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Wendell Steavenson |
(newyorker.com) In 2008, I wrote a Profile of President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia, known to everyone as Misha, for The New Yorker.
Saakashvili had just, by the skin of his teeth and American
intervention, managed to escape a full-blown invasion by Russia over the
disputed territory of South Ossetia. I lived in Georgia in the late
nineties and have gone back many times over the past decade. Saakashvili
came to power in the Rose Revolution, turned on the electricity, which
had been fitful for years, and fired all of the corrupt police in one
fell swoop. (In Egypt, where I live now, I hear cautious incrementalists
say it’s impossible to dismantle the security services overnight; crime
actually went down in Georgia after the mass firing.) But his moves
since have been uneven and self-aggrandizing, and have increasingly
suggested a canny autocrat bending the trappings of democracy—TV
channels, parliament, an “independent” tax authority, political
parties—to his own purposes. That may include a revision of the
constitution’s two-term limit for for the president, which would mean
that Saakashvili would have to leave office in 2014.
Enter the oligarch: while I was in Georgia, in 2008, I would hear the
name Bidzina Ivanishvili, often in whispers. Ivanishvili is a reclusive
billionaire, listed on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s
richest people last year, with a fortune estimated at five billion
dollars. Ivanishvili made his money in Russia in the wild
perestroika-privatization years, and then returned to his home village
in the foothills of the Caucasus mountains. There was only one
photograph of him in the press, and that had accompanied the only
interview he had ever granted, published in a Russian newspaper in 2005.
Ivanishvili seemed to be a Wizard of Oz philanthropist; he spent his
time in a modernist castle on a ridge overlooking Tbilisi, or else
sequestered in his estate in his home village (there were rumors of
zebras and a van Gogh). He helped to pay for the refurbishment of
several theatres, including the Opera House, and was said to engage in
casual philanthropy, giving impoverished intellectuals pensions or
stipends or sometimes just wads of cash.
A couple of years ago, I went to investigate and write a story about him. As far as I could tell, he had rebuilt every house in his home village, bought new furniture for families, paid for their weddings and their funerals. In the nearby town, he had built a hospital, a sports complex, and a cinema. He had built dozens of schools in the region, paid extra salaries to the teachers, relaid the only road, which had broken down due to post-Soviet neglect and become impassable in the winter snows. Almost every house in the district had a new roof. Many of the people were reluctant to talk—it was well known that Ivanishvili hated publicity of any kind—but those I did speak to painted a picture of an essentially modest man: clever, canny, very much in control. But I never got close to the man himself. Some weeks after my article was published, however, I received a very gracious handwritten note from him, saying that he had enjoyed my story.
Now, surprisingly, he has thrown his hat into the political arena, declaring over the past week, in a series of open letters, that he will form a political party to put himself forward as a candidate for Speaker of Parliament. (He still hasn’t appeared in public, though.) He has challenged the hegemony of Saakashvili’s rule directly, appealing to key players in his administration (most importantly, the Interior Minister, Vano Merabishvili), and denounced what he considers the pseudo-opposition, while calling on key individual opposition figures to join him. He named names, and his choices were shrewd.
Two thoughts amid this interesting turn of events: First, the last time an oligarch threatened Saakashvili it was Badri Patarkatsishvili, who died suddenly from a heart attack in London and whose assets (he kept much of them under different people’s names) were divided up between Saakashvili’s allies and former business partners. Badri, though, it should be said, was a flashy, rollicking adventurer, not the careful operator that Ivanishvili seems to be. And second, Georgians have initially elected each of their three independent Presidents with more than eighty per cent of the vote, but they quickly tire of them; the first two were overthrown.
That said, Ivanishvili is a very smart man with a ton of money, a formidable opponent to Saakashvili and another twist in the tale of post-Soviet Georgia. “I have decided to go into politics,” he wrote. “I will definitely come into power.”
A couple of years ago, I went to investigate and write a story about him. As far as I could tell, he had rebuilt every house in his home village, bought new furniture for families, paid for their weddings and their funerals. In the nearby town, he had built a hospital, a sports complex, and a cinema. He had built dozens of schools in the region, paid extra salaries to the teachers, relaid the only road, which had broken down due to post-Soviet neglect and become impassable in the winter snows. Almost every house in the district had a new roof. Many of the people were reluctant to talk—it was well known that Ivanishvili hated publicity of any kind—but those I did speak to painted a picture of an essentially modest man: clever, canny, very much in control. But I never got close to the man himself. Some weeks after my article was published, however, I received a very gracious handwritten note from him, saying that he had enjoyed my story.
Now, surprisingly, he has thrown his hat into the political arena, declaring over the past week, in a series of open letters, that he will form a political party to put himself forward as a candidate for Speaker of Parliament. (He still hasn’t appeared in public, though.) He has challenged the hegemony of Saakashvili’s rule directly, appealing to key players in his administration (most importantly, the Interior Minister, Vano Merabishvili), and denounced what he considers the pseudo-opposition, while calling on key individual opposition figures to join him. He named names, and his choices were shrewd.
Two thoughts amid this interesting turn of events: First, the last time an oligarch threatened Saakashvili it was Badri Patarkatsishvili, who died suddenly from a heart attack in London and whose assets (he kept much of them under different people’s names) were divided up between Saakashvili’s allies and former business partners. Badri, though, it should be said, was a flashy, rollicking adventurer, not the careful operator that Ivanishvili seems to be. And second, Georgians have initially elected each of their three independent Presidents with more than eighty per cent of the vote, but they quickly tire of them; the first two were overthrown.
That said, Ivanishvili is a very smart man with a ton of money, a formidable opponent to Saakashvili and another twist in the tale of post-Soviet Georgia. “I have decided to go into politics,” he wrote. “I will definitely come into power.”
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