letter from tbilisi

rainy days in georgia
Eduard Shevardnadze is a Western hero.  
What's gone wrong in his own country?
december 18, 2000

1.

     Late on the afternoon of August 29, 1995, Eduard A.  Shevardnadze,
the Georgian head of state, walked out of the Parliament Building,
in the capital city of Tbilisi, and climbed into the back seat
of his car for a long-awaited ride.  He was about to sign a document
that he had thought he might never see: a democratic constitution
for his country.  Georgia had become an independent nation just
four years earlier, with the collapse of the Soviet Union; since
then, it had endured a civil war (over the separatist region of
Abkhazia) and two other serious uprisings.  The nation's economy
had virtually collapsed, violence was widespread, and relations
with Russia were poisonous.  

     Yet by that summer Georgians had begun to hope for better times.
The street fighting had ebbed, farmers were working again, and
Russia seemed to be leaving its neighbor alone.  Most of that progress
was due to Shevardnadze, who by force of will, coupled with an
uncanny ability to find consensus even among people who seemed
to detest one another, governed Georgia then as he governs it
today: decisively and alone.  

     The constitution ceremony was scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.
But as Shevardnadze's car made its way from the Parliament Building,
a man perched in a nearby apartment block detonated a remote-control
bomb that set the vehicle on fire, sending shards of glass through
the air.  Shevardnadze stumbled into the street, stunned and bleeding.
That night, Georgians watched on television as he spoke from the
hospital.  His face covered with cuts, Shevardnadze stared vacantly
at the camera and told the nation, "They want the Mafia to
run this country.  They will not succeed.  This is the last act
of terrorism in Georgia.  The whole nation will rise and raze them
to the ground."

     It was a remarkable performance, and much of what Shevardnadze
promised has come to pass.  Terrorism is no longer a daily threat.
Parliament is run not by thugs but by a thirty-seven-year-old
democrat named Zurab Zhvania, who made his mark as an environmental
activist.  What's more, Shevardnadze has fashioned a lucrative
deal with the West to send oil from the Caspian Sea across Georgian
territory, turning the country into a station along a new Silk
Road.  To achieve this success, Shevardnadze drew on the full and
often contradictory arsenal of his political talents: he was pragmatic
enough to negotiate with killers and ruthless enough to side with
the most successful among them.

     Georgia today is a more tranquil place than it was on that
summer day when the bomb went off--in no small part because the
country is, in a sense, a highly dependent duchy of the United
States.  American leaders, for both practical and sentimental reasons,
revere Shevardnadze.  Last year, the United States provided nearly
a hundred and fifty million dollars in aid, almost a third of
the Georgian budget.  Over the past decade, only Israel has regularly
received significantly more money per person from Washington.
Despite Georgia's efforts to establish a democracy, in other respects
its progress has been slight: tax revenues are anemic; and last
year Transparency International, an independent monitor of international
ethics, placed Georgia eighty-fifth out of a hundred on its list
of the world's most corrupt countries.  Nearly everything that
should be earned in a free society through merit is blatantly
for sale, from college diplomas and drivers' licenses to the right
to vote.

     Not long ago, I asked former Secretary of State James A.  Baker
III why Georgia, with five million people, was so vital to American
interests.  Armenia has a far larger and more influential American
diaspora, and Azerbaijan has one of the world's great reserves
of oil.  Baker told me that by 1991 it had become clear to the
Bush Administration that new institutions were about to form out
of the wreckage of the Communist world, and that America had been
handed a rare opportunity to influence them.  "If there was
one special place in that region, one country above all that we
knew we needed to help, it was Georgia," Baker told me.  "Getting
the oil out matters, and so does Georgia's physical and cultural
position in the world.  But obviously you cannot think about that
country without thinking about Eduard Shevardnadze.  I am not sure
that the Cold War could have ended peacefully without him.  He
changed all our lives.  And when we thought about that part of
the world we never forgot it.  The man's a hero."

2.

     The world first became aware of Shevardnadze in 1985, when
Mikhail Gorbachev, the new leader of theSoviet Union, asked his
old friend to replace Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, one of
the last of the hard-line Soviets.  One evening the previous winter,
at Pitsunda, a resort on the Black Sea coast favored by the Soviet
bosses, the two had spoken at length; and Gorbachev had said,
"We cannot go on living like this"--in Soviet society.  "Everything is 
rotten."  Shevardnadze replied, "It has to be changed."

