In the early hours of April 9, 1989, Soviet paratroopers launched a brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters in Tbilisi, the capital of the then-Georgian SSR.
Armed with entrenching shovels and toxic gas, they cleared the square outside the Georgian parliament, leaving 21 civilians dead. The blood on the asphalt was not merely a tragic accident of Soviet decline but a statement of imperial continuity. One of the key commanders present that morning was General Alexander Lebed, then head of the 106th Guards Airborne Division. The troops under his command, deployed as a “punitive force” in the Caucasus, had one task: to restore order “by any means necessary.”
More than three decades later, that legacy of violence masked as order, and of imperial force cloaked in “law and order,” still haunts Georgian politics.
The man now widely viewed as Georgia’s most powerful figure, billionaire-turned-powerbroker Bidzina Ivanishvili, once financed the 1996 presidential campaign of that same General Lebed. While living in Moscow, Ivanishvili bankrolled Lebed’s Russian presidential run, aligning himself not only with a man implicated in the 1989 massacre but also with a broader post-Soviet oligarchic network that reshaped the region’s politics from behind the scenes.
This convergence of military repression and oligarchic strategy offers a rare window into the political DNA of Georgia’s current regime.
The Kremlin’s grip on Georgian sovereignty
Ivanishvili’s path to influence began not in Tbilisi, but in Moscow. In the 1990s, he amassed a fortune through banking, metals, and industrial acquisitions — often with silent coordination alongside the so-called Semibankirschina, the cabal of seven oligarchs who helped re-elect Boris Yeltsin in 1996. Though less flamboyant than media tycoon Boris Berezovsky or Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Ivanishvili earned a place in the club through strategic quietude and effective deployment of capital. His most politically consequential contribution? Funding General Lebed’s 1996 presidential campaign.
Lebed, a hard-nosed general with nationalist appeal, was more than a spoiler. His candidacy was carefully integrated into Yeltsin’s re-election strategy: split the Communist vote in the first round, then deliver Russian nationalist votes to Yeltsin in the second.
Ivanishvili was key to that maneuver. According to multiple Russian and Georgian sources, including Berezovsky himself, it was Ivanishvili who maintained Lebed’s trust and helped broker his post-first-round support for Yeltsin — thereby securing a place for both himself and his money within the Kremlin’s inner ring.
But why, nearly 30 years later, does this matter now? Because Georgia’s governing style under Ivanishvili, through the ruling Georgian Dream party, increasingly mirrors the same informal, personalized, and security-dominated politics that defined the Russian Federation’s late-Soviet and early post-Communist regimes.
A Soviet blueprint in democratic wrapping
Since returning to Georgia and founding the Georgian Dream in 2011, Ivanishvili has ruled largely from the shadows. Though he briefly held the office of Prime Minister, he quickly stepped down only to continue directing policy and personnel behind closed doors. This style of governance — informal authority, reliance on the security services, and tight control over the judiciary and media — is not new. It is a direct descendant of the Soviet political architecture in which men like Lebed operated and Vladimir Putin continues to operate.
The symbolic irony is hard to miss. The same man who funded a general tied to the deaths of 21 Georgian civilians now presides informally, but decisively, over a regime accused of undermining those very citizens’ democratic aspirations.
In 2025, when Georgian officials attempted to lay flowers at the April 9 memorial, protesters blocked them, shouting that Ivanishvili’s regime betrayed the victims’ legacy. There is historical symmetry here, though not justice.
Between East and West: A balancing act or a strategic surrender?
Supporters of the Georgian Dream insist that the country’s current tilt toward Russia is a form of pragmatic realism. Given the geographic and military asymmetry, they argue, it would be suicidal for Georgia to provoke the Kremlin. This logic underpinned the Georgian ruling party’s refusal to join Western sanctions against Russia following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since the war began, trade with Russia has expanded, commercial flights have resumed, and Tbilisi’s rhetoric toward Moscow has grown conspicuously soft.
For a decade after the 2003 Rose Revolution, Georgia was a leader among former Eastern Bloc members who aspired to join NATO, the EU, and the wider democratic world. But slowly, since the Georgian Dream came to power in 2013, the small Caucasian republic has become a one-party state, subservient to Moscow.
Western analysts increasingly warn that Ivanishvili, though officially a private citizen, is steering Georgia into the Russian Federation’s orbit by quiet degrees. The recent resurrection of the “foreign agents” law, styled after Russian legislation designed to stifle civil society, is but one example.
