ABSTRACT
During the last months of 1990 and the start of 1991, changes lashedacross the Georgian nation of a magnitude unknown since theBolshevik invasion of 1921. First the name went. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia became the Republic of Georgia. The Communist Party lost power in the USSR’s first democratic election in November 1990 and a new government formed by Zviad Gamsakhurdia quickly locked itself in a separatist battle with Moscow as the republic tried to shake itself free from its Communist past. For a few months the bird of Georgian independence sang loudly within its Russian cage — and then suddenly the cage was gone.
