Pronounced like "Graham's Accordian," except not really.

Douglas Muir at Fistful of Euros hates Zviad Gamsakhurdia more than I do. That isn't saying much: I don't hate the first president of post-Soviet Georgia that much, and Muir hates him a lot, although having read the post I'm not sure it's for the right reasons. For instance:

. . . if there’s one man who’s responsible for the current mess in Georgia — more than Saakashvili, more than Putin — it’s Gamsakhurdia.

Why?

Because he was a complete jackass.

[...]

. . . in terms of sheer damage inflicted upon his hapless country, nobody — not Yeltsin, not Berisha, not even Milosevic — came close to Gamsakhurdia. [Yowza!—CSB]

There’s a whole long backstory about Gamsakhurdia, and if you like you can go and read it. Briefly, he was the son of a very important Georgian family (his father was one of the nation’s great literary figures) who grew up to be an intellectual, anti-Soviet dissident, and fervent Georgian nationalist. As a teenager, he got thrown in a Soviet psychiatric ward for a while; as an adult, he did some time in jail; meanwhile, he built a career as a writer and translator, circulated a lot of samizdata, and feuded viciously with other Georgian intellectuals. There’s a whole book to be written on his early life — it’s a very Soviet story — but suffice it to say that he was in and out of trouble for over thirty years before emerging as leader of independent Georgia.

"In and out of trouble?" Muir is giving us a portrait of Gamsakhurdia as white trash cousin, and it doesn't quite work. The "psychiatric ward" line is especially weak; dissent was a mental disorder in the Soviet Union, remember? And it's not like he was in jail for knocking over a liquor store.

As for being awful for Georgia, I'm not convinced he was awfuller than his equivalent post-Soviet contemporaries (forbidding Georgians from selling food and building materials outside of Georgia is pretty dumb, but I've heard worse) and Muir hasn't convinced me. Nor on G's handling of the South Ossetian question:

An emollient policy towards the minorities might have worked; failing that, there was always the possibility of delaying a confrontation until Georgia’s embryonic military was ready to roll. Certainly it’s hard to imagine a worse policy than Gamsakhurdia’s “we’re revoking your autonomy — suck it up!” without having either the guns or the political clout to make it stick.

Gamsakhurdia's line was less "Suck it up" and more "I am concerned that you are being manipulated by Russia." Maybe his actions drove them deeper into Russia's arms (more folly than wickedness, surely?), but his concern that Russia was using ethnic tensions to destabilize post-Soviet states wasn't entirely batty. Also, his government only revoked South Ossetia's autonomy after the South Ossetian regional government declared its intention to secede, which is an important difference between Gamsakhurdia's overreaching and Saakashvili's.

Then Muir hits the kicker: the 1991 coup:

Gamsakhurdia then mismanaged things so badly in Georgia itself that within a year he’d been ousted in a coup.

Er, sort of. Muir admits that it wasn't the Georgians but "a disaffected coalition of Georgia’s elites" that ousted ZG—the fact that the pro-Gamsakhurdians were mostly peasants and factory workers and the anti-Gamsakhurdians were educated elites is an interesting angle to take on the situation—and the examples of "mismanagement" they mustered were hardly egregious (see below).

Would you judge me if I quoted P. J. O'Rourke?:

The Gamsakhurdia supporters . . . were the same kind of poor, benighted slobs who supported Noriega in Panama, Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines and Nixon during Watergate. They were mindlessly patriotic and full of ignorance and prejudices. The [anti-Gamsakhurdia] people at the TV station were much more like us. They really cared about human rights and social justice. They were hip. They were smart. And they were wrong. The president had been duly elected. He hadn't done anything terribly unconstitutional. In fact, by the standards of the Soviet Union, he hadn't done anything worth mentioning. When, at the TV station, I'd interviewed Nodar Notadze, leader of the anti-Gamsakhurdia opposition in the Georgian Parliament, Notadze had said, "There is no legal ground to demand his resignation, but there is moral ground."

Not up to our standards, maybe, but the very bottom of the post-Soviet barrel?