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საქართველო პოლიტიკური ისტორი� დამოუკიდებლობი� გამოცხადების შემდეგ
Georgia emerged from the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 with the promise of swift economic and democratic reform. But that promise remains unfulfilled. Economic collapse, secessionist challenges, civil war and the failure to escape the legacy of Soviet rule - culminating in the 2008 war with Russia - characterize a two-decade struggle to establish democratic institutions and consolidate statehood. Here, Stephen Jones critically analyses Georgia's recent political and economic development, illustrating what its 'transition' has meant, not just for the state, but for its citizens as well. An authoritative and commanding exploration of Georgia since independence, this is essential for those interested in the post-Soviet world
456 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
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248 people want to read
About the author
Stephen F. Jones
9books9followersStephen Francis Jones is an English historian of Eastern Europe. He has been a member of the Mount Holyoke College faculty since 1989. He is an expert on post-communist societies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Jones has briefed the U.S. Department of State on a regular basis, as well as a number of U.S. ambassadors to Georgia.
From 1989 to 1991, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Jones was repeatedly called upon by the New York Times, the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and National Geographic magazine for background information. In 1992, he was included in a New York Times article discussing Georgia's future. Additionally, he has participated in five different news programs with the BBC World Service as well as numerous American radio and TV stations, including NPR's Weekend Edition. In July 1996, Jones traveled to Georgia for the World Bank to examine the impact of economic reform on the lives of ordinary citizens in Caucasia and the following year traveled as a consultant to UNDP (United Nations Development Program) to Abkhazia, a secessionist region in Georgia, to investigate the plight of refugees.
Jones is also leading an ongoing effort to work with officials in Georgia to identify, preserve, and catalog archival materials and employ contemporary library technologies to support the nation's archival and library systems. In 2003-2004, he directed two summer programs for Georgians funded by the U.S. State Department. The first was a Georgian Library Professionals program, the second a program on religious tolerance. In 2011, he was named a foreign member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. That same year, Jones was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Tbilisi State University, Georgia.
At Mount Holyoke, Jones has taught Nationalism: East and West, Post-Soviet Foreign Policy, and The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. Coconvening six conferences, Jones has published widely, including dozens of articles, chapters, and book reviews on contemporary events in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
From 1989 to 1991, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, Jones was repeatedly called upon by the New York Times, the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and National Geographic magazine for background information. In 1992, he was included in a New York Times article discussing Georgia's future. Additionally, he has participated in five different news programs with the BBC World Service as well as numerous American radio and TV stations, including NPR's Weekend Edition. In July 1996, Jones traveled to Georgia for the World Bank to examine the impact of economic reform on the lives of ordinary citizens in Caucasia and the following year traveled as a consultant to UNDP (United Nations Development Program) to Abkhazia, a secessionist region in Georgia, to investigate the plight of refugees.
Jones is also leading an ongoing effort to work with officials in Georgia to identify, preserve, and catalog archival materials and employ contemporary library technologies to support the nation's archival and library systems. In 2003-2004, he directed two summer programs for Georgians funded by the U.S. State Department. The first was a Georgian Library Professionals program, the second a program on religious tolerance. In 2011, he was named a foreign member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. That same year, Jones was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Tbilisi State University, Georgia.
At Mount Holyoke, Jones has taught Nationalism: East and West, Post-Soviet Foreign Policy, and The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. Coconvening six conferences, Jones has published widely, including dozens of articles, chapters, and book reviews on contemporary events in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 22, 2019
Georgia is a country that is 'multi-layered palimpsest, modern, optimistic, and entrepreneurial on top, but poor, traditional and traumatised underneath'. There are not many books that tackle the recent history of Georgia in detail in English. Stephen Jones book published in 2013 is one of the few and offers an intricate detailed account of Georgia from its split from the wreckage of the USSR up to the somewhat tarnished dying days of the Saakashvili administration. The book deals with the events leading up to the fracturing of the USSR and the emergence of post-Soviet Georgia. It looks in detail at the rise to power of the first three presidents of independent Georgia and the conditions that led to their rise and the characteristics of their reigns. Individual chapters then access specific topics including the state, the economy, democracy, nationalism and national security and how these issues shaped or were shaped over the years and by the different presidents.
