Georgia: Nobody's Bigger Than Bidzina

Chorvila, the remote mountain town in central Georgia where Bidzina Ivanishvili was born. While the surrounding area is all mud and poverty, Chorvila’s streets are clean and lined with neat rows of two-story homes in pastel stucco with bright red roofs. Many residents, especially the sick, the disabled, the orphaned and families with many children, get generous monthly stipends. There’s free medical care, free TVs and VCRs and, for 17,000 fortunate people, free gas stoves.

All of it—the home building, stipends, health care, TVs, stoves, plus 40 rebuilt schools and a renovated hospital—have been paid for by Ivanishvili. The largest employer in the area is Ivanishvili.

Bidzina Ivanishvili's Glass House, a $50 million complex designed by the futuristic Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu

Now that he is running for prime minister, it’s enough to make any sitting president, let alone Georgia’s volatile, jealous, power-hungry Mikheil Saakashvili, feel threatened.

Five months ago Ivanishvili announced he was going to form Georgian Dream to put up candidates in the country’s parliamentary elections scheduled for the fall. In his opening salvo he accused Saakashvili, a darling of the West, of consolidating a “total monopoly” on political power in the eight years since he came to power in the peaceful Rose Revolution in 2003. Ivanishvili used to be one of Saakashvili’s biggest political and financial supporters. Three years ago the two most powerful men in the country broke off their relationship. Ivanishvili says he and his people have been harassed by the government ever since. His decision to enter politics and become a public citizen may just be for his own protection. But Ivanishvili has an even more fundamental quibble with Saakashvili, and it is a quintessentially Georgian one. “He doesn’t understand what love is,” he says, completely seriously. “How can

Between the eastern shore of the Black Sea and the western border of China there is a huge world of lost kingdoms of which we know nearly nothing. They are in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, bordering the Caspian Sea, and encompass all that the former Soviet Union had dominated and cut off from the outside world. Most of them lay alongside the highways of conquest used by Darius, Alexander, Temujin, and Tamerlaine, and the Silk Road traveled by Marco Polo.

I was deployed to Uzbekistan. It was like the fabled island of Brigadoon. The people had not formed an opinion about Americans and that’s what we liked about it.

Georgia itself is an isolated Christian land with its own language, alphabet, and church patriarchs. Hard to believe it was the birthplace of the monster Josef Vissarionivich Djugashvili, aka Stalin.

Georgia itself is an isolated Christian land with its own language, alphabet, and church patriarchs. Hard to believe it was the birthplace of the monster Josef Vissarionivich Djugashvili, aka Stalin.

Well said. This is also the area from which the Ashkenazi Jews derived the force of their culture. They were not the Hebrews of the Torah of the Middle East, but the people who took on Judaism and developed the Talmud. This overlap of two different cultures, and its resultant confusion over who is a Jew (the very word "Jew" being an Ashkenazi creation in contrast to "Hebrew") lasts to this day.

These are not irrelevent details. Massive amounts of slaughter and wars from the Middle Ages onwards have results precisely from the cultural confusion of what Jews are, where they came from, what they represent, where they live, etc., and then since the creation of modern Israel, how all of that fits together.

Even starting to figure it all out is a mess - asking questions and trying to determine definitions automatcally steps on toes. Muslims exploit the hell out of the confusion as well (which is ridiculous, since they want to kill everyone who isn't converted to Islam anyway).

And it doesn't help that it's almost impossible to find a translation of the Talmud - even now, in the days of the internet.

I have my Chandos Classics copy of the Talmud dated around 1894 which I found in an abandoned farmhouse in Ohio when I was in high school.

BTW, the Uzbeks I talked to insisted theirs was a tolerant Sufi form of Islam, that Jews have lived in Tashkent & Samarkand for 3,000 years, that Aleksandr Makyedonskii took an Uzbek wife on the eve of his invasion of India, our heroes are either poets or conquerors, our national dish “plov” was originally devised as combat rations for Alexander’s legions, blond haired Uzbeks are descended from the Macedonians (I literally choked on that one!).

Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked the Uzbeks and enjoyed learning about their culture. They are the most laid back of Muslims, they like their vodka and their very good looking young women dress as they please. What did floor me was the nostalgia among the young people for communism, as they sure didn’t get it from their parents who told me about the bad old days of KGB and midnight arrests.

Interesting tour in Central Asia, wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

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