     Shevardnadze, who is seventy-two, was an unlikely radical.
He had grown up in the rural Georgian village of Mamati in the
thirties, during the worst of the purge years.  Yet his allegiance
to Stalin never wavered, and by the time he was twenty, in 1948,
he had joined the Party.  Shevardnadze, the youngest of five children,
was a talented student and his parents urged him to become a doctor.
Instead, he chose politics.  He advanced rapidly--by 1972, he had
become the Georgian Party leader--not just because he shut down
opponents but also because he ran a harsh public campaign against
corruption.  

     Georgians prospered during Soviet times, but they did so by
playing angles, avoiding rules, and breaking laws.  (Almost invariably,
in Soviet films the mobsters were Georgian.) Their produce, their
wine, and even their mineral water were prized in Moscow, which
opened up many opportunities for bribery.  Shevardnadze, however,
realized that an economy based on theft was bound to fail.  Not
long after taking over as Party boss, he called a meeting of his
deputies and asked them to raise their hands if they agreed that
he should launch a war on corrupt officials.  Every hand shot into
the air.  Then Shevardnadze asked the deputies to keep their arms
raised as he circled the room checking wrists.  Anyone wearing
something better than a cheap Soviet timepiece was fired.

     Shevardnadze supported intellectuals when other Communist leaders
tried to put them in prison.  During the Brezhnev era, films that
one could never see in Moscow were routinely--if discreetly--on
view in Tbilisi.  The filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze, who began writing
his anti-Stalinist epic "Repentance" in 1981, never considered making 
the film until Shevardnadze encouraged him to proceed.

     "This is a Shakespearean sort of country,'' Georgia's best-known 
director, Robert Sturua, said when I spoke with him one evening in 
Tbilisi.  "And our leader is the most Shakespearean among us, with 
all his flaws and all the gifts.  Shevardnadze supported us when it 
as impossible for him to do it.  You can't imagine how rare it was--
a Communist with respect for free speech."


     When Shevardnadze was named Foreign Minister, he had rarely
been out of the Soviet Union, and many diplomats were shocked.
He asserted himself immediately, though, leading the reformist
wing of Gorbachev's politburo; and in the period between 1988
and 1990 he travelled frequently between Moscow and Washington,
entering into a remarkably open personal relationship with his
American counterpart, James Baker.

     "I decided by May of '89 that this was somebody whose
word was good, whom you could trust completely," Baker said.
"He felt like something dramatic was going to come, and that
they ought to make it happen in an orderly and peaceful way."


     But by December of 1990, Gorbachev's most passionate idealist
had had enough of the reactionary intrigue in the Kremlin.  He
appeared before the Congress of People's Deputies and announced
that a "dictatorship is coming," and that he had no choice but to 
resign.  The warning seemed alarmist, but it presaged the coup 
attempt of August, 1991.  "Let this be my protest against what is 
happening," Shevardnadze told the startled deputies before walking 
out of the hall.  The speech marked the end of Gorbachev's most 
progressive period of leadership.  Within two years, Shevardnadze 
would return to Georgia, and find himself in charge of a government so 
medieval and divided that legislators had to be forbidden to carry guns 
into Parliament.  Yet by 1995--when the car bomb exploded in Tbilisi--
Shevardnadze, by negotiating, compromising with gangsters, doing 
everything but actually waging another war, had managed to pull 
Georgia back from the edge of anarchy.  

3.

     Except for the protruding, burning hazel eyes and the occasionally
errant wisps of white hair--which give him a haunted look--Eduard
Shevardnadze is an open and unassuming man.  He is quiet and reflective,
and I couldn't find an aide who remembered the last time he had
raised his voice.  He always seems to be alone, even when he is
not.  In Tbilisi, his routine seldom varies: each morning at eight-thirty,
he settles into an armor-plated Mercedes that the German government
donated after the first attempt on his life (there was another,
in 1998).  Shevardnadze rarely gets home before 10 p.m.  His friends
are his colleagues.  He sometimes attends the opening of a play
or a concert with his wife, Nanuli.  But he does almost nothing
but work.  (I asked one of his closest aides, Peter Mamradze, if
I could spend some time with Shevardnadze outside the office.
He looked at me, smiled, and said, "Not unless you plan to
sleep with him.")