If there is a “Georgian doctrine” under Ivanishvili, it is not one of neutrality, but of sovereign submission: avoiding confrontation with Moscow not as a strategy of balance, but as a quiet acquiescence to the realities of the regional, former imperial power.
Yet, public sentiment tells a different story. Polls consistently show that over 75 percent of Georgians support Euro-Atlantic integration. The gulf between the public and the ruling elite is stark and widening.
Legacy networks and the logic of control
Ivanishvili’s enduring comfort with Russian elites and the governance methods forged in the Soviet Union is no accident. He built his career in the system that rewarded proximity to power and punished ideological naivety. That system lives on, not through Marxist-Leninist slogans or Politburo decrees, but through informal networks, privatized authority, and the strategic repurposing of national institutions as tools of elite survival.
Georgia’s slide toward overt authoritarianism cannot be understood as a sudden deviation. It is the logical outcome of a political economy built on the legacy of late-Soviet crisis management and post-Soviet oligarchy. Ivanishvili’s decision to back Lebed in 1996 was not just a misstep. It was a sign of strategic alignment: an early investment in the machinery of power and a revealing preview of the methods he would one day use to rule his homeland.
From influence to occupation
The 1989 Tbilisi massacre was intended to extinguish Georgia’s independence movement at a time when the Soviet Union was rapidly coming unstuck. Instead, it lit a fire that eventually drove the Red Army out. Today, the tanks are gone, but the shadows remain, reflected in the opaque governance, in the silence around Russian influence, and the quiet return of authoritarian instincts.
For Georgia, the challenge of 2025 is not merely to resist external threats. It is to reckon with its own internal continuities. To ask whether the sacrifice of April 9, 1989, was honored, or was it slowly reversed through the patient return of those same imperial dynamics in civilian disguise.
Revelations by Giorgi Chikvaidze, a former insider of the Georgian Dream party, underscore a disturbing reality: the erosion of Georgia’s sovereignty under the influence of Russian intelligence. Chikvaidze identified Andrey Krushanov, an active operative of Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, as Ivanishvili’s day-to-day handler and mentor. Krushanov has reportedly resided in Georgia for the past nine months, orchestrating strategies that align the country’s governance with Kremlin interests.
This direct involvement of Russian intelligence in Georgia’s political sphere is not an isolated incident. Chikvaidze also alleges that he was approached to assist in reflagging a yacht belonging to sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, facilitating its evasion of Western sanctions. His refusal to participate led to legal repercussions, which he says are politically motivated.
These accounts, corroborated by former FSB colonel Gennady Gudkov, who has documented Moscow’s covert operations in neighboring states, reveal a pattern of Russian interference aimed at subverting democratic institutions and processes.
Gudkov claims that Russian oligarchs close to Putin have said: “There was an agreement between Putin and Ivanishvili: Putin would not interfere with Ivanishvili’s rise to power or the transfer of his assets from Russia … And in return, Ivanishvili owes him.”
Georgia is no longer ruled openly. It is governed in the shadows by an unelected billionaire who issues no decrees but controls the levers of power. By a network of loyalists, installed not through merit but through loyalty to Ivanishvili. Institutions are hollowed out — the parliament, judiciary, and media are all stripped of independence and filled with silence. Georgia is now a fully surveilled society, where dissent is monitored, restrained, and branded as the work of “foreign agents,” and the people are deceived into believing this is “strategic patience.” In truth, it is a strategic surrender.
The fiction is that Ivanishvili is merely a businessman with unfortunate Russian ties. The fact is more damning: He is a long-embedded Kremlin asset, cultivated in post-Soviet Moscow, brought into the Semibankirschina, and later tasked, through wealth, networks, and soft power, with managing Georgia’s “hybrid reintegration” into Russia’s sphere. Ivanishvili is Putin’s Trojan horse.
It is not influence, it is an occupation by proxy.
April 9, 1989, was a cry for independence; clear, unified, and courageous. In 2025, that cry is muffled by misinformation, Russian-influenced propaganda, judicial intimidation, corruption and institutional decay.
The final question is not for Georgia, but for the West: Will we finally see Ivanishvili, his enablers, and the Georgian Dream party for what they are? Will the West act accordingly, before it’s too late?
