We learned this from a BBC documentary. The government didn't admit any wrongdoing, let alone apologize. It didn't even launch a credible investigation. Instead, it followed a playbook now familiar across the world's democracies-in-decline: deny everything, attack the messenger, and punish the truth-tellers. Within days, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze threatened to sue the BBC — citing Donald Trump's recent lawsuit as precedent and calling the documentary “a cheap provocation orchestrated by foreign intelligence services.” 

The State Security Service summoned Georgian doctors, protesters, and NGO workers who had spoken to the BBC, interrogating them under procedures typically reserved for serious crimes. The charge: assisting a foreign organization in activities harmful to Georgia's “national interests.” This kind of aggressive denial isn’t unique to Georgia. In 2023, for instance, the Indian government banned a two-part BBC documentary which explored the rise of Narendra Modi, including accusations that when he was chief minister of Gujarat, he enabled the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims in statewide riots. The Indian government described the documentary, in language strikingly similar to that used by the Georgian government, as “a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative.” Just last month, the White House said the BBC was a “leftist propaganda machine.”

But the inconvenient truth is that I was there when the Georgian government sprayed us with chemicals. And I know how it felt.

Let’s rewind. Over a year ago, in November 2024, when the Georgian government announced that it was halting the constitutionally-promised integration process with the European Union, hundreds of thousands Georgians spontaneously flooded the main avenue in the capital Tbilisi. The government's announcement had taken the protesters by surprise. But, in turn, the ruling party, the Georgian Dream, clearly did not anticipate the size of the protests or the mood of the protesters. 

I had left my house expecting another midsize protest. For a month, Georgians had been protesting against an election that had brought Georgian Dream back to power and that the country’s president at the time, Salomé Zourabichvili, said was a “Russian special operation.” I got there early and the crowd was nowhere near its peak, but as soon as I arrived, I knew this was something different. There were no speakers on platforms, no pre-planned messages brandished on placards. Instead, thousands of people stood together, some banging on metal barricades around the parliament building, and chanted ‘revolution’. You could feel the anger and frustration in the atmosphere.

I called a friend at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “They are mobilizing all of us,” he warned me. “Even from other cities. Everyone’s been told it’s a red alert.”

What followed was a long, relentless night. 

Crowd control quickly became punishment — an endless rain of teargas, watercanon and pepper spray, a storm of police beatings and fractured bones. On the first night of the protests alone, 207 people were taken to hospitals around the city. The protesters, most of whom had no protection, would scatter but gather again. Over and over for more than a week. 

My friends, acquaintances, and protesters I have interviewed, often recall these days as a fever dream. Almost all of them have a dramatic story of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of the government crackdown. It was, agrees everyone, unprecedented. See, Georgians are no strangers to protests and neither to government crackdowns. But this time, everything was on steroids. Beatings by the Special Forces were savage and aided by uniformless, government-hired thugs. Rustaveli Avenue, the main drag, was covered in a thick fog of tear gas, the water canons seemed to have an endless supply of liquid that burned your skin as soon as it made contact with it. The smell of chemicals lingered in the air. 

Protesters who managed to avoid being physically beaten, but couldn’t avoid the teargas and other measures, talked about experiencing violent coughing fits, spells of lightheadedness and nausea. In more severe cases, protesters passed out, vomited, had nose bleeds and a persistent skin irritation. Many people described these symptoms on social media, even as they kept going out each night to protest. “We were soaked, it was freezing, and I couldn’t breathe,” Tata Khundadze told me about being hit by sprays from the police water cannons. “My skin felt like it was on fire. It became too much — I lost consciousness.”

In the days that followed, Khundadze shared photographs online that showed a severe red rash on her hands and face. She developed open wounds on her skin that began to bleed. For several weeks after the incident, she continued to vomit, sometimes throwing up traces of blood. She thought maybe her capillaries had burst. “But in reality,” she says now, “who knows what happened, what we inhaled, what went into our lungs and what did not.” 

Many protesters, including Khundadze, speculated that the government was using an unknown teargas spray. Local news outlets started asking questions. Doctors called on the government to ease the measures, some even signed a petition demanding the disclosure of the chemicals used during the crackdown. The government denied any wrongdoing. But public speculation continued. More people spoke about suffering prolonged effects, but without access to police records or chemical analyses, their suspicions remained unprovable. 

The story stalled.

Then, this month BBC Eye released its hour-long documentary. After harrowing accounts from protesters about police brutality, the documentary turns its attention to what was in those water cannons. We hear from protesters, activists, lawyers and doctors who tried to sound the alarm. The viewer is introduced to Dr. Konstantine Chakhunashvili who, along with his brother, surveyed nearly 350 affected protesters. “Last year, on the 11th of December, after I left administrative detention, I found out that many of my friends were still experiencing nose bleeds,” he told me. “I wondered why.” Konstantine and his brother’s study found several irregularities compared to the effects of conventional riot control agents. But they couldn’t pinpoint what caused the irregularities. 

The documentary-makers spoke to Lasha Shergelashvili, the former head of weaponry for Georgia's riot police. Shergelashvili, who left the ministry in protest after the brutal crackdowns, claimed that he tested a mysterious compound in 2009, before Georgian Dream came to power three years later. He described its effects as "probably 10 times" stronger than regular teargas and recommended against its use. Anonymous current officers confirmed that the same compound Shergelashvili tested in 2009 was used during the 2024 crackdown.

And then a key document surfaced. The BBC obtained a copy of the inventory of the Special Tasks Department, from 2019, listing two unnamed substances: “Chemical liquid UN1710” and “Chemical powder UN3439,” with instructions for mixing them. UN1710 is identified as a solvent. UN3439 takes longer. It’s a hazmat classification, not a chemical name. Experts are consulted, options eliminated. Eventually, only one substance fits the description: bromobenzyl cyanide — a WWI–era chemical agent. 

While watching the documentary, I felt a strange mixture of emotions. I was angry but not in any way shocked or surprised. We discussed the documentary among friends and family, agreeing how disturbing the whole thing was. Then, in true Georgian spirit, we made jokes about it.

Tellingly, though, no one around me, including supporters of Georgian Dream, questioned whether the ruling party was capable of such evil. 

The government’s response was fast and furious. Officials and government-affiliated media dismissed the documentary as fake news spread by some shadowy global “deep state.” But their denials were inconsistent. The current minister of internal affairs denied the existence of ‘camite’ in their arsenal. But the minister at the time of the protests admitted that the government had had access to camite since 2009, though it did not use it. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Kobakhidze confirmed that there was indeed something in the water but refused to share what it was, before calling on the UK government to apologize on behalf of the BBC.

The Georgian government did launch an investigation into the “abuse of official authority.” It took barely a week for the investigation to conclude that the water was laced with a standard teargas agent. Even discounting the speed, the investigation was farcical — why did the government need an investigation to “find out” what chemicals it was spraying on protesters?

Meanwhile, a separate investigation was initiated into the people who had taken part in the BBC documentary. Konstantine Chakhunashvili, the doctor, was one of the main targets. Government spin doctors said the BBC’s conclusions around the use of camite rested entirely on his findings and were therefore not valid. But Chakhunashvili’s study never attempted to narrow down which chemicals caused the effects he had observed. With the government’s insistence that the documentary is the product of a foreign plot, it will likely be used to further limit the access of foreign journalists to Georgia, while tightening domestic media laws. And Chakhunashvili fears that academia won’t go unpunished either. 

For me, the main thing the documentary gave me was some validation. As a journalist, I spent every day of the protests standing right on the dividing line between protesters and special forces. I inhaled absolutely every single chemical released onto Rustaveli Avenue that week and was directly hit by the spray from water cannons twice. On one of those nights, when I got back home at seven in the morning, my whole body was burning. I stood in the shower for an hour pouring water, a saline solution and even milk over myself, only to go to bed with my \ body still on fire. I coughed for months onward and still, a year later, I don’t feel like my breathing is back to normal. But now I know, I am just one of the people who suffered prolonged and mysterious after-effects, many of whom are now dealing with much more serious lung and heart ailments. 

Two weeks after the revelations, it’s clear — whether specifically camite or some other hazardous compound — chemicals were used that caused injuries far beyond approved riot-control standards. Our speculations have been justified. Yet, with little hope for a proper international investigation, we are left in limbo, still wondering if the symptoms we felt were caused by sheer exhaustion and overwhelming amounts of gas and pepper spray, or if indeed, a World War 1-era chemical is, or was at some point, inside our bodies. 

For people whose lives and health have been drastically altered by the events, it means that they will have to continue spending endless days and money, looking for medical answers on their own. 

I am still unsure whether Georgian Dream understood exactly what they were doing. I think they were aware of at least the immediate effects of the mixture, but I cannot be certain that they fully planned to poison protesters with a chemical weapon. When a government is driven solely by its desire to hold onto power, its judgement becomes clouded. When you see fellow citizens with different, opposing views as enemies, limits dissolve. When there is no check on your actions and your power, you take reckless decisions. And one day, when you endanger the lives of your compatriots, your lucky streak, your immunity, might run out.

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The post Georgian nightmare: did a government knowingly poison its people? appeared first on Coda Story.

As Georgia's first female Baptist bishop, Rusudan Gotsiridze challenges the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, and is known for her passionate defence of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. She stands at the vanguard of old religion, an example of its attempts to modernize — so what does she think of the new religion being built in Silicon Valley, where tech gurus say they are building a superintelligent, omniscient being in the form of Artificial General Intelligence?

Gotsiridze first tried to use AI a few months ago. The result chilled her to the bone. It made her wonder if Artificial Intelligence was in fact a benevolent force, and to think about how she should respond to it from the perspective of her religious beliefs and practices.

In this conversation with Coda’s Isobel Cockerell, Bishop Gotsiridze discusses the religious questions around AI: whether AI can really help us hack back into paradise, and what to make of the outlandish visions of Silicon Valley’s powerful tech evangelists.

This conversation took place at ZEG Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in June 2025. It has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

Isobel: Tell me about your relationship with AI right now. 

Rusudan: Well, I’d like to say I’m an AI virgin. But maybe that’s not fully honest. I had one contact with ChatGPT. I didn’t ask it to write my Sunday sermon. I just asked it to draw my portrait. How narcissistic of me. I said, “Make a portrait of Bishop Rusudan Gotsiridze.” I waited and waited. The portrait looked nothing like me. It looked like my mom, who passed away ten years ago. And it looked like her when she was going through chemo, with her puffy face. It was really creepy. So I will think twice before asking ChatGPT anything again. I know it’s supposed to be magical... but that wasn’t the best first date. 

Isobel: What went through your mind when you saw this picture of your mother? 

Rusudan: I thought, “Oh my goodness, it’s really a devil’s machine.” How could it go so deep? Find my facial features and connect them with someone who didn’t look like me? I take more after my paternal side. The only thing I could recognize was the priestly collar and the cross. Okay. Bishop. Got it. But yes, it was really very strange.

Isobel: I find it so interesting that you talk about summoning the dead through Artificial Intelligence. That’s something happening in San Francisco as well. When I was there last summer, we heard about this movement that meets every Sunday. Instead of church, they hold what they call an “AI séance,” where they use AI to call up the spirit world. To call up the dead. They believe the generative art that AI creates is a kind of expression of the spirit world, an expression of a greater force.

They wouldn’t let us attend. We begged, but it was a closed cult. Still, a bunch of artists had the exact same experience you had: they called up these images and felt like they were summoning them, not from technology, but from another realm. 

Rusudan: When you’re a religious person dealing with new technologies, it’s uncomfortable. Religion — Christianity, Protestantism, and many others — has earned a very cautious reputation throughout history because we’ve always feared progress.

Remember when we thought printing books was the devil’s work? Later, we embraced it. We feared vaccinations. We feared computers, the internet. And now, again, we fear AI.

 It reminds me of the old proverb about a young shepherd who loved to prank his friends by shouting “Wolves! Wolves!” until one day, the wolves really came. He shouted, but no one believed him anymore.

We’ve been shouting “wolves” for centuries. And now, I’m this close to shouting it again, but I’m not sure. 

Isobel: You said you wondered if this was the devil’s work when you saw that picture of your mother. It’s quite interesting. In Silicon Valley, people talk a lot about AI bringing about the rapture, apocalypse, hell.

They talk about the real possibility that AI is going to kill us all, what the endgame or extinction risk of building superintelligent models will be. Some people working in AI are predicting we’ll all be dead by 2030.

On the other side, people say, “We’re building utopia. We’re building heaven on Earth. A world where no one has to work or suffer. We’ll spread into the stars. We’ll be freed from death. We’ll become immortal.”

I’m not a religious person, but what struck me is the religiosity of these promises. And I wanted to ask you — are we hacking our way back into the Garden of Eden? Should we just follow the light? Is this the serpent talking to us?

Rusudan: I was listening to a Google scientist. He said that in the near future, we’re not heading to utopia but dystopia. It’s going to be hell on Earth. All the world’s wealth will be concentrated in a small circle, and poverty will grow. Terrible things will happen, before we reach utopia.

Listening to him, it really sounded like the Book of Revelation. First the Antichrist comes, and then Christ.

Because of my Protestant upbringing, I’ve heard so many lectures about the exact timeline of the Second Coming. Some people even name the day, hour, place. And when those times pass, they’re frustrated. But they carry on calculating. 

It’s hard for me to speak about dystopia, utopia, or the apocalyptic timeline, because I know nothing is going to be exactly as predicted.

The only thing I’m afraid of in this Artificial Intelligence era is my 2-year-old niece. She’s brilliant. You can tell by her eyes. She doesn’t speak our language yet. But phonetically, you can hear Georgian, English, Russian, even Chinese words from the reels she watches non-stop.

That’s what I’m afraid of: us constantly watching our devices and losing human connection. We’re going to have a deeply depressed young generation soon. 

I used to identify as a social person. I loved being around people. That’s why I became a priest. But now, I find it terribly difficult to pull myself out of my house to be among people. And it’s not just a technology problem — it’s a human laziness problem.

When we find someone or something to take over our duties, we gladly hand them over. That’s how we’re using this new technology. Yes, I’m in sermon mode now — it’s a Sunday, after all. 

I want to tell you an interesting story from my previous life. I used to be a gender expert, training people about gender equality. One example I found fascinating: in a Middle Eastern village without running water, women would carry vessels to the well every morning and evening. It was their duty.

Western gender experts saw this and decided to help. They installed a water supply. Every woman got running water in her kitchen: happy ending. But very soon, the pipeline was intentionally broken by the women. Why? Because that water-fetching routine was the only excuse they had to leave their homes and see their friends. With running water, they became captives to their household duties.

One day, we may also not understand why we’ve become captives to our own devices. We’ll enjoy staying home and not seeing our friends and relatives. I don’t think we’ll break that pipeline and go out again to enjoy real life.

Isobel: It feels like it’s becoming more and more difficult to break that pipeline. It’s not really an option anymore to live without the water, without technology. 

Sometimes I talk with people in a movement called the New Luddites. They also call themselves the Dumbphone Revolution. They want to create a five-to-ten percent faction of society which doesn’t have a smartphone, and they say that will help us all, because it will mean the world will still have to cater to people who don’t participate in big tech, who don’t have it in their lives. But is that the answer for all of us? To just smash the pipeline to restore human connection? Or can we have both?

Rusudan: I was a new mom in the nineties in Georgia. I had two children at a time when we didn’t have running water. I had to wash my kids’ clothes in the yard in cold water, summer and winter. I remember when we bought our first washing machine.  My husband and I sat in front of it for half an hour, watching it go round and round. It was paradise for me for a while. 

Now this washing machine is there and I don't enjoy it anymore. It's just a regular thing in my life. And when I had to wash my son’s and daughter-in-law’s wedding outfits, I didn’t trust the machine. I washed those clothes by hand. There are times when it’s important to do things by hand.

Of course, I don’t want to go back to a time without the internet when we were washing clothes in the yard, but there are things that are important to do without technology.

I enjoy painting, and I paint quite a lot with watercolors. So far, I can tell which paintings are AI and which are real. Every time I look at an AI-made watercolour, I can tell it’s not a human painting. It is a technological painting. And it's beautiful. I know I can never compete with this technology. 

But that feeling, when you put your brush in, the water — sometimes I accidentally put it in my coffee cup — and when you put that brush on the paper and the pigment spreads, that feeling can never be replaced by any technology. 

Isobel:
As a writer, I'm now pretty good, I think, at knowing if something is AI-written or not. I'm sure in the future it will get harder to tell, but right now, there are little clues. There’s this horrible construction that AI loves: something is not just X, it’s Y. For example: “Rusudan is not just a bishop, she’s an oracle for the LGBTQ community in Georgia.” Even if you tell it to stop using that construction, it can’t. Same for the endless em-dashes: I can’t get ChatGPT to stop using them no matter how many times or how adamantly I prompt it. It's just bad writing.

It’s missing that fingerprint of imperfection that a human leaves: whether it’s an unusual sentence construction or an interesting word choice, I’ve started to really appreciate those details in real writing. I've also started to really love typos. My whole life as a journalist I was horrified by them. But now when I see a typo, I feel so pleased. It means a human wrote it. It’s something to be celebrated. It’s the same with the idea that you dip your paintbrush in the coffee pot and there’s a bit of coffee in the painting. Those are the things that make the work we make alive. 

There’s a beauty in those imperfections, and that’s something AI has no understanding of. Maybe it’s because the people building these systems want to optimize everything. They are in pursuit of total perfection. But I think that the pursuit of imperfection is such a beautiful thing and something that we can strive for.

Rusudan: Another thing I hope for with this development of AI is that it’ll change the formula of our existence. Right now, we’re constantly competing with each other. The educational system is that way. Business is that way. Everything is that way. My hope is that we can never be as smart as AI. Maybe one day, our smartness, our intelligence, will be defined not by how many books we have read, but by how much we enjoy reading books, enjoy finding new things in the universe, and how well we live life and are happy with what we do. I think there is potential in the idea that we will never be able to compete with AI, so why don’t we enjoy the book from cover to cover, or the painting with the coffee pigment or the paint? That’s what I see in the future, and I’m a very optimistic person. I suppose here you’re supposed to say “Halleluljah!” 

Isobel: In our podcast, CAPTURED, we talked with engineers and founders in Silicon Valley whose dream for the future is to install all human knowledge in our brains, so we never have to learn anything again. Everyone will speak every language! We can rebuild the Tower of Babel! They talk about the future as a paradise. But my thought was, what about finding out things? What about curiosity? Doesn’t that belong in paradise? Certainly, as a journalist, for me, some people are in it for the impact and the outcome, but I’m in it for finding out, finding the story—that process of discovery.

Rusudan: It’s interesting —this idea of paradise as a place where we know everything. One of my students once asked me the same thing you just did. “What about the joy of finding new things? Where is that, in paradise?” Because in the Bible, Paul says that right now, we live in a dimension where we know very little, but there will be a time when we know everything. 

In the Christian narrative, paradise is a strange, boring place where people dress in funny white tunics and play the harp. And I understand that idea back then was probably a dream for those who had to work hard for everything in their everyday life — they had to chop wood to keep their family warm, hunt to get food for the kids, and of course for them, paradise was the place where they just could just lie around and do nothing. 

But I don’t think paradise will be a boring place. I think it will be a place where we enjoy working.

Isobel: Do you think AI will ever replace priests?

Rusudan: I was told that one day there will be AI priests preaching sermons better than I do. People are already asking ChatGPT questions they’re reluctant to ask a priest or a psychologist. Because it’s judgment-free and their secrets are safe…ish. I don’t pretend I have all the answers because I don’t. I only have this human connection. I know there will be questions I cannot answer, and people will go and ask ChatGPT. But I know that human connection — the touch of a hand, eye-contact — can never be replaced by AI. That’s my hope. So we don’t need to break those pipelines. We can enjoy the technology, and the human connection too. 

This conversation took place at ZEG Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in June 2025.

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The post “It’s a devil’s machine.” appeared first on Coda Story.

This interview, as told to Nadia Beard, reflects what's at stake in Georgia from the perspective of the young people whose future now hangs in the balance.

What’s happening now is the go-to conversation starter here. People are always asking: what do you think is going to happen? I’ve been taking photos for nearly a year, since the foreign agent law protests this spring. So far, I haven’t missed much school, except for the times when we weren’t able to get there because of masked cops blocking the streets. Though now my school has announced that, in solidarity with protests, they'll close, so no school for a week. 

When Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that Georgia will stop pursuing European integration until 2028, it triggered young people into action and now there’s a huge wave of them  out on the streets. 

