Jacobin Magazine

Georgia’s Clownish Mikheil Saakashvili is the Perfect Embodiment of
Post-Soviet Capitalism

By  Sopiko Japaridze
Oct. 14, 2020

The United States isn’t the only country facing terrible options in
its elections this fall. Georgia, in the Caucasus region south of
Russia, is again looking at the usual lineup of right-wing parties to
choose between — something typical of its politics in recent years.
But there are also dozens of new vanity-project parties that have
formed in order to take advantage of the low barrier to get into
parliament — and hence access state funding.

The low barrier was itself a victory won by the opposition, after
protests last summer prompted by an MP for European Georgia (a
splinter from former president Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National
Movement). He rushed into the parliamentary auditorium draped in the
Georgian flag and threw Russian MP Sergei Gavrilov out of the chamber.
If Gavrilov was chairing a routine meeting — a barely political event
connected to the Orthodox Church — the optics couldn’t have been worse
for the dominant Russophobic mood: a Russian politician sat in the
most powerful seat in the Georgian parliament, and so he had to be
chased out.

Such histrionics have been the norm in Georgian politics over the last
three decades — a blend of farce and tragedy perfectly symbolized by
Saakashvili himself. After his election defeat in late 2012, he was
ousted as president by the then-new Georgian Dream coalition,
bankrolled by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. Forced to flee the
country, Saakashvili curiously pursued his political career abroad —
becoming a Ukrainian citizen and governor of that country’s Odessa
oblast. His time as governor was short-lived, as he turned on Petro
Poroshenko — the president who appointed him in the first place — with
accusations of corruption.  Ukraine’s new leader, Volodymyr Zelensky,
has since appointed Saakashvili to chair the executive committee of
its National Reforms Council. But in recent weeks, the well-traveled
Saakashvili has announced his return to Georgian politics.

This story of one country’s former president becoming another
country’s governor seems bizarre. But it isn’t quite so odd if one
considers the former Soviet space as one entity. Twenty-seven new
countries were “born” again into capitalism after the destruction of
the Eastern Bloc, and they were all prescribed the exact same shock
therapy by international organizations. These latter would also use
one country’s radical liberal reforms to pressure another unwilling
government to follow the same line, thus forcing the whole region to
swallow neoliberalism and compete for foreign direct investment. This
— combined with the anti-Russian politics that hold sway in much of
the region — gives “Misha” Saakashvili huge sway, not least given the
legendary status drawn from the August 2008 war with Russia. There was
even a tasteless Hollywood film about the conflict, with Andy Garcia
playing Misha.

Saakashvili is particularly important because he has the Western
connections vital to any burgeoning government’s success (John McCain
and Hillary Clinton nominated him for a Nobel Prize). Added to this is
the lack of other experienced personnel locally. But also key are the
limits on democracy in postcommunist countries. Neoliberalism gets
voted out by the people again and again, only for the same policies to
be recycled through international and regional organizations. The
neoliberal reformers ousted by the electorate often get jobs in these
international bodies and think tanks, which then preach these same
measures to other governments in the region.

Now Misha — whose Georgian citizenship was revoked in 2015 and faces
charges for various counts of abuse of power — is not only vying to
return to office in his homeland, but convinced that he is the right
man to lead the country through the storms of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But it’s also worth noting that he remains popular in Georgia. With
each passing day under Georgian Dream’s lackluster rule, Misha’s
period in charge seems better and better for most people — especially
if one takes into account the fact that the economic policies have
stayed the same.

This forgiveness takes many forms. Back in 2012, Saakashvili’s
presidency was undone by revelations of “excessive” police brutality
in prisons, as videos circulated showing shocking scenes of torture
and rape of inmates. Yet with the current government proving feeble in
the face of COVID-19, it seems as if such footage has been relegated
to a distant and blurred memory. Today, a repentant Saakashvili admits
that “mistakes were made” and claims to be a new man — while also
playing down these “errors” by insisting that “only those who don’t do
anything, never make mistakes.” This barely apologetic attitude also
shone through in an interview where it was suggested that many of his
opponents doubted the realism of his current plans; he retorted that
his record on criminal justice had proven his sincerity. As he put it,
“I said zero tolerance towards criminals and everyone would be jailed
— and it happened, no?”

Eating His Tie, Breaking up Old Ties

Why Saakashvili remains popular is a troubling lesson for the Left,
which often considers him simply as the pro-Western father of Georgian
neoliberalism and a madman who ate his own tie on national television.
For despite his neoliberal and radical-libertarian policies, most
Georgians remember him not for being laissez-faire, but for being a
statist and interventionist who disregards cultural norms.

