DREAM DESTROYER
Tbilisi, Georgia
Words and photography by Elijah El Kahale
2024-2025
Dense clouds hung low over Shota Rustaveli Avenue in front of the Parliament of Georgia. Barrel fires burned in tight circles, their heat barely reaching the hands stretched towards them. Some protesters were only just arriving, while others were dragging themselves awake from where they had slept on the pavement.
Georgia sits between the Black Sea, Russia and Turkey, a crossroads of empires where borders rarely stay still. Its modern politics are shaped by a long, uneven struggle with Moscow. Abkhazia and South Ossetia were taken by Russian-backed forces in 2008, while the older wound of Soviet troops killing pro-independence protesters on Rustaveli Avenue in 1989 has never fully healed. Every election here is a choice between Europe and the pull of Moscow’s orbit.
My camera was cold enough to numb my fingers as we huddled together. A giant screen faced the crowd, its light flickering across sleepless faces. We waited, hearts lodged in our throats, for the election result. The result flashed onto the screen: Georgian Dream had won. The hope that had held the crowd together drained away, leaving their desperation for democracy visible. No one accepted the result. Rage rippled through the crowd as people surged forward, fists hammering against the metal barricades outside parliament, faces lit harshly by the screen’s pale glow.
Everyone knew what it meant. The election had been stolen.
Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, has held power for more than a decade. The party was created and financed by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire who made his fortune in Russia and kept his interests there. In the weeks before the election, the city was plastered with billboards showing Ukraine in ruins and opposition leaders chained at the neck. It was less an electoral platform than a warning: do not provoke Russia. For many here, the result was never in doubt. Bidzina Ivanishvili is widely regarded as the country’s de facto ruler, even though he holds no official position. He stepped down in 2013, but his influence never left. His power is not only financial; it is structural. The networks he built run through parliament, the media and the courts. He presents himself as a philanthropist, but the policies enacted under Georgian Dream have kept Moscow’s hand hovering over the country, easing the passage of laws that mirror Russian “foreign agent” legislation and slowing Georgia’s path towards the EU.
This is why the election result felt predetermined. The young remember the 2008 annexations; the old remember Soviet boots on this pavement.
Among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has been one of the most stubborn in resisting Moscow’s attempts to shape its future. The memory of Soviet tanks in Tbilisi, the wars in Samachablo and Abkhazia, and the long uneasy years between them have carved protest into the national muscle. My landlord once put it simply: “We have been protesting for 40 years.”
She spoke Russian, as nearly every one of her age does, but younger families are now teaching English first. I remember children as young as four playing in the alley outside my first apartment, greeting me in English with a kind of practised confidence.
Russian, by contrast, carried a different weight. In many parts of Tbilisi, speaking it openly wasn’t always welcomed. After decades of invasions, occupations and cultural erasure before and after the Soviet collapse, prioritising Georgian over Russian had become both a cultural defence and a political stance.
Tbilisi wears its cultural memory in layers. Post-Soviet concrete blocks stand beside traditional Oda houses and qvevri wine vessels. The past and present sit openly alongside each other, and neither is subtle. EU flags hang from almost every institutional building, while graffiti denouncing Russia stretches across the city — including the pan-continental classic: “Путін – хуйло!” (translated as “Putin is a dickhead”).
For Georgians, EU integration is far more than a symbolic gesture. According to the 2024 EU Annual Survey, 81 per cent of the population supported joining the EU, not as an aspiration but as a necessity. EU integration is spoken of less as a political alignment and more as an escape route: a way out of corruption, poverty and the lingering shadow of Sovietism.
During the year I lived in Georgia, at least three adults and twelve children were killed in building collapses caused by neglected safety repairs and failures in hazard reduction. When infrastructure fails because money is siphoned toward Russian interests, democracy is no longer an ideal. It is the difference between safety and death.
In the months before the election, legislation began to appear that closely resembled the laws used in Moscow to silence dissent. The Family Values bill was drafted to target all public forms of queer expression. The Foreign Influence bill threatened to starve artists, journalists, NGOs, community initiatives and cultural institutions of the support that kept them alive. These laws signalled not only a tightening of control but a shift in the country’s direction.