First, for a week in the spring, I was protesting with my friends, but I wanted to do more. I also grew up in a household of journalists, and I felt that just protesting — just being there — wasn’t enough. When you’re young, people your age are easier to photograph. They look at you differently. It’s more comfortable. I think that comes out in my images.  And feel I help protesters more by photographing who they are and showing the world what’s going on beyond the fireworks and gas.

I want to become a professional but I also know that I'm young and just starting. In general that’s OK because I think a lot of my images were better because I can go behind the scenes and people are less afraid of me because I don't put on this big serious, media face.

I love photographing the protests. It’s so tiring but also so fulfilling, to watch people and see how they are united. I was at a protest and I got tear-gassed and some people, wrapped in flags, came and helped us immediately. They were walking on the upper streets, talking on the phone, and they had milk for you, saline solution. They just pass by and ask if you need saline and put it in your eyes and then go on to the next person. I remember saying “I need water”, and before I knew it there were like five people at the ready with bottles of water for me.. It really showed me how many heroes there are.  People aren’t afraid. Even yesterday, when people got gassed, they ran away, and another wave came to replace them in the crowd. It’s almost as if they’re on shifts. It’s really cool to see how people are helping each other in any way possible. 

The other day I was taking a taxi to the protests and the taxi driver asked me “are you going to the protest?” and I said yes, and I was thinking, I wonder what he’ll say. And he asked “how much do I owe you to pay you back?” I asked him what he meant, and he said “you’re going to do such a good deed, how can I ever accept money for you doing that?” And I said no, please, and he started crying. He said how cruel it is, what these cops are doing to people and how it’s so emotional for him and that the future of the country is hanging by a thread right now. It was just so moving to see this grown man cry about his country. 

Young people are very angry and they are not thinking about anything else apart from the protests. There are no other priorities. The priority is to save our country. Protesters say we are protecting you and your kids’ future so you don’t wake up in Russia tomorrow.

The post I’m 14, photographing the violent protests in Georgia. The EU dream is slipping away appeared first on Coda Story.

Earlier this week, I filed entries from November 28 on, as the scale and fury of the protests against Georgian Dream mounted. On that day, Irakli Kobakhidze, the prime minister, said he was putting Georgia’s bid to join the European Union on ice for the next four years. Georgian Dream, in other words, is pushing Europe away to bring us closer to Russia.

But our country’s constitution promises to attempt full integration with the EU, a promise that Georgian Dream appears to want to break, despite its claims to the contrary. If you read my entries from November 28 chronologically, you will see that I felt motivated and enthused, thrilled that Georgians, after post-election protests seemed to peter out, were out on the streets in greater numbers, determined to assert their rights and protect their aspirations.

Since I filed those entries though, the government has adopted darker, even more repressive tactics. After arresting and beating hundreds of young protestors, the police are now using the same brutal tactics on opposition politicians. Footage of Nika Gvaramia, a prominent opposition leader, being dragged unconscious down the street by a gang of masked policemen has been seen around the world.

The violence is vicious and unrelenting. But Georgians will not be intimidated. We’re not going anywhere any time soon, so watch this space.

It’s 7.30 and I’ve just woken up. Later today, Georgian Dream politicians will open a new session of parliament, a month after a tainted election, and begin a new four-year term as the governing party of Georgia.

I head straight towards the protests outside the parliament building. Protestors have been camping outside since the previous night, even though protests in front of parliament now carry the threat of a prison sentence.

As we wait for Georgian Dream deputies (‘our’ members of parliament) to show up, we ask ourselves if there are enough of us to overwhelm the police if necessary. And will the police wait until it’s dark to take action or attack us during the day? Already, we’ve learned that we can’t impede or block the entrance to parliament and that we cannot prevent deputies entering or exiting the building.

But even this early in the morning, the police are guarding the parliament in heavy numbers. All the gates are reinforced, with metal walls erected behind them. The security measures are so extreme that even the Georgian Dream deputies - traitors - might struggle to get into the building.

Arriving outside parliament, I see the swelling crowds of protesters and feel encouraged that Georgians understand that taking to the streets in significant numbers is our only weapon. There are more of us here today than anytime in the weeks following the election. We need more, though, to join us. We want the people who sold our country to hear our anger through the walls. 

Around noon, Georgian Dream deputies arrived to bluster their way into parliament and declare the session open, even though the opposition parties had staged a boycott. As our legitimate president, Salome Zourabichvili, said, the “Georgian parliament exists no more,” since it “tore up the Constitution.”

By 1.30 pm, someone started banging on a metal wall in front of the parliament building. People rushed to join in. The noise the drumming made swallowed up all the other noises. Then some others threw firecrackers over the gate, causing loud explosions. The Georgian Dream deputies inside sure can hear us now.

Georgian Dream nominates Mikheil Kavelashvili, a 53-year-old former professional soccer player, as its presidential candidate. The current president, who has described the parliamentary elections as illegitimate, has already said she intends to stay in office until the inauguration of a “legitimately elected president by a legitimately elected parliament.” The pro-Russian Kavelashvili was not allowed to become the president of the Georgian football federation because of his lack of a university education. Yet here he is, the pick to become president of Georgia. I think it is safe to say that people expected anyone but him, a man notable nowadays for swearing at the opposition in parliament. It does make a warped kind of sense. He is the perfect puppet for a regime in which ethics and human decency are considered nuisances, a “yes man” placed by Bidzina Ivanishvili, the Russian-made oligarch who controls Georgian Dream, to obey Putin's every grim order.

The prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, just announced that Georgia will be halting European Union accession talks until 2028. This comes right after the European Parliament announced that elections in Georgia should be rerun and that top Georgian Dream officials, including the prime minister, should face EU sanctions, a sanctions package aimed at the top of the Georgian Dream leadership, including the prime minister. 

No more Europe! That’s basically what he is telling us. I thought they would just ghost the EU, as they have for so long, and let the relationship wear out, just so they could pretend that they were at least trying. I didn’t imagine this! I didn’t imagine that they would literally change their narrative overnight. If this is not enough to make even the most passive Georgians come out onto the streets, I don't know what will. 

I turn on my TV and see that, in fact, there are protests in front of parliament. There were none scheduled for today. But thousands are out there, more than at any of the recent protests including the one in front of Tbilisi State University in which the police arrested dozens of young people, including 21-year-old Mate Devidze, who faces seven years in prison if he is convicted on trumped up charges of assaulting a police officer.

Today, in contrast, this gathering is not organised by political leaders, it is completely improvised. People just feel compelled to come out, like we used to, until the elections made everyone hopeless. Even the president Salome Zourabichvili is on the streets, asking the riot police who they are working for – Georgia or Russia? She gets no answer. And when she asks why they won’t answer her, their commander in chief, they remain silent. 

Many Georgians have been asking whether we still had any fight left. We’ve criticised the opposition and showed contempt at their inaction. When, we asked, would the people reach their boiling point? From what I was seeing on TV, maybe we were getting there, despite the scary amounts of police and special forces with their shields and tear gas.  

I head out to the protests. The atmosphere is tense but in a good way. Undeniably, there are more people out on the streets than we’ve seen in recent weeks. And, if the police action is excessive, more will come out. That’s what everyone is saying.

Sure enough, around midnight it starts.

The police, advancing from the streets adjacent to parliament, turned water cannons on the protestors. From the very first blast it became apparent that the water was laced with something. People described feeling a burning sensation on their bodies. Many felt they couldn’t breathe. Still, soaking wet in the freezing air, their skin stinging and struggling for breath, the protestors stood in front of the jets of ‘water’. They were not afraid.

But the police were thuggish. They kept advancing, pushing us back down Rustaveli Avenue, beating up and arresting anyone they could lay their hands on. The police formed a line in front of the Tbilisi Marriott, the same location where protestors were gathered back in May, a night on which I, alongside many others, was arrested.

Tonight, I discovered that a friend of mine, Dachi, had been arrested. The police beat him as they dragged him to a police car. I called my lawyer. She was already awake, fielding dozens of calls from people who knew someone who had been arrested.  

As morning broke, the police continued to chase and beat people, to hunt down those who had taken refuge in the shops nearby. The police were brutal, in keeping with what Georgian Dream has to offer to the country.

I managed to get five hours of sleep and then went to the prison, taking food and cigarettes for my friend Dachi. His lawyer told me the police beat everyone who they arrested, some of them so badly that the prison officials refused to accept them, insisting that they be taken to hospital. On cue, an ambulance sped, sirens blaring, out of the prison gates.

After the night’s violence, as I expected, there were even more people out on the street. The police are still brutal. But the sheer number of people makes it hard for them to control the crowds. Fireworks were being thrown. And the police, under the barrage of sparks and lights, were finding it difficult to hold that line in front of the Marriott.

So many people are coming out onto the streets, it was as if the post-election lull, the inertia that took hold of the protests, had never happened. There is an incredible feeling of unity. This is our moment.

By six AM though, the police advanced once more, this time firing rubber bullets at protestors. A group of masked men were walking down Besiki Street, perpendicular to Rustaveli Avenue. Protestors were being penned in, unable to escape ‘police’ intent on violence. There were people on the ground, being stomped on by multiple officers. No mercy was shown. Women were beaten. Old people. Journalists. Children. The police were swearing at people, humiliating protestors as they beat them, seeming to enjoy their work. They seemed to believe Georgian Dream propaganda that we are all anti-national agitators backed by some nefarious combination of the EU, CIA and George Soros.

They are arresting fewer people though. Our prisons are full to the brim with protestors. On November 30, schools, businesses, and organizations around the country said they were going on strike. Videos made the rounds that showed the extent of police brutality. Georgians throughout the country are outraged. In the evening, protestors gather around the offices of TV Pirveli, the public broadcaster, demanding that the media do its job. The protestors will be given airtime, the channel’s executives promise. Later that night, I hear that my friend Dachi is being brought in front of a judge. They want to make space for new prisoners. 

The police have become instruments of state oppression, using pepper spray, water cannons, tear gas, and excessive violence to suppress peaceful protesters. Twenty eight journalists have been injured in just two days and all international human rights norms have been violated.

Still, despite all the horror, I feel positive. Georgians are refusing to be intimidated. Everyone I know who has been arrested and/or beaten, is back out on the streets.

Police violence has had no effect. Even more people take to the streets on the weekend. People are still being arrested. But there are far too many now for the arrests to make a dent. There are fewer beatings, now that so many videos of police brutality are circulating. Firework use has become more targeted and tactical. One legend even managed to rig up a homemade Gatling gun, pushing back a swarm of riot police with a dazzling burst.

Once again, though, at six am, the police make their customary advance. This time though there are fewer men in masks alongside. And as we walk away, the police aren’t engaging, aren’t looking for protestors to beat and bully. Many are speculating about this apparent softening. I just think we’re facing the B-squad, while the thugs rest.

Right now though we take advantage and walk towards Tbilisi State University, managing to occupy and block off one of the most important arteries of the city. Tonight was a win. And we’ll take it, knowing there are many more battles to be fought.

Tonight was historic. It finally felt like we were a properly organized resistance. There were more people on the streets. More medics. More people prepared for teargas. More intelligence. More fireworks. And not least, more courage.

The police, as if acknowledging new realities, became aggressive earlier than usual. Almost as soon as the protestors arrived, the police turned on the water cannons, from inside the parliament premises. At midnight, the water was replaced with tear gas. Protestors were pushed down Rustaveli Avenue, the usual tactic. As they force protestors back, more police like to emerge from side streets, beating and arresting protesters. But this time we were ready, shooting fireworks at the police and neutralizing tear gas canisters as fast as we could. There were seasoned veterans on the front lines, looking out for the injured and coordinating the crowd’s movements.

Exhausted and stretched thin, the police were less effective and on edge. They knew they were in a battle, that we were, for once, returning fire. We even used drones to help us keep tabs on police movement and organize ourselves. We understood that by being mobile, we made life more difficult for the police.

By six AM, as they have every day since the protests began on November 28, the police began to indiscriminately round up and arrest protestors. Many of those arrested, as acknowledged by global human rights organizations, have been severely beaten, their faces rearranged by the vicious riot police. 

I went home. But there were still protestors out there. On TV, I saw a miracle: police circling a group of protestors shrouded in smoke, but when the smoke cleared, the protestors had disappeared. The police, stretching down the avenue, looked confused. I almost felt sorry for them – no sleep, no arrests, and punked in view of the whole country by a bunch of kids they were trying to bully.

The protests are growing in size and scale. We need to keep this momentum, to show the authorities that we have staying power, that we will fight for our rights.

Last night, I found myself on the river bank with about 300 other people. The police have started to crack down harder. They have been arresting opposition politicians as well as continuing to beat and arrest protestors on the street. I was on the periphery of the crowd when I saw a brand new white Skoda with tinted windows, a car normally favored by high ranking police officers, being driven directly at protestors. More and more people across Georgia are coming to understand just how extreme the police violence has been. Protestors who have been released from prison have been talking about being beaten to near death, about being taken to a van far from the cameras and journalists and being tortured. Many have said that the police threatened to sexually assault them with truncheons, others have described in graphic detail the severity of unprovoked beatings. On TV, a protestor said the police put a gun to his head, threatening to blow his brains out if he didn’t unlock his phone.

Since November 28, the protests have been completely spontaneous. People feel they are in an existential struggle. That Georgia is being dragged back into the Russian orbit, even as the majority of people, especially young people, link their future to Europe and think of the European Union as a form of protection against Russian expansionism.

For obvious reasons, Georgian Dream would rather pretend the protests are organized by opposition parties and activists funded by and beholden to Western interests. So now the next phase of the crackdown has begun. The offices of opposition parties and civil society organizations are being raided without warrants. Police are going on fishing expeditions, seizing every electronic device they can. Opposition leader Niko Gvaramia was beaten unconscious and dragged into an unmarked police car. And in a bid to stop the use of fireworks, which protestors have used to defend themselves and embarrass riot police, the revenue service has reportedly closed fireworks shops and is even looking at shops that sell helmets and masks.

This government is revealing its true self and every day it’s turning more people into resistance fighters.

Luka’s diary from last month

With everyone anxiously monitoring the results of the US elections as they came in, it felt today as if I lived in Georgia the state, not Georgia the country. When it became clear Donald Trump was the winner, some celebrated, while others felt even more hopeless. Like many, I worry that Trump’s stand on negotiating with Putin could weaken the US’s position in the region, giving Russia even more of a hold over Georgia than it already has. I really hope I’m wrong.

This is an account of the last couple of days on the street in Tbilisi, as we protest the sham election of October 26. Understandably, the world’s eyes are elsewhere right now, but our battle for our democracy continues.

I'm heading to a protest organized by the opposition where they say they will show us proof of election fraud and present us with a plan of action. I'm so anxious I’m actually shivering. I really hope the opposition realizes that they need to show a united front. The doubts are growing by the day and this is probably their last chance to show us why we voted for them.  Now is the time for them to  honor the trust we put in them.

After just a couple of hours, I’m already back home. To say that the protest was a disappointment would be an understatement. Greta Thunberg might have been there, reportedly wearing a keffiyeh and expressing her solidarity with protestors at this “outrageous development,” this “authoritarian development,” but the turnout was below par. The lack of people protesting, compared to the numbers who hit the street in the wake of the stolen election, was noticeable. Morale, it seemed, was low and people were looking to opposition leaders for answers. 

Instead we got platitudes. “The plan is you.”  “The plan is to fight.” “The plan is to not let Georgian Dream steal our voices.” “The plan is to be out on the streets.” “The plan is to have real democracy.” 

These are not plans! And if the plan is to “fight,” you need a plan, a strategy, for the fight, no? For the young people out on the street, whose blood is boiling, the opposition’s words were demoralizing. Still, I’m going to show up for the protests that are being planned every day. Our protests are going to drag on longer than we would have hoped but we have to find a way to stay the course.

Honestly I feel exhausted. I'm afraid that like many others I'm going to grow cold to the situation and stop feeling anger, stop feeling anything. Already, it feels like life has been sucked out of these beautiful, bright young people, who were once so energetic and vocal. Dead inside, would be the best way to describe how we are starting to feel.

What a difference a day makes. This morning, I woke up to the news that the district court judge in Tetritskaro had ruled that the rights of voters to keep ballots secret had been violated, thus annulling results from 31 polling stations in two constituencies. The lawsuit is one of many filed by the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association and Vladimir Khuchua is the first judge to rule in their favor. He upheld their complaint that the ballot paper was so thin it was possible to read people’s votes through the paper. If the Young Lawyers Association can force enough annulments, the process would require snap elections. After Judge Khuchua’s verdict, Georgian Dream has decided to bundle all legal complaints about voters’ secrecy rights into a single trial to be heard by one judge.

Just as I was heading out to the protest, I learned that the venue had changed. The opposition wanted people to gather in front of the Court of Appeals in Tbilisi. I turned on the TV to see if we had anyone reporting from the courthouse. Sure enough, a crew from TV Formula was there, waiting for protestors to show up. But guess who had got there before them? Half the cops in the city. They surrounded the courthouse and even put a lock on the gate. A gate that is never closed. What a symbolic image that was – Georgian Dream literally locking down our courts.

On my way to the Court of Appeals, I feel much more hopeful than I did last night. Seeing our young lawyers working to overturn the election and seeing that there are judges who will put the law and their principles first gave me some energy and belief. Though it’s still a far cry from how I felt during the protests on election day. Outside the courthouse, most of the protestors were my parents' age. There were some young people, but for once we were not the majority. The atmosphere was calm. Even with hundreds of police officers walking around trying to listen in on conversations. 

At some point, we started a march from the courthouse. Where we were going, though, was unclear. I asked around and no one knew. We were just following, like perfect soldiers. I guess we were tired of thinking for ourselves. Eventually,  I managed to flag down one of the organizers who answered my question. We were going nowhere in particular. We were going to march on Tsereteli Avenue to disrupt traffic. 

To my surprise the people stuck in traffic because of us were not complaining. You could even sense support from them. What became clear to me at the end of the day was that we may have lost the critical mass, but the protests are still alive. We just need a push. We need sanctions. We need our visas revoked, and some bans on our banking system for starters. The only way to bring people back out on the streets is to make them feel uncomfortable and shatter Georgian Dream’s lies about prosperity, economic growth, and euro integration. Everyone needs to understand that over the last 12 years Georgian Dream made more money than we can wrap our heads around. The money it now uses to buy this country.

The fact that western leaders are threatening us with sanctions but are issuing none only helps to push Georgian Dream’s false narrative that they are taking the country into Europe. Sanctions might be the last hope we have left if we want to build up a wave of civil disobedience. Before, that is, they start arresting everyone who dares to speak up, and induce such fear that any change in the future will be impossible.

Luka’s diary from last month

My country officially became a satellite state of Russia. Twelve years of fighting has come to this; a Russian puppet government managed to yet again get “elected.”
These elections have seen unprecedented voter turnouts not only in the country but also abroad. And now it looks like there was some unprecedented voter fraud too.

Waking up this morning I felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Months of sleepless nights spent in the streets protesting, that constant paralyzing stress you feel, seeing your country lose a war it has been fighting for over 200 years, all gone! Today, I thought, is the final battle.

While still in bed I immediately checked my phone to get the  morning news. I couldn't wait to vote! It was around  7am when I came across the first video of Georgian immigrants in the U.S driving to the voting location. The image of a U.S highway filled with cars bearing Georgian flags will live in my head for years to come. I felt so proud of my people I started tearing up. Video after video of immigrants voting abroad were coming in by the minute. Lines of Georgian voters stretching for blocks on end in major cities around the world. We were mobilized, we were together, we were going to win! Everyone in the city was excited to fulfill their civic duty and once and for all end Russian rule over our country. 

I came across the first video depicting a fight at one of the voting stations. An observer who was supposed to make sure there was no fraud at his station was getting beaten up by multiple thugs sent there to derail the peaceful processions of elections. These thugs are nothing new. For months the government has been using them to scare journalists, activists and political figures by means of violent physical attacks.

It became apparent straight away that the Georgian Dream was going to try everything not to lose their grip on power. Throughout the day more videos of voter fraud and intimidation started to surface. In one of them you could see a man dumping two handfuls of ballots into the ballot box even though observers were trying to prevent him. That voting location was shut down within the hour. Preventing hundreds from casting their vote. These were far from being the only incidents. Fraud and violation reports were coming in so fast it was hard to keep up. 

