The rose revolution shows its thorns.

Early May 2005. In a few days the first visit of an American president to the small Caucasian country of Georgia will be the main event. Building facades along Bush's motorcade route are being repainted in gaudy pastels, the gaping potholes in the roads filled with cement and tar. Huge billboards are going up in town with the smiling faces of the Georgian and American presidents.

A private company has made the city of Tbilisi a gift of thousands of Bush posters, which are pasted up everywhere (luckily, because these would be otherwise difficult for the administration to afford). The schools are closed and the TV stations exhort Georgians to turn up in masses to greet Bush when he speaks in Liberty (formerly "Lenin") Square. Georgians are generally thrilled to be receiving so much attention, but are worried about whether he'll like their food and their country. My taxi driver practices his two words of English--"Georgia, good?"--and a local website's reporter gets so carried away that he proclaims, "U.S. President Georgia Bush." For those who know what is on the other side of the facade in this impoverished country, a joke is making the rounds: If only Bush would turn up twice a year.

It's now more than a year and a half since Georgia's much vaunted "Revolution of Roses." It isn't so much that the rose has faded, but rather that well-hidden thorns are beginning to draw blood. While Bush hails Georgia as a "beacon of liberty," alarm bells are already sounding amongst civil libertarians. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, young and Western-trained, darling of the European media, is beginning to display autocratic tendencies that go even beyond those of his deposed predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze.

Saakashvili holds nearly all the cards in the Georgian deck. His party won almost every seat in the last parliamentary elections, and he can still claim unparalleled popularity. His challenge to the dinosaur Shevardnadze, effectively ousting him after fraudulent elections and literally chasing him out of parliament in the middle of a speech, made him a national hero at thirty-six. Yet, while Saakashvili makes the rounds of European capitals, brandishing the word "revolution," many of the social evils he inherited are still in place while others have worsened. The ex-mayor of Gori, Paata Tckheidze, believes the time has come for the president to "drop the word 'revolution' and get the country back to work."

It is true that the country Saakashvili took over was a wreck. Georgia, once considered the cote d'azur and breadbasket of the Soviet Union, now looks like a Third World country: poor in resources and destructively corrupt. Saakashvili has tried to address many of the country's problems, but it will take years, if not decades, before the effect is really felt. The central notion of his reforms appears to be simple: If you pay people a decent wage, they will not be tempted by corruption. So, after weeding out 18,000 men in overstaffed police departments, he has now given those remaining a pay raise as well as spanking new VW squad cars instead of the old Soviet-style jalopies they used to drive. He has also put them on the streets where they can be seen; in fact, they are everywhere, reinforcing the black-clad private security men guarding nearly every hotel, restaurant, and gas station. He has reformed the army as well, giving them more money and trying to instill a new respect in the profession. Most importantly, salaries, however meager, are now actually paid at the end of each month, something that was a hit-and-miss affair under Shevardnadze.

Yet while every politician worth his salt knows he has to buy himself the army and police force, Saakashvili is less generous in other sectors of the economy. He has doubled pensions from about $7 to $14 a month. There has also been an education reform, hotly contested by students, where the old system of exams is now being overhauled. The practice up to now has been a simple one: If you want to take your exams, you pay the teacher a bribe. (Professors earn only between $15 and $30 a month.) And the better the grade you desire, the higher the bribe. A friend of mine who is a university professor in the provinces tried to gather his colleagues to put an end to this corruption and was nearly lynched.

Saakashvili argues that, in order to put through reforms, he needs to act quickly and decisively. Because he has a free hand, because there is no serious opposition, Saakashvili has let his natural inclination for power augment itself. He recently changed the constitution to weaken parliament and strengthen the presidency. He can now dissolve parliament without much ado (at the moment he doesn't need to, as these are nearly all members of his own party); on the contrary, he has made impeachment proceedings so complex as to be virtually impossible. The result is a rubber-stamp legislature.

