GEORGIA'S SOVIET LEGACY

Except for the three Baltic republics, the new states that burst from the carcass of the old Soviet Union have experienced severe difficulties in reaching democracy. An obvious but little used method for understanding these difficulties is to examine the legacy that seven decades of Soviet politics have left behind. Georgia makes a good case to start with because it was once judged such a promising candidate to consolidate democracy, and because (unlike Russia and several other post-Soviet states) it is free of many of those glaring vestiges of Soviet rule that "overdetermine" continuity with the Soviet period. The analysis here will be preliminary, yet its findings should be relevant to other post-Soviet states once allowances are made for the ways in which they differ.

The postcommunist countries of Eurasia distinguish themselves from Soviet times by reacting against those times. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) is gone, and the very word "party" is often shunned. All the institutional forms are democratic: There are presidents with limited terms, parliaments, judiciaries, privately owned economies, and mostly private media. Ordinary people display their newfound sense of freedom from Soviet pressure by doing everything from traveling abroad to refusing to wear seatbelts, as if they simply cannot endure the constraint. People see government as something alien, intrusive, and filthy.

Contempt and mistrust of government are common in noncommunist authoritarian regimes and even democracies, but almost nowhere are they as strong as what one finds in the former Soviet Union. Although the situation is seldom discussed, it is quite likely the case that not only postcommunist publics, but postcommunist rulers as well share this sense of reacting against the Soviet system. What constraint, like a seatbelt, chafes an elected president beyond endurance? The rule of law comes first to mind, together with all the institutional frameworks, bureaucratic routines, and habits that are related to it.

In the former Soviet countries, crucial elements of Soviet politics have disappeared utterly, beginning with ideology. The names of the youth organizations that spearheaded the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia (Kmara, meaning "enough") and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine (Pora, meaning "it's time") reveal the discomfort with defining ideals that suffuses politics after communism. In Georgia, the ruling National Movement has...