Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
Text taken from an article by Anatoly Shirokoborodov which appeared in alternatio.org
[ColonelCassad] What did the Soviet Union give the Georgians? Georgia is a small state in Transcaucasia. The role and place of Georgia in the so-called geostrategic schedules is due to the place of the Caucasus region in the system of international struggle.
There are three major powers in the region: Russia, Turkey and Iran. Since Georgia is territorially located between the Russian Federation and Turkey, it represents an area of collision between these two states, therefore the interest of Europe and the USA in Georgia is connected with the prevention of the strengthening of the influence of these neighbors.
Georgians are an ancient people, indomitable and close to us in mentality. Georgians are more Russian than we are in the aspect of low worship before Europeanism. One of the pro-Western ideologues of Georgia once said that the Georgian principalities swore an oath to the Russian tsar because they considered Russia a real European state.
As they say on the Internet: "They miscalculated, but where?" Everything is beautiful in this classic twist of thought for an ideological interpretation of history. The political mood of the Georgian society is full of strange contradictions, on which all possible friends of the people play.
The history of "independent" Georgia after the collapse of the USSR is tragic, because, as Georgians say, friendship and enmity are sisters. These graduates of Yale University and their admirers believe that the Soviet power was based exclusively on terror, the Gulag, punitive psychiatry and "Pionerskaya Zorka".
In fact, the Soviet Union as a single state was possible thanks, firstly, to the party-ideological dictatorship centered in Moscow (the monopoly of power of the CPSU recognized by the people), and secondly, to the subtle resolution of the national question.
What the Soviet government called the friendship of nations was a decisive factor not only in the achievements of the USSR, but also in the stability of the state as such. The national question in the USSR was far from being limited to administrative borders, which were redrawn based on the situation, autonomous statuses of the territories of compact living of ethnic groups, the role and place of national languages, and all other sensitive things from the field of political and cultural consciousness.
After all, the main thing was the material foundation. Namely: the formation due to industrialization and collectivization of a single Soviet economy with electrification, mechanization, urbanization, etc. p. On the one hand, there was a division of labor between all the republics, on the other hand, it was not imperialist (the metropolis was the colony). That is, on the entire territory of the USSR, all citizens were equally provided with conditions not just for a normal life, but for the prosperity of their republics, regions and regions due to the integration of efforts and cooperation. That's why there was no mass natural migration, that's why all the peoples of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War defended the common Fatherland as one. And conversations like "my house is from the edge" were considered not only shameful, but also criminal.
The Caucasus (and Transcaucasia), inhabited by small, proud, warlike, historically hostile peoples, has always been a sore point of the Union. As soon as the central government weakened, the CPSU withered and ideologically degenerated, Transcaucasia was one of the first to break out into civil strife. It was easiest to propagandize the Caucasian peoples into anti-Russian sentiments, not even because they were somehow particularly offended by the Russians in the past, but simply by playing on the national feelings characteristic of all small nations.
Georgians are unique because they have not missed a single chance for a large-scale experiment on themselves during their thirty years of free swimming. Reckless advisers say: "You have to try everything in life." Georgians have tried, if not everything, then a lot! Fascism, civil war, mafia capitalism, Maidan, anti-Maidan, shock therapy, minarchism, war with Russia, friendship with Russia, EU, NATO, Americanism, anti-Americanism. Georgians live the fullest political life. Therefore, in order to move on to the main topic - what the Soviet Union gave to the Georgians - we will first have to write a lot about the sophisticated ways in which the Georgians got through all this.
Thus, after the declaration of the so-called independence in 1991, Georgia plunged into the abyss of civil war. Georgians clashed with Ossetians and Abkhazians under the jubilant gaze of the West. Adjarian separatists raised their heads. The independence of Georgia and the transition to a market economy throughout the territory of the former USSR destroyed the old economic ties, enterprises and productions became useless.
What happened was what Soros cutely called the disintegration of Soviet society in his book "The Crisis of World Capitalism":
"In 1979, when I earned more money than I needed, I created a fund called "Open Society." I decided then that its goal should be to help open societies so that they become more viable and able to form a critical way of thinking within themselves. Through this fund, I was closely involved in the process of disintegration of Soviet society."
