Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia

Conclusion: A Period Made Past

CONCLUSION A Period Made Past D uring my first days in Batumi, as the war began, Nino, a local acquaintance , referred to the president as “King Fountain the First.” As she said, “All he does is build fountains! Yes, he also built some roads and made sure we have electricity; that’s also good, but what do we need all those fountains for?” The answer to this question seems to lie in political power struggles played out in and on urban space. In Batumi, crumbling facades, fragments, and partly finished structures indexed not only the failure of those who had once built them but also the political contests over the right to determine the future. Fountains were political signs of a new future and the end of a period. In his work on urban space in Astana in Kazakhstan, Victor Buchli (2007) has noted how progress and continuity are reckoned locally in surfaces and appearances in terms of what he calls material anxiety. Surfaces and materialities, he argues , can be seen as forms of Taussigan public secrets because, when buildings begin to crumble and façades begin to decay, the material instability they signify indexes the failure of the social relations and moral orders that constructed them. In terms of iconoclasm or (re)destruction, many of the same characteristics are at stake, but in these cases façades are forcefully made to crumble; in such cases the indexing of failure is highly politically motivated. As shown in the two chapters in this section, processes of iconoclasm, or what I call “overwriting” in Chapter 2, were abundant in Batumi, particularly following the Rose Revolution. However, although the material changes undertaken by “King Fountain the First” officially indexed the failure of the period of Aslan Abashidze, certain social relations and moral orders in the city connected to this period did not cease to exist. Just as the possibility of a continuation of the war lingered, as a phantom pain of CoNCluSIoN • 73 something gone yet seemingly present, so certain aspects of the 1990s continued to exist for certain parts of the local population. The two chapters in this section explore ruins and ghosts in Batumi in order to explain why my informants talked of their city as a quiet swamp where devils wandered. I began this section by posing the following questions : Who were the devils? How had they come about, and what did they do? There is also a broader question: What does it mean when something is made past? To answer the former questions, it is worth posing the latter question slightly differently: What did it mean when President Saakashvili ended “the transition” (and the period of Abashidze) and declared that networks such as the vory-v-zakone no longer existed? As shown, rebuilding in Batumi symbolizing the “end” in the departure of Abashidze became strongly present. But did Abashidze in fact leave? The data presented in this section suggests that he did not, at least not as a social figure. Abashidze, and the period and practices associated with him, was an image that continued to loom, and it was a specific aspect of the past that, according to my informants, had a decisive meaning in their present lives. As argued in Chapter 3, in this sense it was, for them, not necessarily a past but a continuous unfolding that could be compared to a kind of haunting. The institutions and practices that were announced as being part of the transition period, and thus no longer existent, were not experienced by my informants as having passed. Clearly, such institutions and practices were not the same as they had been before, and not as common. Yet in some way they were still there; they were still part of reality. Sometimes a man was shot in the hand and another man had to help hide the gun. Sometimes drugs were unavoidable. Sometimes crime was a necessity. It is quite possible that these things were the “devils,” along with the social figures that had created them. The notion of devils was not confined to Batumi. As Paul Manning has observed, the Georgian term kaji (horned devil) was much used in Tbilisi in the early nineties as covering both common street criminals and “New Georgians”—that is, the nouveau riche elite (Manning 2009: 89). In the early days of post-Soviet chaos, Manning writes, ‘the kaji haunts the city when the city itself has become a kind of wilderness . . . the dark streets of the...