It is an old culture squeezed into a tiny new state. That is the way visitors to post-Soviet Georgia often describe the place. Resting on the southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, hemmed in by the Black Sea, Turkey and its south Caucasus neighbors, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Georgia became independent with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the roots of Georgia's history wind back for millennia. As ancient Colchis, Georgia was the endpoint of Jason's epic quest for the golden fleece and the homeland of Medea. Its alphabet has been around since perhaps the fifth century AD. As a country of mainly Orthodox Christians, Georgia has long been linked with the magnificent art and culture of eastern Christianity, from Byzantium to Moscow. Beyond that, the country's natural beauty, from the Black Sea coastline to the magnificent churches nestled in lush mountains, and the blend of European and Near Eastern influences in its music, cuisine and architecture have all made it an attractive spot for American and European expatriates.

Partly for these reasons, there are few countries in the former Soviet Union that get better press than Georgia. On a per capita basis, it is one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid in the world--since 1992 over $850 million for a population of five million. It is headed by an internationally acclaimed statesman, President Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister who was a key player in the peaceful reunification of Germany. It has a cabinet and governing party, the Citizens' Union of Georgia (CUG), peppered with urbane, thirtysomething, English-speaking politicians, several of whom hold degrees from Columbia, Georgetown and other prestigious American universities. In its 2000 Human Development report, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) praised Georgia's success:

Of the former Soviet republics, Georgia has been one of the leading countries in providing its population with access to human rights. Georgia is to be given recognition for its achievements in the democratization process of the political, social, and economic aspects of its development. The country's commitment to a free press and respect of political rights have been remarkable in a region of the world not yet known for ensuring respect of such rights to their full extent.

The picture on the ground, however, is sorely at odds with such assessments. Indeed, whether because of Georgia's importance to Western strategic interests in the south Caucasus or because of the Georgian government's talent in public relations, the United States and international organizations continue to cast the country's corrupt economy, its bloated state apparatus and its increasingly authoritarian politics in the best possible light.

During the 1999 parliamentary elections and the 2000 presidential election in which Shevardnadze won another five-year term as president, observers reported multiple irregularities. Recent reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have chronicled a host of abuses, including extrajudicial killing, police torture and state-condoned violence against religious minorities. All of this, moreover, seems to have increased since Georgia's admission to the Council of Europe in April 1999. The economy has continued to slide downward, and the government is unable even to ensure electricity and water supplies to the capital, Tbilisi, much less pay state pensions and salaries. Illegal commerce pouring through the many areas of the state outside Tbilisi's control--the separatist republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the autonomous republic of Achara--have deepened the culture of impunity that has placed Georgia among the world's most corrupt countries.

Georgia is not, of course, the worst of the lot in the former Soviet Union. For all its problems, it is not a raw autocracy. There is no cult of personality (although Shevardnadze does loom far larger in public life than presidents such as Vladimir Putin in Russia and Leonid Kuchma in Ukraine). Unlike President Heidar Aliev of neighboring Azerbaijan, Shevardnadze has not made his son heir-apparent to the presidency. Still, comparing Georgia favorably to the most authoritarian of its immediate neighbors obscures the extreme distance between the country and even the average, mostly illiberal democracies that have arisen across Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Whether consciously complicit in the misrepresentation of the realities of local politics or not, the international community is perpetuating four myths about Georgia--and, in the process, selling out its citizens to a government whose commitment to multiparty democracy, human rights and clean governance is, to put it mildly, highly questionable.

The Myth of Shevardnadze

When Eduard Shevardnadze came to Georgia in the early 1990s, the country was in the middle of a separatist war, on the brink of another, and under the control of a military junta. The policies of the previous president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, had not only alienated the country's substantial ethnic minorities but had led to the virtual disintegration of the state. Abkhazia, the region in the northwest that had enjoyed autonomous status during the Soviet period, opposed Gamsakhurdia's reforms and refused to participate in elections for new central institutions. In the north-central part of the country, another dispute surrounded the status of South Ossetia. The Ossetians, an ethnic group split between Georgia and the Republic of North Ossetia inside Russia, had declared an independent state already in 1990. In the middle of all this, the Gamsakhurdia administration collapsed. Many Georgians had grown increasingly dissatisfied with Gamsakhurdia's authoritarian behavior and his inability to quell the conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. A coup, engineered by members of the Georgian military, overthrew him in January 1992.

Into this failed state stepped Shevardnadze. Having served as Communist Party first secretary in Soviet Georgia through the 1970s and early 1980s, Shevardnadze already had a strong network among former party officials and administrative personnel, and he was respected in both Moscow and Western capitals for his sober hand in guiding Soviet foreign policy during the federation's collapse in 1990-91. He seemed the ideal candidate to haul his native republic, now an independent state, back from the abyss.