The book opens with a scene setting historical background which sets the stage for the turbulent years which followed. Forcefully incorporated into the USSR in the early days of the Bolshevik rise to power in Moscow Georgia had a curious relationship to the centre. Georgia provided two of the Soviet periods most notorious figures in the forms of Stalin and Beria while also experiencing the brutality of the terror which ripped a hole in Georgian society. However, by the 1970s Jones says Moscow was very much 'an absentee landlord' in which institutions were 'Soviet in form, but Georgian in content'. While Georgia was a republic of the USSR it enjoyed a 'large degree of autonomy' where elites were able to 'administer their offices semi independently' and in such conditions 'subversive ethno-federal institutions were able to emerge' which ultimately contributed to the undermining of the Soviet state.
Jones quotes Lenin in describing the conditions encountered by Georgia on its break with the USSR 'Our state apparatus is so deplorable... that we must must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, baring in mind these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome...'. This is an issue which has beset each president with their collective failures to effectively understand the situation and address it being responsible in no small part for their downfall. Jones notes the problem under the Soviet system of a chasm between 'elites' and 'subjects' in a country where reliance on traditional patronage systems, regional power bases and networks to maintain power was paramount. The carrying over of this situation into the post-Soviet era - where it was further effectively exploited by organised crime - led to a period where the centre was enfeebled until the determined, popular � and largely successful - effort of Saakashvili to eradicate organised crime and the worst aspects of economic criminality.
Jones looks at and assesses the reign of each president from which I drew the following. The Gamsakhurdia reign 'appealed to a nostalgic yearning among Georgians for the innocence of pre-Soviet times represented by traditional family roles, fellowship, religion and self sacrifice' � 'support was socially heterogeneous, based on pent up resentments against soulless modernity , social immobility and enforced constraints on status, wealth and Georgia's proper recognition by the rest of the world'. He governed like Soviet party boss with a paternalistic attitude toward law, press, parliament and opposition. His failure to recognise national minorities or take on their concerns, especially the problem of South Ossetia was a key to the unravelling of his administration.
By the chaotic and violent end of Gamsakhurdia a saviour was needed and so arrived Shevardnadze. Although he was to reflect “I should not have come, it was swimming against the tide�. He inherited a state incapable of defending its borders, incapable of controlling crime and corruption, a state unable to pay salaries or maintain adequate schools or hospitals. His conciliatory approach attempted to bring all on board and to buy off opposition with roles in state institutions. In so doing criminality and corruption were essentially formalised as state and government. Despite this there were key victories, including back then entry to the CIS and passing of 1995 constitution and appointment of reformers. By 1991 hyperinflation had been brought under control and monetary reform took place. This however was coupled with an ill considered privatisation programme and 40% reduction in public sector employment, “For the majority of the population life was long queues for rationed bread and petrol, non-payment of wages and pensions,unattainable medicines, sick children, closed schools and dangerous streets�. However, stability was always challenged by interest groups not least with the Abkazia conflict for example which was not an ethnic conflict but attempt by Russia to reassert imperial ambitions, undermine Shevardnadze and was exploited by elites on both sides to further their own ends. Jones gives Shevardnadze credit for at least stemming Georgia's mutinies through policies of political balance, inclusion and moderation. However, Shevardnadze lost popular support due to his failure to 'ensure elementary medical support, adequate pensions and jobs'.
The key difference between Shevardnadze and Saakashvili who succeeded him was while Shevardnadze used laws to maintain his control Saakashvili used them to build a strong state. Saakashvili seems to have been something of a miracle worker in successfully purging a state, government and political system of mafia like control. Saakashvili was successful in taking back control of prisons from Mafia families and in his zero tolerance for crime on streets. His successfully clean up of the security services and ruthless assault on criminality and corruption made a clean break on which to build a fresh system. It is how well the construction of this system went that leaves a blot on Saakashvili's reign. A serious failure was the adopting of a neo-liberal approach to Georgia's economy which 'was not marketised but monopolised' where 'deregulation compounded the loss of state authority and multiplied opportunities for patronage capitalism' the 'Soviet bureaucratic state was replaced by a quasi feudal one of elite pacts and economic monopolies'. At a time when a strong state needed to protect a fledgling economy and a struggling population it threw the doors open to the wolves. As Jones notes 'the IMF emphasised a minimal state, when the real problem was an absent state and a weak private sector (�) if in Soviet Georgia corruption contributed to economic efficiency and political apathy, in post-Soviet Georgia it undermined reform and threatened national security'.