     After Shevardnadze resigned and the Soviet Union collapsed,
he could have embarked on an entirely new life.  He was invited
to lecture for handsome fees at universities around the world;
he was offered foundation jobs.  None of it appealed to him.  He
spent most of 1991 at a Moscow think tank that he had founded
and then returned, briefly, to his position at the Foreign Ministry.
By then, though, the chemistry between him and Gorbachev was 
gone, and he soon left for good.  After that, for whatever reason--
patriotism, ego, pride, or, more likely, a mixture of them all--
Shevardnadze felt that he had only one choice.  "I thought about 
what I would do next," he told his longtime aide and interpreter,
Pavel Palezchenko.  "Return to Georgia?  Well, a different kind of 
people are in charge there now, and the attitude toward me has 
changed.  But I cannot retire and do nothing." 

     Georgia's first post-Soviet President, the mystical nationalist
fanatic Zviad Gamsakhurdia, had driven the nation into civil war.
By the fall of 1991, he couldn't control the fighting on the streets
of his own capital; eventually, a Mafia dandy named Jaba Ioseliani,
who ran a gang called the Mkhedrioni--Horsemen--overcame 
Gamsakhurdia, who fled in January, 1992, to the Chechen capital, 
Grozny, across the mountain pass that serves as the border between 
Georgia and Russia.  By New Year's Eve in 1993, under circumstances 
that have never been fully explained, Gamsakhurdia either committed 
suicide or was killed.  By then, Ioseliani and his gang were in charge.

     Even in the rich tradition of Caucasian bandits, Ioseliani
stands out: he had spent much of his life in prison, dressed like
an industrial baron, and was a playwright, novelist, and former
drama teacher.  He is known in Tbilisi as both a Mafia leader and
a politician, and, in his case, it is impossible to separate the
two.  In 1991, many people had tried to persuade Shevardnadze to
return to Georgia, but while Gamsakhurdia remained in office he
didn't want to appear to be planning a coup.  A year later, when
Shevardnadze arrived in Tbilisi, Ioseliani became his chief confidant
and emissary to international meetings.  Ioseliani and his crew
may have been venal, but they provided the force that Shevardnadze
needed to defeat gangs that were more dangerous.  

     By then, Georgia was falling apart.  Warfare had taken hold
in the province of South Ossetia.  It was worse in Abkhazia, where
Muslim separatists had expelled two hundred thousand ethnic Georgians.
The battle there continued for nearly two years, and Shevardnadze
found himself in the middle of it.  When the Abkhazian capital,
Sukhumi, finally fell, in the autumn of 1993, Shevardnadze, who
not long before had had millions of men and thousands of nuclear
weapons at his disposal, stood sweating in muddied combat fatigues
and watched helplessly as young Georgian soldiers bled to death
beside him.  When I asked him how he felt about returning from
Moscow, he replied, "It felt like I had been dipped in boiling
tar."

     Shevardnadze has often spoken about what he had to do to 
end Georgia's civil war, and his relationship with Ioseliani was his
most obvious compromise.  It was an alliance that was destined
to unravel.  Shevardnadze tried to disband the Mkhedrioni as early
as 1993, but he wasn't successful until after the first assassination
attempt, in 1995.  At that point, Ioseliani was sent to prison,
although no evidence of his involvement was ever produced.

     Ioseliani, who is in his early seventies, was released after
Shevardnadze's reëlection this spring, and not long ago I
went to visit him at his sporty new clubhouse, which was built
in the middle of one of Tbilisi's most popular parks.  He wore
a double-breasted linen jacket over a fashionable shirt with no
collar; his gray hair was perfectly trimmed, as were his fingernails.
I asked him if he had anything to do with the 1995 assassination
attempt.  He spat on the floor, focussed his eyes on me, and said,
"Believe me, I wouldn't have missed."

4.

     Georgia's appeal to the West is obvious: it is a Christian
enclave in a largely Muslim part of the world, and, because it
is able to accommodate pipelines running from Baku to Turkey,
it can help the West diversify its oil supply while increasing
its influence in Central Asia.  Turning the country into a buffer
to keep Russia from asserting imperialistic ambitions would be
an extra benefit.  Shevardnadze works hard at the task; Georgia
has gained entry to the Council of Europe, and Shevardnadze has
said that in a few years he will "knock on NATO's door,"
a goal that even he realizes Georgia is unlikely to achieve.  