But still, everyone kept their spirits high, and remained unshaken. People believed. Restlessly waiting for the exit polls. 
Seeing how mobilized the whole population was despite all the violence and electoral fraud kept our hopes up. The fact that Georgian immigrants traveled over 2000 km to vote at their own expense because the Georgian government did not organize facilities close enough to everyone proved to us that no matter what hurdles you put in our way, we would overcome them.

When the exit polls came in, and we saw that the opposition received  the majority of votes–it felt like a turning point. Some people started celebrating preemptively. The Georgian Dream exit poll on the other hand showed a 10 percent difference more or less in their favor. Next thing we knew, Bidzina Ivanishvili had come on TV to congratulate his party on their victory. So the first images we saw on TV were both sides celebrating based on the results from their own exit polls. Imagine how insane of a sight that was, after a whole day of sitting on pins and needles, we still don’t know who won. 

The only thing left to do is wait for the count. The count comes in with 53% in favor of Georgian  Dream. Which we all know is a scam. So tonight, as of writing this we are still waiting for the ballots to be recounted manually. But we already know that Georgian Dream made it possible for individuals to vote at multiple voting stations so the manual count will still give them the advantage. 

Our elections were stolen, and we know it. A day that started full of hope, quickly turned into despair. What do we do next? Will the opposition present a plan? Do we look to the west? The west, that debated sanctions for so long that now they will hardly affect anything. Do we organize a revolution?

I guess I'll have to wake up tomorrow to see. Today, what I learned is that this was far from our final battle.

It is now day two after the election. Literally! I wrote the top part last night, feeling powerless about the situation trying to feel even for a tiny bit that I was doing something proactive. Today, I don't even know how I feel. My only thought is ’oh shit here we go again.’ Gerogians in New York, are still in line to vote, even though their voices will not be counted. Imagine traveling thousands of kilometers to cast one ballot, only to find out that in Georgia the Georgian Dream gave multiple ballots to its sham electors. It destroys your trust in democracy and in our western partners who we believed in so much. 

I'm watching TV now, eager to see a solution. And all I see is foreign diplomats condemning the Georgian Dream without actually proposing a solution. They are still talking about how a government should not act in this way and that the Georgian Dream needs to take back the results. Moscow doesn't care when you wave a finger. And of course a government should not act this way, but telling them will not change anything. They need to be punished and we need your help to punish them. But still, the only thing we hear from our partners is their shock and outrage. 

Georgia should be an example and a warning to the western leaders, diplomats and policymakers. And hopefully make them realize how little they understand about the power dynamics within the post Soviet space. The balance you once knew is now on the tipping point. You in the west need to listen to your Ukrainian and Georgian counterparts when it comes to Russia because who knows it better than us? You, who live thousands of kilometers away or us the people Russia has tried to subdue for over 200 years? You take time to discuss every single move while Russia acts! That's why sanctions now are 100 times less effective than they would have been 6 months ago. It is time for new diplomacy. A more firm diplomacy. A more active and understanding one. One adapted to the ever-changing modern geopolitical space. Because you can't continue looking at the post Soviet space with the same optics you use to look at your actually democratic countries. When western diplomats talk about Georgia the only point they are conveying is how shocked they are that democracy is not working here. You have to understand that the fight we are leading is for our society to function as democratically as yours. This is something many westerners take for granted. But we have to fight for it. And your inadequacy to act helps further propagation of the Russian narrative about the powerlessness of the west. In hindsight the west should have realized this with their semi useful sanctions against Russia at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.

Please realize that you are actually gambling with real peoples lives that believe in you, and have given you their trust, in Ukraine and in Georgia. You need to prove that the west still holds the power of change. The same power that has been the cornerstone of democracy around the world since WW2. Time for debates, promises and threats is over. It is time for action!

We are back in front of the parliament. Why? Because our elections were rigged and we came out to see what the opposition leaders had to say. I got to the protest at 19:30 and immediately felt something was off. All the previous protests had some kind of electricity in the air, but this time it was different. An unusual mix of fatigue, anger and silent despair. I have never felt anything like this before. All the Gen-Zs who previously were all about peace now wanted to “fuck shit up” even though they all knew that today was not that kind of protest. The closest they got was when they heckled Viktor Orban the Hungarian Prime Minister on his exit from the Marriott Hotel on Rustaveli Avenue by calling him a dick in his own language. He was on an official visit to congratulate the ruling party on their win in the elections.

The first speaker of the night was our president Salome Zourabichvili who was then followed by all the members of different opposition parties. Her speech gave very little hope to our constantly growing desperation.

The post Stolen Dreams: A Diary From Tbilisi appeared first on Coda Story.

But empires are also built from the margins, and no one knows this better than Vladimir Putin. 

This week, Putin scored a huge geopolitical victory when the party the Kremlin was rooting for in Georgia pulled off a seemingly impossible electoral win. 

 “Georgians have won. Attaboys!” posted Margarita Simonyan, head of RT and the Kremlin’s chief propagandist on X. 

“I woke up in Russia. How can I go back to being Moscow’s slave?” a devastated friend texted the morning after the vote. 

The ruling Georgian Dream party, run by an oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili secured a parliamentary majority. Ivanishvili made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, earning in the process the nickname “anaconda” for being methodical and relentless at eliminating rivals. 

He moved to Georgia shortly after Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, and became one of the country’s most impactful philanthropists. He supported culture and arts, paid for hospitals, kept the entire Opera House on his payroll and stepped in every time the government’s coffers didn’t stretch far enough to pave a road or build a school. He was also a recluse, until in 2012 when he set up the Georgian Dream party and scored a landslide victory against Mikhail Saakasvhili, Georgia’s former president whom Putin famously promised to “hang by the balls” and who is currently in jail in Tbilisi.  

Since the 2012 victory, Ivanishvili has been methodically moving Georgia back into Russia’s orbit:  covertly and slowly at first, openly and aggressively in more recent years. 

This caused a lot of friction with the society: Georgians had tired of Saakashvili’s government, which was becoming autocratic, but many were set on a turn towards Europe. For centuries Georgian luminaries have cultivated the idea of Europe as the way of protecting the Georgian language and identity from oppression by its neighbors. The modern Georgian constitution calls for a closer alliance with the west, in particular the EU and Nato. The country’s entire cultural identity is built around the story of struggle against historic oppressors: Persians, Ottomans and, for the past two centuries, Russians. 

By the time Russia launched the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Georgians were disillusioned in Ivanishvili but they were still shocked when the government chose to openly side with Moscow against Kyiv. Ukraine had stood by Georgia through all of its wars, including the most recent Russian invasion in 2008. The government’s position felt like a betrayal. 

But then the Georgian Dream went even further, passing some of the most repressive Russian-style laws, launching brutal crackdowns on activists, targeting the LGBTQ community and unleashing dirty disinformation campaigns straight out of the Kremlin playbook. By 2024, hundreds of thousands were taking part in regular anti-government demonstrations led by the youth demanding that Georgia stays on its European course. 

This election, the only democratic way of getting the country out of Ivanishvili’s and Russia's tightening embrace, became the most pivotal vote in the country's history since the independence referendum in 1991.  Polls, including traditionally reliable exit polls, put the opposition in a clear lead. On the day of the vote, the turnout was so high that in some polling stations people queued for hours to cast the ballots.  

And yet, the Central Election body announced that the Georgian Dream party beat the country’s pro-European opposition and secured a fourth term. “This seems to defy gravity,” a friend in Tbilisi commented.  

In the next few weeks, the opposition in Georgia will work to galvanize supporters and try to prove that the election was stolen. The list of recorded irregularities is long, and include suspicious discrepancies in numbers, violence and ballot stuffing. Despite the evidence, fighting for justice in courts controlled by an oligarch is likely to be futile. 

The opposition also faces the reality that the Georgian Dream did perform better than anyone has expected, in part at least thanks to an aggressive pre-election campaign that focused on fear: the governing party’s singular message equated opposition with another war with Russia.  Their campaign included billboards that juxtaposed ruins of Ukrainian cities with peaceful landscapes of Georgia.  It proved effective in the country, where Russia still occupies 20% of the territory and memories of the 2008 invasion, as well as previous wars,  are very much alive.

The election results may defy both logic and hope for many Georgians but they align disturbingly well with the broader trajectory of the world. For this is not a story of a rigged post-Soviet election, but rather the story of a larger, systemic game that has been rigged against us all. 

Over the past decade, the interplay of oligarchic alliances, disinformation, abuse of technology, and selective violence have all eaten away at the foundations of all societies. These interconnected trends, often obscured by the noise of our news cycle, are part of a larger authoritarian web that is enveloping the globe, and polarizing our communities from within. Connecting the dots between them reveals a pervasive threat that extends far beyond any single event.

In this rigged game, the losers aren’t just the Georgian opposition and their supporters, but everyone who believes in the value of freedom: whether it is the freedom to speak out without being beaten or imprisoned, or the freedom of a newspaper to endorse a presidential candidate. The real winners aren’t the Georgian politicians or even the oligarch who pulls their strings, but anyone who puts money and power above shared values. 

In the case of Georgia, the biggest winner is the Kremlin, who has just won a battle in its global war against liberal democracy.  Ahead of the US elections, there is a warning here too. Georgia has always been the place where the Kremlin has rehearsed its global playbook. 

Throughout the 1990s, it was in Georgia  that Moscow ignited wars and transformed them into frozen conflicts, a precursor to the tactics later employed in Ukraine. As Putin’s Russia grew more assertive, it occupied territories and meddled in elections, using methods that would then spread to Europe and the United States.

It was in liberal, progressive Georgia, where the Kremlin first piloted anti LGBTQ+ narratives, teaming up with the members of the American and European religious right and carefully targeting traditional parts of the society and testing ways to spin marginal homophobia into a larger culture war that  eventually took root in the West. 

Yet, for all the lands Putin has seized and the narratives he has spun, his true success hinges on two tools handed to him by his own adversaries in the West. The first is our information system that is fuelled by social media platforms, which are run on profit-driven algorithms built to spread disinformation, conspiracies, and lies. The second–fueled in part by the first–is the dwindling attention span of those who can and should want to help.

Georgian opposition is unlikely to succeed, unless it gets focused attention from Europe and the United States. But with the tragedy that has enveloped the Middle East, the drama of the US elections and the urgency of the increasingly unsustainable war in Ukraine, events in Georgia will struggle to compete for attention. And yet, the reason empires crumble from the margins is because true resistance always comes from the edges. Helping Georgia bring back its democracy will keep it alive elsewhere.

A version of this article previously appeared in the Guardian newspaper.

The post From the Margins to Power: Georgia’s Elections and the Kremlin’s Empire appeared first on Coda Story.

In Moldova, the pro-European president failed to secure victory in the first round, but the referendum, which will enshrine Moldova’s pursuit of EU membership in the country’s constitution, narrowly passed with 50.38%.  

In Georgia, the country’s pro-Western path is already ingrained in the constitution but the ruling Georgian Dream party, led by a pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has turned increasingly anti-Western and threatens to reverse it. Tens of thousands of protesters waving EU flags in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, worry they are about to lose the promise of independence that generations prior have fought and died for.  

“The subsequent days and possibly weeks in Georgia is something that sometimes generations pass without experiencing. The quest to save your country is a terrifying responsibility, a debilitating endeavor, a great privilege, and an unparalleled sense of fulfillment,” writes opposition supporter Marika Mikiashvili.

Polls have consistently shown that around 80% of Georgians want the country to join the European Union and NATO. The ambition of being part of the European family is seen as the only way to protect Georgia from Russia, whose military already occupies a fifth of Georgia’s internationally recognized territory.

The results of the second round in Moldova and the upcoming Sunday election in Georgia are also part of a larger context determined by the election cycle in the US. The U.S. election result will have a direct effect on the war in Ukraine, which in turn determines the future of the entire region. Moscow is cheering for Trump. This week, the Russian state media widely quoted former president Medvedev who praised Trump as “the most significant US figure to admit Vladimir Zelensky’s responsibility for the Ukrainian conflict” 

Zooming out: Left and increasingly far right-leaning forces in the West often argue that Russia should have the control of their backyard and that Washington and Brussels need to stop interfering in the region. This argument is in itself colonial: just like in Ukraine, Moldova’s and Georgia’s fight for independence is also the fight against historic racism and colonial attitudes aimed at non-ethnically Russian people who have been forced into the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. Read this piece for context.

Connecting the Dots: Georgia and Moldova (as well as Ukraine) are where the Kremlin mastered its election interference skills, including the strategies used in the 2016 election in the US. Tactics like mechanisms of vote buying or hacking, used by the Kremlin are often adopted by authoritarians elsewhere. Paired with an information system built to manipulate and spread lies, such tactics erode democracy worldwide. Some of the more egregious tactics used in elections in Moldova and Georgia include: 

• Open vote buying: The Kremlin has been openly paying voters in Gagauzia region of Moldova, a region known for separatist sentiments. 
• Voter fraud scheme: a large-scale scheme that involved $15 million being transferred to 130,000 Moldovans, financed by Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor, who currently resides in Russia. According to Moldova’s incumbent president, 300,000 votes were bought, plenty to sway an election in the country.
• Pushing Fear: the pro-Russian side launched a propaganda campaign that has framed Moldova’s EU integration as a path to war with Russia. This tactic has been effective in influencing votes, with pro-Russian figures promising to shield Moldova from conflict in exchange for abandoning its EU ambitions.

Fear has been a big weapon for the anti-EU side in Georgia too. The ruling party uses posters comparing bombed sites in Ukraine to newly constructed buildings in Georgia, suggesting that without their leadership, Georgia will face a similar fate. 

Already, the alarm bells of autocracy can be heard: foreign journalists looking to cover the decisive election are being denied visa and entry by the Georgian Dream. In what definitely does not seem like a coincidence, the campaign video for the Georgian Dream is a direct lift of Putin’s 2018 election video. 

Bloomberg recently uncovered documents revealing the scope of a previously unknown Russian cyberattack on Georgia ahead of its 2020 elections.Between 2017-2020, hackers infiltrated the country's foreign and finance ministries, other government departments, central bank, key energy and telecommunications providers, oil terminals and media platforms.One of the goals of the attack seemed to be obtaining the capability to tamper with Georgia’s vital infrastructure services in case the election results were not seen as favorable for the Kremlin.

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I was in the crowd, reporting for the BBC at the time, as hundreds of thousands of people came out to greet George W. Bush in the main square of the capital Tbilisi. It must have felt refreshing to Bush, by then already hated by so much of the world for the disasters caused by the “war on terror”, to arrive in Georgia to a genuine hero's welcome. Georgians embraced Bush, because they needed him to fight their own existential battle against constant, ongoing threats from Russia.

Tens of thousands turned up and stood for hours in the heat as they waited for George W Bush to come out into the main square to give public support to Georgia and send a message to Moscow that the country was not alone in the face of Russian aggression. 

Among those in the square was 27 year old Vladimir Arutunian. According to this FBI report, which is full of rather brilliant detail, he “stood for hours in the hot sun, wearing a heavy leather coat and muttering and cursing to himself, part of a huge crowd waiting for President Bush to speak …He was clutching to his chest a hand grenade hidden in a red handkerchief. He was planning to kill the President.”

As soon as Bush started speaking, Arutunian “pulled the pin and hurled the grenade in the direction of the podium. It landed just 61 feet from where the  President, First Lady Laura Bush, the President and First Lady of  Georgia, and other officials sat”

Compared to the unforgettable scenes that unfolded in Pennsylvania, the assassination attempt against Bush was pretty anticlimactic. The grenade failed to detonate, no one on stage even realized it had been thrown, President Bush’s speech went uninterrupted, and afterwards, Arutunian went home to the apartment he shared with his mother in a sleepy Tbilisi suburb. 

His miscalculation, FBI would explain later, was that he tied his red handkerchief a bit too tight around the grenade, preventing the firing pin from deploying fast enough.

It didn’t take long for the FBI and the Georgian security services to track down Arutunian. A few months later, Arutunian who was unemployed and spent most of his days  experimenting with chemicals and explosives in his makeshift home laboratory, appeared in a small stuffy courtroom overflowing with reporters. He had already confessed to throwing the grenade and said he didn’t regret a thing because he hated the Georgian government for “being a puppet of the US.”

What I remember most vividly from the trial is Arutunian, thin with a black beard, pacing back and forth in his two by two meter metal cage in the corner of the courtroom. I counted his laps to keep myself awake in the airless room, as the judge began to read the verdict. A couple of my colleagues in the back tried to stay awake by chatting to each other, which got the rest of us in trouble. The judge forced everyone to stand up as he very slowly and very monotonously read the entire verdict. It took him four hours. I lost count of the laps, because Arutunian never stopped pacing. 

I reported at the time that as he was led out of the courtroom, he was asked by one journalist if he considered himself a terrorist or an anti-globalist. "I don't consider myself a terrorist, I'm just a human being," he replied.

Today, the man who could have changed global history, is in the 20th year of his lifetime sentence. He spends his days making crafts: tiny soldiers and tanks and occasional portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Che Guevara, according to his mother who spoke to our reporter, Masho Lomashvili, the day after Trump’s assassination attempt. 

Masho called the 83 year old Anjela Arutunian to ask whether she had spoken to her son and whether he had heard about the Trump assassination attempt. “Someone tried to kill Trump? I hadn’t heard, I have mostly been watching football,” said Angela Arutunian “Is he okay?” she asked.

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

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The history of Russian occupation in Georgia dates back more than 200 years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it won its independence but separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia refused to acknowledge the new Georgian state and went to war. In 2008 Russia sent the military into South Ossetia and Abkhazia to shore up control and today twenty percent of Georgia remains under Russian control. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s complex history with its eastern neighbor is deeply rooted in centuries of Russian colonialism and expansionism. In this photo essay, award-winning Polish photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz documents the people of Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan at times of upheaval—in the throes of protest, dissent, and strife, and as they try to hold on to their identity in the face of modern Russian imperialism.

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It was during those slow, meandering rooftop conversations that ventured into every aspect of our lives—from crushes and struggles with identity to global politics—that I was handed the gift of a Senegalese lens to re-examine and better understand my own story. 

I grew up in the nation of Georgia, where as a child I lived through the violent collapse of the Soviet Union and learned—primarily from my parents—that instability and chaos were a small price to pay for the triumph of Georgia’s centuries-long struggle for independence. Among many contradictions that laced my childhood was the fact that I learned Russian, the Soviet lingua franca, from my half-Polish, half-Armenian mother, who would force me to read War and Peace in the original, but also insisted that my formal education be conducted in Georgian—and that I was to never trust anything that came from an appointed authority, especially one in Moscow.  

It was not until I sat on that Dakar rooftop that I thought of my mishmashed identity as a byproduct of colonialism. Just like me with Russian, Khadim loved all the opportunities that French, the language of his historical oppressor, had unlocked for him. Like me, he had a native-level appreciation for the language of a country he’s never lived in, and a nuanced understanding of a culture he was never part of. But unlike me, he was acutely aware of the price he had paid for that access. “I never thought of Russian in the same way that Khadim thinks of the French, but I think I also have a love-hate relationship with it,” I wrote in my journal that particular evening. “It is weird how it represents oppression and opportunity at the same time.” 

My old journal documents my awe (or was it envy?) at the deep awareness that Khadim and his friends possessed when it came to understanding how the historic legacy of French colonialism in West Africa affected their personal journeys. It is a record of my delight over the similarities I discovered between the Senegalese saint Cheikh Amadou Bamba, who led a pacifist struggle against French colonialism, and the Georgian orthodox saint and healer Father Gabriel, who was tortured and sentenced to death by the Soviets after he set a 26-foot portrait of Lenin on fire in 1955.

Today, “colonialism,” with all of its many prefixes and subcategories, often feels like an overused term: there is neo-colonialism and tech-colonialism, post-colonialism and eco-colonialism, settler colonialism and internal colonialism. I could go on—the list is so long, it feels tedious. And yet, no other word at our disposal can quite capture the historical continuity of domination and oppression that is the root cause of so many of the world’s current troubles. 

Every one of us is a carrier of a colonial legacy, either as a victim or the beneficiary—or sometimes both. Colonialism is the system of oppression that our world is built on. As we obsess with decolonizing everything from our schools to industries and corporations, it is useful to remember how easily our understanding of colonialism can be manipulated unless we first decolonize ourselves. 

My story is both typical and telling. My parents may have cherished Georgia’s freedom from Moscow, but somehow I had still bought into a widely accepted myth that the Soviet Union was an anti-colonial power. Both at my Soviet school, and later at university in the United States, I was taught that colonialism was something that Western countries did to Africa, Asia, and the Far East. It was only when I went to Senegal and stumbled upon the depth and ease with which I was able to relate to the anti-colonial part of the West African identity that I began to realize that I, too, was a product of “colonialism.” Until then, the struggle of non-Russian Soviet republics for independence was compartmentalized in my mind as something qualitatively different from the plight of formerly colonized people elsewhere.

