Georgia - should we be surprised at the "Woes' Revolution"?

Actually, just about everyone was surprised that Saakashvili seemed to screw up as badly as he did last week. He may be able to salvage some of his legitimacy in the snap elections he's wisely called,* and the "revolution of tears"** now seems to be over, or at least taking a breather to stock up on Kleenex.

I hope to have time to do a more detailed roundup post in the next few days, but in the meantime you can read fascinating - at times moving - firsthand accounts from foreigners in Georgia here, here and here; from thoughtful Georgians here and here; this website should allow you to keep up with more official news sources; and you can follow the Russian media coverage here and here.

I continue to be struck by the way in which Saakashvili's initial justification for the crackdown - an all-powerful "external enemy" - mirrored the style of those in Putin's inner circle who are color-revolution-phobes and are doing all they can to promote anti-Western paranoia. At least one Russian blogger has seen the parallel between this element of Saakashvili's political persona and Putin (I hesitate to draw a broader parallel, but I think it's safe to say the "spy-mania" and search for external enemies may be rooted in the Soviet past that the two leaders share):

[image source / hat tip]***

In addition to several post facto commentary pieces to this effect, I ran across a couple of items in recent days that suggest we shouldn't have been so surprised either at the opposition's persistence in protesting or at Saakashvili's reaction.

First, from the National Interest Online (Nov. 5):

In discussing Georgia, what is most remarkable is that not a single one of the British, French or German foreign policy experts whom I encountered views Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili as a democrat. On the contrary, the overwhelming consensus was that Saakashvili and his advisors have learned to repeat the key democratic mantras during their foreign trips but routinely ignore this rhetoric in governing the country. Observers noted Saakashvili’s skillful elimination of other political power centers and sources of alternative perspectives in the parliament and the media as well as the utter lack of independent courts.

With this in mind, the European analysts whom I met were deeply skeptical of the Bush Administration’s goal of bringing Georgia into NATO. They considered Georgia’s domestic conditions fundamentally different from those in many other new members of the alliance, which had more experience with democratic governance, different political cultures and—most important—leaders who were trying to empower democratic governments rather than themselves. And they were concerned that some prominent Americans, like aspiring Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, seem to be encouraging Saakashvili’s worst instincts by describing Georgia as a “test” of U.S.-Russian relations. And it was quite clear that Georgian-Russian tensions, temporarily fuelled this week by Saakashvili’s theatrical berating of a Russian peacekeeping officer in front of Georgian television cameras, make most Europeans less rather than more interested in a treaty commitment to defend Georgia.

As someone who thinks that accelerating Georgia's path into NATO (though it's obviously been dealt a huge setback by the violent dispersal of last week's protests) is at best a strange, military carrot to hold in front of a government to get it to make non-military reforms and at worst an irritant to US-Russian relations that is not worth the trouble it causes, I have to agree with much of the above passage.

Also interesting were these results from an April-May 2007 Gallup poll conducted in Georgia, which hopefully speak for themselves:

* perhaps with the encouragement of the "Washington Obkom" (вашингтонский обком) to use a favorite phrase of Russian bloggers (not to mention some journalists and at least one marginal leader) who like to overstate America's tendency to meddle in Russia's "near abroad."

** as it was called by a Russian commenter on the blog cyxymu - "революция слёз" rhymes with the Russian for Rose Revolution, so the wit could perhaps better be translated as "revolution of woes" or "woes' revolution."

***[update] I realize that I should spell this out a bit more for non-Russian-readers (are there any who come here?) - the text reads, "Saakashvili's Plan - Georgia's victory! It is a take-off on the "Putin's Plan - Russia's Victory!" billboards (see, e.g., here) which have created such a stir in Russia.

Consolidating support for the President's course

Now that articles are appearing with titles like "You Must Not Leave Again. The Campaign for a Third Term Signifies That Both a 'Designated Successor' and a 'Caretaker Czar' Have Been Demonstrated to Be Excessively Risky Solutions to the '2008 Problem'" (Andrei Ryabov, Nov. 3, Gazeta.ru) - the 2008 problem looks like it really has become a problem, even for the people supposedly with their hands on all the levers.

