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Georgian roulette:

Mikheil Saakashvili beckons from the brink

By Peter Savodnik

In August 2006, I took a bus from Tbilisi to the city of Gori, a little more than an hour northwest of the Georgian capital. At the bus station before I left, I bought from an old woman some bottled water, a very small apple, and two rolls filled with nuts and a white powdery cheese. The station was really a sprawling car-repair shop circumscribed by an outdoor bazaar. There was a huddle of dusty broken-down buses that hadn’t been driven in many years; Soviet-era Ladas and Volgas propped up on columns of bricks; kiosks manned by fat men hawking dried fruit, sunglasses, pirated DVDs, baked goods, sausage links, and pornographic magazines; dogs of indiscernible ownership; small children; children on bicycles; and hordes of long-distance cabbies leaning against the hoods of their cars, mostly Volgas or Opels or Volkswagens, smoking cigarettes and waiting to drive someone to Batumi, on the Black Sea, or Ninotsminda, near the Armenian border, or Vladikavkaz, in Russia.

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SEE ALSO: Career as Georgian president; Europe, Eastern; Georgia (Republic); Homes and haunts; Stalin, Joseph; Membership; Saakashvili, Mixeil; North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Relations; Russia (Federation); World politics

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