This especially owes to the fact that Georgian politics and society
has a tendency to inertia, due to elaborate friendship and familial
ties that perpetuate patron-client relationships and an inflexible
hyper-patriarchal culture. Such relationships have been disrupted to
some extent by capitalism, internal migration, and emigration, but
among men, these strict behavior codes often persist. Such
relationships also fuel corruption, in the absence of strong
institutions.

Misha was forever willing to disrupt all this. He has always been
absolutely shameless — never backing down from situations that could
be humiliating for other men afraid of losing their standing. This is
the source of both his popularity and the hatred he attracts. Polite
(elite) society finds him embarrassing and insane, while others look
at him as a fighter who risks his personal comfort and reputation for
the greater good: “Misha isn’t loyal to patrons,” “Misha will bite the
hand that feeds him,” they say. This makes him a liability for many
elites.

At the same time, all those who have been typically on the losing end
of patron-client relationships — and in relatively poorer areas of
Georgia — have provided Misha’s electoral base. In general, he
projects the image of doing whatever is necessary to implement his
ideas. As compared to the stereotype of the lethargic Georgian
politician with a huge belly (their size was even the object of an
academic study), the energetic Saakashvili seems like an obsessive
workaholic. If some pundits claim it’s a disaster for the united
opposition to put him up as a candidate — since this is somehow
playing into Georgian Dream’s hands — they underestimate his
popularity.

In fact, Saakashvili’s prospects benefit from much deeper weaknesses
in Georgian Dream. This broad coalition was founded in the run-up to
the 2012 election for the sole purpose of defeating Saakashvili and
started out with promises of social programs and reindustrialization.
Yet such ideas were quickly abandoned in favor of rightfully vilifying
Misha for his eight years in office as a monster who jailed everyone.
Unfortunately, once it reached power the following year, Georgian
Dream didn’t even undermine his legacy effectively. First, in its 2016
constitutional reform, it kept Saakashvili’s egregious Liberty Act,
which outlawed progressive taxation and tightly capped social
spending, even though the coalition had a supermajority that would
have allowed it to revoke this measure. Then — in a  more blatant act
of insincerity and hypocrisy — Georgian Dream kept and handed lifetime
appointments to the very judges who had 99 percent conviction rates
under Saakashvili. This became such a scandal in early 2019 that many
MPs quit Georgian Dream.

In a remarkable illustration of its fecklessness, Georgian Dream’s
leader Bidzina Ivanishvili publicly stated late last year that
Georgians should go and look for work abroad — declaring himself
surprised that anyone demanded jobs be created at home. Startlingly,
he deemed this an unrealistic prospect for the coming decades. His
government has mostly worked to secure legal jobs for the Georgian
workforce in Europe, negotiating with each government. Bidzina, who
once promised dozens of factories would be built in Georgia, was
surprised to learn Georgians expected to be gainfully employed,
without having to leave for other shores.

Further, Georgian Dream abolished the profit tax and forced a
state-sponsored private pension scheme upon the population. Before
COVID-19, the current minister said that she wouldn’t mind if the
Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development would be renamed the
“Ministry of Tourism.” The current government has thus failed to break
with any of Saakashvili’s own purported failings. As one United
National Movement activist stated, “I loved some things Misha did, and
I hated some things Misha did, but I just hate GD, I haven’t found
anything to love or like.”

Misha’s Legacy

In his day, Saakashvili’s politics were developmentalist and went
beyond other postcommunist reformers who were more or less technocrats
— indeed, he compares himself to state builders like Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk and David Ben-Gurion. Obsessed with his legacy as a national
icon, he is conspicuously ideologically flexible. Hence, while he
started out damning his predecessor Eduard Shevardnadze for blaming
Russia for all his problems — thus distracting Georgians from domestic
failings — now, in both Georgia and Ukraine, he has cast himself as an
anti-Putin hero. He went from criticizing British Petroleum’s poor
environmental and social practices and the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan
pipeline — “We won’t be bullied by BP,” he insisted — to
wholeheartedly supporting it.

But an opportunist like Misha couldn’t have ended up as anything else
but right-wing in substance. The difference between left and right on
the political spectrum is weakest in postcommunist countries,
especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union — indeed, such a
split is often unhelpful in understanding what is happening in the
region. Since socialism was discredited among elites (if not among the
population), and there was no alternative to neoliberalism, no
mainstream political party or political figure could emerge to
challenge capitalist hegemony. The main differences instead revolve
around the implementation of neoliberal reforms — how quickly and how
efficiently.

Such political differences as do exist between the so-called Left and
Right never dent a wholesale acceptance of neoliberalism as prescribed
through the Washington consensus and European Union. At times, there
were disputes over selling foreigners land in postcommunist countries
— but even this ended up as a difference over the time frame of
implementation, rather than of stopping the reform completely. After
all, the EU made land liberalization a deal-breaker for countries to
earn associate membership. Indeed, according to one study, left-wing
governments in postcommunist countries were more effective in
implementing neoliberal reforms than right-wing ones. Even when
left-wing governments could have undone reforms, in fact, they
continued them. It’s no surprise that most of the criticism of
capitalism, the EU, and liberalism in postcommunist countries has come
from the Right, presented as a cultural critique.