His early efforts, though, were an abysmal failure. Under his leadership, the Georgian army launched an assault on both South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the first half of 1992. With the assistance of Soviet, and later Russian, forces stationed in the separatist zones, the regional administrations managed to rout Shevardnadze's troops. In the process, over 250,000 ethnic Georgian refugees from Abkhazia--about half the region's total population--were driven across the Inguri River into Georgia proper, another 10,000 Georgians fled from South Ossetia, and some 80,000 Ossetians moved north to Russia. Throughout 1992 and 1993, "Zviadist" guerrillas loyal to former President Gamsakhurdia continued to attack military and police forces in western Georgia. So uncertain was Georgia's future that it was not until July 1992 that the country became the last Soviet successor state to join the United Nations.

These defeats sobered Shevardnadze and demonstrated the need for a solid political base on which to consolidate his rule. That came in the form of the Citizens' Union of Georgia (CUG), formed in 1993. Like similar "presidential parties" in other parts of the former Soviet Union, the CUG was driven less by ties of ideology and class than by loyalty to Shevardnadze and a desire of local elites to secure their political and economic positions amid the turmoil of civil war and state collapse. Shevardnadze was able to rebuild the web of relationships among district-level administrative personnel, factory managers and former party bosses whom he had known before his departure for Moscow. The CUG also attracted a small group of younger, generally reform-minded leaders from the civic organizations that had sprung up in the waning days of Soviet power.

It is undeniable that Shevardnadze's return to Georgia helped save the country from even greater tragedy, perhaps even complete disintegration. The new president managed to corral many of the paramilitary groups that once roamed the country and eventually to defeat the major Zviadist formations. With the exception of a flare-up in violence in 1998, Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been quiet, if for no other reason than that the separatists won their wars and have now turned to the task of building independent--but unrecognized--states. But the absence of open warfare has not produced the growth of a genuinely stable, multiparty and free state. Indeed, in recent years both Shevardnadze and the CUG have seemed less the bearers of democracy than brakes on further progress toward it.

Shevardnadze remains the single most important player in Georgian politics. Under the country's strongly presidential system, he is the ultimate decisionmaker both within the state and within the CUG; even the few political figures who have broken with the ruling party have remained staunchly loyal to the president. His leadership style, however, has been characterized by an effort to balance competing interests to ensure that no single group is able to challenge his authority as head of state, head of government and head of the ruling party. He has at times seemed a strong supporter of Zurab Zhvania, the young chairman of parliament and the most powerful genuine democrat on the Georgian scene. However, Shevardnadze has also cut deals with the country's least reformist figure, Aslan Abashidze, the potentate of the Autonomous Republic of Achara in the southwest. In exchange for Shevardnadze's recognizing his iron rule in Achara, Abashidze guaranteed a high voter turnout in his republic and aided Shevardnadze's victory in the first round of the 2000 presidential race.

Shevardnadze's party has become a mechanism for capturing the state rather than transforming it. The CUG's underlying structure is composed of a system of administrative cadres, factory bosses and security officials who ran Georgia under Shevardnadze in the 1970s. They have transformed themselves into a new class of entrepreneurs in Georgia's largely dysfunctional economy, benefiting from the opportunities to take over state enterprises under the country's Byzantine privatization program. There is little evidence that Shevardnadze has sought to transform the party he controls, precisely because he has created a state in which the ruling party and the administrative system are largely fused--a style of politics borrowed from the Soviet period. All of that may produce some semblance of stability in the short term, especially in a state still threatened by territorial separatism and a hot war in Chechnya on its northern border. But it hardly makes Shevardnadze a committed democratic leader.

The Myth of the "Young Reformers"

No analyst of Georgian politics denies that the CUG is still in large part a tool of Soviet-era elites whose main interest is the protection of their own positions in the country's economy. But, it is often said, at least there is a reform-oriented wing within the CUG, a collection of younger parliamentarians and government ministers allied with the parliamentary chairman, Zhvania. Since these CUG members come from a very different background than their older colleagues--from pro-democracy civic groups--they stand a real chance of reforming the ruling party from within. And given the fact that Shevardnadze is now in his constitutionally-mandated final term as president, it is claimed that this "young reformer" wing will be the group to watch in Georgia's post-Shevardnadze era. The reality, however, is more complicated.