Notwithstanding the elaborate versii (a post I had hoped to translate, but it's over a month old and thus may already be hopelessly stale by the standards of Russian politics - anyway, Google does an OK job of translating it here.) cooked up by professional political handicapper, blogger and anticompromat webmaster Vladimir Pribylovsky, it can be said rather simply that a lot of people - powerful and not-so-powerful alike, it would seem - want Putin to stick around in one Tsar-like guise or another. Others have been writing about how it would be the biggest mistake of his career for him to do so, and that if he really believed in or wanted to construct the institutions of democracy in Russia, he would step down.

Apparently, Putin is being "Driven to the Kremlin Wall" by his supporters - certainly those among the narod, but presumably more importantly, those among the elites, fretting in their Maybachs and Rublyovka mansions about what might become of their cash flow in a post-Putin Russia.

I ran across a crazy and somehow very disturbing website that seems to be part of the universal Putin love-in (last week, K-Vlast' got Russian politicians to respond to the question "Does the universal love [всенародная любовь] alarm you?" - another article I'd like to translate but haven't had time to; here's Google's best effort at a translation). The website is zaputina.ru, which launched last week and apparently is all set to become part of a nationwide "For Putin!" movement. I think I'll let the article from ostensibly objective business news portal RBC (an article which I found through a link on the zaputina website) speak for itself and also show how RBC seems to have been reduced to shilling for the regime on this story (my translation):

Virtual voting "For Putin!" is taking place on the Internet
[Nov. 8, 2007]

The internet campaign [Интернет-акция] "For Putin!" taking place on the Russian-language internet, has collected over 16 thousand votes in support of the President of Russia in a day and a half of existence. The creators of the project state that their goal is not to campaign for Vladimir Putin but to consolidate his supporters on the Internet.

As the organizers note, it is not only residents of Russian cities who are voting for Putin. Votes are coming in from London, New York, Kiev, Khar'kov and the other cities of the world.* "We don't want to convince anyone or encourage them to change their political views in favor of Putin's course," says one of the initiators of the project, political scientist Aleksei Zharich.** According to him, the goal of the project is to consolidate supporters of the president and his course.

Writer and former head of Boris Yeltsin's press service Marina Yudenich says that she decided to become involved in the project because she "watches the positive changes in the life of the country very closely." Lawyer [on TV, at least - trans.] Pavel Astakhov, another participant in the project, agrees with Marina Yudenich. "As a lawyer, I better than others understand and see the results of Vladimir Putin's work over the past eight years. These are lower taxes, social projects, and children's programs, and the development of the economy in such private-sector areas as consumer credits," says Astakhov.

The project's goal, in Pavel Astakhov's opinion, is "to show ourselves that we can choose our own leadership [власть] and can preserve those gains [завоевания] and successes which have already been achieved." Marina Yudenich thinks that the "For Putin!" project will show the part of society which is in doubt that the country's president really "possesses nationwide [всенародной] support."

The project allows internet users, aside from just voting, to publish their photo and leave a link to their web page. This personalization, according to Marina Yudenich, is very meaningful, since it "demonstrates that people are not just voting for the president, but they are doing this openly, showing their face and identifying themselves by name."***

* Here we see one of the more bizarre fixations of Putin's team (and often of Russians in general): a fixation on the support of foreigners, even those from countries perceived as enemies.
** Calling a campaign PR specialist or "polittekhnolog" a "political scientist" is such a very "virtual politics" thing to do. Or perhaps Zharich majored in politologiia at the MVD university (yes, that really is his alma mater, at least according to his LJ profile). Zharich's main contribution to the project appears to be that he had bought the zaputina.ru domain awhile back - I wonder if there is anything interesting lurking in the cached earlier pages from that domain?
*** I guess the secret ballot is no longer good enough. Ms. Yudenich neglects to mention how easy it is to manipulate such a website by posting fake photos and identities or filtering out ones the webmaster would rather not have appear; not to mention the comical idea of a "vote" on a website where there is only one choice.

It seems to me that Pribylovsky gets it just about right when he dubs this project "licking together" (a play on the name of the now-defunct, original pro-Putin youth movement, Walking Together).Strangely, there is also a za-putina project (the hyphen makes all the difference) which has been around longer and thus has more "votes"; according to Zharich, though, it's run by the same person who runs an anti-Putin site. Predictably housed at protiv-putina.ru, at least this website allows "voters" to leave comments. These sites could perhaps be seen as metaphors for the Russian political process - such polarization between a certain wing of the opposition and the mainstream that they can't even have their "voting" on the same website! And of course the more perfect way in which the official zaputina project simulates the Kremlin's view of the proper way for the people to interact with the authorities - the only form of acceptable feedback is a vote of approval; no comments, please.

