Empires collapse from the margins. The fatal crack in the Soviet empire appeared on April 9th, 1989, when Moscow gave the order for its troops to open fire on peaceful pro-independence protesters in Tbilisi, Georgia. They killed 21 people, injured hundreds and set in motion a chain of events that lead to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
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.