Like the Black Lives Matters protests in the United States and the reckoning with anti-Black racism that followed, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 triggered a profound reconsideration of colonialism, including demands for restructuring and amends, from across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire;  a backlash from Russia itself followed. 

From Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Poland, activists, academics, historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens were suddenly digging up long-hidden stories of oppression, deportations, ethnic cleansing and “Russification” policies that the Kremlin had imposed on them over the centuries. Their stories were different, but the point they were making was the same: Russia’s war in Ukraine was a quintessentially colonial conflict, part of the centuries-long cycle of relentless conquest and subjugation.  

Across Russia’s former empire, this struggle to break away from subjugation has defined generation after generation. Today in Georgia, the children of those who in 1989 protested against—and helped end—the Soviet Union are out on the same streets, protesting against the current government’s attempts to take their country off its pro-European course and bring it back into Russia’s fold.

“Do not fear! We will win honorably,” read one poster held up by three women who joined tens of thousands of protesters in May 2024 on the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. The words are more than a hundred years old and belong to Maro Makashvili, a young Georgian woman who wrote them down over a century ago just as the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution helped end Tsarist rule in Russia. For Georgia, the revolution meant freedom from two centuries of domination by  its northern neighbor and, finally, a chance to write its own story.

Few know that in those years, Georgia emerged as one of the most progressive democracies in Europe, a place where women could vote and minorities were granted rights. Young Maro Makashvili watched it all and documented Georgia’s ambitious experiment with democracy in her diaries. The experiment ended, abruptly and tragically, when Bolshviks invaded Georgia in 1921, annihilating the country’s intellectual and political elite, violently forcing Georgia into the USSR and rewriting the country’s history to fit the Soviet narrative. 

“To me, Maro Makashvili lives on in every beautiful, strong, smart, young woman protesting in the streets today,” said Tiko Suladze, a Tbilisi resident who held up Maro Makashvili’s portrait at the recent anti-Russian, anti-government demonstration.

The sentiments Makashvili described in her diaries during this time talk of freedom for women—and her whole country. These are ideas that resonate today with those living in the trenches of the long war against Russian imperialism. Ukraine is its current and bloodiest epicenter, but its frontline stretches across Russia’s vast former empire. You wouldn’t know it, though, listening to mainstream media in the West that explain the war through the prism of a geopolitical struggle between Moscow and Washington and, inadvertently, diminish the actual struggle of people on the frontline. This happens, in part at least, because we have a narrow definition of what colonialism is.

The very nature of Russian colonialism doesn’t fit the Western definition of oppression. Over the centuries, while European powers conquered overseas territories, Russia ran a land empire that absorbed its neighbors. While Europeans instilled the notion that their subjects were “different” from them, Russians conquered using another device: “sameness.” In the Russian colonial system, which was subsequently refined by the Soviets, subjects were banned from speaking their language or celebrating their culture (outside of the sterilized version of a culture that was sanctioned by Moscow). In exchange, they were allowed to rise to the top. In 2022, while dropping bombs on Kyiv, Vladimir Putin launched an audaciously counterintuitive campaign that positioned him as the global anti-colonial hero. The Russian Ministry of Culture announced that thematic priorities for state-funded films in 2022 included promotion of “family values,” depiction of cultural “degradation” of Europe, and films on “Anglo-Saxon neo-colonialism.” 

Piggybacking on the Soviet legacy of support for anti-colonial movements, and banking on people’s genuine disillusionment with the double standards of American foreign policy in places like the Middle East, Putin ordered his diplomats in Africa, Latin America and Asia to double down on the anti-colonial message. Using social media, the Russian propaganda machine beamed the same message, targeting newsfeeds of left-leaning audiences in the West, as well as immigrant and Black communities in the United States. 

The tactic worked. In 2023, I found myself at a small conference in Nairobi that brought together a dozen or so senior editors and publishers from across the African continent, a Ukrainian journalist, an exiled Russian editor, and myself. The conference was hosted by Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a German foundation affiliated with the country’s center-right Christian Democratic Union. The foundation, which despite its association is independent from the CDU, is a big player in media development in Africa. And it was concerned about the growing spread of Russian narratives across the continent, which prompted them to organize the conversation. 

In the room in Nairobi, there was plenty of sympathy toward Ukraine and plenty of concern about clearly malicious disinformation campaigns undertaken by influencers across Africa. But there were also compelling explanations as to why Africa is currently finding Moscow’s messages more persuasive than those being pushed by the West.  

Ukraine, my African colleagues explained, was perceived as a “Western project.” Delivered primarily through Western diplomatic and news channels, the Ukrainian message in Africa was met with resistance because of the West’s perceived refusal to account for the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. “You may call it whataboutism, but it is grounded in real questions that no one has answered,” one African editor said. Russia’s message, on the other hand, “lands well and softly,” Nwabisa Makunga, an editor of the Sowetan in Johannesburg, told me at the time. The challenge for her team, she explained, was to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment and a widespread belief that Ukraine caused the invasion.

During my trip to Nairobi, one of the editors shared an unpublished op-ed sent to him as an email from the Russian Ambassador to Kenya, Dmitry Maskimychev. It read: “If you look at the leaders of the Soviet Union, you will find two Russians (Lenin, Gorbachev), a Georgian (Stalin), and three Ukrainians (Brezhnev, Khruschev, Chernenko). Some colonialist empire! Can you imagine a Kenyan sitting on the British throne? Make no mistake, what is currently happening in Ukraine is not a manifestation of Russian ‘imperialism’ but a ‘hybrid’ clash with NATO.” It is an effective message that lands equally well with many Western intellectuals who continue to argue about the rights and wrongs of NATO enlargement and not the fact that a sovereign country has the right to break away from its colonial masters. 

Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko is among the most prolific voices when it comes to comparing Russian and Western colonial styles. He is also the one who first introduced me to the idea of “sameness” as an instrument of domination. The message of Western colonialism was: “ ‘you are not able to be like us’, while the message of Russian colonialism was ‘you are not allowed to be different from us,’ ” he explained at the Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi in 2023. While there were differences in the way the Russians and the Europeans constructed their empires, the result was the same: violence, redrawn borders, repression of cultures and languages, and annihilation of entire communities. 

The idea of “sameness as an instrument of domination” also explains why most well-meaning Russians I meet often seem weirdly unaware of their country being perceived as a colonial master. There are, of course, notable exceptions, but for the most part even the most liberal Russians I know seem utterly disinterested in engaging on the issue of colonialism with the country’s former subjects like myself.  Soon after the Ukraine invasion, I asked a prominent liberal Russian journalist whether he was going to introduce the topic of colonialism to his equally liberal, Russian audiences. He seemed genuinely insulted by the suggestion. “We are not colonialists!” he said. 

One reason why the debate about colonialism is largely missing from the Russian liberal discourse is because Russia is still missing from the debate about colonialism in the West. Yermolenko believes that when it comes to colonialism, the Western intellectual elite went from one extreme in the 19th century to another in the 21st. “They went from saying, ‘we are the best and no one can compare to us’ to saying, ‘we were the worst and no one can compare to us,’ ” Yermolenko says. 

Georgian historian Lasha Bakradze takes the argument a step further: “At the heart of this inability to understand, accept and analyze other forms of colonialism lies, paradoxically, the West’s own colonial mentality. This is where skeletons of Western colonialism are really buried.” 

For two decades, these self-imposed limits of Western debate about colonialism have given the Kremlin an enormous propaganda advantage, enabling Putin to position Russia as an anti-colonial power, and himself as the champion of all victims of European colonialism. They have also shaped our own, self-imposed, compartmentalized frameworks through which we understand oppression. 

“To this very day, the core of decolonization for me is about being able to learn and tell your own full story in your own words and being able to follow the narrative of your choice,” argues my friend, Ukrainian journalist Maksym Eristavi, whose book Russian Colonialism 101 is a succinct record of one part of Russia’s colonial adventures: invasions. “This means being able to dissect what is authentic in you and what is programmed by the colonizer.”   

But the process of deconstructing your own narratives can be a fraught and deeply uncomfortable experience. Take well-meaning Western academic institutions, for example, which have traditionally taught history and the languages of Russia’s former colonies in Central Asia and the Caucasus within their Russian studies departments. The war in Ukraine triggered a reckoning in American universities, where professors started debating how to teach imperialism and colonialism in Russia. 

Because of the invasion and Western sanctions, some Russian language studies programs could no longer send their students to Russia, and many reached for an easy solution: send them instead to places where Russian is spoken because it’s the language of the oppressor. It is only now that I learn about Americans coming to Georgia to learn Russian that I feel simultaneously angry at the colonial behavior of supposedly liberal arts institutions And embarrassed that at age 20, I did not once question the decision to go to Senegal to study French. 

It is impossible to paint a singular portrait of colonialism. But it is possible and necessary to listen and respect each of their voices. It is only through listening to the multitude of oppressed voices—from Gaza and Yemen, Georgia and Ukraine, American reservations and former slave plantations—that we will begin to understand the systems of oppression and patterns that run through it.

“Colonialism is about trauma first,” says Maksym Eristavi. “The trauma of your identity being violated, erased, reprogrammed. The trauma of losing your roots, figuratively and quite literally. The goal of the colonizer is to make you feel small and isolated. To ensure that you think that your arrested potential is your own fault.”

“At last my poor country will be blessed with freedom,” the young Georgian Maro Makashvili wrote in her diary in 1918. When the Red Army invaded Georgia in 1921, occupying the country for the next seventy years, thousands of Georgians were killed. Among them was Maro. Today, Maro Makashvili is a national hero. But unless her story becomes part of the global anti-colonial narrative, oppressors—in Russia and beyond—will continue to win.

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As a kid, I always bubbled with energy too. I talk at triple speed, and people often have to tell me to slow down. My childhood neighborhood, the Abanotubani district, lies beneath a great gorge in Tbilisi. A huge, ruined fortress overlooks our neighborhood —- for centuries, it served as a stronghold for Tbilisi, protecting it against invaders.

Now, views of the fortress are obscured by an even bigger mansion, built by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in our country. His wealth is about a third of our gross domestic product. Construction on his house began when I was a toddler: a great sea of glass and metal dominating the gorge. I remember looking up and thinking it looked like a Bond villain’s lair. 

Ivanishvili became the biggest philanthropist in Georgia, supporting arts and culture, fixing schools, houses and hospitals. But even as a young kid, I was doubtful that some billionaire was truly going to help our country. 

Protests were the backdrop of my childhood in Georgia. One of my earliest memories is sitting on my dad’s shoulders during the Rose Revolution. I was three. It was a peaceful uprising to oust the then-President Eduard Shevardnadze, ending his reign of chaos that had lasted more than a decade. A man called Mikheil Saakashvili was elected after him and set about trying to rid the country of the corruption that had plagued it for so long. 

While there were problems during Saakashvili’s rule, there was also a huge shift in the country towards democracy and reform. For a while, things felt hopeful. 

Of course, we always lived below our powerful billionaire neighbor — the oligarch Ivanishvili in his spy villain-worthy lair. But I also grew up being aware of another big neighbor, one that sat right above Georgia. On a clear day in the hills above my house in Tbilisi, you could see the Greater Caucasus mountain mange — the natural border with Russia.

I was on vacation in those hills above Tbilisi in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. I remember the warplanes buzzing overhead and how my mom went into a panicked frenzy. During that war, Russia occupied South Ossetia, a region to the northwest of Tbilisi. I guess that was when I started to absorb the idea that Russia was not our friend. 

When I was 12, a party called Georgian Dream came to power, backed by Ivanishvili, the billionaire who lived above us. Ivanishvili, like many oligarchs from the former Soviet space, has close ties to Putin. My parents felt uneasy about it all and moved the family to Paris, where I spent my teenage years. 

We lived in the bougie 6th arrondissement. Kids at my school had no idea where Georgia was — I was constantly having to explain that I was from the country, not the U.S. state. The country by the black sea — “la mere noire,” I would intone, again and again. It was Georgia for dummies. People would nod, not quite knowing. One girl literally thought Georgia was a place in the Arctic region of Lapland. If I was giving her the benefit of the doubt, I guess she was thinking of the island of South Georgia in Antarctica. Wrong again. I realized it was often easier to just pretend I was French like everyone else. 

As I grew older, though, I became prouder of my roots. I found a group of friends who came from all over. They introduced me to an important part of French life: going to protests. At those protests, I learned a lesson — my voice matters. 

The French really put the “pro” in protests — they do not mess around. While I was in high school, the cops killed a French activist with a police grenade during a protest. It caused uproar across the country, so I tagged along with older kids to blockade our school, barricading it with trash cans for two weeks to push for justice for the guy who was killed. 

I started to learn that protest actually works in a democracy. I would go between Paris and Tbilisi, taking lessons from my French friends and bringing them to Georgia. “You guys go home too soon when you protest. You stand there and think stuff is going to fall out of the sky,” I would tell my Georgian friends. Last year, though, a new law was proposed in Georgia, and things went full chaos-mode. 

It’s called the foreign agents law. It’s a copycat of the same regulation in Russia. It dictates that any institution getting 20% of its money from abroad has to register with a statewide system as an agent of foreign influence. 

In practice, it makes it easier for the state to crush opposition, get rid of foreign-aided projects that make our life better and stamp out free expression by creating scapegoats. It gives the government arbitrary reasons to arrest anyone they deem a “foreign influence operation.” 

Loads of my friends in Tbilisi work on projects that would be deemed a “foreign agent” by this new law. Whether they work in plastic recycling programs, as independent journalists or as human rights lawyers, they now face extra interrogation by the state. It’s basically a tool for political repression. 

The law’s proposal last year lit a flame under us in Tbilisi. We organized big protests and for a while, it worked — the government didn’t press ahead. But this year, they tried again. 

On April 3, the Georgian Dream party announced plans to bring back the bill. I felt a mixture of anger and hopelessness when I heard. Here we go again, I thought. Here’s undeniable proof of our government blindly trying to follow Russia's lead. I got ready to fight. 

Maybe if you had the privilege of growing up in a first-world country, you don’t understand, but for us this law means the difference between having a functioning democracy and existing as a puppet for Russia. It means losing our freedom of speech. 

On the morning of April 15, the protests began. 

My friends and I have joined the demonstrations every day, trying to put the lessons I’d learned in France into practice. I believe that if we can inspire enough people to get out on the streets, we can overwhelm the brutality we are fighting against. For now, the state is fighting back hard, with tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon and by simply beating protesters to a pulp. I’m worried things are going to descend into even more violence, though I hope we can avoid it.

On the night of April 30, I put on a gas mask and assigned myself a task: deactivate as many tear gas canisters as I could. There’s a couple of ways to do this. You can put a plastic cup over the canister before it starts to smoke, which snuffs it out. Or, if it’s smoking already, you can dunk the canister in a bucket of water.

Things escalated fast that night. Protesters surged onto Tbilisi’s main street, Rustaveli Avenue, and as they did, police unleashed a torrent of tear gas canisters onto us from the side streets, scattering the crowd. I ran forwards into the impact zone, grabbing the canisters and submerging them into bottles of water that I had previously set out. It was a race to get to the canisters before they started spinning out of control. 

The police began advancing from the side streets and blasting everyone in the area with water cannon, throwing them to the ground. They didn’t care if they hit protesters or journalists — and they hit both. Officers also beat up anyone they could get their hands on. A no man's land emerged between the protesters and the police. In the buffer zone were journalists — and me. Along with dealing with the tear gas, I was also taking pictures — using loads of flash to annoy the officers — just for my own personal project. I managed to capture several instances of how police laid into the protestors. 

It was time to build barricades, French style, and invoke the lessons I had learned in Paris. I started dragging metal barrier fences together and getting people to help. I then told people to gather up trash cans, just like we did in high school. Five guys started to help me. From that moment on, I was standing in the buffer zone in front of the barricades, directing people like an orchestra conductor. I got them to add umbrellas to the structure — a tactic inspired not by the French, but by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — to protect from the water cannon. 

The crowd of police just watched as I directed the resistance. They recorded everything, sussing me out. Then, they mobilized the arresting squad. The police surged forward, grabbing anyone they could — journalists, protesters, they didn’t care. I started to run, but my fashion-victim status let me down, badly. I was wearing my cute new purple Adidas Sambas. But those shoes have no grip, as anyone who owns a pair knows. I slipped on the wet ground. 

A bunch of masked police jumped on me and began beating me mercilessly. At one point I nearly scrambled away, but again my sartorial choices screwed me over. My blazer was tied around my waist and they grabbed it and pulled me back.

By law in Georgia, all police officers have to wear a visible badge number. But during the protests, police hide their badges and mask up with balaclavas, so it’s difficult to prosecute them for brutality down the line.  

They started hitting the back of my head hard, and all I could do was protect my eyes and curl into the fetal position. They dragged me behind the police line and continued laying into me. Then they surrounded me, taunting me, telling me to hit myself and say that I was a little bitch. My legs were like jelly and I could barely stand. I did whatever they ordered, desperate, until they threw me into a van. Already, there was a lump the size of a bar of soap on the back of my head, with deep blue panda rings forming around my eyes. 

They hauled me to prison, but it took them six hours to get me inside. There was already a queue of other protesters they’d caught. My captors waited in the van with me, watching Russian TikToks for hours on end. Honestly, that was almost worse than the beating.  

The atmosphere inside the cells was desperate. People were silently pacing up and down, their spirits hitting rock bottom. Police were bringing in more protesters all the time, their radios crackling. I was in a cell with three other guys. “They beat me like a dog,” one of them said, showing me a bootprint-shaped bruise on his back. I realized we had to get the morale up, fast — and show the guards they couldn’t break us. 

We sang all the songs we could think of — “Bella Ciao,” the European anthem, a bunch of Georgian songs. At one point I even sang the Marseillaise. The police told us to shut up. We kept singing, and cracked terrible jokes that this was a five-star digital detox. 

I got out of jail because a lawyer helped me, pro bono. She works for the Human Rights Center, a group of lawyers here in Georgia that under the new law would be at the top of the state’s list of “foreign agents.” That lawyer, she probably weighs 120 pounds, isn’t much more than 5 feet tall, and she’s formidable. When she goes into the police station, you see the fear in their eyes. She’s the best. If it wasn’t for her and her organization, I would still be in jail. This Russian law wants to take away our access to human rights lawyers like her. 

Two weeks on, and my concussion is getting better, day by day. The nausea has eased and the daily headaches are becoming less intense. 

I’m back on the streets. At these protests, the energy feels different. There’s a crazy electricity in the air. Everyone is singing, fighting, determined not to lose their country. A lot of the protesters are my age — Gen Z. We don’t remember the chaos and corruption of the 1990s. We’re not worn down, like older people, by decades of protesting. We’re also more savvy than our parents’ generation about fact-checking. We don’t just swallow the stream of propaganda that’s fed to us. We’re ready to fight. I spoke with my uncle on the phone about it yesterday morning, just before the law was passed — he told me “my hopes are in Gen Z and a miracle.” 

By Luka Gviniashvili as told to Isobel Cockerell

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the name of the lawyer's association that advised Gviniashvili. It was the Human Rights Center, not the Young Lawyer's Association.

The post I’m protesting Georgia’s ‘Russian law.’ The police beat me up mercilessly appeared first on Coda Story.

The protests erupted on March 7 after the ruling Georgian Dream party began pushing through a controversial draft law that, if successful, would have required independent media and civil society organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence.” By March 9, Georgia’s government had backed down. Some 130 people arrested during the protests were promptly released, and on March 10 an emergency parliamentary sitting was hastily arranged to kill the bill. 

For outside observers, Georgian Dream’s spectacular U-turn may have signaled the end of an outwardly bewildering episode in the country’s politics. In reality, the story is likely far from over.

Dubbed “Putin’s Law” by demonstrators in Georgia, the governing party’s foreign agents bill echoed the measures used to crush dissent in Moscow after they were introduced in 2012. “It’s the trajectory of such laws that makes them frightening,” said Hubertus Jahn, a professor of Russian history at the University of Cambridge. “The impact [in Russia] has been massive. No NGO is operative [and] once these organizations are closed, an open civil society is no longer possible.” Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, the Kremlin has weaponized restrictions against those deemed “foreign agents” such that virtually all opposition voices have now been jailed, driven underground or forced abroad. 