Zharich is not particularly modest about the project he apparently manages. On his livejournal (his handle is brigadier - is that a coincidence?) he writes about what he sees as the main strengths of the zaputina.ru website:

1. Everything on one page!!! On one page.
2. Easy-to-use interface. The possibility of changing something around is excluded, but it's simple and maximally easy for a person to leave their vote.
3. Technologicity [Технологичность]: Video, audio, photo, entertainment [энтертеймент].* [...]
5. This is the real web two [point] zero.
(For those who want it to, their photo links to their web page, blog or online project, by the way. And that's the whole point. It's not a grey mass - but real people. You click and learn about the person, it's cool)
6. If Hillary, for example, had a project like this, the whole world would talk about it.**

* This sums up how Putin has managed to keep people watching TV even with all controversial or potentially controversial news programs dumbed down or removed. It is amusing that this guy seems to have forgotten that there are many perfectly good words in Russian for "entertainment."
** I wonder if this jackass savvy political operator knows anything about Moveon.org or other internet projects that made a splash in US campaigns. They weren't talked about by "the whole world" because they were domestic political phenomena. Why exactly should anyone (other than Russophiles/Russia-watchers like myself) outside of Russia care about this uncreative propaganda website?

For a guy who was born exactly a week before I was and cannot therefore pass as a callow youth, he has a strangely childlike glee about the whole thing.

Gazeta.ru covered the zaputina project and the affiliated (embedded, actually) russia.ru website, which is sort of like a unidirectional version of YouTube (you can watch what the webmasters have uploaded but cannot upload anything of your own or leave comments), in an article appropriately titled Путин-tube (here is a Google translation). The zaputina website is compared to a flash-mob ("where many people repeat the same, most often pointless, action") and it is suggested that these websites are efforts to attract some of the campaign funds which are no doubt flooding the country. You can follow what Russian blogs are saying about the zaputina website here.

So, is this a transparent, "democratic" feedback loop? Or a colossal, polittekhnolog-orchestrated circle jerk? Here at Scraps of Moscow, we report - and you decide.

Moving on to the partner site, Russia.ru calls itself a "Telechannel" (actually, the full text of the title that pops up in your browser window is "Telechannel Russia.ru: Glory to Russia!") and aspires to Internet TV status, although in the lower left-hand corner of the site is the logo and media license information of Kremlin-friendly news portal Vzglyad. As one commenter on a blog post about this story noted:

What do you think, will Russia ever have normal democracy? I think hope is dying out with each passing day...

Even Vladimir.Vladimirovich.ru - which is back in operation, hooray! - had a vignette last Friday about the zaputina project, which I'm too tired to translate and which Google doesn't really do justice. And others are laughing about the whole effort to keep Putin in office as well:

The soundtrack to the above video (really a slideshow of entertaining Putin images) is a song narrating Putin's imagined interior monologue as he arrives at the conclusion that he must remain in charge of the country "for the people."

Meanwhile, from all indications, the runup to to Duma elections is less amusing for parties not enjoying the benefit of the "administrative resource" and is anything but democratic. SPS, for example, has had one of its regional offices vandalized (and was then not allowed to use its allotted campaigning time slot on the local state-run TV channel), its website hacked, and its campaign literature confiscated on a rather thin pretext:

News Friday, November 9, 2007. Issue 3782. Page 3. Police Seize SPS Election Booklets The Moscow Times Union of Right Forces said Thursday that police had seized 14 million copies of its officially approved campaign booklet in more than 20 regions this week. In an entry on his LiveJournal blog, party leader Nikita Belykh said police justified the confiscations by saying it was necessary to examine the campaign materials for content possibly violating extremism or anti-monopoly laws. The Neo-Print printing house in Moscow, which prints most of the campaign materials for Union of Right Forces, or SPS, was raided by police on Thursday and had its operations suspended pending inspections expected to last at least until Dec. 2, when State Duma elections will be held, he wrote. A woman who answered the phone Thursday at Neo-Print said the company was operating as usual and declined to confirm whether it was raided by police. An SPS spokeswoman could not specify which police department had conducted the raid. Meanwhile, Vadim Gologuzov, a senior police official in Krasnoyarsk, said his officers had seized 2 million copies of the party's booklet because it contained an advertisement in violation of election laws, Interfax reported. In Izhevsk, police official Nikolai Shvetsov said police had seized 800,000 copies after an anonymous caller reported a hostage-taking in a garage, Interfax reported. Police found no hostages in the garage, only the campaign materials, which were confiscated to establish their legality.

