soviet experience and conditions of

life and mobilization in that environment are not easily forgotten among former Soviet

dissidents. Soviet-era activist strategies and mores appear to have combined to make the

nationalist perceptions of threat to the emerging Georgian nation more conspiratorial and

made those activists more prone to exclude non-Georgians from the political process for

fear of subversion of Georgian nation-statehood.

This line of argument begs a comparison of Georgia with the post-Soviet

experience of the other Soviet states. Most of the Soviet republics based their

independence movements on a similar nationalist platform. Why. then, did Georgia

descend into anarchy while the Baltic states— Latvia. Lithuania, and Estonia— for

example, have a comparatively docile transition to independence? In short, the Baltic

and other pro-independence “fronts” carried a nationalist frame similar to that used in

Georgia, but the post-Soviet states included some representation from Soviet holdovers.

Lithuania's pro-independence bid. for example, is often compared with Georgia because

Soviet troops brutally repressed demonstrations in both states (April 1989 in Georgia, and

January 1991 in Lithuania). The Lithuanian Reconstruction Movement (Lietuvos

Persitvarkvmo Saiudis). better known as Sajudis, was founded by dissidents and non-

party members, like Vytautas Landsbergis. and also leading Lithuanian communists,

including Bronius Genzelis. Antanas Buracas (former member of the USSR Supreme

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Soviet). Romualdas Ozolas, and Kazimiera Prunskiene (who was Sajudis' choice for

Prime Minister in 1990). As discussed in chapter three, this “pact" between Soviet

holdovers and new activists may smooth the way of potentially devisive Post-Communist

transitions. The distrust, personalized politics, and “vanguardist” tendencies of Georgia's

social movements, however, minimized the opportunity for stabilizing pacts among

Georgia's political elite. The course of events in Georgia conspicuously diverges from

the transition formula above in part because compromise— between radical nationalists

and the Communist elite and even within the movement, between radical nationalists and

moderates—was not forthcoming.

The new Georgian Government, elected in October 1990. comprised a number of

Soviet government officials, including the legislators affiliated with the Communist Party

of Georgia, which received sixty-four seats, but Gamsakhurdia expelled the Communist

contingent after the failed coup of August 1991. After this point, the Gamsakhurdia

Government, riding on a political society personalized around Gamsakhurdia himself,

managed an economic and political decline, punctuated by the continued marginalization

of Georgia's ethnic minorities, the summary labeling of Gamsakhurdia’s opponents as

"enemies of the state” and “stooges of Moscow,” and a leader in Gamsakhurdia whose

actions, statements, and seemingly unreasoned policies became much easier to

characterize as dictatorial.

O'Donnell and Schmitter concede that they do not regard pacts as "a necessary

element in all transitions from authoritarian rule.” They assert, however, that "where

[pacts] are a feature of the transition, they are desirable— that is. they enhance the

probability that the process will lead to a viable political democracy" (O'Donnell and

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Schmitter, 1986: 39). The contrast between the Georgian Governments. Gamsakhurdia

and post-Gamsakhurdia, is truly stark.

The Military Council, Georgia’s coalition of Gamsakhurdia oppositionists, ousted

Gamsakhurdia and persuaded ethnic Georgian and former Soviet foreign minister Eduard

Shevardnadze to return to Georgia. Shevardnadze, a career Communist Party member,

was appointed leader of the Georgian Parliament, and from this vantage point, he created

the Citizens' Union of Georgia, a political party comprised of Soviet holdovers and

young reformers, like Zurab Zhvania, creator of the Georgian Green Party in the early

1990s.

The new government has presided over a halting process of stabilization in

Georgian politics. Georgia is viewed as a middling performer in comparison with other

former Soviet states making the transition away from communism. For example,

according to the Freedom House annual comparative survey of political rights and civil

liberties. Georgia has progressed from a rating on 6.5 in 1991-1992 to 3.4 in 1998-1999

(out of seven).13 Georgia’s overall “democracy rating” for 1997 stood at 4.75 out of 7

(the Baltic states earned the highest scores among the former Soviet states at 2.06 and

Uzbekistan, the lowest at 6.44). Georgia's “political process” and “civil society"

rankings— both of which factor into the overall democracy ranking— were 4.50 and 4.25.

respectively, according to the Freedom House-sponsored Nations in Transit: A Survey of

Reform in the Post-Communist States survey.

