I did not read about the fall of the Soviet Union. I watched it from a sidewalk in Tbilisi, close enough to hear the rounds go by.
In the winter of 1991 and into 1992, my classmates and I walked from our lectures to Rustaveli Avenue, where Georgia’s first democratically elected president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was barricaded inside the Parliament while Tengiz Kitovani’s forces shelled it from the street. We watched a civil war the way other students watch films — live, daily, from 50 meters away. Then, one afternoon, a stray round found one of my classmates. He was not a soldier. He was a spectator, like us. We came back the next day anyway because that is what a dying state trains you to do: Treat the impossible as ordinary. Collapse is not a headline. It is a normal Tuesday with gunfire in it.
I am telling you this because the West is again choosing the manageable version of somebody else’s danger. Last week, the European Union sanctioned a Georgian refinery that turns Russian crude into somebody else’s product. The ban takes effect in six months. I know that reflex. I have seen what it costs.
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Fifteen plus three
Ronald Reagan’s moral clarity helped break Soviet communism. The endgame belonged to George H.W. Bush. As the republics bolted for the exits, his administration settled on the position known as “fifteen plus three”: independence for the three Baltic states, continued union under a reformed Kremlin for the other 12. In Kyiv that August, Bush delivered the speech history remembers as “Chicken Kiev,” lecturing Ukrainians against suicidal nationalism. One manageable empire looked safer than 15 unpredictable capitals. Better the devil with a return address.
For the Baltics, the West showed up. For the rest of us, it sent regrets. That distinction decided which of us woke up in a country and which of us woke up in a crime scene.
The hand at their elbow
The tidy version says Gamsakhurdia was toppled by his own countrymen — his authoritarian streak, his commander turning on him. True, as far as it goes — the U.S. Army’s own country study on Georgia lays out the internal mechanics plainly. The second layer is on the record. On Dec. 15, 1992, the Russian newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti published a letter from Col. Gen. Sufian Beppayev, deputy commander of the Transcaucasus Military District, who admitted that Russian units had supplied Kitovani’s forces with equipment and logistics from late December 1991 — and stated plainly that, without Russian help, Gamsakhurdia’s side would have won. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported well-founded suspicion that the coup carried the quiet backing of senior Moscow military circles.
The men in the street were Georgians. The hand at their elbow belonged to the empire the West had just chosen to preserve. I did not learn that from an archive. I learned it from the men themselves.
The vault
Kitovani’s most trusted unit was the so-called Kareli Guard, and most of its members came from my own village — uneducated, out of options, the kind of men the Guard swallowed when the state stopped existing. They treated my family as an audience worth performing for. That is the only reason I saw what I saw.
They robbed in daylight — cars, cash, jewelry, televisions, worn clothing, anything. One man had the gold teeth pried out of his mouth. This was not war. It was the retail looting of a country whose institutions had stopped answering the phone.
The worst of it, I watched myself. Kitovani’s men breached the National Bank of Georgia with armored vehicles and emptied the vault of cash and gold bars. I saw fighters asleep on top of the money inside those armored carriers, the way a tired man sleeps on a mattress. One acquaintance of mine saw what happened in that vault and never got his mind back. Afterward, the new authorities announced that Gamsakhurdia had robbed the bank. The men who slept on the gold blamed the president they had just overthrown. That is how truth dies in a failed state: not contradicted, simply reassigned.
I listened to them brag about the Russian generals who had helped them. That is how I ended up in counterintelligence: I had seen from 10 meters how an empire takes a country apart from the inside.
The bill, paid in installments
The military council that removed Gamsakhurdia summoned back from Moscow a man Reagan, Bush, and James Baker knew by his first name: Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, who steered Georgia obediently north. Then came the wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, stoked and armed by Russia. My brother fought in Abkhazia; when Sukhumi fell in 1993, he walked out over the Kodori Gorge with the retreating units. Russia took both territories in all but name and, in 2008, recognized them formally after a five-day war.