Things have gotten so bad for SPS (and this time, none of it appears to be the party's own doing, as is sometimes the case with the misfortunes of Russian liberals) that they have even appealed to the OSCE for help, complaining about a "wave of persecution." Good luck.

Update, Nov. 12, 11am: I see this website is a popular topic. Today's Moscow Times in a story titled "United Behind a Putin Third Term", rehashes Gazeta's coverage and provides some more denials and perspective:

[...] [S]ix days after it opened, 27,000 people have already voted on a web site, Zaputina.ru, calling for Putin to stay on despite the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms.

Zaputina.ru did not provide any information regarding its creators, while a United Russia spokesman denied any official party involvement Friday.

"If there is no party's logo on the web site, then it's not the party's project," he said on condition of anonymity, because only the party's chief spokesman was authorized to comment.

Gazeta.ru, however, has identified the site's creator as Konstantin Rykov, who is on the United Russia party list in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

"This could have been a personal initiative on Rykov's part," the party spokesman said.

Gazeta.ru identified Alexei Zharich as the web-site project manager, and the Nic.ru domain registration center said it was registered in his name in October 2004. Zharich is listed by the web site Vybory.ru as the general director of the Political Technologies company and a former Interior Ministry employee.

A secretary who answered the joint work telephone number for Rykov and Zharich said Friday that both were too busy to talk.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, reached on his cell phone Friday, said the presidential administration had no relation to the site. [...]

"United Russia's traces can be found everywhere in one or another form," Alexei Mukhin of the Center for Political Information said Friday. "Because the party has put Putin on top of its federal list, everything done in support of Putin is done in support of United Russia."

Mukhin said the regional rallies and Za Putina, despite United Russia's denials of involvement, could be aimed at pushing United Russia's share of the vote on Dec. 2 to 80 percent and "not permitting any other party pass the 7 percent barrier" to get into the Duma.

Vertical of bureaucrats?

Vertical of Power (chairs)
[image source]

When I first saw Mikhail Khodorkovsky's missive about the importance of voting in the coming elections (the scanned letter, handwritten on school notebook paper, is worth checking out even if some might find MBKh's handwriting challenging in spots) on Ekho Moskvy's elections blog, I planned to translate it. Sean has beat me to it, and the letter has sparked a bit of a discussion at SRB.

But I wanted to focus on one of the things MBKh mentioned in his letter (my translation):

The bureaucracy, and today it in particular is our chief opponent, feels quite comfortable in an environment of social apathy. For the bureaucracy, this [environment] is a confirmation of their monopolistic right to rule the country as they see fit.

It is precisely the fact that citizens are prepared to entrust their choice, their fate, to a little-known bureaucrat that proves to them that it is unnecessary to take into account even minimally the opinion of the people.

Khodorkovsky's conclusion was that people should vote for any the less odious of the smaller parties. I wonder what he would be recommending if Russia still had the "against all" option on the ballot, as it has in previous election cycles.

Veronica at Neeka's Backlog ignited a comments clusterf*** (to use an ATL term, though I'm mildly ashamed to reveal that I read that blog regularly enough to know the local lingo) earlier this fall by declaring her intention to vote against all in the Ukrainian elections, so I guess some regard this as a cop-out option and one that concerned citizens should not take, but I think it is a good option to have on the ballot, and getting rid of it was of a piece with some of Putin's other reforms which strongly enhanced the "management" of Russian democracy. Actually, the Viitorul (Future) Institute's website, where I found the above image, has another poster which is applicable to one of Putin's more spectacular verticalizations of power in Russia:

Democracy without local autonomy is like a ladder without rungs
[image source]

But back to MBKh's focus on the bureaucracy as the rot at the core of the Putinist system. This seems to be one place where the opposition could gain some traction with the public - anyone who has confronted corrupt or indifferent bureaucrats in Russia (or anywhere else, for that matter) knows that such experiences can leave very strong feelings. The Moscow Times had a series of a few articles about various sdownsides of overbureaucratization during this year's slow August news period, though they weren't focused on grass-roots anti-bureaucrat sentiment.