' ’ A score of “ I" is the most democratic and “7” is the least. See Bartley, cd.. 1999. for details on methodology.

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7. CONCLUSIONS

The preceding analysis has elaborated in the Georgian context the confluence of

the Soviet legacy and the nationalist frame on political life. In Georgia, it appears that

post-Communist nationalism placed Georgian political society in peril.

Why did the Georgian national movement decline after 1992-1993? One reason

for the decline lies in the defeat of the common adversary, namely the Communist Party.

Georgia's nationalist-based social movements united in opposition to Soviet authority

and the power monopoly of the Communist Party. By 1991. however, the Soviet Union

had collapsed and the Georgian Government under Gamsakhurdia banned and purged

even democratically-elected Georgian Communist Party members. After these watershed

events, the fragile Georgian political society was more visible, and the weaknesses of the

social movement sector became more pronounced. The personalistic nature of the

movements, for example, exacerbated divisions among Georgia's nationalists. This

process culminated in oppositionist moves to oust Gamsakhurdia from power.

Kenneth Roberts notes “homogeneity versus heterogeneity of popular sector

interests" as one of four structural conditions of collective actions:

In the political realm, authoritarian rule can provide a “negative referent" or common target against which diverse strands of opposition can unify and mobilize, whereas democracy removes this least common denominator and may divide popular sectors among competing partisan or group loyalties. (Roberts. 1998: 62).

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The ethnic nationalist frame also proved a liability when the Georgian movement

leaders became responsible for Georgian national policy. The Georgian ethnic nationalist

discourse alienated roughly thirty percent of Georgia’s population. Further, the

personalist motivations and “sect-like organization design” minimized the potential for

compromise between Georgians and ethnic minorities (Della Porta. 1995: 201). This

same dynamic also strained relations among ethnic Georgian groups. Roberts observes

that, while vanguardist parties and movements thrived under authoritarian conditions,

those same movements “found it difficult to translate their strength in civil society into

sustainable electoral success” because of changes in the political context (Roberts. 1998:

271). Roberts’ analysis of the Partido Unificado Mariateguista (PUM) in Peru and the

Communist Party in Chile has a clear parallel in the Georgian context.

The Georgian nationalist movement may have been unable to withstand the

organizational transition from movement to party. The movements were formed in the

late 1980s in the face of a Communist Party political monopoly. By 1990 the

movements, most prominently Gamsakhurdia's Round Table Free Georgia, were moving

into Georgia's political institutions by way of elections.

An effective social movement, however, will not necessarily make an effective

political party. On this point, it is instructive to return to our brief discussion of political

parties in relation to social movements from chapter two. First, the agendas that

Georgian movements pursue became more rigid after the movement leaders entered

Georgian institutional politics. The fluid, multiform, extra-institutional nature of most

social movement organizations allows some flexibility in movement goals and priorities

over time. When those movements shift toward political party organization and

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institutionalization, the movements lose their flexibility and are beholden to institutional

mechanisms and a rigid set of goals, enshrined in a party platform.

In addition, the direct-action tactics of the movement organizations are harder to

justify when the actor is the state. In 1990, Gamsakhurdia incited ethnic Georgians to

travel by bus to the South Ossetian region of Georgia to counter the rising demands for

autonomy of the ethnic minorities there (Suny, 1994: 325). Gamsakhurdia-as-movement-

leader could easily incite such a direct-action move outside institutional channels to

further his cause. Gamsakhurdia-as-Georgian-President, however, was accountable to all

Georgian citizens, both ethnic Georgian and ethnic minority. Such a move against other

Georgian citizens, therefore, diminished the credibility of Gamsakhurdia in particular and

of the Georgian nationalist movement in general.