“[Georgian Dream] has implemented hate and the inability to accept differences of opinion,” Gia Pailodze, a 66-year-old filmmaker, told me at the demonstration in Tbilisi last week. “It’s the same psychology you see at work in Russia.” Many Western commentators saw the protests as evidence that while the Georgian government has Russian sympathies, the Georgian people believe their future lies with Europe.

Russia for its part denied the protests in Georgia have anything to do with Russia, claiming, as Georgian Dream does, that the draft bill was based on a United States law stemming from the 1930s that requires lobbyists and advocates for foreign governments, organizations and individuals to disclose their related activities and compensation to the U.S. Department of Justice.

After the bill was withdrawn, Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, noted on Telegram that “Georgia lost the chance of sovereignty.” He claimed the street protests in Georgia were a product of Washington’s “soft power” rather than organic popular anger.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, also blamed the United States. He said that Salome Zourabichvili, the president of Georgia who expressed support for the protesters, was “addressing Georgians from America.” Zourabichvili was on a visit to New York to attend a United Nations summit. Peskov, referring to the U.S., said “someone’s visible hand is trying to add an anti-Russian element.” He also referred to “provocations” and the Kremlin’s “great concern.”

Others were less diplomatic. 

The Twitter account for “Russia’s MFA in Crimea,” Russia’s self-proclaimed Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the annexed region that is flagged as a Russian government organization, threatened protesters who were calling for the resignation of the Georgian government. “We recommend,” read the tweet, “to recall a similar situation in Ukraine in 2014 and what it finally led to!” Since 2008, Russia has consolidated its control over the Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the Caucasus, which constitute more than 20% of Georgian land. According to some reports, the protests over the draft bill led to security forces in the occupied areas conducting military exercises. As an example of saber rattling, this was comfortably topped by the RT editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, who called for a nuclear strike on Georgia.

In the weeks leading up to the protests in Georgia, critics had pointed out that the draft law — titled “Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence” — represented only the latest evidence of a growing authoritarian slide in a nation once held up, in the words of one former U.S. diplomat, as “a beacon of democracy in an ocean of autocracy.” A state security leak in 2021, for instance, appeared to have revealed mass surveillance of voices critical of the administration. And prominent journalist Nika Gvaramia, a critic of the government, was handed a prison sentence last year on charges that his supporters, human rights groups like Amnesty International and even the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi have said appear more motivated by a vendetta than justice.

But to truly understand how a country still subject to the Russian occupation got to the point of trying to implement an analogue of the Russian law, it’s important to grasp the fraught geopolitics at play. When Georgian Dream assumed office in 2012, it was on a mandate to preserve peace and stability after the disastrous 2008 war with Russia. In pursuing that mandate, Georgia has long sought to tread an exceptionally fine line between deepening its ties with historic allies in the West and avoiding any provocation of the Putin regime. 

This delicate balancing act became significantly more difficult, arguably impossible, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, as Western nations called on Georgia to join sanctions against Russia and provide material support to Ukrainian forces. Georgian Dream rejected those calls, instead launching unprecedented verbal attacks against the United States and the European Union. The Georgian administration’s relationship with the Putin regime, by contrast, has only grown warmer. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has even praised Georgian Dream for not becoming “another irritant” to the Kremlin with their decision to remain largely neutral on the conflict. 

In 2022, $2.5 billion worth of business with Russian companies turned Russia into Georgia’s second-largest trading partner after Turkey, in turn raising international concern that Georgia may be acting as a conduit for sanctions evasion. Talks remain ongoing about the prospect of resuming direct flights between Moscow and Tbilisi for the first time in over three years. 

But roughly 85% of Georgia’s population is in favor of joining the EU. After war broke out in Ukraine, the EU undertook to fast-track Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova’s applications for candidacy status — but while Ukraine and Moldova were waved through in June, Georgia’s bid was deferred because of an apparent lack of willingness to implement necessary reforms. 

Amid the doubling-down on anti-Western rhetoric that has followed, the foreign agents bill was received as a blatant attempt on the part of Georgian Dream to sabotage the country’s remaining prospects for integration with the EU. Not least given that the draft law was in fact first tabled by People’s Power, a vehemently anti-U.S., anti-EU party faction, and that its provisions actively contravened the European Charter on Human Rights, to which Georgia is a signatory.

“We want a European democracy and the new law is against that path,” said Giorgi Zhvania, a 35-year-old IT manager who was at the protests in Tbilisi. This, he said, “will divide Georgia. It’s Russian politics: divide and conquer.” Among the demands the EU is making of Georgia, say experts, is “deoligarchization,” a meaningful effort to counter the influence of vested interests over Georgian politics and public life. 

It’s an open secret that Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, by far the country’s wealthiest businessman, remains the party’s gray eminence though he formally left politics — not for the first time — in 2021. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, members of the European Parliament have repeatedly called for him to face sanctions for his long-standing links to powerful Russian business interests, leaving no illusions about what is meant by “deoligarchization.” But, said Julie George, a professor of political science at City University New York, “by definition, Georgian Dream cannot abandon Ivanishvili.” And so, she added, “the bid to enter the EU — not for the EU, or the Georgian people, but for Georgian Dream — ended last year.”

Last week’s protests may have been successful in achieving their immediate goal, but the government’s U-turn was not without some notable qualifications. The vast majority of ruling party MPs conspicuously failed to turn up and vote the foreign agents law down on March 10, instead leaving the process of withdrawing it to be largely carried out by the woefully fragmented parliamentary opposition. 

Referring to domestic and international coverage of events, Georgian Dream said that a “machine of lies was able to present the bill in a negative light and mislead a certain part of the public.” The party said it would be making efforts in the near future to clarify “what the bill was for and why it was important.” 

Indeed, party chairman Irakli Kobakhidze has since been quick to lavish praise upon the draft law’s authors for helping expose NGOs and independent media as subversive “LGBT propagandists” and opponents of the Georgian Orthodox Church, bent on dragging Georgia into the war in Ukraine and returning to power the widely-despised former government of imprisoned opposition figure Mikheil Saakashvili. According to Britain’s Sky News, which got in touch with Saakashvili through his lawyer, the former president says he has been poisoned and is “in bed all the time” and in “excruciating pain.” He warned Georgians to be wary of “the vengeful mood of the oligarchs' regime.”

It’s difficult to forecast what the wider implications may be should Georgian Dream choose to continue on its current trajectory. The message of the protests, say some analysts, is an embrace of the EU and the West. And Georgia is due to hold elections in 2024 with its new constitutionally-mandated proportional representation electoral system, intended to make all votes contribute to the final results. 

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia established not a perfect democracy,” said Stephen Jones, the head of Harvard University’s Georgian Studies Program, “but one that to a degree protected citizens’ rights and allowed some sort of public space for discussion.” Further democratic backsliding, he told me, means that will go, “and that’s a tragedy for Georgians.”

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A recent documentary follows the trek of these massive trees as they are uprooted and transported across Georgia and replanted in the private seaside park. But most Georgians may never see it on the big screen.

Salome Jashi’s 90-minute film “Taming the Garden” premiered across Europe last spring, and has finally come home to Tbilisi. But after the film’s premiere last week, the Georgian Film Academy abruptly canceled all other screenings of the film.

In a late message to the film’s creator, the Academy said the film would “divide public opinion.” Jashi said she took this as a clear message that Ivanishvili did not want the film distributed in Georgia. It was a shock, she said, even after spending four years documenting the absurd extremes Ivanishvili will go to satisfy his wishes.

Having made his money in Russia in the 1990s in extractive industries, banking and real estate, Ivanishvili today is the country’s richest man and the founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party. His fortune — an estimated $5.77 billion — is about a third of Georgia’s GDP. In 2021 Ivanishvili announced he was leaving politics and returning to a private life, but his opponents say he is still exerting his power over the country from behind the scenes.

While several cafes and non-profits have offered to host showings of “Taming the Garden,” no major cinema will take Jashi’s documentary, which is set to premiere in U.S. theaters this summer. The censored screenings come amid a tumultuous political moment in Georgia, where 20% of national territory is occupied by Russia. In 2008, Georgia fought its own war with its northern neighbor. The war in Ukraine has put Georgians on high alert, as Georgian authorities have opposed sanctioning Russia and Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party has gone so far as to sue the country’s president Salome Zourabichvili for speaking out in support of Ukraine. The war also has become a stress test for the government’s commitment to EU integration. Opposition politicians and protestors at the country’s frequent anti-government rallies have long said that this commitment is only skin-deep. 

Katia Patin spoke to Salome Jashi about her film in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the film getting pulled from screens last week on April 28. Can you explain what happened and why it’s a big deal?

The film started its life in Sundance, then the Berlinale, it was nominated for the European Film Awards, which are like the European Oscars, it was released in Germany, Switzerland, U.K. and it will go to the United States. However in Georgia, it cannot go to the cinemas. There is no cinema that can show the film.

The president of the Georgian Film Academy academy decided that the film is too political and should not be shown. And by “too political,” he said, this is a film that “divides people according to their political beliefs.” This has never happened in independent Georgia, never.

What did their decision and their explanation tell you about Georgia in 2022?

I think this confirms how the system works. The system works according to subordination and subordinates who try to guess what their superior might think. In this case the superior of the Film Academy is the Minister of Culture. Her superior is either the prime minister or Bidzina [Ivanishvili] himself.

This is the system that has been created under the rule of Ivanishvili. This is the system of self-censorship, trying not to upset the boss, not to have political or business trouble.

Our country has the ambition to become part of the EU. It is something very, very important to me and the people around me. But certain parts of the government — the Ministry of Culture — do not comply with EU values. Openly we are going towards the EU but clearly what the government is doing, it complies more towards Russia. It is a tightening of screws and the marginalization of free institutions and free expression.

Ivanishvili is absent from the film — his name is only mentioned a few times — but by following his project the viewer gets to know him in a way. Did making the film change how you think about him?

I was much more critical of him before. It doesn’t mean that I’m not critical now. But I realized what I learned through making the film is that it’s not only him. Power is not taken by one person. It’s a whole system. There are other people involved in it starting from his personal assistant and ending with a person in the village. It’s not just him to blame, it’s also each and every one of us. 

I think this is what changed in my relationship with him. Of course when someone has a lot of money and power he can control much more but it is up to each one of us to resist it. 

That sounds especially relevant to many of the conversations happening now around a collective guilt that many ordinary Russians bear for the war in Ukraine.

It’s not just about guilt. In the case of Russians it is important to understand this collective guilt because something bad has already happened. I think it’s more correct for us to talk about responsibility, being responsible to freedom and to independence.

During filming I observed that there are individuals who are responsible to people in power but ultimately every person is responsible to be free and independent. Here in Georgia it is a problem. People are afraid not to lose their job, their reputation. We know where this will go, this will go towards Russian authoritarian rule. And then we will complain that we live in an authoritarian country but in fact we contributed to it ourselves.

Bidzina’s park was covered extensively by Georgian and international media. However you chose a different, very specific style for your film and this story. What were you hoping to accomplish?

Information is one thing and it’s less of what I’m interested in. I’m interested in creating an inner experience, a space where this story can be experienced and a person can make their own conclusions. We did not want to offer consultations. That’s what TV does, at least in Georgia. And to create not just an experience for the brain but for the heart. This sensual experience is important because some things are not concrete but very abstract. They cannot be named or identified. They can only be felt.

I think the film does not show one dimension of what happened. The film shows multiple opinions, it shows people who praise him and people who are upset about what is happening. It is open to interception. I thought that he would like the film.

There’s very little dialogue in your film. Instead you take the viewer through long shots of how the trees are uprooted, the way the trees move when they’re floating across the sea, the sound of branches breaking as a tree rides on a truck. Why did you choose a more abstract approach to tell this story?

I tried to give symbolic meaning and metaphorical meaning to things. I tried to present the tree, which is the main protagonist, as not just a tree, but as something else. Same with Ivanishvili, he’s not just Ivanishvili but rather he represents a man, an “X” man with power. I wanted to show this local story to a wider audience and have them relate to it.

The feedback I get is that the film creates a kind of fairytale where Ivanishvili is a mythical figure. He does not belong here and now. 

I had this fear that we were depicting a certain thing happening in time. And I had this fear that after a couple years it won’t be relevant. But I think this film is still very relevant. One because Ivanishvili is still — unofficially — in power. And second, because his rule is becoming more powerful. The political institutions that they supervise are becoming more controlling of the country and of people and the media. It’s all more obvious now. People see it more obviously now.

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Another, more recent example, was when I found out that I had been swept up in one of Georgia’s biggest political scandals in a decade. Earlier this month, a massive data leak revealed to the nation that state security services had been secretly monitoring the electronic communications of hundreds of journalists, politicians, diplomats, high-ranking members of the clergy — and me.

So, why did a 19-year-old woman, fresh out of university, working her first job at a nightclub, become a target of Georgia’s security services? 

The answers to that question point not just to what Bassiani is, but what it means to many young Georgians. For us — living in a former Soviet country, strongly influenced by the conservative ideologies espoused by older generations and the powerful Georgian Orthodox Church, where LGBTQ people face daily oppression — it was much more than just a club. It was a safe space, where everyone was equal.

I can recall the first time I went there vividly.

I spent pretty much every weekend at the club. Then, in 2017, the founders asked me to join their team. I love music, I’m always on the hunt for what’s new and exciting, and I jumped at the chance. I became the manager of Bassiani’s record label, and handled bookings and promotions for the club.

I thought it would be a cool job. And it was. 

But Bassiani faced regular attacks from right-wing political and religious groups. They started spreading lies about us, saying that we were performing bizarre rituals in the club and selling drugs. Soon pro-Russian groups started attacking us online, calling us “drug addicts,” “gays” and “whores.” One Facebook post in particular went viral, in which a man alleged that a strangely dressed woman could always be found standing near the club’s toilets holding a basket full of drugs that she handed out to anyone passing by. 

The rumors and innuendo turned into an outright attack in 2018, when the police raided Bassiani. In the previous few weeks, five people in Tbilisi had died in their homes after taking adulterated MDMA, bought from a Russian dealer on the dark web. That was all the reason the Georgian police needed to target the club, even though there had been no fatalities on our premises. 

May 12 was just a regular Friday club night, until police clad in riot gear barged in. They pointed guns at dancers and at the DJs who were playing, made us turn off the music, kicked us out and shut down the club. Later, news reports said hundreds of people were arrested. I remember my mom calling me frantically, then rushing to the club to find me.

It’s clear that the raid was a show of power by the government, staged to demonstrate exactly what it thinks of progressive people and their beliefs. So, the next day, we pushed back and announced a rally in front of the parliament building. We set up massive speakers and started playing music. Over 10,000 people showed up. It was one of the best raves of my life — thousands of people dancing in the heart of the city.

The square in front of Georgia’s parliament is the heart of the country’s political life. It is where every protest of any significance has ever taken place. Previous generations had occupied it to demand independence from the Soviet Union. At the Bassiani protest, my generation found the voice it needed to speak up for its freedoms.

Bassiani was closed for a month while the authorities rifled through the club’s business documents. They found nothing to incriminate us and were left with no choice but to let us reopen. I should, however, have known that the matter would not end there. 

I found out that my phone had been tapped just over a year before the leaks made such information public. In July 2020, a few months into the Covid-19 crisis, I received a call from an unknown number. Like so many other businesses, Bassiani had closed in March, and I had left my job to explore other opportunities. I was in my garden at the time and wondered who was ringing me.

It was the police. 

A man told me that officers had been listening to my phone conversations for the entire summer of 2018, starting from the raid on the club in May. I was frightened and enraged. What had I done to be spied on like this? 

The man said that the police had monitored my phone for three months before shutting down the investigation. They didn’t tell me what they found or what they had done with all the information they had gathered. But, two years later, in the middle of a pandemic, I was being summoned to a police station to sign a document stating that I had been informed that I had been placed under police surveillance.

I remember calling my friends who had also worked at Bassiani. Many had received a similar call. I spoke to my uncle, who is a lawyer. He told me there wasn’t much I could do, except sign the paperwork. 

Months later, the stress of this revelation still hasn’t left me. I don’t remember what I said on the phone back then, whether they were reading my messages and listening to all my calls. I feel like I have no privacy anymore, that someone is still listening to me and watching me whenever I use Facebook, send a WhatsApp message, or speak to anyone on the telephone. Many of my friends feel the same way. And with good reason.

In October this year, I realized that Georgia’s snooping went much much deeper than Bassiani. An anonymous whistleblower leaked thousands of documents online, detailing how the nation’s security services had been systematically spying on a wide range of public figures, from prominent news reporters to foreign diplomats.

The scale of the surveillance was so immense that even Georgia's public ombudswoman, Nino Lomjaria, was taken aback. "We live in a terrible country," she said in an interview broadcast on national television in September. "I could not imagine this kind of monitoring."

Bassiani has been closed for a year-and-a-half now. I miss it deeply. Growing up and going to school, I always felt like an outsider. I was a rebellious kid, who had problems with teachers and some of my fellow students. I felt different from them, showed it in my own way and was bullied for doing so. Bassiani was one of the few places where I have felt at home.

That’s why the rave outside parliament felt so momentous, and why the subsequent surveillance felt so intrusive. It wasn’t just clubbers who were there — our parents showed up, as did every other person who wanted to protest against the government’s decision to raid a nightclub and demonize its patrons. I think we showed them that we weren’t alone and that we have a little bit of power too.

Photos by Hitori O.G

As told to Harsimran Gill  

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Lashkarava, who worked for the local opposition TV channel TV Pirveli, had suffered a number of injuries, including a concussion. After undergoing surgery, he was discharged from hospital and was receiving treatment at home. An official cause of death has not been announced.

Sunday’s protests were led by civil rights organizations and activists demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili. Speakers accused the government and the Georgian Orthodox Church of sanctioning the violence. The church organized what was billed as a public prayer meeting on July 5, but priests and members of violent radical groups were seen threatening journalists.

At a government meeting on Monday, Gharibashvili said the administration condemned the July 5 violence and was investigating Lashkarava’s death. He repeated an earlier statement that the planned Pride March was a provocation and said that opposition groups were using the tragedy to further their political aims. 

“The investigation is working on several theories, including the theory of how those aggressive people appeared there and why they deliberately attacked journalists and camera operators,” he said. “This is a legitimate question that the investigation should answer.” 

Lashkarava's death has unleashed a disinformation campaign by far-right groups.

In a special YouTube episode of a political commentary show by Alt Info, an alt-right group that led the July 5 anti-LGBTQ protests, host Irakli Martinenko referred to the involvement of “liberals” in Lashkarava's death. “They probably sacrificed, murdered, one of their own and are now using it politically,” he told Alt Info’s nearly 17,000 subscribers. “Generally, the way the liberals fight differs from that of the conservatives. The main tool for the liberals is taking the position of victim.”

The disinformation angle has been picked up by other prominent figures in Georgia. On July 11, Levan Vasadze — an ultra-conservative public figure and businessman who has long campaigned against the LGBTQ community and has strong ties with pro-Kremlin actors such as the Russian far-right ideologue Aleksandr Dugin — made a video statement on the Georgian-language channel of the World Congress of Families, a U.S. and Russia-led coalition of right-wing Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and abortion and which has just under 65,000 Facebook followers. 

In the video, Vasadze cast suspicion on the timing and circumstances of Lashkarava’s death. He also called out the U.S. Ambassador to Georgia Kelly Dagnan for pressuring the Georgian government to let “this provocation take place,” referring to the Pride march. 

James Nixey, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, said the attempts to obfuscate the circumstances of Lashkarava’s death bore all the hallmarks of a disinformation strategy. “These are tried and tested tactics in Georgia from enemies foreign and domestic, and those domestic enemies are often funded by the foreign. There’s a merging of tactics there and we’ve seen it before.” 

LGBTQ rights have been in the firing line in a number of countries in Europe. Last week, Hungary passed a new law banning the dissemination of educational material viewed as promoting homosexuality in schools. In Poland, Andrzej Duda won a second presidential term last year on a platform of anti-gay rhetoric. In March, the nation’s government banned same-sex couples from adopting children and since the summer of 2019, more than 100 towns and areas have declared themselves "LGBT-free.”

“There’s the trend of an illiberal streak we see running across Europe from Brexit to the rise of the far-right in France,” said Nixey. “You move from there into Eastern Europe and the intolerance shown by the Polish and Hungarian governments there. It’s all part and parcel of the same thing, but each one has its specificities.”

