Dreams of Independence: Georgia Beyond Russian and European Imperialisms

It is easy to read the ongoing protests in Georgia as necessarily associate their desire for emancipation from Russian imperialist structures with a non-debatable move towards the European Union. We asked Keto Gorgadze to articulate a framing that would, instead, free us from such an easy dichotomic reading.

Protests against the authoritarian pro-Russian regime in Georgia have been taking place continuously for the past two years. They began after the introduction of the so-called ‘foreign agent’ law—often referred to as the “Russian law”—and were later intensified by the compromised parliamentary elections of 2024 and the subsequent suspension of the country’s European Union integration process. But these protests are far from monolithic and do not revolve solely around Euro-accession. Rather, they are directed against tightening authoritarian policies, police violence, corruption, anti-queer legislation, evictions, and environmental destruction. The crisis the country has faced since the ruling party, Georgian Dream, came to power in 2012 is closely linked to its pro-Russian political orientation and its direct ties to Russian state structures and capital. These connections have enabled Russian intrusion and influence at the ideological level, in decision-making processes, and in patterns of police control and persecution thus undermining the country’s autonomy.

Despite Georgia’s formal independence from the USSR in 1991, Russia has continued to exert control through the backing of secessionist regions, military invasions, gas cut-offs, economic blockades, and the infiltration of the political class whenever Georgia’s political course has contradicted Russia’s imperial interests. However, as part of the Soviet Union, Georgia occupied a distinct position within the empire. After gaining independence in 1918, it was occupied by the Red Army in 1921 and incorporated back as “Soviet Georgia,” a period that lasted until 1991. Throughout this era, Georgians were subjected to simplifying stereotypes of their culture and identity and treated as a supplier of natural goods to the entire USSR due to favorable climatic conditions and available resource deposits, while being regarded as a “developed nation”—a designation that elevated them within the Soviet hierarchy of peoples and in the Caucasus itself, leaving a legacy that remains visible in the regional positioning of it to this day.

Europeanization is therefore envisioned by many as a path toward actual independence, with the promise of democratic institution-building and economic development.When the protests erupted, what stood out was the massive number of European flags displayed by protesters, while simultaneously framing the agenda of the protests as anti-imperialist. For those outside the regional context, this combination was particularly puzzling and often sparked heated debates over the irreconcilability of the two positions. The history of imperial powers positioning themselves as allies of peoples colonized by other empires has been widely discussed, including the fact that Russia is still regarded as an ally by some nations and communities subjected to Western colonial violence, with this alignment complicating anti-colonial solidarities among these communities.

In this case, the reductionist (self-)framing of Georgian struggles as solely pro-European prevents them from being understood as part of a broader regional dynamic, both Caucasian and West Asian, where trans-imperial violence is inescapable.

Focusing on Russia’s intervention solely through the lens of the opposition between democracy and dictatorship overshadows the fact that Western capital exploits the country’s land and natural resources, which is enabled by the absence of political and economic autonomy. Understanding the overlaps and, at the same time, the contradictions of imperial interests in West Asia is crucial for imagining avenues in which anti-authoritarian struggles are not framed or narrated through alignment with a particular imperial interpretation of how they should be practiced.

Shaped by multiple imperial interests that have simultaneously positioned the country as both ‘European’ and ‘Oriental,’ the Georgian context is not only challenging to inscribe within the Western world neatly but it also complicates the East–West dichotomy itself. Despite the Georgian pro-Russian government’s self-proclaimed anti-Western stance, articulated through an ideology of ‘traditional values’ and claims to protect national sovereignty, the situation is far more complex when it comes to capital and military relations. Georgian liberal opposition tends to take a Zionist stance supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza since 2023, systematically framed as a fight against Hamas, which they associate with allies of the ruling regime Iran and Russia. Yet this same regime has simultaneously collaborated with Israel through multiple channels, including abstaining from votes on UN ceasefire resolutions in Gaza and pursuing the modernization of Georgia’s defence system “to NATO standards.”Due to its proximity to whiteness and its relative freedom from being fixed within an ‘Eastern’ identity, Georgia is often considered the most ‘European’ among the Caucasian regions, a positioning that carries the risk of merging with an oppressor through the promise of independence. This binary is also vivid in the relationship between Armenia and Georgia, which is often characterized through neglect. Armenia, subjected to Azerbaijani–Turkish violence, is forced to form an alliance—although extremely complicated and non-linear—with Russia, which prevents it from being perceived as “progressive” and “freedom-loving” in the same way as Georgia, especially given the presence of the Russian military base in Gyumri, and therefore from forming solidarities. The dichotomization of political discourse in the region along East–West lines narrows visions of liberation to forms of saviorism, in which solidarities with other West Asian struggles are not recognized as paths toward building alternative strategies independent of imperial forces and obscures the West’s actual interests in the region, which lie in the extraction of natural resources and in expanding its influence in West Asia.

At the center of the current Georgian protests is the miners’ movement in Chiatura. Located in western Georgia, the town is organized around manganese mining, with the company Georgian Manganese holding extraction rights and being the region’s largest employer. The company was granted a monopoly over operations in 2006, at a time when it functioned as a subsidiary of the British company Stemcor. It is now wholly owned by Miami-based Georgian American Alloys, which maintains close ties to Georgia’s ruling regime, and by Ukrainian-Israeli businessman Ihor Kolomoysky. The company has been responsible for exploitative working conditions, mass layoffs, water and air contamination, infrastructural neglect, and the collapse of entire villages due to ground instability caused by underground mining operations. Those affected by these consequences, as well as people subjected to persecution, have engaged in repeated hunger strikes since 2020, following the sinking of the village of Shukruti and other severe cases of labor conditions. These protests intensified in 2022, as residents lost their homes and family members.