The marriage of Sovietology texts and the social movements literature is

especially instructive. The thesis highlights several ways in which post-Soviet social

movement leaders, harboring clandestine, dissident, perspectives on mobilization, are

affected by the previous conditions of mobilization under an authoritarian regime such as

the Soviet regime. Admittedly, this approach wanders close to a psychological, rather

than sociological, approach, but social movement scholars have walked this tightrope

before.1-4 The psychological underpinnings do not diminish the observation that

authoritarian regimes project a multifaceted influence upon the dissidents who challenge

those regimes.

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In addition, the authoritarian influence can outlast the regimes themselves.

Georgian social movement development demonstrates that the dissidents of the Soviet era

were unable to adapt their tactics and strategies to maximize their effectiveness in a

comparatively more open atmosphere. Lynn Kamenitsa, discussing East German social

movement activity, sums up the point:

“Understanding the ability of movements to [adjust rapidly to new political terrain during a transition from authoritarianism] requires an awareness of the fact that social movements may well continue to bear the marks of the authoritarian system out of which they emerged, even when they have been successful in toppling it" (Kamenitsa. 1998: 316).

As Jonathan Aves pointed out, the experience of clandestine dissident activism left

Georgia's activists ill-prepared for open politics. The organizational skills and tactics

necessary to maintain a clandestine dissident network can prove less effective at best and

impotent at worst when mobilizing in an open political system. The Georgian

movements appear to exemplify this development.

This dynamic, of Soviet-era dissidents trying to mobilize in post-Soviet

conditions, stresses the need for attention in academic research to social movements’

transitions from authoritarianism. The extant, state-centric, literature on transitions from

authoritarianism among political institutions would be greatly enhanced with a

complementary focus in social movement studies on the character and behavior in

democratic or quasi-democratic conditions of movements that are used to operating in an

authoritarian environment. Movement organizations will be effective under “transition

conditions" if their leaders and constituents can make the requisite alterations in the

IJ Ted Robert Gurr (1970) and Donatella Della Porta (1995) exemplify this tightrope walking between disciplines. Della Porta, for her part, found a solid middle ground in her use of life-historics to complement

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movement's priorities, organizational structure, and its attitude toward allies and

competitors in the social movement sector.

Scholars studying social movements also may find useful data in past political

science studies of political efficacy in the Soviet context. Popular apathy in the Soviet

Union and Post-Soviet environment is well-documented but not explained in detail.

Notions and measures of political efficacy in the Soviet context could be married with the

social movement theory of cognitive liberation, the enhanced consciousness that prompts

formerly passive communities to mobilize.

Manzo's "nationalism as religion” analogy underscores how national identity

fundamentally restructures life experience and can fundamentally affect a movement's

ability to mobilize a community. Individuals may choose from a host of identities to

nurture solidarities, to include gender, class, age. occupation, religion, and nationality.

Religion and nationality, however, mold systems of meaning that transcend the present

and offer structures of experience that, when lied to the present, become powerful

mobilizing tools. The canonization of history, the ideational covenant made between the

national community of the present and the “ancient” heritage, and the reinforcement of

canon and covenant at the most primary level of social relations, i.e.. family and kinship

ties, constructed a robust frame to mobilize ethnic Georgians, even to the exclusion of the

ethnic minorities cohabiting Georgian territory.

Scholars must be more sensitive to the power of the teleological character in the

nationalist frame. Once such a robust frame as nationalism is embedded through the

processes above, political communities may be more easily mobilized in defense of the

social movement studies.

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sacred and immutable nation. As the Georgian context demonstrates, mobilization

under the nationalist frame under certain conditions can open the way to national

chauvinism, privation of minority communities, and radicalization among movements. In

the context of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and war in Chechnya, greater

attention to nationalist frames and their translation to political mobilization is warranted.

Soviet affairs icon Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1989 described nationalism in the

Post-Communist era as a “lethal challenge” (Brzezinski, 1989: 25). Indeed, Post-

Communist nationalism proved lethal not only to ethnic minorities in Georgia but to the

Georgian state itself. Our challenge is to minimize the lethality of Post-Communist

nationalism by assessing the influence of Soviet-era dissidence in the Post-Soviet era and

the mobilizing power of the nationalist discourse, both operating in an environment of

transition. Hopefully this thesis is a step in that direction.