Talk of the young reformers goes back to the very beginnings of the CUG. The party leadership, and Shevardnadze in particular, were very astute about promoting younger party members to public positions, especially those offices best sited for contact with Western governments and international financial institutions. In the last year, several of these members have been placed in high-profile ministerial posts. By autumn 2000 the parliamentary speakership, the CUG faction leadership, the parliament's defense committee, and the ministries of justice, tax, finance, economics and agriculture had all come under the control of a younger, partially Western-educated elite.

These personnel changes are significant. Never before have so many members of the CUG's new generation held governmental portfolios. Still, they do not signal the sea change in Georgian politics that observers have been expecting for nearly a decade. As has often been the case in Georgia under Shevardnadze, there are several reasons for suspecting that the very idea of a "young reformer" circle is more the result of wishful thinking by the international community than a portent of clean and responsive governance.

In the first place, younger CUG activists, although in more visible positions than before, still control ministries that are largely irrelevant in the real world of Georgian politics. The ministries with genuine influence remain firmly in the hands of Soviet-era cadres, all in their late forties and fifties. Foreign Minister Irakli Menagharishvili was a former leader of the Georgian communist youth organization, chair of a district party committee, and minister of health in Soviet Georgia before becoming foreign minister in 1995. Minister of Internal Affairs Kakha Targamadze--arguably the most powerful person in Georgia after Shevardnadze--is likewise a product of the Soviet era who has refused to launch thoroughgoing reforms in his institution. The minister of state security spent his early career in the Soviet security services. The minister of state property served in the Soviet ministry of foreign trade, including at the Soviet trade mission in Iraq. A real sign of change would be to see a young reformer appointed to one of these positions. Until then, it is this older, Soviet-era elite that will control both the government and the internal machinery of the CUG.

Another reason for skepticism is that the young reformers are in no real sense a unified group. They are united by little more than age, and there are plenty of other young party activists whose reform credentials are uncertain at best. Their positions in government are likely to highlight their differences on key policy issues. Indeed, the only thing that seems to bind them at the moment is their loyalty to the CUG as the leading force in Georgian politics and the vehicle of their own political ascendancy. Unwavering loyalty to a party that has led the country deeper into corruption, and has been behind several flawed elections, hardly seems a sign of a clear reform orientation.

The Myth of Progress

Progress in democratization is notoriously difficult to measure, as is the impact that foreign assistance might have on the process. Those who design, administer and monitor democracy assistance programs rightly stress that a country's overall trajectory, not the short-term ups and downs of its reform effort, is the proper measure of how well it is performing. In these terms, Georgia has drifted backward in recent years, not inched forward, in the critical areas of democratization, human rights and administrative reform.

Since independence Georgia has had three parliamentary elections, three presidential races and one set of local elections--most of them during Shevardnadze's tenure. None, however, has fully met international standards, and the elections got worse throughout the 1990s. Parliamentary elections in 1995 and 1999 produced an assembly overwhelmingly controlled by the CUG, and presidential elections in 1995 and 2000 led to sweeping victories for Shevardnadze. In all of the elections, observers openly condemned CUG manipulations. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) primly noted in its report on the 1999 elections that they "failed to fully meet all commitments", especially since the "election law allowed the ruling party to enjoy a dominant position in the election administration at all levels." Non-governmental observers were less guarded. The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), the country's highly respected local monitoring organization, reported widespread stuffing of ballot boxes, intimidation of voters by police and violence against independent observers.

Both local and international observers were unanimous in their assessment of Shevardnadze's 79.8 percent victory in the 2000 presidential race. As ISFED noted in its election report, "The biased interference of local officials and law enforcement representatives in the election process, as well as their criminal inaction, were outrageous. These facts demonstrate that the rights of presidential candidates and thousands of voters were severely violated." The victory even gave rise to a popular joke: Shevardnadze's chief adviser greets him the morning after the election with good news and bad news. "The good news is that you won the election", he reports. "The bad news is that no one voted for you."

In practical terms, Georgia's multiparty system remains to a great degree a notional one. Under the current electoral law, central and regional electoral commissions have most of their members appointed by state institutions--and are therefore guaranteed a majority of CUG supporters. Moreover, complaints about the conduct of the elections are processed not through the courts but by the electoral commission itself, an exemplary case of the fox guarding the hen house.

There are, of course, other parties represented in parliament. The most powerful of these is the Revival Union, a political formation that could not exist in its present strength without the willingness of the strongman of the Achara republic, Aslan Abashidze, to deliver votes in openly fraudulent elections in the districts he controls. There are opposition currents besides Revival, but these mostly exist within the ranks of the CUG rather than in the weak and poorly organized opposition parties. Machinations within the ruling party are far more significant to everyday politics than any potential challenges from outside, and representatives of foreign NGOs report that, especially in the countryside, there is little sense among CUG activists that a genuine multiparty system is even desirable. At the moment, Georgia does have a relatively stable political system, at least at the center, but that stability is based on a hardening of the CUG's corporatist authoritarianism. That may be better than the perpetual presidencies and quasi-monarchical rule of chief executives farther to the east, in Central Asia, but it is a far cry from the standards to which other post-communist states to Georgia's west are normally held.