That is what stability first bought in one small country: a looted central bank, militias like the notorious Mkhedrioni — the “Horsemen” — running robbery and murder as public policy, two amputated provinces, tens of thousands dead across the years.
The same conquest, by wire transfer
The second time, Georgia was not taken back by tanks. It was bought back. Bidzina Ivanishvili made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, in banking and metals — the same decade Kitovani’s guardsmen spent sleeping on my country’s gold. He came home, founded the Georgian Dream party, served a year as prime minister, and retired. Twice. He holds no office today. It has not mattered.
Under his party, Georgia adopted a Russian-style foreign agents law, turned the police loose on its own demonstrators, and, in November 2024, suspended the European Union accession talks its own constitution requires it to pursue — a European future shelved until 2028 by the men who swore an oath to it.
On Dec. 27, 2024, the Treasury Department sanctioned Ivanishvili. Read the authority, not the headline. He was not designated under a corruption program or a human rights program. He was designated under Executive Order 14024 — the sanctions architecture built for the Russian Federation. The State Department said he had derailed Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future for the benefit of the Russian regime. In the formal judgment of the United States government, the man who runs my country runs it on Moscow’s behalf.
Then Washington flinched. That same day, Treasury issued General License 116, authorizing Americans to go on doing business with the companies he owns, provided the companies themselves were not listed. The man was sanctioned. The empire was licensed. Stability first — 33 years later, in a press release.
Which brings us back to that refinery. It sits at Kulevi, on the Black Sea coast, and is reported to be run by men close to the ruling party. Brussels proposed blacklisting the Kulevi port in February, then dropped it in March after Tbilisi and the terminal’s operator promised to comply. Last week, it went after the refinery instead — effective in January. Proposed, withdrawn on a promise, adopted with a half-year head start. I am not here to establish any man’s criminal guilt, only to note how consistent the destination has been, and how consistent we have been. Russia does not accept losses. It reschedules them, and it has learned that we can always be talked into rescheduling with it.
The invoice keeps arriving
The lesson is not that Washington should storm every capital. It is the opposite of the one it drew in 1991: When a people reaches for freedom, the cheapest moment to abandon them is also the most expensive. The same pattern carved Transnistria out of Moldova and froze it into a permanent lever, and left Armenia, the victor in Karabakh, more dependent on Moscow than the vanquished. Ukraine is paying the bill in the open.
Congress has already written the answer twice. The MEGOBARI Act cleared the Senate foreign relations committee without amendment in April 2025 and soon after passed the House 349-42. It has been sitting on the Senate legislative calendar ever since — 15 months, waiting for a floor vote nobody has scheduled. The Countering China’s Control of the Caucasus Act, which orders a classified assessment of Russian and Chinese penetration of the Georgian state within 180 days of enactment, passed the House in June and now waits in the Senate as well. Neither commits an American soldier to anything. One of them commits us only to find out what is true.
MEGOBARI is not stuck in committee. It cleared committee 15 months ago. It is simply not being called — which is the 1991 argument in its quietest form. Better the devil with a return address. That reasoning cost my country its central bank, two provinces, and a decade. What it would cost to be right this time is a scheduled vote.
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Stability bought with someone else’s liberty is a loan, and the interest is always collected somewhere the lender never has to look. I watched it be collected. Fifty meters from the gunfire, beside a classmate who should never have bled, in a bank vault turned into a mattress, in a brother coming down a mountain. There is no such thing as a collapse that happens to no one. It happened to us. I was there.
Freedom is not the safe choice. It is only the right one. That is the luxury the powerful can afford to forget, and the rest of us cannot.
Emzari Gelashvili is a Georgian-born American analyst and a former senior official in Georgia’s state security, defense, and interior ministries (1996-2008), specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations, and a former member of the Georgian Parliament (2008-2012). This essay draws on personal testimony, published investigative reporting, and public sanctions records; it does not seek to establish the criminal liability of any individual.