ABSTRACT
It was March 2004, and my old friend Gia Janjgava, last seen giving me a cigarette in Sukhumi in 1993, but now consul general of the Republic of Georgia’s representational office in the Turkish Black Sea commercial hub of Trabzon, was incensed-and not because I had quit smoking, and thus had “forgotten” my usual tribute of a carton of American “street” Marlboros to His Excellency in exchange for a free visa. No, Gia was peeved for other reasons. At the ripe old age of thirty-eight, he was feeling himself to be an old and crumpled veteran of the political and military hurly-burly that had rocked his native land at the time of the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and was now being shunted off to the side as younger compatriots seized control of the levers of power, prestige, and authority in the “new” Georgia ushered in by the Rose Revolution-the George Soros/Open Society Institute-funded vehicle of social and political change that was led by the dashing, six-footfour, thirty-six-year-old Mikheil (“Misha”) Saakashvili.