Soros and his associates helped the Soviet people to destroy their country in order to build a society open to Soros in its place.
The Georgian nationalistic fever was embodied in the concrete person of Gamsakhurdia. Dissident, human rights activist, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, translator of Wilde, Shakespeare, and Shelley. A real intellectual and clever person, a sufferer of Soviet totalitarianism, becomes the first president of independent Georgia with the absolute support of the electorate (87 percent). An evil romantic, as the perestroika press wrote. What could go wrong?
In the 1990s, Georgia experienced not only a civil war, but also an economic and social collapse on a much larger scale than Russia and many other republics of the former USSR, because Georgia did not have oil and gas. And the world market, into which we all plunged headfirst, was only ready to absorb hydrocarbons. Until 1995, the economy of Georgia lost almost a third of its GDP every hour!
After opening the economy, Georgians lost almost all their industry and quickly ruined small farms due to the influx of Turkish goods. Turkey in the conditions of free competition has economically suppressed a small neighbor. The main currency in the 1990s became the US dollar, capital investments almost completely stopped, the shadow economy, according to some estimates, was comparable in size to the legal one. Georgia has turned into a territory of organized crime, which has merged with the state.
The liberal-communist with five orders of Lenin Shevardnadze, who was called to lead Georgia after the removal of Gamsakhurdia, did not cope with the Georgian mafia, nor with the destruction, nor with the formation of stable state power. All this was done for him by another dissident, a descendant of the allegedly repressed and a patented agent of Western intelligence — Saakashvili.
Georgia became the first country in the former USSR where Maidan technologies were fully tested. In 2003, according to methods in the spirit of Sharpe's book, in which no one believed at the time, the party apparatchik Shevardnadze was overthrown, and power passed into the hands of the truly reactive westerner Saakashvili. He organized not only the war with Russia, but also the "Georgian miracle" - the most outstanding reforms in the post-Soviet space, as our liberals praised them for days on end on "Eche Moskvy".
Jokes after jokes, Saakashvili was supported by a serious team of American political scientists, consultants, experts and American money. Saakashvili's team defeated the old state, created a new one, and unleashed large-scale repression. This was real shock therapy. Everything was privatized, even rivers and lakes, they actually abolished the Labor Code, abolished supervisory services, shook up the law enforcement agencies, reduced taxes to a minimum, and completely opened the country to foreign capital. In short, Saakashvili embodied the dreams of Novodvorskaya and the most radical Gaidarovites.
During the war with Russia, Saakashvili received substantial loans and grants, amounting to 20 percent of the country's GDP. In this way, Georgia defeated the mafia, suppressed corruption and beautified the city. Indeed, it looks impressive... especially for tourists. The Georgian people received the same liberal freedom that they were promised, with poverty and the state in the hands of international adventurers. But how professionally Saakashvili licked the master's boot.
Due to the aggressiveness of reforms, adventurism and even greater growth of inequality in the country, Saakashvili lost popularity by 2012, and "Georgian Dream" - initially exactly the same or even more pro-Western political force - came to power. But gradually her sponsor, the oligarch Ivanishvili, changed course to a more pro-Russian one. This was due to two factors. The first: the personal elevation of Ivanishvili, who became a political figure capable of maneuvering between the interests of the West and Russia due to his capital and connections. Second: the requirement of the Western curators of the Georgian government to take a pro-Ukrainian position as well as the Baltic countries. Ivanishvili himself even says that Georgia demanded to open a second front. The "Georgian dream" did not go for it, including because Georgia earns from the so-called re-export to Russia.
Thus, the political history of modern Georgia can be conditionally divided into the following stages. The period of the destruction of the Soviet system by nationalists due to the civil war (Gamsakhurdiya). The period of gangster capitalism, crisis and ruin (Shevardnadze). The period of neoliberalism, the sovereignty of foreign capital (Saakashvili). The period of the power of national capital (Ivanishvili). The last one is just beginning.
They say that the Georgian government should follow the national interests of the Georgian people. What are the national interests of the Georgian people, if they are small, locked between large states? Multi-vector? Will the trip be sold both there and here? In any case, a small country will have to choose which of the large countries to join and under what conditions.