     Georgia belongs more to the West than any other Asian country,
yet it takes more of its heritage from the steppes than any Western
nation.  As Rezo Gabriadze, a prominent director and screenwriter,
said to me one night as we sipped Turkish coffee in the café that he 
owns in Tbilisi's old town, "Georgia is not Asia and it's not Europe.  
It is part of a Mediterranean culture that begins in Gibraltar and 
ends in my café."

     The Western presence, however, is growing rapidly.  The streets
of Tbilisi are crammed with S.U.V.s driven by international officials,
both American and European; there are also representatives of
many humanitarian-aid groups and various agencies of the United
Nations, as well as a full complement of oilmen, hustlers, development
experts, communications specialists, and spies.  At nearly every
meal, the dining room at Betsy's--Tbilisi's best guesthouse--is
filled with the sounds of Americans cutting deals.  

     Five years ago, it was often hard to book a call to Moscow.
Now there are cell phones in backpacks, on bicycles, and in cars.
FedEx delivers.  Georgian cuisine remains popular, but there are
also French, Chinese, and Central Asian restaurants in the capital.
When I was in town, performances of ballet, opera, and several
plays sold out each night, including Robert Sturua's production
of "Hamlet," in the Rustaveli Theatre.  A puppet-theatre
group that Gabriadze directs staged a lyrical version of "The
Battle of Stalingrad'' in a tiny theatre that he and his troupe
built themselves.  Earlier this month, the group brought the show--a
metaphor for the death of the Soviet Union--to the Kennedy Center
in Washington.

5.

      Just as Georgia's wars of separatism and identitywere ending, 
in 1994, Chechnya--which shares Georgia's only border with Russia 
and has unhappily been a part of its empire for three hundred years--
asserted its independence.  Chechen rebels fought the Russian Army 
for two years before driving forty thousand weary soldiers from their 
territory, and the war often threatened to spill over the mountains 
and into Georgia.  The conflict was a reminder of how fragile peace 
was in the Caucasus, and of the extent to which Russia still seeks 
to control the region.  Moscow has helped start two of Georgia's 
civil wars in the past ten years, and the Russian military maintains 
four bases on Georgian territory. 

     Georgia managed to remain aloof during the previous Chechen
conflict, but it has been harder this time.  Last year, when the
war started again, the Russians tried to station troops in the
Pankisi Gorge, a narrow valley that leads to the mountain pass
where Georgia ends and Chechnya begins.  The Russians were quickly
rebuffed by Shevardnadze, who understands that neutrality is his
only hope of staving off a full-blown war throughout the Caucasus.
But the Russian generals have kept up the pressure, and at least
twice in the past year bombs have fallen on Georgian villages.

     "It is literally the case that no high-level meeting takes
place between American and Russian officials without the word
`Georgia' being mentioned,'' Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary
of State, told me recently.  "When we talk to Russia, we talk
about red lines.  Those are lines it must not cross.  Well, the
brightest of the red lines that exist is the border between Chechnya
and Georgia."  

     The gorge has long been a transit point for drugs and arms
on their way from Afghanistan to Chechnya and beyond.  Many of
the people who live there immigrated from Chechnya decades ago
and, egged on by local warlords, they resent the humanitarian
aid that is available for the new Chechen refugees.

     I drove up from Tbilisi one morning, arriving after a shoot-out
in which eight gang members had died.  People were on edge.  Although
the refugee camps are supposed to admit only women, children,
and old men, the first thing that caught my eye along the dusty
trails--just thirty miles from the battlefields-- was two groups
of young men cruising around in Mercedes S600s, with smoked mirrors
and Chechen flags pasted on the back.  The scene in the gorge was
much like what you saw in Grozny, in 1994, on the eve of the first
war: markets full of bright-red plastic buckets, wheels of cheese
the size of tires, rusted tools, ancient spare parts--all spread
out on tables as if they were Swiss watches.  There were pictures
of the late Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev and enough wolf 
insignias--the sign of the Chechen fighter--to outfit an army.  
The gorge was like Grozny in another way, too: you could sense 
the violence.

     I had last been in those mountains in 1996, right after the
Russians had been chased out.  I had driven from Grozny through
the peaks to Itum-Kale, fifteen miles from the Georgian border.
There I watched Chechen elders prostrate themselves toward Mecca,
thanking God for helping to destroy their enemy.  It was a late-fall
day, and after the prayers several sheep were boiled in huge cauldrons
on the open fields.  

