It was a rainy and gloomy morning on October 26, 2024. I needed to catch a minibus back to Tbilisi after voting in a crucial “Russia vs. Europe” parliamentary election in my hometown in western Georgia, where I was registered. I was lucky to find a minibus quickly, unlike a trip from Tbilisi two days earlier, when an unprecedented transportation collapse nearly prevented western-Georgia-registered voters from exercising their constitutional rights. I was even luckier to get a front seat next to the driver, the highest comfort and honor a passenger can dream of on otherwise claustrophobic minibus rides. That good fortune began to wane, however, when I realized that my seatbelt – mandatory for such a highly respectable seat – wasn’t working.
The driver reacted awkwardly when I alerted him to the problem, first pretending to try to fix it, then offering me his own seatbelt, which I politely declined, and finally making such a fuss about it that I began to feel the ears and eyes of other, less privileged passengers on my back. Aware that public opinion was turning against me as an overly sensitive city wimp, I quickly gave up – life is overrated, and death is not the worst that can happen to a wo/man, after all – and only pretended to wear a faulty seatbelt so that the police wouldn’t make trouble. The transition from a law-abiding urban citizen back to a small-town mess was quick and smooth. The minibus took off, with me seated between a cheerful driver and a grumpy passenger.
The two seatbelt skeptics, however, showed unlikely caution in discussing politics – exchanging only cryptic texts about an inevitable topic on election day. “Are we going to wake up in a new Georgia tomorrow?” the cheerful one asked cheerfully, to which the grumpy one grumpily replied that he wasn’t any party’s ardent supporter “as long as there’s peace in the country.” Both seemed to understand who the other had voted for, which was probably not the same party, and agreed to disagree by agreeing – also cryptically – on some sort of “European peace”. Strange level of obsession with peace, for those who just shamed you for asking for a seatbelt, no?
It could be that even in death, one longs for some agency. Even though our driver was frequently distracted by Messenger chats, I survived that trip, possibly thanks to the (must-have) cross hanging from the rearview mirror. But as we were about to see that fateful day (and for many days after), the country could never survive the cultural and social differences that were at play during that two-and-a-half-hour drive.
Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to tell you about the Free Will vs. Determinism dilemmas Georgia faced these past weeks.
It’s no longer the rainy fall months. It’s March 2025, and the days are sunnier. Groups of volunteers who went to western Georgia to help locals cope with deadly snowstorms are returning. Some of them had gone there straight from Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, the epicenter of Georgian protests, packing survival gear, warm clothes, and their 5,000 lari fines to come to the aid of helpless citizens stranded in snow-covered villages. Activists mobilized after horrifying reports came in in late February of entire villages cut off after days of continuous snowfall, many unable to reach their loved ones to call for external help while those stranded fought for their lives. Until the public backlash set in, the authorities seemed unprepared for the crisis and indifferent to the alarms.
Soon after the groups arrived on the scene, heartwarming videos of their life-saving efforts flooded social media. Some were digging through impossible trails to check on citizens in remote homes, others were delivering food and medicine via drone, and groups were seen carrying stranded, bedridden elderly across long, snowy distances on handmade stretchers. And, of course, there were the familiar scenes of locals reaching into what little they had to show arriving volunteers the best of Georgian hospitality.
But digging deeper also meant finding a multilayered social catastrophe buried under a thick blanket of snow. Reports of widespread poverty in increasingly emptying Georgian villages were accompanied by stories of how that poverty was being exploited, contributing to the Georgian Dream’s ever-growing grip on the country’s regions. Media workers reported hostile encounters with police and what appeared to be local GD loyalists. Volunteers told stories of ignorant locals disregarding the needs of others to hoard supplies meant for the truly needy or stories of other indifferent locals who, instead of helping their neighbors, treated volunteers as some sort of “Glovo couriers.” Some were also hurt by the ingratitude of those who, after receiving help from volunteers, still took the opportunity to show their dissatisfaction.
Where are those good old-fashioned values?..
“We, the Gurians, were once decent people,” lamented Ani Intskirveli, a native of Guria, one of the western Georgian regions hardest hit by the snowfalls, in a Facebook post recalling her bitter experience after arriving in the home region with a group of volunteers from Tbilisi. Indeed, small Guria was once a center of rebellious community culture and progressive politics, from the fiercest anti-imperialist peasant revolt in the 19th century to the creation of the “Gurian Republic” in the first decade of the last century, a rebellious project with a social-democratic system of self-government. When Georgia’s first republic was established in 1918, those hailing from the province dominated the political elite.
That rebel spirit seems to have left Guria for now. Georgian Dream won all three Gurian municipalities in the last parliamentary elections with more than 60% of the vote, which is considered too much even by those who believe the election was rigged. As snow buried Gurian villages and authorities were unable to cope with the emergency, many couldn’t help but remind locals of how the party they voted for had failed them. Others hoped that witnessing the solidarity efforts of repressed and vilified activists in Tbilisi, as opposed to indifferent authorities, would push locals to change their worldview. This hope, however, seems to be based on the (naive?) assumption that GD supporters in the countryside are merely victims of propaganda, just one humanitarian visit or honest conversation away from converting and rebelling against the local networks they’ve come to rely on (however unreliable you may find them to be).
Ultimately, such calls only end up sounding like the desperate cries of self-designated saviors who themselves are in need of saving. Many in these regions seem to see dealing with snow as an individual responsibility rather than something to be expected from the state. And if people still feel abandoned by local authorities in times of need, it’s the same local elites and networks they’ll be left with once the urban rescuers pack up and head back to Tbilisi.
But now that even these “saviors” feel increasingly abandoned by the “rest of the country” in the struggle for their rights and freedoms, one cannot help but wonder: how angry should they be with the destitute fellow citizens who seem to have sanctioned their oppression by voting for the party that never made a secret of evil intentions?
Got what they deserved?
The question is kept alive thanks to the ongoing turmoil in the mining town of Chiatura, which is facing recurring existential crises. Thousands risk losing their income as the mining company has halted production. The most brutal part of the story is that miners first heard of the terrifying prospect days after the disputed October 26 election, where Georgian Dream secured up to 66 percent of local votes.
But as desperate workers demand answers, the widespread anger is struggling to grow into greater nationwide solidarity. A video from the Chiatura rally showed one of the leaders openly distancing himself from the ongoing protests in Tbilisi, even criticizing the Rustaveli rallies for “burning trash cans.” Clearly, it is a desperate attempt not to alienate the authorities in this struggle, and yet not something an exhausted Tbilisi activist wants to hear after 100 days of freezing in the streets against police dispersals, arrests, beatings, repression, and disproportionate fines many times their monthly salaries – given they still have their jobs. And this is when those in the progressive camp of the ongoing resistance movement have tried their best to put the plight of Chiatura and other communities on the protest agenda. But it was clearly not enough.
Remarks from the Chiatura rally prompted some opposition-minded citizens to respond with angry “got-what-you-deserve” comments. Others struggle to figure out how fair such anger can be. Perhaps some responsibility goes to the educated urban activist circles that handle such crises just like authorities handle snow: only getting involved when cultural and social differences reach such catastrophic levels that the effort to resolve them becomes riskier.
Or maybe we can still save some anger for fellow citizens who, even when in trouble themselves, still find time to add insults to our mounting injuries?
After all, frank communication of one’s disappointment could still be more humanizing than the common approach to communities that make up two-thirds of our country: impulsively alternating between generalizing, somewhat snobbish idealization of “common people” and no less snobbish condemnation of the “Georgian Dream slaves.”