A final chapter addresses the issue of nationalism. Jones correctly criticises an 'overwhelming bias' in Western academic studies of the Caucuses 'toward national conflict and its resolution� with this focus tending to the 'mistaken assumption about the relationship between nationalism and politics in Georgia'. He argues that 'the link between ethnic conflict and violence in Georgia is the result of three erroneous assumptions: that if the groups are “ethnic�, then the conflicts source must be ethnic; that ethnic conflict is an explosion waiting to happen; and that all ethnic conflicts are irrational and therefore likely to end in violence. All these premises lead us to a flawed analysis of the role of nationalism in Georgia'. From this perspective the 2008 South Ossetia conflict, for Russia the war was not predominantly about Georgia but more fundamental issues including the eastward NATO expansion, recognition of Kosovo, Russia security in North Caucuses and the western challenge to control of oil and gas supplies from Eurasia. In this and other cases Jones argues while there may be an ethnic smokescreen, and indeed efforts by some to stoke an ethnic based grievance or conflict, the underlying issue which is the cause lies elsewhere. This problem was understood and highlighted by Tedo Japaridge, Sec Gen of Georgia's Nat Sec Council 2002-3, who saw the economy as Georgia's greatest national security threat and would remain so as long as mass poverty and unemployment persist.
In conclusion Jones sees EU membership 'the only realistic future for Georgias economic development'. Given the crisis which has gripped Europe since the book appeared it is debatable whether this might still be the case. While Georgia remains an area of interest for the EU nothing has really been done towards setting the country on route for membership and at least in the short term concentrating upon strengthening regional trading and ties including some form of rapprochement with Russia (unlikely given the current direction of Moscow) seem like better first steps. Despite the fact this book stops about a decade ago it remains I think essential for anyone wanting to get an idea of how Georgia got where it is today. Ideally this book needs a new volume to include the post Saakashvili years. A rewarding read for those prepare to make the effort and the chapter on nationalism worth a read alone for anyone interested in the subject.
The book opens with a scene setting historical background which sets the stage for the turbulent years which followed. Forcefully incorporated into the USSR in the early days of the Bolshevik rise to power in Moscow Georgia had a curious relationship to the centre. Georgia provided two of the Soviet periods most notorious figures in the forms of Stalin and Beria while also experiencing the brutality of the terror which ripped a hole in Georgian society. However, by the 1970s Jones says Moscow was very much 'an absentee landlord' in which institutions were 'Soviet in form, but Georgian in content'. While Georgia was a republic of the USSR it enjoyed a 'large degree of autonomy' where elites were able to 'administer their offices semi independently' and in such conditions 'subversive ethno-federal institutions were able to emerge' which ultimately contributed to the undermining of the Soviet state.
Jones quotes Lenin in describing the conditions encountered by Georgia on its break with the USSR 'Our state apparatus is so deplorable... that we must must first think very carefully how to combat its defects, baring in mind these defects are rooted in the past, which, although it has been overthrown, has not yet been overcome...'. This is an issue which has beset each president with their collective failures to effectively understand the situation and address it being responsible in no small part for their downfall. Jones notes the problem under the Soviet system of a chasm between 'elites' and 'subjects' in a country where reliance on traditional patronage systems, regional power bases and networks to maintain power was paramount. The carrying over of this situation into the post-Soviet era - where it was further effectively exploited by organised crime - led to a period where the centre was enfeebled until the determined, popular � and largely successful - effort of Saakashvili to eradicate organised crime and the worst aspects of economic criminality.
Jones looks at and assesses the reign of each president from which I drew the following. The Gamsakhurdia reign 'appealed to a nostalgic yearning among Georgians for the innocence of pre-Soviet times represented by traditional family roles, fellowship, religion and self sacrifice' � 'support was socially heterogeneous, based on pent up resentments against soulless modernity , social immobility and enforced constraints on status, wealth and Georgia's proper recognition by the rest of the world'. He governed like Soviet party boss with a paternalistic attitude toward law, press, parliament and opposition. His failure to recognise national minorities or take on their concerns, especially the problem of South Ossetia was a key to the unravelling of his administration.