Lashkarava’s death caused wide discussion on Georgian Facebook as well, where many echoed the unproven theories of the Alt Info anchors.

“The United National Movement sectarians forced him on TV channels to yell that he had been beaten. Then they killed him with narcotics, so that they could get people’s support and cause unrest in Georgia in the name of the deceased,” said one user, referring to the main opposition party politicians and supporters.

While Alt-Info’s website and Facebook page were both suspended on Sunday for as yet unknown reasons, its Telegram group of over 2,600 subscribers has been filled with discussion about Lashkarava’s death.

“The guy died of an overdose and they are calling us murderers,” one of the Telegram group members commented.

The comments echoed speculation by allegedly far-right users on Facebook that Lashkarava had been under the influence of alcohol or drugs the day before his death. The theories point to July 10 street camera footage released by the Interior Ministry, which allegedly shows Lashkarava stumbling while walking.

On July 13, as dozens of mourners gathered at Lashkarava’s funeral to pay respects, a group of journalists disrupted a health briefing by Georgia’s deputy health minister, Tamar Gabunia. 

One journalist who interrupted the briefing held up a photo of Lashkarava and a sign that called for Gharibashvili’s resignation. “Irakli Gharibashvili must resign because he is the number 1 homophobe in our country and he is a violent prime minister,” he said.

Additional reporting by Burhan Wazir

Additional research by Sophiko Vasadze and Masho Lomashvili

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When he arrives in the capital Tbilisi, Pompeo will find a situation eerily similar to the one he may be trying to escape: rising Covid-19 numbers and big street protests over a bitter, disinformation-mired election dispute. And while Pompeo is a lame duck diplomat in much of the world, his visit to the small South Caucasus nation could alter history. 

On October 31, Georgians voted in a highly contested parliamentary election. After eight years on the political sidelines, the opposition thought it stood a chance of at least diluting the power of the ruling Georgian Dream party. 

But according to the opposition, the game was rigged from the start. The election was marred by disinformation and allegations of vote buying. And once the ballots were cast, evidence of fraud began to emerge. In over a hundred polling stations, for example, no one voted for the opposition  — a statistical impossibility in a politically divided Georgia. In some areas, the vote totals cast for the ruling party were greater than the number of people who actually voted. 

The ruling party is run by the Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country’s richest man, an oligarch with ties to Russia who, over the years, has successfully managed to keep the opposition weak and fragmented.   

The international community — the usual arbiter between the Georgian government and the opposition — has been distracted by the pandemic and the turmoil in the U.S. While there has been some criticism of the government, overall the response has been muted and government-backed media channels cite Pompeo’s upcoming visit as a validation of the election’s outcome. 

For years Georgia, an ally of the U.S., has been held up as a model for the region. This election further erodes the country democratic stature and is likely to come at a geopolitical cost for the West. 

The “Ivanishvili government has hired lobbying firms in Washington while embracing Russian disinformation narratives and Russian tactics at home,” says Giorgi Kandelaki, an opposition politician. “Retreat of democracy here harms the United States interests and works to Putin’s benefit” 

As America’s top diplomat, Pompeo often urges free and fair elections and peaceful transitions of power. But his two-day visit to Georgia does not include a meeting with the country’s opposition, and his apparent refusal to accept election results in his own country makes him a deeply compromised interlocutor. 

Upping the stakes is a massive geopolitical tremor in the region. The South Caucasus — which includes Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan — is a key global transit route and a strategic gem that Washington and Moscow have been at loggerheads over for years. This week, its map was redrawn, literally, when Azerbaijan scored a military victory over Armenia in a war over the long-disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. 

It was a conflict much of the world didn’t even notice, but regional powers Turkey and Russia filled the vacuum created by a distracted America. Over the past six weeks, Ankara provided key military support to Azerbaijan, while Moscow stood back, allowing Azerbaijan to crush Armenia, Russia’s most loyal ally. This week, after Azerbaijan took key territories, the Kremlin stepped in, negotiated a truce and was invited by Azerbaijan to maintain stability. Moscow is sending troops to act as peacekeepers.  

Who the ultimate geopolitical winner of this situation is in dispute. Azerbaijan is the obvious one. But Russia now has boots on the ground and new leverage over both Azerbaijan and Armenia. Turkey, too, has come out ahead.

Losers are much easier to identify. Armenia: a devastated nation now sinking into a political crisis that will take years to overcome. And the United States: for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington is suddenly not even a player in a Great Game that it only recently led. 

As Mike Pompeo leaves the election chaos at home to embark on his foreign tour, the Caucasus provides a striking destination to showcase America’s diminished role on the global stage.

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Since 2016, when it won its first six seats in the Georgian parliament, the Alliance of Patriots has been accused of working on Russia’s behalf in Georgia. Documents published by the Dossier Center last week allege that Russian security services are crafting a $8 million election campaign for the party in the run-up to a parliamentary vote in October.

Relations between Russia and Georgia have been tense since the outbreak of the Russo-Georgian war of 2008. Georgia remains extremely sensitive to Russian interference in its affairs. In June 2019, thousands of Georgians took to the streets of Tbilisi to express their anger at a Russian politician’s address to the nation's parliament.

Nino Evgenidze, the executive director of the Tbilisi-based think tank the Economic Policy Research Center, said Kremlin meddling in its neighbors’ elections is motivated by a fear of democratic examples emerging to inspire domestic discontent. “We’re talking about Russia’s neighbors, like Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia or Belarus. If these countries defeat Russian influence, then the next stop is Russia itself,” she said in a phone interview. 

Irma Inashvili, head of the Alliance of Patriots, has called the allegations of Russian financing “a lie from start to finish.” Inashvili gained attention last fall when she brought thousands of protestors to the gates of the American Embassy in Tbilisi to demand that two former US diplomats be made persona non grata in Georgia.

The Dossier Center reports that consultants from a Moscow-based company named Politsecrets produced campaign videos and formulated political messages for the Alliance of Patriots, with the intention of stirring up fear of a collapsing economy among the electorate. Several examples were published in the Dossier report:

“If we don’t change the political system, then by the New Year we will see a round of unemployment and an outflow of the population. Georgians will again become illegal migrants to the EU,” read instructions to the Alliance of Patriots from Vera Blashenkova, director of Politsecrets.

The Dossier Center says its documents include itemized budgets for the months leading up to the October election and volumes of correspondence. The organization also reports that the Georgian language edition of Sputnik, a Russian state-controlled news agency, was tasked with providing media support for the Alliance of Patriots .

Khodorkhovsky, the Dossier Center’s owner, is widely regarded as one of President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent foes. He was jailed for fraud in 2005 in what many observers viewed to be a politically motivated trial. Although he was pardoned by Putin in 2013, their relationship remains adversarial.

Evgenidze, of the Economic Policy Research Center, said the Dossier Center is a credible source of leaked documents in Russia, adding that the disclosures “should at least prompt the Georgian government to start investigating.”

On August 25, Georgian opposition groups demanded that the Alliance of Patriots be barred from the parliamentary election and have appealed to the General Prosecutor’s office to begin an investigation.

“A huge storm and attack is planned against us,” Inashvili warned the next day in an interview on Georgian TV. 

Inashvili was a subject of Coda Story’s documentary series “Clash of Narratives,” when she first campaigned for parliament in 2016. “Russian propaganda? It’s really ridiculous,” Inashvili said in an interview for the project. “There’s practically no threat of Russian propaganda in Georgia.”

Photo by Robin Forestier-Walker

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The manufacturer sells hundreds of thousands of tons of fertilizers to many traders and companies around the world. The company’s director Ephrem Urumashvili said he could neither confirm nor deny his company sold the particular batch of ammonium nitrate stored in the Beirut port because it “happened under a different ownership” and that Rustavi Azot was preparing an official statement. 

Another company representative said he was worried about a flurry of Russian disinformation and accusations about sales of ammonium nitrate and the factory. 

Concern over becoming collateral damage from disinformation campaigns and online media attacks seeking to capitalize on the humanitarian catastrophe in Beirut is well founded. 

In the minutes and hours following the devastating explosion in Beirut, conspiracy theories ricocheted not only in Lebanon — a country riven by political factions, sectarian division, and conflict— but across the region and even much farther afield. In Georgia, years of disinformation campaigns coordinated in Russian media targeting a U.S.-funded biolab called the Lugar Research Center have more recently attempted to falsely pin the Covid-19 pandemic on the lab.

Two Georgian government officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said that following news reports of the blast they checked and confirmed that it was manufactured in Georgia and 2,700 tons of fertilizer were legally shipped from the country’s Black Sea port in Batumi. “It was a registered, clean sale and there was no reason for us to be suspicious,” one of the officials said.

The ammonium nitrate loaded in the Batumi port was destined for Mozambique. The vessel, called MV Rhosus, sailed under a Moldovan flag and was owned by a Cyprus-based Russian businessman named Igor Grechushkin. The crew were Ukranian and Russian nationals. 

Captain Boris Prokoshev joined the crew when the ship docked in Turkey. In an interview with Russian media, he said he was told that the ship was headed to Mozambique but that during their refuelling stop in Greece, the owner, Igor Grechushkin ordered him to sail to Beirut to load it up with additional cargo. 

Ammonium nitrate, which is a dual-use fertilizer, is banned in Lebanon. “I have no idea how Grechushkin got permission for us to dock in Beirut,” Prokoshev said in the interview with the Russian publication MediaZona, adding that in Beirut the crew was told to load up the ship with heavy machinery. The captain refused to receive the machinery on board because the ship “could not physically take so much.” By then, he said, the crew had grown increasingly angry with Greshuchkin over his failure to pay their salaries, and a partial strike ensued. The Lebanese authorities confiscated the ship for failing to pay port dues and taxes, and Prokoshev and his crew spent the following 11 months trying to get out of Lebanon.

"They should have gotten rid of the vessel right away instead of confiscating it and demanding fees for harboring it," Prokoshev told RFE/RL.

Lebanon is one of a handful of countries that has outlawed dual-use fertilizers. According to leaked court documents, Lebanese customs authorities between 2014 and 2017 repeatedly asked Lebanese courts to allow them to re-export the banned chemicals which “posed a grave danger to public health.” 

Lebanese authorities are still investigating the cause of the fire that led to the massive explosion.

Photo by Daniel Carde via Getty Images

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On the outskirts of Tbilisi, staff at the U.S.-funded Lugar Research Center are helping to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Georgia by testing hundreds of samples and turning results around in under 24 hours. 

The lab, funded by $350 million in American taxpayer dollars, has been at the center of Georgian media coverage for weeks. But for years prior to this pandemic, it’s been the subject of media attention for a different reason – as a key target for Russian disinformation campaigns.

In January, the lab activated its emergency response unit, and quickly focused its resources on testing for COVID-19. When Russian and Chinese state media began claiming the coronavirus is the product of a U.S. military bioweapons operation, one Russian outlet, Kremlin-backed RenTV, went further: it attempted to pin the pandemic to the Tbilisi Lugar Lab. 

“This is propaganda. What can we do?” said Paata Imnadze, director of the lab in an interview with Coda Story. He added that the coronavirus outbreak may now play a part in shifting Georgian attitudes towards the center. “For me it's  more important that the majority of our population will now see why we need it.”

Russian military expert Igor Nigulkin was one of the first Kremlin figures to push conspiracy theories linking the disease to the US military. “We will soon see who coronavirus is directed against,” said Nigulkin on Ren-TV in January. “It can be beneficial for American corporations that are developing these kinds of new diseases just for profit. Or maybe for the Americans themselves, because America is the only country that has 400 military biological laboratories around the world.” 

A reporter on Ren-TV, which reaches 115 million viewers, then singled out Tbilisi’s Lugar lab as a potential source of the virus.

When Coda Story visited the lab, technicians were busy testing samples of COVID-19. “It’s not the first time journalists have visited the center – one time, all of Russian TV was here,” Imnadze told me as we watched technicians testing samples through a thick glass window. “Of course the majority of them showed nothing – and if they showed something it was just the opposite of what we told them.”

Asked how he felt about the constant onslaught of disinformation targeting the lab, Director Paata Imnadze shrugged. “It doesn't affect me. But it does affect people who still believe propaganda. We’re waiting for the next propaganda activity from our neighbor.”

Conspiracy theories about the work done at the Lugar Lab have persisted for years. Coda Story previously wrote about the lab in 2018 when the Russian Defense Ministry claimed the facility was a secret U.S. bioweapons project, posing a threat to neighboring Russia’s security. Kremlin-backed media also floated conspiracies that the lab is a “nest of viruses,” illegally testing on Georgian citizens and responsible for events as diverse as flu outbreaks, Ebola, and the Skripal poisonings. 

It’s been a source of frustration for the lab’s directors and Georgia’s disease control officials. 

“I do not like this question. The source of this disinformation is one country – you know which country it is, yes?” said Amiran Gamrekildze, Head of the National Center for Disease Control. “If you can nominate another country except this one, our big neighbor, then I will answer this question. Everybody agrees that the Lugar lab is for public health research, and nothing to do what our big neighbors are manipulating.” 

The U.S. government built the $350 million lab in 2011, with the aim of limiting the spread of disease in the region, and dealing with deadly pathogens left over from the Soviet Union’s biowarfare program. 

The lab’s high levels of biosafety and advanced technology are part of what makes it a target for Russian disinformation. 

In recent months, the lab has been crucial in quickly testing for the coronavirus in Georgia. “For tracking the virus, it’s very important to have results as quickly as possible,” said Imnadze. “The technology we have here is very unique for this region,” he said, adding that the lab was starting to carry out sequencing work, contributing to broader international research on the virus’s behavior.

While the lab’s employees are fighting on two fronts, in Georgia at least, attitudes towards their work is changing. 

“There’s always been a big question mark about the Lugar Lab,” said Sandro Bregadze, the leader of the extreme-right Georgian March party, previously one of the loudest Georgian voices calling for the lab’s closure. “When something is secret there are always doubts – are they working in the Lab on some kind of biological or chemical weapon?” But, Bregadze added, seeing the work the lab had been doing to combat coronavirus in recent months, he was grateful. “I think that the Lugar laboratory plays a very important role in the fight against the virus,” he said. “I want to thank the lab for doing such a good job.”

At the time of writing, there are 34 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Georgia. Just a few hundred miles away from coronavirus-hit Iran, Georgia’s outbreak is currently under control. “We’re in response and containment mode,” the lab’s head of emergency response, Ana Kasradze, said. “We hope we’ll keep the rate very low.”

The World Health Organization is clear on how to mitigate the spread. “We have a simple message for all nations: test, test, test,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday.

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Many of the protestors have worn t-shirts and wave banners that read: “20% of my country is occupied by Russia.”

In a five-day war in 2008 between Russia and Georgia, Russia took control of South Ossetia, a Georgian province in the country’s north.

Russian media have largely portrayed the protests as motivated by Russophobia. For many Georgians, however, Russian occupation and the country’s economic and political influence are viewed as the latest instances of colonialism and imperialism that begins with the Red Army invading an independent Georgia in 1921.

Photographer Tako Robakidze has spent more than a year with families who live along the South Ossetia line of control, a moving border that Georgians call a “creeping occupation” because the Russian military has continually pushed deeper into Georgian territory. What is it like to live under creeping occupation? This is the question Robakidze explores in “Creeping Borders.”

The project was produced with support by Magnum Foundation

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“I was bullied at school for 12 years. I still hate to visit the place, because every day it was terrifying, each day meant facing death. Today I cannot visit my parents in Kakheti [in eastern Georgia], because it is dangerous,” said Sozashvili. “This is the difference between me and you. You will never, never understand this, you will never understand what it costs me to stand here and say this,” he told the politicians, jabbing his finger for emphasis.

Since the 2000s and especially in recent years, Georgia has sought to distance itself from its Soviet history and to market itself as a wine-soaked country firmly in the European camp. Tourism is booming in Georgia, and Forbes has proclaimed its capital one of Europe’s hippest destinations, declaring in 2018 that Berlin was “out” and Tbilisi was “in.”

While many in Georgia’s government have embraced the mantle of a rapidly developing nation that celebrates Western culture and values, LGBTQ activists like Tamaz have faced a less tolerant side to the nation: violence and political indifference in their fight for civil rights and justice. For a month after his speech at parliament, the 23-year-old was afraid to ride public transportation for fear of reprisals after he had outed himself in public.

This week, a small group of Georgian activists are swallowing their fear and holding Tbilisi’s first-ever Pride Week, a five-day long affair that includes a theater performance of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a conference and a march.

But the groundbreaking events have hit a wall of resistance within the LGBTQ community as well as the nation at large, underscoring the challenges Georgia faces at a time when the legitimacy of liberal European values are being called into question and Russia, its aggressive neighbor to the north, is interfering in the debate.

A few days before Pride Week commenced, the Georgian Orthodox Church released a statement calling Pride “absolutely unacceptable” and a “sodomite sin,” calling on the government to shut it down.

In response, queer activists held a rally in downtown Tbilisi, where they clashed with nationalist groups. At least eight people were detained.

A few days later, the Ministry of Internal Affairs — which had said previously it could not guarantee protestors’ safety and that the Pride march should not take place outdoors-- announced it will “protect both freedom and freedom of expression, regardless of their political views, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and other marks,” so long as such expression does not exceed “permissible limits.”

But just this week, Levan Vasadze, a Georgian businessman who uses his millions to strip LGBTQ people of civil rights, announced his intention to organize vigilante patrols on the streets of Tbilisi during the Pride march. “We will tie their hands with belts and take them away,” he told his supporters at a rally on Sunday evening.

Civil society groups moved quickly to defend the rallying activists and condemn actors like Vasadze, and while they welcomed the Ministry’s response, they also noted that “the strengthening of such [extremist] groups over the years is the result of the government’s inappropriate policies, inaction and often tolerant attitudes.”

Soon after the Pride Week commenced, on Wednesday, Tamaz wrote on Twitter that members of far-right groups had announced their intentions to storm the offices of Tbilisi Pride and tried to attack several organizers as they left the building. Tamaz also reported that he received a death threat the same day.

Six years ago, a large LGBTQ celebration of the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia was held in Georgia. Thousands of counter-demonstrators led by Georgian Orthodox Christian priests broke police lines and attacked a group of about 50 activists.

The aftershocks of that violence still grip the LGBTQ community and many struggle over how best to achieve equality. Some question whether having a high-profile Pride event is helpful for the country or whether it elevates Western values of visibility and “coming out” over the safety of its activists.

When the modern queer liberation movement started with the Stonewall Riots in America 50 years ago, the enemies of equality were clear: discriminatory legislation, prejudiced societal beliefs, religious conservatism.

But now, in an age of information manipulation, it’s getting much harder to define who exactly the enemies of the LGBTQ are. In 2019, Georgian activists find themselves facing similar prejudices to those faced by Stonewall protestors, but in a world complicated by fake news, disinformation campaigns and cyber threats.

Vasadze, the ultra-conservative businessman, says modern wars are no longer fought between countries. Instead, the fight between the “life culture” and the “death culture,” by which he means families versus LGBTQ people, is played out “in every living room and in every bedroom where your wife and my wife [and] our children sleep.”

As Tamaz was speaking to the human rights committee last year, a demonstration was raging outside Parliament. The same committee that decided that the annual May commemorations for International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia should be canceled had put together an action plan that included a stipulation for an awareness-raising campaign about LGBTQ issues, according to activists.

The bureaucrats’ decision was supported by around four dozen LGBTQ activists. They feared nationalist groups capable of mobilizing great numbers were planning counter-demonstrations, and the risk of violence was too high. A larger group of activists decided to demonstrate anyway, gathering outside government buildings in the city center.

Giorgi Tabagari, who took part in last year’s demonstration, gained confidence with its success. He then spent months drumming up support for what to some must have seemed like a radical proposition: a Pride Week in Tbilisi. He felt that staging bold events would institutionalize queer activism, increase visibility and accelerate social change. “Visibility comes first, and the changes follow,” he said.

In the wake of the announcement of the planned Pride week, LGBTQ community members have been fiercely debating the decision, including at a seminar held outside Tbilisi.

A Georgian woman who works at an international nonprofit network and attended the event told me that some queer Georgians, especially those from regional towns, said they felt Tbilisi-based organizations were out of touch with the community’s interests. She said the critics felt that the urban activists “sit around discussing sex and sexuality, watch [queer] movies and eat cookies.”

Those against the Pride celebrations fear the visibility that the events bring, terrified of coming out themselves for fear of being shunned from their families or fired from jobs. More attention, they said, needs to be paid to poverty, homelessness, domestic violence and access to healthcare and education, issues that affect LGBTQ people in their daily lives. Pride may increase awareness, but many fear it does nothing to address problems head-on.