But that sentiment is certainly there - a FOM poll earlier this year found that 23% Russians rated "bureaucracy, arbitrary rule by officials" as an annoying problem, a higher percentage than were annoyed by "lack of money for food and other goods" or "bad roads." And if you add in the 14% who noted "the poor performance of housing and public services" and the 14% who noted "corruption in regional government and legal institutions" as annoying (respondents were allowed to name up to five problems), it's obvious that a fairly large number of people are unhappy with the services they get from their flush-with-cash government.

The government deals with this by using their near-monopoly on the broadcast media to periodically publicize demonstrative anti-corruption crusades and by passing periodic pension increases, and so far it seems to be working - I doubt that any of MBKh's non-loathsome small parties will clear the barrier to enter the Duma, especially since it was hiked up a couple of percentage points by Putin in his earlier reform of the electoral process.

State of emergency on my mind

Reminds me of Moscow [image source]

Here are roundup stories on the violent dispersal of protests (which by some accounts had themselves turned violent) and the declaration of a state of emergency in Tbilisi from the Int'l Herald Tribune, Washington Post, BBC and Kommersant (also, do not miss this Yahoo collection of photos of Wednesday's chaos).

One aspect of the Kommersant story made me want to do a bit of digging:

It is no coincidence that the Georgian president took such decisive steps shortly after a speech by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Mathew Bryza who said that the opposition rally was “destructive and irresponsible.” The White House thus virtually gave the Georgian authorities the green light to suppress the protests.

I was unable to find Bryza's remarks online, although Google News found a story about his conversations with Georgian leaders in the Messenger, an English-language Georgian newspaper; unfortunately, the Messenger's website seems down at the moment. Actually, websites for Imedi TV (here and here) are currently down as well, but that makes some sense, since the Georgian authorities have taken that station as well as another, smaller station off the air. Actually, Saakashvili's declaration of emergency seems to shut down all broadcasters other than Georgian Public Television, even the government-friendly Rustavi-2, perhaps because its journalists showed solidarity with their colleagues at Imedi and broadcast their last minutes on the air, when the Imedi newsreaders didn't know their broadcast antenna had been turned off.

Much more below the cut...

The only official US statement I could find (in a brief internet survey) was from the State Department's Nov. 7 daily press briefing (Sean McCormack, the State Dept. Spokesman, is paid to dodge tricky questions or at least answer them diplomatically):

QUESTION: There is a lot of civil unrest in Georgia, seems to be reaching sort of a new height today. Georgian -- people in the Georgian Government actually are accusing the Russians of stirring this up as some sort of a payback for the Rose Revolution, et cetera; just wanted to know if you had anything to say about that situation.

MR. MCCORMACK: Well, there have been, over the past couple days, some protests in Georgia, political protests raising a variety of different issues with respect to the actions of the government. Of course, we are very supportive, we're -- regardless of where protests may take place, the right of individuals to peacefully protest to express their point of view. I can't speak at this point to any of these accusations that there may be outsiders trying to stir up things in Georgia. Of course, if that were true, that would be something of concern not only to us, but I would expect of special concern to the Georgian Government.

Look, if there are political differences within the political system in Georgia, they can -- they should be worked out within the confines of that political system and also, they should be worked out in a peaceful manner. And neither side, whether the government or the opposition, should take any steps that would be deliberately provocative to the other -- that could lead to violence. So these are issues that can be resolved through peaceful political dialogue in Georgia and certainly, that's what we hope to see.

QUESTION: I'm sorry, is there any U.S. diplomatic involvement here, any contacts with them or --

MR. MCCORMACK: I know that we've been in contact with the Georgian Government. Beyond that, I don't have any information for you.

But the Russian media are not the only ones blaming the US for what is happening in Tbilisi. From the WaPo story:

Tina Khidasheli, an opposition leader, said in an interview that she had been beaten and hit with a tear gas canister when police moved in. She blamed the violence in part on the United States' "unconditional support" for Georgia's ruling party, adding that she thought her country's leadership would have respected the rule of law more if U.S. officials had insisted it be upheld.

"For four years they did not question anything Saakashvili was doing," she said. "Beacon of democracy? The shining of democracy was in the streets today."

As the Moscow Times and everyone else reports, Saakashvili blames his large neighbor to the north for all of his problems with the opposition:

Opposition leaders, who have not questioned Saakashvili's pro-Western line, called the accusations baseless and laughable. They said the Georgian Interior Ministry was responsible for the "wild" accusations of Russian intervention.

