the long, often hindered march towards independence and sovereignty

The news put into perspective every Saturday, thanks to the historian Fabrice d’Almeida. Saturday May 11: the major demonstrations which are shaking Georgia, and which should be read as a continuation of the long history of the struggle for independence in this country.

This region is already recognized as a political entity in Antiquity, a kingdom disputed by many powers, on the borders of the Black Sea. Hittites, Parthians, Romans, Persians, all tried to appropriate it. It was even a combat zone between Muslims and Orthodox Christians of Byzantium, in the Middle Ages and after. Finally, at the beginning of the 19th century, after several campaigns, the Russian Empire captured the region and annexed it. But patriotism smouldered under the ashes and was reborn thanks to the First World War and the end of the Russian Empire. Georgia existed as a state between 1918 and 1921. Then it joined the Soviet Union.

The best-known Georgian of this era is the master of the USSR: Joseph Djougashvili, known as Stalin. Under his rule and that of his successors, it was impossible to speak of a nation. But with perestroika in the 1980s, ambitions returned. From November 1988, popular demonstrations demanded a free state. The largest, in April 1989, was bloodily repressed by the Red Army, with around twenty dead and dozens injured. The reason for these mobilizations? Moscow’s attempts to detach Abkhazia and North Ossetia from Georgia. So much so that in 1991, the country gained its independence with a form of silent hostility towards Russia.

A democratically elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, comes to power. But the elders of the Soviet Communist Party organized a coup d’état and soon placed at their head Gorbachev’s former foreign minister, who had become close to Boris Yeltsin, Eduard Shevardnadze. The country falls into civil war. Then regained calm under the authoritarian regime of Shevardnadze. The latter was overthrown by a peaceful revolution on November 22, 2003. A democratic era began, but the problems were not over.

Before Ukraine, Putin had cracked down on Georgia

For Russia, in fact, the country must remain within its sphere of influence. However, Georgia is moving closer to Europe and the Western world. Putin therefore decides to weaken it by relaunching the internal war and detaching the Russian-speaking provinces. A process close to what happened in Ukraine, later, in 2014. But in 2008, Georgia was a first: pro-Russian militias in these regions; sending troops… War breaks out. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, intervened quickly and facilitated an end to hostilities through mediation which endorsed Russian positions.

Since then, the tension has only slightly subsided. And it returned with the election of a majority in parliament which seeks to avoid any confrontation with Russia. According to the country’s president, elected in 2018, Salomé Zourabichvili, Russia has only one goal: to break this young democracy’s relations with Europe. Hence the bill against foreign financing to silence pro-Westerners. A method already tested in Moscow.

Today, as for millennia, Georgians are trying to escape the hegemonic aims of their neighbors and build their own destiny. Their courage can change history.