And with memories of the violence six years ago still fresh, some community members are afraid Pride will incite another backlash.

The nationalist group Georgian March announced its plans to form a political party and run in the next parliamentary elections in 2020, and although the group does not yet attract much support, events like Pride may give it a galvanizing issue to attract votes. Women’s Initiatives Supporting Group, a local LGBTQ nonprofit, said it fears that “the likelihood of the mobilization of politically motivated and managed homophobic groups remains high” as Pride nears.

Tabagari, the Pride organizer, concedes that violence could occur, but says this is “unavoidable” in a country where LGBTQ people are, according to some measures, still the most-hated group. “Either you have to say no to visibility and publicity and go down underground and never come out, or if [you do the opposite] there will always be people who are against you,” he explained.

Not all of Georgia’s liberals agree.

Giorgi Ptskialadze is a charmingly boyish young man who has read Judith Butler in English and clenches his fists in excitement when he talks about Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign. There isn’t much about the 19-year-old’s politics that differs dramatically from his millennial and Gen Z peers in the West who have increasingly voiced the opinion that the leftist ideals of their parents’ generation are just not left enough.

Ptskialadze, an art history student, attended the queer seminar this spring that was rocked by debate over Pride. He described the conversations there as focused on how to bring about “authentic queer activism” in Georgia separate from the current strand of identity politics that he says further divide society. He doesn’t want to follow the United States, for example, where the queer liberation movement led by white gay men is perceived to have ignored many trans people and people of color.

Ptskialadze worries, though, that Georgia is headed down the same path, towards a future where LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people, atheists, and Orthodox Christians are more segregated than they are now, and what he sees as the more pressing political struggle — battling big government, big business and capitalism — is neglected. He says the very idea of Pride Week disgusts him. He dismisses it as a hyper-commercialized spectacle that does nothing for the community, while companies like Coca Cola rake in money from advertising. “They stick a rainbow on water bottles and charge you more for it,” he said. “This is not activism for me.”

As Pride kicks off this week, many in Georgia’s queer community, like Ptskialadze, will stay on the sidelines, which is itself another kind of protest.

Others, like a young, closeted psychology student I spoke to, barely know where they stand on the issue.

In hushed, nervous tones, she told me of her first queer experience, a drunken night with a female friend, after which she felt only shame. When I spoke about Pride, she looked confused — she hadn’t heard of it. Nor, it turned out, did she know that LGBTQ rights nonprofits even existed. After explaining the possibility of violence at Pride, she cocked her head to the side and asked why it would be violent. Despite the risk, she plans to attend anyway.

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The onset of fall has brought to Russia, as it often does, flu and conspiracy theories. Back in the news is Moscow’s seasonal talk of an imminent American biological attack, to be launched from medical research labs in Russia’s neighborhood.

In this telling, Russian pigs have become the first victims of a test run for a future offensive on humans. That was the insinuation from a recent press conference by the Russian Defense Ministry, which has noted that swine flu has been spreading to Russia from neighboring Georgia, home to a U.S.-sponsored medical research laboratory known as the Lugar Lab.

As Russia’s chief TV propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov is famously wont to say: “Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

And Moscow is bracing for things to get worse. “The U.S. is systematically building its biological potential and is getting control over national collections of pathogenic microorganisms” around the world, Major General Igor Kirillov told the October 4 press conference.

Russian defense officials described the U.S.-sponsored medical laboratory in Georgia as a mothership in a network of similar facilities built around Russia, “in Azerbaijan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan,” that can serve as launching pads for a germ war on Russia.

These accusations are not new. The epidemiological surveillance lab in Georgia, created to prevent outbreaks of epidemics, has long been the reason for paranoia outbreaks.

The U.S. government spent $350 million to set up the facility in Tbilisi, equipping it with a regionally unmatched capacity to detect and mitigate infectious disease threats. The lab — formally known as the Richard G. Lugar Public Health Research Center – is named after the former U.S. senator and non-proliferation activist, hence the Lugar Lab sobriquet.

But the U.S. funding and the involvement of American military medics turned the lab into one of Russia’s favorite information war punching bags, aimed at spoiling its neighbors ties with Washington. State-run Russian media has regularly targeted the lab in a vigorous scare campaign portraying the facility as a Pentagon-run petri dish of biological and chemical weapons, where unsuspecting Georgians serve as lab rats.

“Local residents tell us terrifying stories about the Lugar Lab,” ominously began one recent report by Russia’s Sputnik news network. “The wind brings a terrible stench, as from a stinky outhouse, [from the lab],” one elderly local woman told Sputnik.

An earlier report by Russia’s REN TV featured an elderly Georgian citizen who lives in the vicinity of the lab and “is wasting away before everyone’s eyes.” REN TV’s correspondent said that the woman’s health troubles began after “the former flight attendant sensed an unpleasant odor coming from the streets. She breathed in the air and immediately fainted.”

The story went on to claim that from 2014 the lab unleashed giant mosquitos and bats carrying viral infections across Georgia.

These tales tend to be laced with images of dead animals, biohazards signs and spooky video effects, and sci-fi horror tropes (think Andromeda Strain or Kiss Me Deadly). This correspondent visited the Lugar Lab last year and was disappointed to find a prosaic-looking research facility with no terrible stench, dead animals, or human subjected to experiments, but Russia can always argue that journalists don’t to get to see everything.

Russian news stories about the lab rely heavily on “revelations” coming from one eccentric American living in Tbilisi, a certain Jeffrey Silverman, who says that the U.S. will use bioweapons developed in Georgia to depopulate the Middle East and take over its oil. Despite a lack of evident expertise or knowledge, Silverman is held up as a bona fide American whistle-blower in the Russian media. “That lab is a time-bomb,” he intimated in an interview with REN TV.

But the source of the latest outbreak of ex-Soviet mysophobia is a shadowy former Georgian security minister, Igor Giorgadze. In September, Giorgadze called a press conference in Moscow to declare that the American military was conducting lethal experiments on humans in the Lugar Lab and that it is all part of Washington’s Strangelovian plans for Moscow. Giorgadze based his claims on documents that he allegedly obtained from the lab.

Giorgadze claimed that he had asked U.S. President Donald Trump to look into the work of the Lugar Lab. Trump has not said or tweeted anything about the lab, but Russian security and defense ministries followed up with a warning for Washington.

In Georgia, Giorgadze is widely seen as the KGB’s point man that late former President Eduard Shevardnadze was forced by Moscow to have as minister in his government. Giorgadze fled Georgia in 1995 after being accused of orchestrating an attempt on Shevardnadze’s life. Russian propaganda watchers are now saying that Giorgadze and Russian officials’ statements are part of a carefully planned information campaign, spread and amplified by Russian and pro-Russian international media.

“The reemergence of Russian media interest in the Lugar case coincides with charging [of] two Russian citizens in Britain with attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal, [a] former Russian GRU office, and his daughter, Yulia,” said the Media Development Foundation, a Tbilisi-based non-profit group that keeps tabs on Russian propaganda. Some also linked the recent Russian preoccupation with biolabs with the series of indictments against Russian spies in the U.S., Britain and the Netherlands.

The Pentagon echoed that analysis, with spokesman Eric Pahon saying that the Russian defense ministry’s claims were an “attempt to divert attention from Russia’s bad behavior on many fronts,” AP reported.

Officials in Georgia and Azerbaijan also refuted Moscow’s accusations. Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry said the country has no foreign government-operated medical laboratory, while Georgian officials said that the Lugar Lab, although built with American money, is now fully controlled by Georgian authorities. U.S. military medical researchers continue to work at the Lugar Lab and insist that their work is entirely public health-oriented, but Moscow is not buying it.

In an unsuccessful attempt to assuage Russian concerns, the Lugar Lab’s Georgian management has repeatedly invited Russia journalists to tour the facility, but it hardly helped matters. “When Russian media representatives come visit the Lugar Center, they are all smiles,” said Paata Imnadze, head of Georgia’s National Center of Disease Control, which operates the Lugar Lab, in an interview with local news site ipress.ge. “But then they go back and spread dirt.”

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Safe sex has become the latest battleground in Georgia’s culture wars after a court effectively outlawed a brand of condoms featuring religious jokes.

Condom maker Aiisa (Georgian for “that thing”) ran afoul of the law this month with a new line of irreverent prophylactics. One had packaging featuring a hand gesture representing sign of the cross, with two fingers inserted in a condom. Another had the tagline “I’d jerk off, but it’s the Epiphany,” a catch phrase from a controversial music video from last year.

Tbilisi City Court Judge Lasha Tavartkiladze issued a 500 lari (about $200) fine to Aiisa on May 4, a ruling that touched off a debate in the deeply Christian country on where to draw the line between the constitutional right of freedom of expression and protections against defamation of religion.

Critics argued that the court ruling sets a dangerous precedent for limiting freedom of speech. “The court ruling is shameful, as it cannot be left to the court to decide what constitutes an offense to someone’s feelings, especially religious feelings,” Tamar Chergoleishvili, editor of libertarian Tabula magazine, told the news website Palitra. “The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is registered [as a religious group] in Holland, so should we ban depictions of spaghetti to make sure they are not offended? This is a direct road to absurdity.”

Two other sets of condoms also failed to pass the muster with the judge. One featured Queen Tamar, a deeply venerated medieval monarch and saint, with a slogan punning on the Game of Thrones TV show. The other alluded to a famous battle fought between Georgians and invading Turkish armies from the 12th century.

Earlier this year, Georgia’s much-revered Orthodox Church had condemned the condoms as “reprehensible” and called for the authorities to put in place legal protections for the faithful’s feelings. Aiisa responded by thanking the church for its interest and for “choosing the Georgian brand of condoms.”

Later, an ultraconservative group, the Georgian Idea, lodged a formal complaint about Aiisa’s condoms with the Tbilisi Mayor’s Office, which found the condoms offensive and took the case to court for review. Aiisa founder Anania Gachechiladze said that she will appeal the court decision. In the meantime, she invited consumers to snap up the banned condoms before the court’s decision becomes effective on May 14.

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The blame, she said, lay with a string of U.S. government-funded bio-laboratories in the two countries, chief among them a multi-million dollar facility on the outskirts of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Its work was so tightly under wraps, she reported, that residents had dubbed it “a secret Pentagon station.” The on-screen graphic read: “nest of viruses.”

But Kremlin-controlled Rossiya 24 failed to mention that the bacteria responsible for the spate of swine deaths had been identified and contained — by vets working in conjunction with scientists from what is better known in Georgia as the “Lugar Lab.”

Welcome to one of the more obscure frontlines in Russia’s information war with the West.

The American and Georgian governments say the lab’s primary mission is to detect and tackle disease outbreaks. But the Kremlin refuses to accept that the U.S. government has spent $350 million of taxpayers’ money to build a research center on Russia’s doorstep simply to deal with public health hazards.

Ever since it opened seven years ago, it has been under attack from Russian government officials and the Kremlin’s network of supportive media outlets. It is a microcosm of Moscow’s wider disinformation efforts, say those tracking Russian information campaigns — using “black propaganda” about the lab to spread fear and divide public opinion in pro-Western Georgia, while also targeting the United States. The charge sheet keeps changing, but the Kremlin’s core accusation is that the U.S. military is doing biological weapons research on its border.

This information frontline has been heating up once more, as the Kremlin has pushed back at accusations it used a chemical weapon to try to kill a former Russian double agent in the U.K. Just last week, in a press briefing dominated by the case, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova singled out the Lugar Lab by name, saying that the presence of a Pentagon-financed laboratory “at the borders of Russia causes particular concern for us.”

It is the latest example of an old pattern, according to Sophie Gelava of the Tbilisi-based Media Development Foundation (MDF), which monitors Russian statements about the lab. The Kremlin has been “actively spreading black propaganda against the laboratory since the day it was established,” she says.

Allegations about the lab are disseminated through a wide variety of media outlets, in the Russian, English and Georgian languages, feeding suspicion and distrust as they are picked up and recycled through social media.

The Kremlin-controlled news agency Sputnik portrayed it as part of a U.S. effort to encircle the country with bio-weapons facilities. Earlier this year, the pro-Russian New Eastern Outlook site claimed the lab was a “front” for testing new viruses and bacteria on the Georgian people. The operation would have “impressed” the Nazi concentration camp doctor Joseph Mengele, the writer added. A pro-Kremlin Georgian language site recently repeated an old charge that the lab was linked to local outbreaks measles and other diseases.

So we asked if we could see the lab for ourselves.

Its official name is the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research, and it is housed in a specially-built complex just off the main road to Tbilisi’s international airport. It is equipped to what’s known as Bio-Safety Level III (BSL III) standards, which means it can handle all but a handful of the most dangerous known microbes, including anthrax and the bacteria that causes bubonic plague.

Our credentials were checked before our visit, and we were searched when we entered the complex — though the security precautions hardly seemed out of the ordinary.

As part of our tour, we were shown what is regarded as the lab’s most sensitive area, its store of “Especially Dangerous Pathogens” (EDPs), a high-security repository of lethal bacteria and viruses collected by scientists. It is known as the “pathogen museum.” Even though many of these EDP samples were originally procured in Soviet times, some Russian media reports have speculated that this store is the basis of a bio-weapons arsenal. Its work was so tightly under wraps, that residents had dubbed it “a secret Pentagon station.” — Russian TV reporter.

On one Russian point there is no dispute. The Tbilisi laboratory, as well as an associated network of smaller monitoring facilities across the country, was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. It still contributes to the running costs, and although the majority of the staff are Georgian, a small number of American scientists employed by the Pentagon’s medical research arm still work there, which the Kremlin has called “disturbing.”

But the Lugar Lab network has its origins in an American initiative aimed at neutralizing the potential threat from the leftovers of the Soviet-era Kremlin’s biological and chemical weapons research. (Former U.S. Senator Richard Lugar played a lead role in creating the program, and he opened the lab.) The anthrax scare that followed the 9/11 attacks was another later driver, spurring the U.S. government into extra spending on early warning and detection efforts for biological threats.

The so-called Cooperative Biological Engagement Program or CBEP is run by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. And one of its initial priorities for the Lugar Lab, according to both current and former staff, was to use it to secure viral and bacterial EDPs left behind by Soviet scientists.

Many of these samples — now inside the lab’s “pathogen museum” — were previously kept in an old, Soviet-era research institute in the middle of Tbilisi, posing a significant potential risk to the public. Far safer, say Lugar Lab staff, to store these and other pathogen samples in a purpose-built facility on the outskirts of the city. But Russian media reports alleging that the U.S.-funded lab is creating biological weapons don’t mention this back story.

And according to its director, Paata Imnadze, the Lugar Lab is in effect continuing a public service previously carried out by the Soviet-era institute — detecting and tackling disease outbreaks.

“Monitoring of infectious diseases has been done in Georgia since 1937,” said Imnadze. “Here we do exactly the same work that we did in the old center, except in a much safer environment.”

Georgia faces a wide range of disease threats, he explained as he gave us a tour of the lab, including brucellosis — a serious threat to livestock — as well as cases of anthrax and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.

What’s more, he says, Georgia is far from alone among former Soviet states in having this kind of laboratory. Russia itself has its own similarly-equipped facilities, and at least one declared lab with the top BSL-IV safety rating, which can handle the deadliest microbes, such as Ebola. This frontline is heating up once more, as the Kremlin has pushed back against accusations it used a chemical weapon to try to kill a Russian spy in Britain.

With his salt-and-pepper hair and moustache, Imnadze is a familiar face on local television. For many years, he has been the Georgian government’s designated speaker on viral infections and other health issues, urging people to get flu shots, or to go easy on their antibiotic use. And he scoffs at charges that he is, in effect, overseeing a secret germ-warfare center, calling them “a product of ignorance, and the workings of the security services of a certain country.”

Since 2013, the Lugar Lab has been run by Georgia’s National Center for Disease Control (NCDC), the equivalent of America’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC). And the U.S. presence has dropped significantly in recent years, according to staff there.

There are currently nine Americans working in the lab, employed by the Pentagon-run, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR). In an interview, the head of the team, Colonel Paul Kwon, said their research has focused on areas such as sexually-transmitted diseases, naturally-occurring illnesses and emerging patterns of microbial drug resistance.

Kwon, who is a physician himself, said his agency is involved simply because it has much greater capacity and “reach” than its civilian counterpart, the CDC. The Lugar Lab is one of several similar “global partnerships,” he said, citing other examples of U.S.-funded disease research centers in Kenya and Thailand.

In a follow up statement, Kristin Roberts, a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Georgia, said “the work of the Army scientists primarily aims to protect U.S. soldiers from infectious disease as they exercise and train,” adding that “there is a broader applicability of their research for the greater good of society.”

Nonetheless, some insiders say they are not surprised the Russians have complained so much about the Lugar Lab. “We would do the same if they built a facility like this in Cuba or on the border in Mexico,” said an American source who has previously worked in the lab, but did not want to be identified in case it compromised work relationships.'

In effect, the source said, the lab and its network give the U.S. a strategically-placed early warning system for disease outbreaks, providing “an outer ring of security,” far from American shores. But for Georgia’s requirements, the source added, the Lugar Lab “was overbuilt.”

However, he dismissed Russian allegations that it is a front for conducting covert biological weapons work. “I’ve been in every room in that lab, and I don’t believe there is any secret research going on there.” It’s also a very complex process creating viable biological weapons, he added. “Just having a store of pathogens is not enough.”

Imnadze has a theory that the Russians can’t abide having an American-funded success story on their doorstep, which also gives Western-leaning Georgia greater distance from Moscow’s embrace. “In the past, we had to ask them [Russians] for help when we didn’t know what kind of disease we were dealing with,” said Imnadze. “Now people from all over come to us.”

Our visit was far from the first time the lab has tried to address Russian-inspired allegations about its work. Several years ago, they opened their doors to a group of doubting Russian journalists. “If this was a secret weapon facility, would we be so open to everyone?,” asked Imnadze. Perhaps most striking of all, he said “we’ve had Russian scientists working here too.”

Requests for comment were sent to both the Russian journalists and a scientist who had worked in the lab, but no one responded. “The operation would have ‘impressed’ the Nazi concentration camp doctor Joseph Mengele.”

The Americans have reached out to Russia too, through diplomatic channels, to try to explain the lab’s work, according to Debra Yourick, a WRAIR spokeswoman in the U.S.

But it is very hard to respond “meaningfully,” she said, adding that if the American or Georgian governments do react to what she called some of the “nonsense in the media, you actually give it some validity.” And the rumors keep coming.

Earlier this year, Moscow tagged the lab to the spread of the so-called “stink-bug,” a pest that has wreaked havoc on crops in Georgia and the surrounding region. “We cannot exclude the possibility..that it [the stink-bug] could be a biological weapon,” said Yuliya Melano, an official with the veterinary division of Russia’s agriculture ministry.

Two years ago, a Russian official claimed that the Americans could use the lab to infect mosquitoes with Zika virus and release them over the border into Russia. It has also been blamed for outbreaks of human and animal flu in the breakaway Georgian territory of South Ossetia — currently under de facto Russian occupation.

An eccentric American living in Tbilisi has helped feed the rumor mill, claiming that the lab is being used to test killer viruses and bacteria on humans. “Georgians are being used as white rats,” declared Jeffrey Silverman in an interview with Patrioti TV, a Georgian news outfit that advocates close ties with Russia. Though he has been widely discredited as a conspiracist, he has regularly been interviewed by the Russian media — including in this 2015 Rossiya 24 report — and his claims are often picked up and recycled by alternative news sites.

The MDF monitoring team has drawn up a diagram of the recurrent themes in Kremlin statements and Russian media reports. They include stories predicting confrontation between Moscow and Tbilisi, and even claims that the lab was used to make chemical weapons deployed in Syria. It is not clear that the Russians actually believe their own allegations though.

Even if the claims shift, the strategy is the same according to Sophie Gelava, depicting the lab as secretive and dangerous “so often that people start believing it.”

Now the MDF team has a growing list of examples of Russian officials or media outlets trying to use the Lugar Lab as a diversionary issue in the public relations battle over the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

“US laboratory for biological weapons found in Georgia,” read one recent Russian headline — as if it had never been covered in the Russian media before. Perhaps the “Novichok” agent used in the March 4 attack in Salisbury was stored in “Georgia and Ukraine” suggested Russian Senator Franz Klintsevich, in a statement reported by the Kremlin’s global RT network.