Analysts, too, questioned whether Moscow was fomenting unrest.

"This is hogwash," said Alexei Malashenko, senior expert with the Carnegie Moscow Center. "Russia has neither levers nor opportunities to influence the situation."

Malashenko said Saakashvili was blaming Russia in an effort to lure the United States into throwing its support behind him in the escalating standoff.

If there is anything that the opposition and Saakashvili agree on, it is the need to counter Russia's efforts to project influence on this republic, Malashenko said [...]

Any tangible interference by Russia would prompt the opposition to abandon its efforts to challenge Saakashvili and rally behind him to counter the threat from its larger neighbor to the north, he warned.

From Kommersant:

Mikhail Saakashvili crowned to the speculations of Moscow’s clout when he addressed the nation in an evening TV statement. He said that the opposition was supplied with “money and guidelines” by employees of the Russian embassy who are “staff employees of the Russian intelligence”. He also announced that these people would soon be expelled from Tbilisi. [...] President Saakashvili said that Georgia’s Ambassador was recalled from Moscow “for consultations” so far. In essence, the Georgian president in his speech declared another war on Russia.

“Our intelligence reported of an alternative government that was shaped in Russia,” Mr. Saakashvili said. “But our people will not allow a civil war or events similar to those in 1991 to happen.” The president, who used to call himself a democrat and “defender of people’s right to protest”, said that “everyone is eligible to rally in a democratic country but authorities will no longer tolerate destabilization and chaos.”

I'm sure it's true that Russia is delighted to see that Saakashvili may have made a misstep or blinked under the pressure of dealing with a potential encampment of protesters. After all, official Moscow often seems to respect Misha little more than it would a pesky American-trained lapdog yapping away at the mighty bear. Unfortunately for Saakashvili, even without Russia, he seems to have a knack for rubbing people the wrong way (not to say rubbing them out) and has built up a fairly substantial amount of enemies among the elites.

Saakashvili's speech introducing the state of emergency drew the following response from Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (quoted by Kremlin-friendly web newspaper Vzglyad):

The pathos of Mikhail Saakashvili's speech comes down to one thing: in the face of an external threat, he suggests that the citizens of Georgia should forgive the president all his sins and reconcile themselves to the idea that he is "bringing order using a strong hand."

Wait a minute - doesn't this sound like something one could say about Putin's regime in Russia? The parallels, if you think about it, between Putin's hyping a non-existent "Western" threat and Saakashvili exaggerating the extent of Russia's involvement in the Georgian opposition are interesting, though perhaps superficial.

In any event, Saakashvili is showing a willingness to hold on to power that his rather easily ousted predecessor lacked, at least by the end of his career. I would like to hear what the Silver Fox has to say about how young Misha has handled things...

Georgian blogger jibs, writing at TOL's Georgia blog (a good place to watch for updates), says the following:

Four years ago, the current authorities came to power through mass demonstrations against the Shevarnadze regime, and back then the mass media was left untouched. Saakashvili does it differently — this must be a democratic measure I have never heard about.

This is why the demonstrations swept Georgia in the first place, and not because of an “evil” Russia. Russia looks way more democratic right now than Georgia. This is the end of the Rose Revolution myth in Georgia.

These last words ring especially true. After all, many believe that the critical event leading Georgia to break away from the USSR was the Soviet military's violent suppression of protesters in Tbilisi on April 9, 1989 (it's no accident that Georgia declared its independence two years later on that exact date). So if the Georgian political culture includes an admirable tendency to stop respecting leaders after they beat protesters in the streets, then perhaps Saakashvili's days are numbered.

One Russian pundit believes that nothing good will come of this for Saakashvili or for the opposition:

However, recent events are badly damaging to Saakashvili in any case. If he yields to opposition, chances of his party and his candidacy at the upcoming elections will jeopardized. If he cracks down on the protests violently, he will either become a dictator or at least make a bigger row with the political elite. Opposition cannot be called winners either. They are hardly united by anything except for animosity to Saakashvili and general West-friendly sentiment. In the short history of an independent Georgia, the crowd topped two presidents, and it was twice that a successor of the overthrown leader won a following election on a landslide. But who will win now if Saakashvili becomes a third ousted leader?