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Appendix One: Map of Georgia

Georgia

B la c k

TBILISI

' Republic boundary Autonomous republic CASSR) boundary Autonomous obia* (AO) boundary Republic cental O Autonomou* republic (ASSR) canter Armenia • Autonomous obi** (AO) canter A zerbaijan — ■ Radroed TURKEY Road

(Central Intelligence Agency, 1991)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. O' U led creation of a Green Party in early 1990. "Language, Religion, and Fatherland." supported Gorbachev’s glasnost' and perestroika initiatives. from the group); Georgian independence. Georgian culture, religion, independence from European Green parties; Zurab Zhvania (current Parliament Speaker) Tengiz Sigua was a leading member of the Rustaveli Society. consciousness of ecological issues; received financial and material help 1988 Georgian independence; proposed Georgia apply to join NATO 1988 Radical break-away from ITchS (in part because Gamsakhurdia was1988 barredBreak-away from Tsereteli of ICS-4th Group; 1988 Counterweight to GHU and ITchS, Georgian language and cultural revival and 1986 Established as a section of the Rustaveli Society; raised public 1987 Human rights, anti-Russification, Georgian national revival under the banner, Irakli Batiashvili 1988-89) broke Irakli Tsereteli Irakli Shengelaia Merab Kostava Giorgi Tchanturia Merab Kostava, later nationalist Akaki Bakradze (in GCP grip over the Society led by Tedo Paatashvili Giorgi Tchanturia Appendix Two: Prominent Georgian Social Movements Ilia Ilia Tchavtchavadze Society-Fourth Group Zviad Gamsakhurdia 1987-1991 Ilia Ilia Tchavtchavadze Society Merab Kostava (also known as "Fourth Group") Society of Saint Ilia the Righteous Zviad Gamsakhurdia Georgian National Independence Party Irakli Tsereteli Georgian Social/Political Movements, Movement NameGeorgian Helsinki Union Zviad Gamsakhurdia Leader(s) 1987 human Data Estab. rights,Grievances Georgian national revival Shota Rustaveli Society founded by GCP leadership; Georgian Green Movement Givi Tumanishvili

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. j O' U Formed on initiativeRecognition of Abkhazian of Writers'Abkhazia Union; as a full-union republic, outside of Georgia; Gamsakhurdia for the October 1990 elections. Sought to lure the most direct descendant of the last Georgian king spearheadedpooling establishment its cause withof thethat Assemblyof N. Caucasian of Mountain regionsPeoples, of the RSFSR. movement has about 5,000 members-radicalsParamilitary organization(influencedFormed by connected Dashnaks) on initiativenationalist of toGeorgian Javakh intelligentsia. Writers’movement. Union; moderate voice among Conservative Parly, and the MerabGamsakhurdia's Kostava Society anti-Shevardnadzism. for leverage during for Georgian independence, democracy, and human rights. Council of Representativesgovt, appointed to govern a prefect (dismissed accepted in Nov. by the1991 Armenianwhen national community. Officially, from his home in Spain back to Georgia. October 1990 elections; many of its members are still loyal to pre-Soviet Social-DemocraticSDPs being establishedParty and fostered in the Sovietcontactsin local Union. schools, with other protectionregion.new of Organizednational institutions armed andprotests development against of Gamsakh.the Govt, appointment of and pro-Georgian wing. advocated decisive political role for the Georgian Orthodox Church; ethnic Georgian prefects to the Javakheti region; organized an elected Provisio Tchanturia broke away from ITchS-4 because of strains with Gamsakhurdia. 1990 Split from Monarchist-Conservative 1989Parly; joined electoral1990 blocBloc ledincluding by Society of St. Ilia the Righteous (Paatashvili), Monarchist- 1991 Formed Septeber 1991 as a parliamentary faction of eight members.calling 1989 Saw monarchist rule as a unifying structure for Georgian society; 1988 Preservation of Armenian cultural heritage, science, and history of Armenia 1988 Georgian independence; claimed inheritance of pre-Soviet "NDP"; (initiative group); (founding conf.) November 1988 1989“ Moderate line on Georgian independence; recognized by Georgia’s July 1989 Summer 1988 (initiative group); (founding conf.) July 1989 Sham ba in late 1989 led Aleksei Gogua (chairmanof Abkhazian Writers’ Union);Gogua replaced by Sergei by Tengiz Kikacheishvili). Akaki Asatiani Tedo Paatashvili Zviad Gamsakhurdia (now Nodar Natadze Giorgi Tchanturia Guram Muchaidze David Rstakyan Temur Zhorzholiani Union of Georgian Traditionalists Democratic Choice Roundfor Georgia Table of the National Liberation movement") Aidgylara (Popular Forum) Movement/Round Table Free Georgia Party Charter-91 (not really a "social Parvents Georgian Monarchist Conservative Georgian Popular Front Georgian Social Democratic Party Georgian National Democratic Party Javakh