The day after the Family Values bill came into effect, the country learned of the death of transgender actress and model Kesaria Abramidze.
Only days after the crowd waited on Rustaveli Avenue for the election results, another blow came: the EU bid was suspended until 2028. It was the most radicalising betrayal for Georgian society.
Immediately, citizens across Tbilisi gathered outside parliament to protest and were soon met by police arriving in trucks equipped with water cannons and tear gas. Each night, the protests grew in size, and each night more police arrived to hold the line around parliament.
Protesters arrived with gas masks, saline, five-litre water bottles for washing off tear gas, makeshift batons and shields fashioned from oil drums, dumpster bins and anything that could be used to build barricades and keep the fires burning in the winter cold.
Bars and restaurants across the city centre opened their doors to protesters, offering shelter and supplies in a show of solidarity. The crowd chanted in unison — pointed taunts directed at the police — as fireworks cracked against government buildings and fresh graffiti spread across the walls, moments before officers moved in with batons, water cannons and tear gas.
The tear gas was Condor-manufactured GL-202, a higher-potency grade chemical weapon used in Bahrain, Sudan, Pakistan and Venezuela, where it has been linked to serious injuries and deaths. The canisters hit with enough force to split skin and fracture bone. One protester was struck in the head and later woke from a medically induced coma partially blind. Clouds of gas rolled through the street. Eyes burned. Breathing tipped into panic. When the gas reached us, my vision blurred and my lungs tightened.
People pulled one another out, rinsing eyes and dragging the injured back behind shield lines. Others launched fireworks toward the police or tore up pavement to reinforce the barricades. Tbilisi was on edge. Neither side was backing down.
Roadblock demonstrations in the capital became a daily occurrence. Protesters destroyed surveillance cameras wherever they could. The police force only intensified. When officers advanced, anyone caught in the open was beaten, including journalists. People ran in groups down side streets, hiding for hours and checking their phones for updates about when it was safe to move again.
Arrests followed. Journalists, students, activists, musicians, opposition organisers and political figures were detained. Some were taken to hospital. In one incident, an officer kicked a protester directly in the head while he was already unconscious on the pavement. Reports spread of fines, restricted bank accounts and assaults carried out not only by police but also by Titushki — masked men in black, rumoured to be recruited from former prison networks and gyms.
Protesters helped anyone in need, spraying saline into their eyes as they struggled to breathe through the tear gas. Others built barricades from whatever they could pull from the pavement and destroyed surveillance cameras. No distinction was made between protesters, passersby or journalists — anyone documenting the scene was beaten. When police advanced and beat people as they made arrests, everyone sprinted for cover in groups, hiding for hours and keeping contact over the phone with updates about when it was safe to return home.
According to Amnesty International, more than 300 of the 500 people arrested during the protests reported torture or ill-treatment in custody. Police were permitted to use preventative detention, allowing arrests without cause. Fines could reach up to US$5,550 — enforced with AI surveillance capable of identifying faces and clothing.
As the protests dragged on, harassment widened. Journalists, photographers, writers and organisers were stopped, searched, fined or detained. In some cases, bags were forcibly unzipped and searched. Key activists and organisers were also subjected to raids. Others were deported or barred from re-entry. A colleague of mine, Erik Boel, a journalist and political scientist, was warned that he would be fined and deported if he returned.
In the months I spent at the demonstrations, I knew something would eventually happen. I was anxious but I could not stop showing up. Tbilisi had become my home. I had work, an artist residency, friends, a life. I did not want to leave, but my visa required me to cross the border to renew my status.
At the crossing, I was told there was a US$1,850 fine that I had never been notified of. I could either stay in Armenia with whatever I was carrying or pay the fine and attempt to return. I paid everything I had. It made no difference. I was taken aside and questioned — where I lived, where I worked, what I did — but the outcome was already decided. I was barred from re-entering Georgia.
I crossed into Armenia with no money. A new life had begun without warning. I shook the whole way. Later, a Georgian friend learned what had happened: I had been blacklisted.
There would be no return.