By the chaotic and violent end of Gamsakhurdia a saviour was needed and so arrived Shevardnadze. Although he was to reflect “I should not have come, it was swimming against the tide�. He inherited a state incapable of defending its borders, incapable of controlling crime and corruption, a state unable to pay salaries or maintain adequate schools or hospitals. His conciliatory approach attempted to bring all on board and to buy off opposition with roles in state institutions. In so doing criminality and corruption were essentially formalised as state and government. Despite this there were key victories, including back then entry to the CIS and passing of 1995 constitution and appointment of reformers. By 1991 hyperinflation had been brought under control and monetary reform took place. This however was coupled with an ill considered privatisation programme and 40% reduction in public sector employment, “For the majority of the population life was long queues for rationed bread and petrol, non-payment of wages and pensions,unattainable medicines, sick children, closed schools and dangerous streets�. However, stability was always challenged by interest groups not least with the Abkazia conflict for example which was not an ethnic conflict but attempt by Russia to reassert imperial ambitions, undermine Shevardnadze and was exploited by elites on both sides to further their own ends. Jones gives Shevardnadze credit for at least stemming Georgia's mutinies through policies of political balance, inclusion and moderation. However, Shevardnadze lost popular support due to his failure to 'ensure elementary medical support, adequate pensions and jobs'.
The key difference between Shevardnadze and Saakashvili who succeeded him was while Shevardnadze used laws to maintain his control Saakashvili used them to build a strong state. Saakashvili seems to have been something of a miracle worker in successfully purging a state, government and political system of mafia like control. Saakashvili was successful in taking back control of prisons from Mafia families and in his zero tolerance for crime on streets. His successfully clean up of the security services and ruthless assault on criminality and corruption made a clean break on which to build a fresh system. It is how well the construction of this system went that leaves a blot on Saakashvili's reign. A serious failure was the adopting of a neo-liberal approach to Georgia's economy which 'was not marketised but monopolised' where 'deregulation compounded the loss of state authority and multiplied opportunities for patronage capitalism' the 'Soviet bureaucratic state was replaced by a quasi feudal one of elite pacts and economic monopolies'. At a time when a strong state needed to protect a fledgling economy and a struggling population it threw the doors open to the wolves. As Jones notes 'the IMF emphasised a minimal state, when the real problem was an absent state and a weak private sector (�) if in Soviet Georgia corruption contributed to economic efficiency and political apathy, in post-Soviet Georgia it undermined reform and threatened national security'.
A final chapter addresses the issue of nationalism. Jones correctly criticises an 'overwhelming bias' in Western academic studies of the Caucuses 'toward national conflict and its resolution� with this focus tending to the 'mistaken assumption about the relationship between nationalism and politics in Georgia'. He argues that 'the link between ethnic conflict and violence in Georgia is the result of three erroneous assumptions: that if the groups are “ethnic�, then the conflicts source must be ethnic; that ethnic conflict is an explosion waiting to happen; and that all ethnic conflicts are irrational and therefore likely to end in violence. All these premises lead us to a flawed analysis of the role of nationalism in Georgia'. From this perspective the 2008 South Ossetia conflict, for Russia the war was not predominantly about Georgia but more fundamental issues including the eastward NATO expansion, recognition of Kosovo, Russia security in North Caucuses and the western challenge to control of oil and gas supplies from Eurasia. In this and other cases Jones argues while there may be an ethnic smokescreen, and indeed efforts by some to stoke an ethnic based grievance or conflict, the underlying issue which is the cause lies elsewhere. This problem was understood and highlighted by Tedo Japaridge, Sec Gen of Georgia's Nat Sec Council 2002-3, who saw the economy as Georgia's greatest national security threat and would remain so as long as mass poverty and unemployment persist.
In conclusion Jones sees EU membership 'the only realistic future for Georgias economic development'. Given the crisis which has gripped Europe since the book appeared it is debatable whether this might still be the case. While Georgia remains an area of interest for the EU nothing has really been done towards setting the country on route for membership and at least in the short term concentrating upon strengthening regional trading and ties including some form of rapprochement with Russia (unlikely given the current direction of Moscow) seem like better first steps. Despite the fact this book stops about a decade ago it remains I think essential for anyone wanting to get an idea of how Georgia got where it is today. Ideally this book needs a new volume to include the post Saakashvili years. A rewarding read for those prepare to make the effort and the chapter on nationalism worth a read alone for anyone interested in the subject.
November 8, 2024
Uno de los pocos libros de la Historia georgiana contemporánea.
Ideal antes y después de viajar a Tblisi.
Ideal antes y después de viajar a Tblisi.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 13, 2019
I got an impression that the author’s conclusions in the chapter on nationalism and when he discusses Georgians in the Soviet army are very much influenced by his Georgian intellectual elite interlocutors.
October 26, 2022
Excellent standard work on Georgia's political history since independence (until 2012'ish). Compulsory reading for anyone looking into this subject.
January 3, 2017
A compelling account of Georgia's recent history.
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