However, the state came to be the author of the weakening of its own effective sovereignty by handing over nearly all control on economic matters to local or international business elites. In this respect, the post-Communist independent Georgian state, successively or concurrently under the rule of the former nomenklatura and paramilitary groupings during the 1990ies or young, Westernized leaders after 2003, has been the motor of the mentioned radical socio-economic changes. Both the intelligentsia and the dissident circles have been at the source of the general discreditation of the socialist idea, which ideologically paved the way for the radical substitution of the communist economic organization of society by market relationships on nearly all institutional levels, from the gradual privatization of state assets, public services, goods and spaces since the early 1990ies to legal, even constitutional mechanisms of radical deregulation since the Rose Revolution of 2003. Dissidents formed the major driving force behind the “national liberation movement” (the so-called “neformaly”) and it was their most influential segment headed by Zviad Gamsakhurdia who ousted the old Soviet nomenklatura out of power in the elections of 1990. The late Soviet Georgian intelligentsia was the source of the repertoire of chauvinist nationalism that nurtured the intensifying conflicts with ethnic minorities in the early 1990ies. Georgia’s overall development since the 1980ies through the fall of the Soviet Union up to the contemporary state of affairs is a unique showcase of the complex interplay and permanent shifts between different elites and levels of institutional and discursive change orchestrated from above.
Georgian Cultural Elites from late socialism to post-communism
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