Saakashvili has thus succeeded where Shevardnadze failed. This is the viewpoint of the researcher and civil rights activist, Paata Zakareichvili, once one of the president's closest friends and political associates, now in the opposition: "Shevardnadze tried to diminish the role of parliament; Saakashvili did it. Shevardnadze tried to control the local administrations and failed; Saakashvili did it. Shevardnadze dreamed of controlling the media and couldn't; Saakashvili does."

Zakareichvili says the media was stronger and more independent under Shevardnadze. Now it is essentially made up of self-censoring yes-men or controlled by the government. Just as in Putin's Russia, the three most important Georgian TV networks have been taken over by the government. According to the French journalist and political observer Regis Gente, who lives in and reports from Tbilisi, the networks have also been compelled to film live the heavy-handed arrests of corrupt members of the old government. "You have to wonder why it takes a squad of hooded police brandishing Kaleshnikovs to arrest a guy who hasn't paid his taxes," says Gente. "This is trial by television." What's more, three TV talk shows, usually critical of the governing power, have been taken off the air. There have also been rumors that the age-old Soviet era practice of telephone pressure on journalists is still at work. In typical fashion: "The ministers tell us that it's a time of revolution, an exceptional moment during which we mustn't criticize the government," reports one Georgian journalist.

In time-honored fashion, Saakashvili has used the "nation" card to his advantage. In a country already fiercely nationalist, he has changed the country's flag. Supplanting the banner which came in with the founding of independent Georgia (1918-21) with one full of crusade-like crosses, inspired by the medieval patriot David the Builder, Saakashvili is clearly addressing Georgian dreams of grandeur. And the implicit message here has to do with the two breakaway republics in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, which Georgia still claims as its own. Many observers believe that Saakashvili would be willing to go to war over these territories, if not for the opposition of Russia, which supports these rebel outposts.

Paata Zakareichvili believes that it's too soon to use the word dictatorship here. "Autocracy is more appropriate," he says. "Saakashvili doesn't believe in civil rights or in governing by consent. All opposition demonstrations are quashed, and the government has reinforced a state of fear. Power is now in the hands of a non-elected elite of ministers, all personal friends of the president." These men do not hesitate to use the expression "enemies of the state" for anyone speaking out against this situation.

For the moment, the Georgian population seems to accept this. Small reforms have given them some hope, some promise of a better future.

Into this Georgian context swings the Bush team on a brief stopover after the World War II commemorations in Moscow.

"Citizens of a free Georgia, Laura and I were in the neighborhood and thought we'd swing by and say 'gamarjoba,'" which means hello. These eighteen short hours, however, count heavily for Saakashvili, who craves recognition and aid from his American counterpart.

A few days before Bush's arrival, a government spokesman, Guivi Targamadze, warned on public television against any "individual attempting to speak ill of our country or of Mister Bush." Unlike in Moscow, Bush was not greeted here with banners showing Lenin or the hammer and sickle. Georgian soldiers are on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush is a hero in Tbilisi, and he laid it on thick. "You are building a democratic society, where the rights of minorities are respected, where a free press flourishes and a vigorous opposition is welcome," Bush said.

A few hours after Bush's departure, an unexploded grenade was found in a newspaper near the tribune where he spoke. Some weeks later a suspect, an unemployed Armenian, was arrested in a shootout. A journalist asked the assassin, who was on a stretcher going to the hospital, why he wanted to kill the U.S. President. His answer: "Because he's a prick!" This man was down and out, another loner living with his mother in a slum. But Saakashvili's men were quick to seize on the opportunity and announce that the grenade attack could not have come from "a single-handed person." The government is looking into the suspect's alleged links with the political party Revival. A thriving autocracy requires enemies, fictive or otherwise.

In Tbilisi, fear has replaced hope for many erstwhile supporters of Saakashvili. One day, I was sitting with some friends in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the capital. Zurab, now in his sixties, was criticizing the government, after having invested all his hopes for a new Georgia in the "Revolution of Roses." Then he stopped short and lowered his voice: "I have to be careful. People are being arrested for speaking out publicly."

Illustration by Lloyd Miller

David Zane Mairowitz is writing a book and making, a documentary film about Stalin's legacy in contemporary Georgia. He wrote "Outpost of the New Cold War" in the April 2004 issue of The Progressive.