A similar situation prevails with regard to human rights. Georgia joined the Council of Europe in April 1999, only the fourth country in the Commonwealth of Independent States to be admitted to Europe's human rights and democracy body. In the lead up to the Council's vote on accession, Georgia adopted a number of reforms designed to bring the country in line with European standards, particularly in the area of human rights and judicial procedure. Since then, however, not only has Georgia failed to comply with the Council's mandated reforms, but some of the legislation adopted before it became a member has been reversed or watered down.

Thus, in February 1998, for example, Shevardnadze signed a new criminal code that strengthened the power of the defense counsel, re-inforced the right of individuals to seek redress in cases of alleged abuse, and reduced the legal value of defendant confessions as a way of diminishing the opportunities for police torture. But in the summer of 1999, shortly after admission to the Council, amendments to the criminal code were adopted that virtually destroyed any progress that the original reforms might have made. Local and international human rights groups continue to report frequent police beatings (both inside and outside police stations), death threats to journalists coming from state officials, and the use of electric shock torture against detainees.

Consider also local government reform, an area of particular interest to the Council of Europe. Pressured by Strasbourg, the Georgian parliament adopted a package of new laws in 1997. A system of local councils with directly elected members was established in each of the country's districts. So far, however, the ability of the councils to influence policy has been negligible. The real power in Georgia's regions rests with the district governors and prefects--both appointed by the president. The overhaul has had little real impact on local administration; if anything, it seems to have diminished it further, at least in the eyes of average Georgians. According to the UNDP's 1999 Human Development Report, in 1996, 42 percent of Georgians expressed high or moderate confidence in local government institutions; by 1998 the figure had fallen to 25 percent. The truth is that the country remains highly centralized in terms of both political authority and budgetary control, with the mass of the country's citizens having no power to effect change.

Many foreign governments, and especially the United States, are concerned to present a different picture. So eager have U.S. agencies been to give a positive spin to Georgian developments that inaccurate facts have been inflated into evidence of major progress. In May 2000, for example, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched a call for proposals to administer a $5.82 million program in the area of local government reform, a solicitation eventually won by the Washington-based Urban Institute. In the background information for prospective contractors, the agency asserted that the Georgian government had worked hard to reshape local government and that the country was entering a critical stage in which foreign expertise would be necessary to round off the reform effort. As the solicitation explained, "USAID, in cooperation with the U.S. Treasury, has . . . supported the development of a package of eight draft laws related to fiscal decentralization (local budget, municipal finance, local audit, equalization formula for transfers, etc.). The newly elected Parliament will be debating these bills in 2000."

Yet not only were the "eight draft laws" never debated in parliament in 2000, but it is questionable whether they really existed at all.

The Georgian government has also been active in placing obstacles in the way of the few individuals who are genuinely committed to serious reform. In May 2000, when the Rustavi 2 television station broadcast a series of reports on abuses within the prosecutor's office, the prosecutor launched an investigation against the program's producer. A major anti-corruption commission, staffed by seven prominent government officials and intellectuals (and financed by the U.S. Department of Justice), was set up in September 2000. But since the commission reports directly to Shevardnadze, its draft recommendations were only made public after the international community began to put pressure on the president.

Notwithstanding its origins, there is a great deal of excitement about this new commission, with everyone from the U.S. government to George Soros getting behind the effort. Still, some of those intimately involved with the commission's work, both Georgians and Americans, are skeptical that anything but the most anodyne recommendations will ever be fully implemented. In November 2000, when Mikheil Saakashvili, the new justice minister, suggested launching a full-scale crackdown within his ministry, Shevardnadze publicly rebuked him for the potential "negative consequences" of his zeal.

Of course, this is not to say that no progress has been made. After all, Georgia under Shevardnadze is not involved in a full-scale war, either internally or with its neighbors; there have been elections, although fraudulent ones; human rights are guaranteed by law, even though the police and chief prosecutor have been known to harass journalists and torture prisoners; and the government has admitted that corruption exists and should be rooted out. All of this may be progress of a sort, but not the kind that warrants the enthusiastic accolades Georgia typically receives.