The history of this infrastructural town is most often narrated through a Soviet industrialist lens, a framing that obscures an earlier history of joint imperial interests in the region shared by the Russian Empire and Germany. In the Russian empire-building process of the second half of the 19th century, German capital played a crucial role as a supplier of technology and infrastructure during the industrialization, which occurred later than in Western European countries. For German companies that would later advocate for state bodies to pay closer attention to the “wealth” of the Caucasus, Russia offered opportunities for lucrative enterprises, primarily due to its vast territory. This served as the basis for the market entry of a company such as Siemens & Halske as early as the 1850s. The company built a telegraph network across the empire and was invited by the governor of the Caucasus to consolidate control over the region and its physical integration into the rest of Russia, while at the same time strategically connecting European telegraph lines with Persia and India. Later, the same company became involved in the copper smelting industry in Azerbaijan. However, Chiatura remained one of the main interests of Germany and other European countries in the region.

In the early 20th century, Russian and German collaboration accounted for more than 40 percent of global manganese production. Almost all of the mines were owned by German companies that have received mining licences directly from the Russian Emperor. Mining operations began between 1877 and 1879, following the discovery of manganese deposits in Chiatura in 1858 by the German geologist Hermann Abich, a member of the Russian Corps of Mining Engineers and described by his Russian contemporaries as ‘the father of Caucasian geology,’ whose research laid the groundwork for Otto Siemens’s drilling operations. The Russian military general M. Vorontsov wrote to Alexander von Humboldt, Abich’s former professor, that Abich was “very useful for us not only as the author of fundamental scientific works, but also in practical relation to the satisfaction of the needs of our country, particularly for the successful search for coal, peat, salt, etc.”

The companies operating in Chiatura were major actors in metallurgical and mining industries and were deeply entangled in Germany’s colonial ventures. The technical director of the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG (GBAG) company, Emil Kirdorf, was a staunch advocate of colonial annexation and financed railway companies in the colonies. He later embraced National Socialism and actively lobbied Adolf Hitler within German business circles. Another founding member of GBAG, Adolph von Hansemann, who also served as a director of Germany’s largest private bank, Disconto-Gesellschaft, financed mining and railway enterprises in German New Guinea (current Papua New Guinea). This company was particularly invested in expanding German influence into the Caucasus, as the country’s military industry was heavily dependent on reliable manganese supplies and fossil fuels.

In 1918, Georgia gained independence from the Russian Empire under German protectorate. Yet this independence was not granted gratuitously. As historian Giorgi Astamadze contends, Georgia was imagined as a neutral ‘buffer zone’ between Russia and Turkey, while Germany’s primary interest laid in securing access to manganese ores in Chiatura and oil reserves in Azerbaijan. Today, manganese is widely recognized as a crucial material for the European green transition, as it is used in the production of nickel–manganese–cobalt batteries for electric vehicles and wind turbines. This growing demand is likely to further intensify mining in Chiatura and other supplier regions outside Europe, particularly in South Africa, the most significant supplier. Georgia’s pro-Russian government facilitates this extractive enterprise through its direct ties to political and economic power by employing authoritarian measures of protest suppression and persecution. This, once again, complicates attempts to frame the situation within the dominant discourse of a ‘West vs. East’ rivalry, often reduced to a binary of ‘democracy vs. dictatorship.’ Just as the Russian military conquest of the Caucasus historically paved the way for German capital’s involvement and exploitation in Chiatura, Russia’s contemporary imperialism now enables Western extractivism.

To grasp the inter-imperial dynamics in the region and move beyond attachment to the colonizer, it is important to understand several colonial continuities in this context.

Chiatura demonstrates that the current catastrophe would not have occurred without the continuity between German and Russian colonialisms, in which working-class Georgians are forced to sew their mouths shut to draw attention to their cause, while Europeans are taking pride in their environmental consciousness and Russians are leveraging their capital tax-free in Tbilisi. At the same time, German imperialism in the Caucasus must be understood as part of the broader system of German colonial expansion rather than as an anomaly. And, in order to envision forms of resistance to the trans-imperial shaping and reshaping of the region, it is essential to recognize the continuity between past and present—something that, in the post-Soviet context, is too often framed solely through the infrastructural spatiality of the Soviet state, without acknowledging its tsarist antecedents.

Identification with the West hinders Georgia from recognizing its West Asian identity, as the Georgian-Armenian artist Ana Mikadze has once noted. The overpromising project of independence and autonomy through Europeanization deepens Georgia’s detachment from regional dynamics and from its own struggles. This obstructs the building of solidarities within the North and South Caucasus and across West Asia, which could be witnessed during the blockade and occupation of Artsakh and the genocide in Gaza, as well as the limited support for the Kurdish struggle. Moreover, this orientation allows for a turning away from Georgia’s own displaced population from occupied Abkhazia, many of whom have been living in dire conditions for more than 30 years. The hierarchies imposed by this consciousness have tangible material effects on communities positioned at the margins of this evolutionary scale and excluded from the European fantasy. If we want to imagine an alternative form of anti-colonialism in the region, we have to recognize the multiplicity of colonial influences shaping the Caucasus and acknowledge that, despite differing and at times conflicting interests, it is still possible to develop strategies for resisting this layered colonial situation. This is only achievable through refusal to rely solely on the overpromising solutionism of becoming-European. Instead, there is a need to free ourselves from the compulsion to continually “choose a colonizer,” drawing on past infrastructures of solidarity and learning how to extend and transform them in the present. ■