In his post on recent events in Tbilisi (titled "The Rose Reversal"), Registan's Nathan
Hamm calls these the "scariest-looking riot police in the world." [image source]

For now, it looks like Misha is using "any means necessary" to keep from having to find out the answer to that question. This is certainly not an inspiring picture (from the IHT):

Sozar Subari, the country's human rights ombudsman, denounced the government's use of force and suggested that Georgia, which had undertaken many reforms since 2003, had taken large steps backward.

"Georgia is now the same as Lukashenko's Belarus," he said, referring to President Aleksandr Lukashenko, the leader of a post-Soviet state that much of the West has labeled a dictatorship. A woman could be heard screaming in the background.

Subari later called the police action "illegal" and said that he himself had been beaten by the police. "Even after I declared that I am the ombudsman, they beat me more," he said.

Around the internets, Mark MacKinnon's post on this story sums up the lay of the political land well and is worth reading. Registan pooh-poohs Saakashvili's allegations that Russia is behind everything:

Saakashvili has vowed to stay in power and has, in what has now become quite characteristic for him, blamed Russia for the protests. I’m all for blaming Russia as much as the next red-blooded fan of Red Dawn and Rambo 3, but come the hell on Misha… He says he has proof, but I think it’s safe to assume he won’t produce it.

TOL's Georgia Blog is similarly dismissive, and has a post on this topic entitled "WHAT RUSSIANS?!"

A few bloggers to watch if you can read Russian are cyxymu, tony_geo, and elenaim, all of whom are in Tbilisi and have commented on their experiences moving around the city. In the coming days, no doubt This is Tbilisi Calling will have something to say about the events of Nov. 7, and so will many others. Civil Georgia might also be worth following - although it's very gov't-friendly, it is aimed at a Western audience, so it will presumably try to remain credible. One place you won't see many updates on this story is here - this post represents an almost inexcusable break from the busy-ness that has characterized my life of late.

As of now, here are a few other random on-topic items culled from the web:

Echo of Moscow Radio had posted an open letter to Saakashvili on its blog, but the post has since been removed. The text of the letter, also signed by non-Echo journalists, is up on the LJ of a Russian journalist based in Georgia. It reads, in part (my translation):

Democracy ends when journalists are gagged as they fulfill their professional responsibilities. The slide into dictatorship begins where journalists are beaten at rallies and demonstrations, frightened and intimidated.

Certainly the Russian state-run media outlets seem overly concerned with the possibility of democracy's end in Georgia. From a comment on cyxymu's blog:

The first 11 minutes of Vremia...strangely enough were not about HIM [Putin], but about a small but proud neighbor. So obviously everything is great in Russia - the most interesting stuff is happening in Georgia. A fire in an old folks' home with over 30 deaths is of course no big deal. And in the whole 11-minute segment they didn't manage to actually show the Truth about what is happening there [in Georgia].

Naturally, Vremia has people like Andranik Migranyan commenting on the situation, saying things like this:

Today Saakashvili, having received carte blanche, is ready to do away with the opposition, positioning himself as an anti-Russian leader [as though he needed to do anything more to position himself as anti-Russian]. If he hadn't received carte blanche from Washington, it's unlikely he would have resorted to taking such serious actions against his own people. Today we once again see the obvious truth: wherever leaders speak out in support of Washington, they receive carte blanche to do anything you can imagine."

Migranyan has been working on his anti-US schtick for a while, so he does it pretty well.

Russia Today, the state-run English news channel, seems to have been quite prepared to cover the unrest in Tbilisi. I never thought I would call RT useful, but they have translated into English Imedi's last minute on the air (you can even see the lights go off in the studio as the police enter) and one of their intrepid correspondents battled tear gas to report from downtown Tbilisi (isn't this a better use of YouTube than those Diet-Coke-and-Mentos videos?). More video is available from NTV, which headlines the story, "Tbilisi is on a siege footing."

To close on a more positive note, a RIA Novosti-affiliated website, newsgeorgia.ru, reported early Thursday morning that some of the troops and riot police are being withdrawn from Tbilisi, that the suppression of the protests did not turn into mass rioting, and that the windows of many fancy shops on Rustaveli are still intact, the airport and train station are operating, and utilities and communications are functioning as normal. So perhaps this too shall pass and Saakashvili's day in the sun is not over yet.

[Update: Onnik Krikorian has a great roundup of blogging about the situation in Georgia; cyxymu has a very downbeat and comprehensive new post, which I may try to translate later; Zhirik is making either a bad joke or Duma campaign political hay out of the crisis]