     By the fall of 1999, the Russian generals had adopted the tactics
of General Baratinsky, who in defeating the Chechen leader Imam
Shamil, in 1859, instructed his soldiers to level every hamlet,
village, and lean-to they could find.  Russian paratroopers have
now dug in throughout the mountains.  On the Georgian side of the
border, particularly at night, one can listen as SU25s attempt
to incinerate the last few thousand rebels.  

     Now, as the gorge fills with the detritus of war, the pressure
on Georgia has grown intense.  Moscow's military leaders have accused
Tbilisi of, among other things, providing training camps for rebels,
hiding members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist group, transporting
Taliban fighters to help the Chechens, and supplying the Chechens
with guns.  The charges have been refuted by every official observer
who has visited, yet Moscow persists.

     "When they accuse us of using helicopters to ferry rebels
to the Chechen battle zone," Shevardnadze told me, "the
Russians apparently believe I am too proud to admit that I am
the leader of a country that does not have a single helicopter
that works well enough to do any such thing."  

6.

     Last April, Shevardnadze was elected to a second term with
more than eighty per cent of the vote.  There was no real opposition,
and surely he would have won a fair and open election.  But the
contest was neither fair nor open.  Western and local observers
complained loudly about tampering; and they found that many polling
places in contested regions were closed illegally and that at
least some votes were faked by supporters of the President.  

     A story soon circulated that says much about the disheartening
journey of the leader who once ripped watches from the arms of
his Communist colleagues.  The day after the election, Shevardnadze
was approached by Peter Mamradze, who is the closest thing he
has to a chief of staff.  

     "There is good news and there is bad news,'' Mamradze
told him.  "The good news is that you won in a landslide."


     "And the bad news?"  Shevardnadze asked.

     "Nobody voted for you," Mamradze replied.  (I assumed that the 
story was apocryphal, but I asked the extremely good-natured
Mamradze about it anyway.  He laughed and said, "Come on,
you know he got some votes.")

     It is perhaps unfair to ask any single person to carry the
weight of a nation, but for more than a decade Shevardnadze has
been widely seen as the solution to all of Georgia's problems.
Increasingly, however, and perhaps inevitably, many people also
regard him as a principal cause.  To achieve peace, he traded the
idealism of his Gorbachev years for the pragmatism needed to bargain
with warlords.  If the warlords no longer run the country, a small
group of wealthy and dishonest plutocrats do.  Pensions average
seven dollars a month and are infrequently paid.  There is no real
public sector.  The government has made it easy for a few well-connected
businessmen to snap up valuable state properties for almost nothing.
Shevardnadze's son-in-law received a license to run one of Georgia's
mobile-phone companies for fifteen dollars--far less than it would
have cost him to buy a telephone.  "Under Georgian law, you
cannot say that the sale of a mobile-phone license for fifteen
dollars is technically illegal,'' Christopher Lane, the International
Monetary Fund representative in Tbilisi, told me.  "It's terribly
imprudent, but it's not a crime."  

     There are as many police officers on the streets of Tbilisi
as there are in New York, which has at least eight times the population
of Tbilisi.  Policemen are paid almost nothing, so they attempt
to scratch out a living by shaking down motorists; they are squeegee
men with badges.  I was pulled over three times in ten days.  "I
don't get paid, and I have four children,'' one officer explained.
"Just give me five laris"--about two and a half dollars--"and
you can go."  To get into university one has to pay a bribe,
to get into the best courses you pay again.  Then there are fees
for the tests (to take them and to pass them) and fees to graduate.


     Shevardnadze knows all this.  When I sat down with him at a
large oval table in the anteroom outside his office, he said gravely,
"We are facing a situation of intolerable corruption.  It is not 
connected with or dependent upon one or two ministers or 
even the whole government of Georgia....  The entire system was
created full of corruption.  They are flourishing, and they are
sucking blood from the rest of society.  They are killing this
nation."  He pounded the table hard enough to rattle the tea
glasses.  

     I asked him if he ever looked back with longing at his time
away from Tbilisi.  "I remember those years with the greatest
pride,'' he said.  "But my position today, being President
of Georgia, is the highest post I have ever held.  And it is the
post that I want to define me."