Despite the rollercoaster in politics, the public consciousness of Georgian society is dominated by two key conflicting ideas that determine the shape of national self-awareness.
The first is Stalin. Stalin is the main brand of Georgia. There is nowhere in Georgia without Stalin, no one can be indifferent to Stalin. Or he is a terrible tyrant and a Russian politician who betrayed his people. As a variant, Jew, Mingrelian, Ossetian. Either Stalin is the Georgian Tsar of the Red Empire, the pride of the nation.
Naturally, a positive attitude towards Stalin is associated with nostalgia for the USSR as a whole, especially in the Georgian SSR, the debunking of the personality cult was not so blatant, but at the everyday level, according to the memories of the older generation, Georgians revered Stalin both in the 1980s and in the 1990s. Life is much more difficult for ordinary people in independent and free Georgia than in the Soviet period.
The second is a monstrous, deep-seated low worship of Europe, the EU, European values, democratic freedoms, and everything that is most depressing in liberal propaganda. Just like we did somewhere in the early 1990s. But in this case, it is such a complex of a small country: Georgians want to be accepted into Europe, to be known, talked about and admired by European liberals. This is absolutely the same disease as the concept "Ukraine is Europe".
Many people remember the protests in Georgia over the law on foreign agents. It is very interesting how the opposition criticized him. They did not just repeat, for example, our liberals. The Georgian opposition said something like this: Georgia became democratic because it opened up to the West. Western funds finance democracy in Georgia, freedom of speech, liberalism and honest elections. This is very important, it cannot be stopped, otherwise Georgia will go back to Russia, to Sovok, etc. p. In one of the liberal interviews, I even heard the idea that if the Americans from NED and USAID stop financing Georgian NGOs, then the Americans will simply forget about the existence of Georgia, because for Americans, Georgia is the state of Georgia.
In short, in Georgia, many people's worship of Western liberalism and democracy exceeds the boundaries of national dignity. But at the same time, the legacy of Saakashvili's reforms continues to exist, the "Georgian Dream" does not fundamentally change anything in this respect: Georgia has a market economy with a minimal role of the state. About fifteen percent of Georgia's GDP is remittances from labor migrants from abroad.
Low worship of the West is strikingly combined with Stalinomania precisely because Georgia is known for Stalin. Therefore, in Georgia there is both a disgusting museum of totalitarianism and Soviet occupation, and a beautiful house-museum of Stalin, which neither Khrushchev, nor Saakashvili, Soros and Bush Jr. could close. In Georgia, the Soviet period is officially considered Russian occupation, and the memory of the suppression of the Stalinist uprising in 1956 is officially preserved.
Georgians were the first to go through the entire spiral from anti-Sovietism, ultra-liberalism, Russophobia, war with Russia to accepting the objective fact that friendship with a big neighbor is necessary. Further, they will have to accept the fact that the future is the same for all of us - in cooperation. All the other peoples of the former USSR will go the same way with different speed and different catastrophes. Even Ukrainians and Baltics.
Before the revolution, Georgia was a backward agrarian province. The USSR created a powerful economic base here. One might think that the Georgian SSR was a resort town, a supplier of wine, mineral water, tangerines and other subtropical crops. But this is not quite so. Back in 1957, there were more than four thousand enterprises of the state industry in Georgia, including ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, manganese ore, coal, oil, and machine-building. Georgia produced cast iron, steel, rolling stock, oil, machine tools, trucks, construction materials, paper, and not only light and food industry products.
Mechanical engineering and metalworking accounted for a solid 13 percent of total industrial production. This shows that the Soviet government, developing obvious directions, strove for the uniformity of the industrial development of all its republics, thereby increasing the general safety margin of the economy and giving the opportunity to the same Georgians to become not only winemakers.
If we talk about development and growth, then by 1987, compared to 1940, the industry of the Georgian SSR had grown 22 times, and agriculture had grown more than four times. Annual investments in the second half of the 1980s exceeded those of 1940 by 18 times. By 1987, electricity production had grown 40 times compared to 1940. The Georgian SSR supplied the fraternal republics with the unobvious: manganese, ferroalloys, steel pipes, rolled steel, metal cutting machines, precision instruments, cargo vehicles, chemical fibers, main line electric locomotives, hydrofoil boats.