In his spell living in the United States, Misha claims to have
observed the limits of liberal democracy when he saw the road leading
to the White House in DC. “You get a sense what different governments
are,” he recounted. “The road was really very bad, worse than roads
[in Georgia] in Shevardnadze’s time. But because local D.C. government
was broke — even if it was leading to the White House, who cares?
There he sits, the most powerful President in the world, but he cannot
fix the road!” He went on, “They call it separation of powers. Some
people would call it democracy. I would call it inefficient.”

As president from 2004 to 2013, Saakashvili thus needed a strong
state. But to this end, he had to manipulate the dominant
international and regional organizations peddling structural
adjustment programs. He learned that it was easiest to placate the
international community by adopting their reforms on paper, while
relying on more informal practices to continue implementing his own
“successful” brand of postcommunist capitalism. This approach was
characterized by mafia-type extortions of businesses, which were then
channeled to certain development funds. If Georgia was rife with
corruption and informal patron-client networks, Misha followed the
Mussolini/Rudy Giuliani practice of jailing everyone for petty
violations in order to break the larger racket leaders and fund the
state budget through bail. Such primitive accumulation through
dispossession and violence was, indeed, fundamental to the transition
to capitalism. Far from the rosy story liberals tell themselves of
rising capitalism bringing democracy and “human rights,” we had what
Karl Marx called “expropriation, written in the annals of mankind in
letters of blood and fire.”

Harry Cleaver’s use of the concepts “devalorization” and
“disvalorization” is very helpful in understanding what happened in
post-Soviet Georgia (and elsewhere in the region). A “devalorization”
happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, which is a loss of
skills, abilities, and knowledge, including their passing down over
the generations. The entire political economy of the USSR was erased
in one fell swoop — and so, too, the professionals and bureaucrats
that went with it. The higher skill sets which the Soviet Union had
relied on — for example, occupational disease specialists — were no
longer needed in post-Soviet Georgia, since the new regime no longer
tracked occupational diseases. Similarly, Georgian silk production was
completely destroyed, as part of an abrupt deindustrialization.

While devalorization was occurring throughout the Shevardnadze period,
with Misha we saw a much more powerful “disvalorization” — meaning, a
recasting of skills and abilities and knowledge in service of whatever
can make most profits. Georgia is known to be hospitable, so let’s
turn every home into a guesthouse; Georgia has great food and wine, so
open up restaurants. Misha did accelerate the development of
capitalism in Georgia, but a peculiarly Western-sanctioned one. Our
neoliberal comparative advantage in a province hidden in the Caucasus
didn’t require highly trained and highly skilled people, but a
low-skilled service economy heavily composed of hosts, drivers, sales
associates, restaurateurs, and servers for tourism. This kind of
political economy evidently limits the economic and social development
of the Georgian people — and has additionally proven vulnerable and
volatile through crises like the 2008 war and the current COVID-19
pandemic.

Comeback King?

Saakashvili remains widely credited for tearing down the post-Soviet
purgatory capitalism of Eduard Shevardnadze’s rule and implementing
capitalism as prescribed by neoliberal institutions. He used the heavy
hand of state power as well as informal power to force these reforms
onto the population. He also used big infrastructure plans, colorfully
painted buildings, and many other shiny-looking projects to coax the
population into his vision of Georgia. But though his is a legacy of
liberal economic policies that limit the state’s formal responsibility
toward its people and sends them to sell their labor on a market
defined by precarity, most Georgians remember him as a “big
government” man — and that is precisely why many want him back.
Despite his horrendous human rights record, he retains his reputation
as a capable — or at least, ever-present — leader.

Georgian Dream’s unabashed laissez-faire attitude seems to have made
Georgians nostalgic for a time when the government acted like they
cared about them — even if that meant disciplining them. It’s
unimaginable that anyone from the current government would run into
the Liberty Bank office and scream at management for mistreating the
elderly, like Misha did when he saw a long line of pensioners waiting
to get their measly pensions. Today, the pension lines are still
extremely long, but no one in power protests about it even for PR
reasons.

In a country where remittances from abroad make up three times the
amount salaries do, where people are systematically beaten down every
day, where employers are not held accountable for their oppression and
exploitation, and where huge sections of the population are addicted
to gambling and debt, it’s easy to understand why many Georgians want
“big government” back. So long as we don’t have a Left willing to
promote a state interventionism that actually gives Georgians public
services they can rely on — finally reversing the post-Soviet
destruction of the social fabric — it seems Georgians will continue to
look to a “madman” like Saakashvili as their defender.