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. £ in in the political sphereManana under Archvadze-Gamsakhurdia. the leadershipGeorgian of Gamsakhurdia's government-sponsored widow, anti-Abkhaz, anti-Russian paramilitary group. Shevardnadze-led government, while another faction continues to participate unification with the Russian Fedeation’spolicy N. Ossetianof civil disobedience; AR. the Committee broke apart by early 1990 was ousted. A portion took to paramilitary/terrorist tactics against the 1989 Limited appeal outside Gori, Georgia (Stalin’s birthplace).1992 Coalition of radicalized Gamsakhurdia loyalists after the former President 1989 Called for upgrade of S. Ossetian1989 AO Splinteredto AR status; radicals eventual united in call for Georgian independence through a 1989- 1990 Founded in Kostava’s memory after he died in an Oct. 1989 car crash. m assacre. Irakli Jorjadze Radical oppositionists (including Vazha Adamia Gamsakhurdia, al),Tchanturia arrested et following April 1989 Zviad Gamsakhurdia Alan Chochiev in The Road To Post-Communism: Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union (London: Pinter Publishers, 1992) and 1992) Publishers, Pinter (London: Union Soviet the in Movements Political Independent Post-Communism: To Road The in 1998 (http://poli.vub.ac.be/publi/crs). 1998 Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 11 April 1998, 1998, April 11 Gazeta, Guretski, Nezavisimaya LD0904155198). (FBIS 1998 Suny, Ronald G, The Making of the of Making The G, Ronald Suny, (Bloomington: Nation 1988), Georgian Press, University April 9 Indiana Iprinda, 98R32219P), (FBIS 5 p. Javakheti," of Question "The 3,1), (v. Voitsekh, Studies Regional Caucasian Stalin Society Sources: Aves, Jonathan, "The Rise and Fall of the Georgian Nationalist Movement, 1987-91," pages 157-179, pages 1987-91," Movement, Nationalist Georgian the of Fall and Rise "The Jonathan, Aves, Sources: Merab Kostava Society Main Committee for National Salvation White Legion Zviadists Adaemon Nykhas (Popular Shrine)

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^pemdix Three F etim ln tim Annie GmpuiSocidMsraiMnfe

GKU 19OT

19(8

GNUP

19(9 MCJE fM d v tt^ rU N ) MKS

199® SSR

UCT Ndiotircwi

GenMliairileM. RTTC

GHU = Georgia Helsinki. Union ITcK> = Ilia Tchavtchavad:* Society ITcK-4G = Ilia Tchavtchavadae S o c ie ty ^ Group GNDP = Georgian National Democratic F^rty SS IR= Society of Saint Ilia the Righteous GNIP = Georgian National Independence Party MCNS = National Committee tor National Salvation MKS = Merab KostavaSociety GMCP = Georgian Monarchist Conservative Party UGT = Union o f Geo^ian Traditionalists NF = National Forum R1FG = Round Table-Free Georgia GGM = Georgian Green Movement

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 66

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