Dispatch – November 1: Anxious Attachment

The Tbilisi civil war, which broke out on December 21, 1991, is said to have carried “a rather peculiar character.” According to historian Gabriel Chubinidze, “the frontline stretched across only several streets, while the rest of the city continued to live its usual life. Locals observed the confrontation between two armed groups from afar – some from the Avlabari Metro station, which offered a great view of Rustaveli Avenue, and others, the more daring ones, from Pushkin Square and the areas around Rustaveli Metro station.”

It’s October 2025, and the same exact place where armed groups once exchanged fire is now caught in exchanges of a different peculiarity. Instead of bullets, there are footsteps, as a small group of protesters again moves to block traffic in front of parliament. They join their hands and line up across the road, while two or three fierce dogs – survivors of earlier mysterious disappearances that claimed their fellow canine activists – move to clear the way of cars. Other demonstrators cheer with “thank yous” from the packed sidewalk. Police cars approach and order the group to clear the road, are not obeyed, and drive back. Dozens of officers, however, remain at the scene, watching from across the road, huddled beneath the Museum of Fine Arts building. That’s how it remains frozen for a while.

It’s only a matter of twenty-odd minutes before the police cars return, repeat their warnings, get whistled back, and then the officers move from the Museum in formation to push the smaller group of demonstrators off the road. The whole scene unfolds so quickly, peacefully, and routinely that one might think it had been harmoniously pre-staged, a silent, unconscious agreement between two opposing camps, a temporary truce. Yet shortly after the routine ends, the same officers are seen stopping and snatching “offenders” just outside the protest zone.

Further outside the perimeter, however, things are pretty much like in those historical records: “…the rest of the city continues to live its usual life.”

Or does it?

Here’s Nini and the Dispatch Newsletter to tell about Georgia’s anxious attachment to a small place that came to echo the country’s bigger battles.

For nearly a year, it has felt as if Georgia has had two parliaments.

One, housed in the vast, brownish historic building on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, has been mostly occupied by Georgian Dream, a political party struggling to reclaim legitimacy since last year’s parliamentary vote. The other has stood right in front of that building, outdoors. That scene came to acquire its own representative powers as daily protests of many thousands pouring into the streets after November 28, 2024, gradually and inevitably dwindled to a few hundred, with shifting turnout. Over time, the place also started to produce its own laws, often in open conflict with those coming from inside the building. One such law was a mandatory routine of blocking the road there every evening as an act of continued resistance.

How many people show up there every evening has been a matter of heated scientific dispute. Repressive protest laws, the complexity of the rally venue, and the occasional selective flying of not-too-impartial TV drones have made doing exact math tricky. The ruling party has claimed that some 50 radicals – or “Akatsukis” – as they came to refer to them after a Naruto criminal group – were blocking the road each evening. Yet as stricter laws took effect, police arrested more than twice as many for “blocking roads” or “covering faces” during rallies. Something doesn’t quite add up, critics noted.

What matters more than numbers is that each protester standing there seems to be representing many others who have stayed home, for reasons excusable or not. The police have learned this repeatedly, and the hard way. Every time they tried to push demonstrators off the road for good, scores of others would flock in out of nowhere, rendering their efforts futile again and again. Writing hundreds of solid fines didn’t help either, so they introduced detention.

Blessing, Curse

Those dedicated protesters – the permanent guard – aren’t always happy about their representative roles.

There has been plenty of blaming, shaming, and complaining about how some would rather stay comfortably at home while a smaller group of committed activists (an identification some have come to hate lately) take the hit: police crackdowns, “rain and wind”, draconian fines, and now even administrative detention with criminal sentences for repeated acts. Then the shamers, too, got shamed back. The daily road blockages, critics argued, had exhausted their purpose; they were no longer worth the sacrifice.

But while some days it does feel as though a consensus is forming that it’s time to explore alternative battle strategies, something still makes it impossible to let go of it, of that tiny little piece of land. And authorities, too, aren’t giving up their desperate urge to reclaim control over the holy site.

It’s not that anyone is truly fascinated by the beauty of the place. The capital has far more scenic views to offer. Nor is anyone particularly fond of the legislative building, which only carries sour memories. Stop someone in the street and ask for alternative architectural ideas for the site, and they’ll likely have a project ready, one whose main purpose would be to erase all memory that this stupid construction with all these silly men inside ever existed. The more pious ones have even traced all the doom to the fact that the country’s main political building rose on the ruins of a cathedral. It was Alexander Nevsky’s military cathedral, built in the late Tsarist period and demolished by the communists in the 1930s as they came for the church. While there have been repeated calls to rebuild it, to finally get rid of the curse, historians have cautioned: Don’t get too nostalgic, the military cathedral was meant there as a tribute to the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, they’d say.

Outside, too, the scene had its share of tragedy, nonsense, and, not too rarely, bloodshed. Yet it also became the stage for political victories. Every time the institutions inside that building failed their people, Georgians would try to reclaim their rights from outside its doors. The gray square remembers many battles, even if with causes contrasting and outcomes diverging.

Read the recollections from March 1956, when the brutal Soviet crackdown on pro-Stalin demonstrations left dozens dead, and you’ll find striking similarities with scenes from March 2023, when mass protests thwarted Georgian Dream’s first attempt to pass the “foreign agents” law. “I stood here on April 9, too,” older citizens love to say as the first thing when addressing today’s rallies in the same place. The memory reaches back to 1989, when Soviet troops crushed peaceful demonstrations in blood, and yet, on its second anniversary, April 9, 1991, Georgia proclaimed the restoration of its independence. It would be a matter of months, however, before the events of “rather peculiar character” would reclaim the Avenue.

Define ‘Usual’

It remains to be seen whether the stricter protest laws will eventually put an end to the daily rallies outside parliament, as Georgian Dream warned would happen. So far, they have only managed to transform the routine, while authorities continue to encircle the protest zone with their own parallel reality.

On October 22, the same day as tensions flared within the small protest perimeter and dozens were detained for attempting to block the road, the Opera Theater, barely half a kilometer away, hosted the opening ceremony of the fifth Silk Road Forum, bringing together political leaders and business figures from across the region. Georgian Dream officials, undisturbed, took the stage to boast of Georgia’s “Middle Corridor” potential. Just a day earlier, inside the freshly renovated Rustaveli Cinema building across from parliament, Georgian leaders had festively inaugurated the local office of the UAE-based Eagle Hills real estate company. Officials hailed it as “the largest investment in Georgian history,” worth over six billion dollars, selling it as an alternative path to prosperity as relations with the West continue to fray.

But none of that seems to matter to those who remain within the sacred perimeter. Has it become, however risky, a kind of comfort zone for those unwilling to reach farther out? Or is it precisely because spaces for self-expression are shrinking and resources are dwindling that it remains vital to guard this symbolic stronghold, to maintain control over the heart that keeps pumping protest energy through a struggling nation?

“Maybe you can get the word around,” a woman in her early eighties said as she approached me and my colleague during a larger march on October 26, the anniversary of the disputed 2024 parliamentary vote. She had an idea: to share her photo and passport details with others, who would make an effigy of her, and of others like her, and place them at the parliament to fill the number of daily protesters. Her health no longer allowed her to be there every evening, but she still wanted to be represented.

It’s perhaps that even when “…the rest of the city continues to live its usual life“, the “usual life” doesn’t mean a “good life.” It didn’t back in 1991, and it doesn’t now.