     When Gorbachev was in power, he loved to talk during interviews.
Shevardnadze is far less voluble, but one walks away feeling that
he has shared his deepest thoughts and doubts.  He is so skilled
at creating this impression that a visitor can be dazzled.  
Shevardnadze decries the corruption that threatens to ruin Georgia, 
but in important ways he is Georgia.  If corruption is rampant,
who else could possibly stop it?  Apart from complaining, Shevardnadze
has in fact done little.  Plans are released and ignored.  Speeches
are delivered and forgotten.  No senior officials have gone to
jail, and only a few have been fired.  Breaking the law is acceptable.
When a landlord shows a prospective tenant an apartment in Tbilisi,
he will always point out the electrical meter, the phone connection,
and the "illegal line,'' for stealing electricity when there is a blackout, 
as there has been every day this winter, or when the bill has 
gone unpaid.

     For many years, Shevardnadze managed to avoid the fate of 
Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who were regarded abroad as visionaries but 
were detested at home.  Shevardnadze used to be met with cries of 
"Nas Eduard"--"Our Eduard"--nearly everywhere he went.  No longer.  
"The man saved Georgia, and I doubt that anyone else could have 
done it," Ghia Nodia, who runs a think tank called the Caucasian 
Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development, told me.  "But it's 
time already to say the truth.  Eduard Shevardnadze has lost touch 
completely with this country.  He is an old power addict, and his 
reputation is at the lowest it has ever been."  

     "The truth is that Georgia is as corrupt as any place you will 
ever see," Gela Charkviani told me when I went to see him one 
morning at the State Chancellery.  Charkviani, no critic of the 
regime, is one of Shevardnadze's oldest allies and his senior 
adviser on foreign affairs.  He is a former sociology professor,
with thick eyebrows and thinning hair; his father, Kandida, was
a loyal aide to Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's K.G.B.  chief.  "Nobody
ever had democracy in this part of the world," Charkviani
said.  "It doesn't come naturally to us."

7.

     Not long ago, a young television correspondent named Akaki
Gogichaishvili began his broadcast this way: "International experts 
have concluded that, owing to corruption, the state budget
is losing an annual one billion laris from customs.  This sum is
equal to the official state budget, which means that Georgia has
two budgets--the official one, which is applied to five million
citizens, and an unofficial budget, which is exploited by fewer
than a hundred high-ranking officials."

     That report--and others that the thirty-four-year-old 
correspondent presents each week on his show, which is called 
"60 Minutes"--has startled the country.  Gogichaishvili is Georgia's 
first true investigative television journalist, and he regularly infuriates 
Shevardnadze. In fact, last summer he called a news conference to 
announce that several government officials had told him to run for 
his life, and in July the chairman of the Helsinki Commission met with 
Gogichaishvili in Washington and denounced the government's efforts 
at intimidation.

     Akaki--as he is called by everyone--looks a bit like a thin,
intellectual Andre Agassi.  His head is shaved and his black eyes
are the size of walnuts.  He studied geology at the university
in Tbilisi and then won a scholarship to study journalism and
politics at Duke University, before working for a while in Washington.
Each week he and his colleagues attack various privileged groups,
usually in great detail, and with supporting documents in hand.
The show sometimes feels breathless, but it never roams far from
the facts.

     Recently, Akaki went after one of Shevardnadze's favorite groups,
the union of professional writers, which he accused of embezzlement.
Within weeks, the security establishment of Georgia--including
the Interior Ministry and the office of the general prosecutor--were
ordered to investigate Akaki's work and his life.  

     "My bosses have been amazing," Akaki told me.  "I made it clear 
to everyone on the show that if they leave I will understand.  Not 
one has gone.  Old ladies come up on the street and kiss me."

     The only time I saw Shevardnadze at a loss for words was when
I asked him about "60 Minutes."  For a long while, he was silent.  
"Please believe me,'' he said finally.  "It was I who created the 
atmosphere for the newly emerged free press.  I have fixed meetings 
every Monday with the press.  Does your President do that?  Everyone 
is invited, and anyone can ask any question."

     He took a sip of tea and went on, "My popularity is not what I 
would desire.  This hungry population, with arrears in wages, pensions,
unemployment--it's terrible.  How can I betray these people and go 
home?  For me, of course, the best thing would be to go home, sit 
silently, write my memoirs, and remember the great events that I 
have seen in my life."  I suggested that might bore him.  "Oh no, it 
would be wonderful.  My life is hell. It's a nightmare.  Every day I am 
burned again.  When I came to Tbilisi, I had the feeling that I had 
dropped myself into an inferno. Even now I feel that I am swimming
in water that is far too hot. It is hard, it is always hard, and it 
always will be."