There are indications too that Russian government denunciations of the lab come from a standard set of talking points. As Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova read out her statement on the lab last week, her language bore striking similarities with remarks she made about it last year, and again she added the detail that it is near “Alekseevka” village.

“The intensity of these stories [about the lab] and the channels of distribution indicate that all of this is orchestrated directly from the Kremlin,” says Nodar Tangiashvili of East-West Management Institute, a U.S. non-profit organization which helps fund the MDF monitors.

Yet those associated with the lab doubt the Russians really believe all their own allegations, because they are sure their intelligence services have their own picture of what really goes on inside. “They must have had their own agents in there at some point,” said the American source.

The man whose name is on the door takes a similar line. “Both civilian and military United States personnel have conducted research at the lab for many years,” said former U.S. Senator Richard Lugar in an email “and these research activities were well known to the Russians.”

What is more, he added, Russia has “gained some benefit in knowing that the lab in Tbilisi is on the constant look-out for substances that threaten populations of any country in the area.”

Despite the caustic statements and reports, the Kremlin has not put any pressure on the Georgian or U.S. governments to close it down.

The lab seems to serve as a useful tool Moscow can brandish when needed. When the Kremlin brought up the Lugar Lab last year, it came after a confrontation with the U.S. government, which had accused Russia of failing to comply with international arms control commitments.

And since the Skripal poisoning affair, Russia is now under even more pressure over allegations that it has been hiding a secret chemical and biological warfare program of its own.

But while the U.S military has been keen to reduce its involvement and “footprint”, it does not want to pull back entirely, according to the American source, and thereby risk losing its early warning capability for disease outbreaks.

So be prepared for this arcane information battle over the Lugar Lab to keep on going. When Russian claims that it’s a germ warfare facility came up again, the American source laughed.

“Did they show you the basement?” he smiled, before answering the question.

“There is no basement.”

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Using means like television programs, fact-checking websites, and book clubs, the United States government is combating what it sees as a Russia-directed disinformation campaign aimed at getting Georgians to abandon their Western geopolitical orientation.

These efforts began in earnest about two years ago, and are gathering momentum as Washington devotes more and more resources to countering anti-Western and anti-liberal narratives around the post-Soviet space.

The U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi has just awarded its largest anti-misinformation grant to date, for a $250,000 project to work with Georgian government officials on improving “official messaging promoting Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration with Georgian public.”

As Georgia has solidified its links with the European Union — including a free trade agreement and a visa-free travel regime — conservative elements in Georgia, including populist political groups and tabloid media, have led a backlash. They argue that ties with Europe are harmful to Georgia’s economy and its traditional cultural values. They also are portraying the West as a fair-weather friend to Georgia, and that Russian hegemony is, ultimately, an unavoidable reality.

The emergence of that narrative poses a geopolitical threat to Washington and Brussels, many Western officials believe.

“Where it becomes counter to our broader interests is when it’s designed to get people to give up their stated aspirations to become a Western country and not a Eurasian country, and that’s where we have to help them,” a senior American official told Eurasianet.org on condition of anonymity. “When [propaganda] is designed to get people to give up their stated aspirations to become a Western country...that’s where we have to help them.” American official in Georgia

The current American-supported efforts cover a broad range of strategies. The U.S. funds two fact-checking websites, mythdetector.ge and factcheck.ge, which scour the Georgian media for anti-Western misinformation and attempt to debunk it. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funds a segment on a weekly television news program, called “Strength is in Europe,” with four well-known public intellectuals discussing myths about Georgia’s growing ties with the European Union. USAID has even funded a series of book clubs around the country in which participants read and discuss journalist Peter Pomerantsev’s memoir of working in Russian television, “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.”

All this has already had an effect, said Nodar Tangiashvili, an official at the East-West Management Institute, the USAID contractor implementing many of the counter-disinformation programs. “Even one year ago, no one talked about propaganda in Georgia. Now everyone is talking about it,” he said, pointing to a recent poll by the National Democratic Institute showing that 47 percent of Georgians believed that Russia was spreading propaganda in the country.

“What we managed is to mainstream this in the media,” Tangiashvili said.

The new grant, which will be administered by the Georgian Center for Security and Development, will strengthen the Georgian government’s strategic communications ability, working particularly to coordinate messaging from the ministries of Defense, Foreign Affairs, Euro-Atlantic Integration, and the prime minister’s office.

“One of the challenges is that they do not have a strategic communications operation here,” the American official said. The strategic communication lead should be in the prime minister’s office, which is not currently the case, the official added. “They’re doing a better job of it now, but it’s a challenge.”

For now, the government’s strategic messaging is led by the Euro-Atlantic Integration Ministry.

“The main message of Russian propaganda in Georgia is that the EU and NATO are unreachable goals. And everything comes down from that,” said Tornike Nozadze, head of the ministry’s Strategic Communications Department. “I don’t believe in fighting propaganda with propaganda. You have to fight propaganda with truth,” Kornely Kakachia, Georgian Institute of Politics.

“It’s all about the lies. Russia was never, ever our friend,” Nozadze said. He holds regular meetings with other government officials and civil society groups to discuss Russian disinformation and the government’s response. “I start my meetings with the very first question, ‘Can anyone in this room tell me one thing Russia did for Georgia that was good. One single thing.’ And people are in shock with this question, because there is none.”

Much of the focus of the pro-Western campaigning is in rural areas, where people are thought to be particularly vulnerable to anti-Western messaging. In comparison to bustling Tbilisi, rural areas struggle economically and have seen little benefit to Western integration so far. In addition, many ethnic minorities, particularly Armenians and Azeris, tend not to speak Georgian and so are more likely to watch Russian television. “In Tbilisi, resistance [to anti-Western messaging] is very strong, but if you go to the regions, it’s different,” said Kornely Kakachia, director of the Georgian Institute of Politics.

“We’ve done a lot of outreach to the Armenian community, they’re the ones who poll the lowest in terms of support for NATO, and I think it’s a direct correlation to the fact that they watch Russian TV,” the American official said. Neighboring Armenia is also Russia’s most important ally in the Caucasus.

The hosts of the “Strength is in Europe” broadcast make regular visits to small towns around Georgia to meet with people outside the capital. Media and government officials outside Tbilisi also get special attention. Paata Gaprindashvili, the director of Georgia’s Reform Associates, which runs factcheck.ge, notes that regional officials are much more sensitive to their statements being fact-checked — either positively or negatively — than are officials at the national level. “They watch quite closely, and they take it quite personally,” he said.

The U.S.-funded fact-checking, meanwhile, runs the gamut from debunking obvious misinformation — about EU regulations that don’t exist, for example — to more contentious issues.

One recent mythdetector post identified as a “myth” the notion that “In 1801 Georgia Joined Russia of Its Own Free Will,” and instead argued that Russia simply “annexed” Georgia. Mainstream historians, however, have hewed closer to the former interpretation. Ronald Grigor Suny, in his The Making of the Georgian Nation, notes that the last eastern Georgian king, in the face of predations by Persia, “had no recourse but to attempt to renew the Russian protectorate... [and] made a desperate request that his country be incorporated into the Russian empire.”

The fact-checking enterprises also engage in revisionist history with respect to one of the most sensitive periods in Georgia-West relations: the inability of the U.S. or Europe to protect Georgia militarily during the 2008 war with Russia. While Georgians complained bitterly at the time about that “betrayal,” a talking point has emerged more recently — and embraced by the fact-checking websites — that credits the arrival of an American humanitarian aid ship with stopping the Russian invasion.

“I don’t believe in fighting propaganda with propaganda. You have to fight propaganda with truth,” Kakachia said. “The U.S. involvement will not be so good here,” he said. “People say that Russia hasn’t changed in 25 years [since the Cold War], but it’s the same thing on the other side. People here know that the U.S. also has a huge tradition of propaganda.” The narrative that the West is never going to be able to truly protect Georgia from Russian influence or aggression will be particularly hard to dislodge, because “it is true.”

Western governments have an uphill battle to fight because anti-Western disinformation finds fertile soil among conservative Georgians, said Nino Danelia, a media studies professor at Tbilisi’s Ilia State University. “Russian information is more ‘Georgian,’” she said.

Similarly, pro-Western information — even if it’s not actually Western-funded — seems to many people to be propaganda, she said: “If something matches your belief, it’s very easy to believe, and vice versa.” The narrative that the West is never going to be truly able to protect Georgia from Russian influence or aggression will be particularly hard to dislodge. “The problem is that it is true,” she said.

She also said that the U.S. efforts have focused too much on liberal values, especially human rights, and not enough on the social and economic rights that animate many poorer, rural Georgians. “They say for example, ‘Why do you talk about gay rights when children are hungry,’” she said. “We need to talk more about social rights. Until now, we’ve been more oriented toward liberal values, including human rights, but not strongly social rights. But this is now costing us.”

The implementers of the pro-Western campaign acknowledge that there is thus far no proof that Russia is to blame for anti-western discourse in Georgia, but that future efforts may focus on that. “I’m sure there’s Russian money there, but I don’t have any proof of it,” the American official said.

“All of this is a little bit of guesstimation, it’s not hard evidence,” Tangiashvili, of the East-West Management Institute, added. Tangiashvili said that one of the future directions of anti-Russian messaging should include support for high-quality investigative journalism that might be able to uncover those links. “There should be more investigative journalism, more evidence connecting the dots,” he said.

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On the eve of getting visa-free travel to Europe, Georgia has updated its legislation on sexual assault, removing “sodomy, lesbianism” and “other perverted sexual contact” from its definition but Sputnik presented the updated laws against sexual and domestic violence as encouragement of homosexuality coming from Europe.

Ever since Vladimir Putin positioned himself as a protector of “traditional values” around the world, the narrative of a “morally corrupted” West that promotes homosexuality and erodes families has been a common theme for pro-Kremlin news sites.

Within this theme domestic violence is a new hot topic: Russia recently passed a law that actually decriminalizes domestic violence and in Armenia legislation meant to strengthen laws against domestic abuse was scrapped for being too “European.” Human rights groups in Armenia blamed pro-Russian forces and media for influencing parliament’s decision to drop the bill.

Unlike Armenia, Georgia has an overwhelmingly anti-Russian political establishment and population, which seems to make Russian propaganda here more subtle and creative.

“It’s still unpopular to be clearly pro-Russian in Georgia,” said Tamar Kintsurashvili, the head of the Media Development Foundation in Tbilisi which monitors Russian propaganda. Kintsurashvili says that despite overwhelmingly anti-Russian sentiments, Moscow’s narrative has gained a foothold in Georgia since the country fought a war with Russia in 2008. It happened, she explains, largely because of sites such as Sputnik which offer a mix of entertainment and clickbait news with only an occasional serving of fake news on topics that are likely to resonate, such as the promotion of “sodomy” in the context of Georgia’s relationship with Europe.

Sputnik’s Georgian edition is a great example of why the organization which publishes in 29 languages and has regional offices in Washington, Cairo and Montevideo, has been labelled the “Buzzfeed of propaganda.”

The site publishes a mix of articles about Academy Award upsets, European football scores and a video series about sea lions interested in having sex with penguins. Then, once in a while a piece of fake political news such as “lesbianism and sodomy might be permitted” creeps through.

Sputnik was not immediately available for comment.

“Anyone who shares any news from this freaking Georgian language site, be it about cats or anything else, you are aiding kremlin propaganda,” wrote one Facebook user along with screenshots of Sputnik’s original headline for the piece.

While cats and Russian propaganda may seem unlikely allies for Sputnik the mix of entertainment news, clickbait stories and a political agenda are a potent formula.

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Tbilisi’s rendition of West Side Story has pitted hippies against nationalists, salad against steak. The story made international headlines: “sausage wielding extremists” had launched an attack on harmless herbivores.

But this correspondent went behind the front lines in an attempt to hear both sides of the sausage story, and was served a curious tale which mixes everything from ultra-nationalism to homophobia, along with a dash of Donald Trump. This culinary clash gives unexpected insight into a highly conservative society, trying to find its way in the modern world.

Piles of sandbags and painted outlines of soldiers create a trench-like feeling as you walk down the stairs to the dingy Military Bar. Camouflage netting and Georgian flags are draped along the walls. In this testosterone filled tavern, beer, meat and patriotism are on the menu.

My guide, Rezo, stands amidst the combat paraphernalia. He needs to explain himself. On May 29, he and around a dozen of his comrades abandoned their command post at the bar and set out into the night—all packing meat–determined to teach a lesson to their gastronomic and ideological nemesis.

“They came in, acting aggressively and interrupted a film screening,” recalls Giorgi Ianvarashvili, a representative of the Kiwi Cafe, a tiny vegan restaurant scrunched in the city’s handsomely aging Old Town. “One of them lit a cigarette. Our café is strictly non-smoking,” Ianvarashvili says.

Customers reported that the group had sausages draped around their neck, and were carrying slabs of meat on skewers. The ensuing brawl quickly spilled out of the cafe and into the street, but the sausage-wielding assailants fled before the police arrived.

The Kiwi Cafe received an outpouring of support both locally and internationally. American DJ Moby took to Twitter to congratulate the vegans for standing up to “nationalist thugs.” After a symbolic visit of support from the U.S. ambassador to Georgia Ian Kelly at Kiwi Café, the Military Bar made a ham-fisted attempt to counter allegations that they are right-wing nativists and posted their, unexpected, endorsement of Donald Trump on the bar’s Facebook page.

“We did not shove sausages into people’s mouths,” Rezo says, his deadpan manner and stocky military physique making the whole conversation seem even more absurd. He doesn’t deny attacking the Kiwi Cafe that night, but he is keen to set the record straight.

A friendly bartender offers Rezo a drink, and he settles in to tell the story of his bar and its beef with the vegans.

The Military Bar is known to be popular among ultranationalists, and its Facebook page is filled with photos and videos of uniformed and masked youths aggressively chanting and giving raised-fist salutes. It seemed like an open-and-shut case: the muscle-bound nationalists had launched an attack on the peace-loving vegans.

But Rezo claims that it was an associate of the Kiwi Cafe, that ignited the feud. He showed up to work on May 26, Georgian Independence Day, and found that the Military Bar had been, in his own words, “violated.”

“The sandbags were pulled down and sliced open,” he says. “The paintings and national symbols from the walls had been stomped over.”

Outraged at the intrusion, a post appeared on the bar’s Facebook page which read: “The parasites that damaged the bar’s façade are anti-nationalist elements and [deserve] a bullet in the head.”

Fortunately for all involved, a very different weapon of vengeance was chosen.

Rezo says they collected CCTV footage from nearby shops and identified the attacker: an anarchist who goes by the nickname Aaron. He was known to the staff of the Military Bar for his provocative online posts in which he ridiculed nationalism, the army and the flag.

“How can anyone hate the army? We fight and die for the country,” says Rezo, letting a hint of irritation slip through his otherwise monotone speech. “Even when I was a little kid, I was fascinated by the soldiers. Every time I’d see a man in uniform I wanted him just to lift me up and carry me around.”

At this point we are interrupted by some unexpected customers. Three Israeli tourists in kippahs and white slacks walk in. Rezo remains expressionless, but his eyes flicker with that familiar excitement that we Georgians get when we see foreign guests and are overcome by an urge to drown them in drink and food. “They are Arabs right?” Rezo asks the bartender, who shrugs his shoulders.

“Quite the opposite,” I interject to avert the faux pas in the making. The Israelis point at the guns on the wall and give a thumbs-up. Rezo summons something close to a smile and invites the visitors to sit down, treating them more as house guests than as customers. He leaves them in the care of the bartender who offers them a beer on the house and later, a lesson in Georgian history delivered in effortful English.

Rezo returns to his story. He believed that their assailant, Aaron, was a bartender at the Kiwi Café. However during a TV interview, a member of staff from the Kiwi Cafe acknowledged that while Aaron was a regular customer, he had never worked for the cafe.

My attempts to reach the proverbial Aaron and hear his side of the story failed, however Rezo says that he managed to track him down and gave him a stern talking-to about the inviolability of private property and the national flag. “I told him that people died for the flag, that when a flag bearer would fall, another soldier would pick up and carry the flag,” he says.

After the Military Bar’s retaliatory strike provoked international outcry, they have made some clumsy attempts to redeem themselves. The owner Nika Kavelashvili came out to say that the bar is open to anyone and that they even had three homosexual customers once: “Now would we have allowed homosexuals in if we held neo-Nazi ideas?”

Rezo too seems puzzled by those who harbour fascist views. “To be frank, I am personally not into that fascism thing at all,” he says flatly.

To disabuse me of any wrong ideas I may have, Rezo tells me about how the bar got started. “The city needed a bar like this because most cafes in the center are LGBT,” he says. A tenuous claim to make in country which is fervently Christian and homophobic. In Rezo’s thrifty vocabulary, the acronym LGBT is a catch-all term for anyone, who is liberal, hipster or generally looks unconventional.

The warring cafes are both small, shoestring affairs catering to subculture customer bases, but the similarities end there. Design-wise alone they could not be any more different. Daylight burst through the large, single-pane windows at Kiwi Café’s former premises, which has since been abandoned following the sausages scandal. The landlady complained about noise and men in “flower-print shorts,” while the neighbours were worried it would attract further trouble, Kiwi cafe’s management said. The cafe has since migrated to a new premises.

Ebullient, scrawny youths with fluorescent faux hawks and tattoos make up much of the café’s clientele and the egalitarian management system. “There are no bosses and no employees here, no distinction between Georgians or foreigners. We are all here because we believe in what we do,” says the cafe’s Ianvarashvili, who has a lobe-stretching earring and elaborate tattoos to match his subculture philosophy.

Rezo, by contrast, says he is proud that he and his comrades are taking back the city’s downtown from the gay/vegan/hipster/you-name-it crowd. On more than one occasion he digresses to talk about his views on homosexuality.

“You can fuck in the ass if you must, but you should not flaunt that in public and should not insult national values,” he said.

With vicarious pride he pontificates about his knightly ancestors. Stories of their patriotic feats, real or romanticized, have been passed down through generations in music, tales and in toasts at the dinner table. For many, these stories and Georgia’s rich culinary tradition are the essential components of the country’s machismo national identity.

Rezo sees himself as a “true” Georgian by this interpretation of national identity. For young people looking to rebel, these social conventions have also proved to be a useful place to start. The Georgian capital has long had a lively scene of creative, bohemians youth united by art, music and the desire to shed the straightjacket of tradition. Those who challenge well-established conventions are often singled out for undermining “Georgian-ness.”

Intolerance toward diversity in Georgia can perhaps be attributed to fears that the small country, both young and ancient at the same time, is being diluted by globalization. Since it gained its independence from the USSR twenty-five years ago, dogmatism has been on the rise in Georgia in everything from religion to social norms and food. But this tidal pull of conservatism is confronted by a no less powerful urge to explore and innovate.

Tbilisi’s now infamous foodfight is a symptom of this cultural friction. For young progressive Georgians and much of the expat community, Kiwi Café offers some much-desired diversity. But the self-appointed guardians of Georgian values view it as a place of apostasy, not so much for its menu, but because of its nihilist vibe.

“They are free to do their LGBT things at home,” says Rezo, getting back on his gay soapbox. “But they have no business in mocking national symbols and the church.”

He claims that they initially went to Kiwi Café intending to make peace and brought along some meaty meals from the bar’s kitchen as a peace offering. “But they chose to start a fight,” he says. When I point out that a sausage is a strange substitute for an olive branch when visiting a vegan establishment, he disagrees: “They did not have to eat it.”

The great sausage war may have been a blessing in disguise for both sides of Georgia’s cultural and dietary divide. The Military Bar has since scaled back on its nationalist social media posts and instead focuses on promoting its football screenings and beer-drinking contests. Many visitors, curious to check out the supposed taproom of bigotry, were surprised to find a welcoming and fun atmosphere at odds with the place’s gritty reputation. Even a few less-than-straight customers have since emerged from the pub claiming to have become besties with some of the bar’s god-and-gun-loving clientele.

The Military Bar recently announced plans to renew its menu in 2017. In a Facebook post, the bar’s management wrote that the updated carte de jour will now include “fries, steak burgers, grilled kebabs and a few vegan dishes,” followed by a series of a smiling and winking emojis.

Before I leave, I ask Rezo if I can take a couple of pictures of the bar. With the most phlegmatic display of vanity possible, he says I can photograph his muscular silhouette from behind, with the bar’s entrance as a backdrop. After posing with his muscles flexed, Rezo shows me out.

“I trust that you will write the truth about us.”

This material was produced with the support of Project Objective and NIRAS.

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