The Myth of "Georgia"

Like all its neighbors from the south Balkans to the south Caucasus to Central Asia, Georgia is a chronically weak state. In a region of only minimally successful countries, however, the Georgian case is particularly dire, even compared to its immediate neighbors, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Indeed, it is worth asking whether a state called "Georgia" even exists today in any meaningful sense.

Some 20 percent of the country's territory is either wholly outside the control of the recognized government or is only tenuously connected to it. After winning secessionist wars in the early 1990s, Abkhazia and South Ossetia are de facto independent states with their own armies, customs posts, flags, currencies (the Russian ruble) and school systems. Neither considers itself to be in the same time zone as the rest of Georgia; because of their strong political connections with Russia, locals set their clocks on Moscow time, an hour behind Tbilisi's. Travel between Tbilisi and Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, is relatively easy, if one can push through the crowds of smugglers selling contraband petroleum products, wheat flour and cigarettes imported from the Russian Federation. Traveling in Abkhazia, however, is still dangerous, so much so that the U.S. government now forbids its two soldiers working with the United Nations mission in Georgia to go anywhere near the security zone separating Georgian and Abkhaz forces.

Achara, while still officially committed to existence inside a unified Georgia, has little real connection to the center. The region's population is linguistically Georgian, although many inhabitants are Muslim rather than Orthodox Christian. The region does send deputies to the parliament in Tbilisi but, in practical terms, Achara is controlled by one man, Abashidze. He and his extended family have enriched themselves by controlling the border trade with Turkey, where illegal commerce in hazelnuts, cigarettes, alcohol and women is rife. So profitable has Abashidze's fiefdom become that it even attracted the attention of Hillary Clinton's brothers, Hugh and Tony Rodham, who signed a hazelnut export deal with Abashidze in 1999, before being dissuaded from going through with it by the Clinton administration.

In Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Achara, state structures exist that are, more or less, independent of the Georgian center. But plenty of other regions of Georgia are only theoretically part of a single state. The country's main north-south artery, the Georgian Military Highway, is no more than a wagon trail for much of its length, becoming impassable in the winter snows and the spring thaw. For most Georgians outside Tbilisi and a few other urban centers, the only interaction with the Georgian state is through a corrupt traffic policeman, waving down cars loaded with produce to extort a few lari in "fines." So accustomed have average Georgians become to the predatory state that they either voluntarily pull over and drop a few bills in the police coffer or speed past the roadblock, hoping that the officers will think that only someone too important to be swindled would dare rush through without stopping. In Georgia, flouting the law has become a hedge against being cheated by it.

No observers deny that Georgia's economic and social situation is dire. One need only spend a night in Tbilisi--and venture anywhere outside the Sheraton hotel--to experience the frequent electricity cuts. Strangely, though, the progressive pauperization of Georgian society is usually seen as a phenomenon somehow outside the control of the government, as if the poverty, corruption and lawlessness that confront average Georgian citizens were separable from the policies pursued by the CUG government. But to local journalists and analysts, the links between Georgia's weak state and the interests of its rulers are readily apparent.

Under Shevardnadze, Georgia has seen a marked expansion in banditry, kidnapping and extortion, yet the police and security organs remain largely unreformed. Indeed, as average Georgians and Western expatriates alike report, state officials are themselves often complicit in the crimes they are meant to police. Stories are legion about police officers who mysteriously seem to know their way around an apartment when they are called to investigate a break-in. Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry has superseded the Defense Ministry as the real locus of organized violence. In budgetary terms, the army is largely an irrelevant institution; its allocations, which accounted for only 9 percent of the total state budget in 1997, stood at under 3 percent in 2000. The security services, however, have maintained their level of state support at 7-8 percent throughout this period, and remain under the control of a Soviet-era minister. Furthermore, the "other goods and services" line in the ministry's budget each year covers a host of administrative sins, including the purchase in 1998 of a fleet of expensive foreign cars bearing police license plates.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that state budget expenditures are only a fraction of the amount of money coming into government institutions and the pockets of their employees. Even during the Soviet years, for example, the highway police was essentially a tax farming organization. Its employees paid exorbitant bribes to secure positions--the better the post, such as on a road leading to a vacation spot where people were likely to carry money, the higher the cost--and then spent the rest of their careers paying off their investment by extorting money from travelers. The same system operates today, as a drive on any Georgian highway will confirm.

The tax inspectorate has provided a similar source of graft. When examinations were held for a new intake of inspectors, thousands applied. The government lauded this response as a sign of citizens' faith in the newly reformed inspectorate, but average applicants knew better--a tax inspector's job was a sure ticket to prosperity. If anything, opportunities for state-sponsored dishonesty have probably expanded under Shevardnadze.