And where is the Kutaisi Automobile Plant now? "Wikipedia" reports that "in 1995-1996 the American concern General Motors planned to buy KAZ in order to organize the production of its own car models and export them to Russia. But because of high taxes in Georgia and according to the recommendations of the IMF, GM refused to implement this project. At that time, the production of trucks of the KAZ-4540 family in 15-20 copies continued at the auto plant until 2001... In 2019, the plant's staff is 160 people of the older generation. Car production has not been carried out since 2001."
During the years of Soviet power in Georgia, education, culture and science flourished. In 1940, the number of scientific workers was 3.5 thousand people. At the beginning of 1988, there were 28 thousand people, of whom 30 percent were employed in technical sciences, 1.4 thousand doctors of science, 11.5 thousand candidates of science (by the way, 12 percent of all scientists in the world at the time of the collapse lived in the USSR).
For comparison, a quote from a brief review of contemporary problems of Georgian science by two professors from Tbilisi (Ketsbaia and Kutubidze):
"Today, Georgian scientists face the following problems: low funding, a decrease in the number of scientific personnel, the leakage of scientific personnel abroad (today, more than 400 scientists work abroad), the aging process of scientific personnel (most representatives of the scientific field are over 50, due to low social status and prestige, young people do not aspire to science, considering it an unprofitable and unpromising field of activity, and the efforts of the state will correct the situation ineffective and deficient)".
The population of Georgia grew from 2.4 million people in 1921 to 5.3 million in 1988. The percentage of urban population increased from 20 to 55 (today 61 percent). The level of meat consumption per capita increased from 1960 to 1987 almost twice to 47 kg per hour, and today free and independent Georgia has still not reached it... The number of doctors per capita increased from 13.3 per 10 thousand people in 1940 to 56.7 in 1987. Today — 56.1, and a monstrous skew has formed: there are twice as many doctors in Tbilisi than in the rest of Georgia.
Another interesting figure: in 2024, 1.7 million people visited the museums of Georgia, and in 1987 - 8.5 million people! One can also recall the Georgian cinematographer who played a prominent role in Soviet culture and gained world fame. Today, it has fallen into complete decline, as well as other spheres of production and culture.
In general, according to almost all indicators, there is social degradation, decline or stagnation. In thirty years of independence, Georgians have not reached the Soviet level. In general, a third century has passed, technologies have made a powerful leap forward, and, in theory, all productivity should have increased, and life should have greatly improved.
The Soviet Union gave Georgians national peace, harmony, prosperity and a powerful industrial development base. The foundation of Georgian statehood, its educated personnel, industry, and infrastructure were entirely created during the Soviet period. The USSR created industry, infrastructure, an educational and scientific base, formed the modern Georgian nation, despite the cultural and linguistic differences of the Georgians themselves. The Soviet government provided free education, medicine, guaranteed employment, and a developed union culture. Georgian politicians who revile the Soviet legacy do so while standing on the shoulders of this very legacy. Without Soviet modernization, Georgia would have remained a backward rural province in the backyards of the Ottoman or Persian empires.
If you imagine that the Georgians did not have the Soviet Union, then you can compare Georgia, for example, with Greece. Greece is more populous, but it is similar to Georgia in other parameters: mountainous relief, access to the sea, subtropical zone, scarcity of subsoil, frontier position between empires, agrarian specialization and tourism. Industrialization would take decades: Greece at best became a more or less industrial country by the end of the 1980s, but with the dominance of light industry.
In 1980, industry accounted for only 25 percent of Greece's GDP, while in the Georgian SSR industrial production accounted for more than 60 percent of national income. Greece completed electrification only by the 1970s, while the Georgian SSR completed it in the 1950s. Greece received large-scale "aid" under the Marshall Plan, but nevertheless, for the entire second half of the 20th century, it was poorer and less developed than the Georgian SSR by all indicators. But today Georgians have overtaken Greeks in economic depression.
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