Sopiko Japaridze is cofounder of Georgia’s Solidarity Network, an independent union. She has been a labor and community organizer in the United States and Georgia.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Georgian health care system became a testing ground for shock-therapy privatizations. The result: soaring morbidity, the return of long-suppressed diseases, and the sidelining of preventive care.
In Georgia, rival bills on “foreign agents” sparked mutual accusations of US and Russian interference. With all politics turned into jockeying over the country’s geopolitical position, discussion of its bleak economic record is quietly suppressed.
Soviet chess grandmaster Nona Gaprindashvili has announced that she is suing Netflix for belittling her achievements in The Queen’s Gambit. Her career shows we don’t need fictional rags-to-riches stories but welfare states that allow us to realize our true potential.
Ousted from the Georgian presidency in 2013, Mikheil Saakashvili bizarrely moved his anti-Putin crusade abroad, as he became governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region. His recent return to Georgian politics is the latest in a series of quixotic antics — but also expresses the essential shallowness of liberal democracy in the post-Soviet space.
Founded by a former Bill Clinton aide, Frontera is a failed oil firm known for its bid for domination in the former Soviet Union. Now, US congressmen are trying to stop it being expelled from Georgia — blaming its well-deserved legal woes on “Russian interference.”
Georgia’s elites are changing the country’s constitution to forever foreclose the possibility of taxing the rich.