Rival Factions Take to Streets in Discord Over Georgia President : Soviet Union: The republic’s leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, is labeled a dictator by the opposition. The march toward independence and democracy proves perilous.

Nanuli Kakabadze, a silver-haired math teacher with the heavy-lidded sloe eyes of her people, spent Wednesday at the opposition barricade, giant cement blocks bearing the slogans “Long Live Georgia!” and “The President Must Resign!”

“One man has usurped power,” she said, “and that is dictatorship.”

A few blocks away, Nona Kvelashvili, a black-tressed English teacher, joined the opposite faction, a milling crowd backing the president of this republic in the southwestern Soviet Union.

“The situation is such that we must support him to reach independence,” she said.

Such chatter is typical of the Georgian capital’s streets these days as political activists turn to competing hunger strikes and, this week, to opposing barricades.

Georgia’s shaky experiment with democracy has raised concerns not only about this tiny, mountainous republic but also about the seven others that have declared themselves outside the Soviet Union but whose independence has not been recognized by Moscow.

In this grape-growing republic of 5 million, longtime political ferment turned into frenzy after August’s unsuccessful coup in Moscow. Georgians, who declared their independence in a referendum last March, have new hope that they can actually break away from the onetime Soviet monolith.

But first, they will have to work out their own internal problems. That means turning thumbs up or down on Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the onetime dissident and current president whose political opponents accuse him of human rights violations.

Gamsakhurdia is depicted by these critics as a would-be dictator who abuses the extensive powers granted him by the republic’s Parliament in April, whose opponents are arrested, imprisoned, beaten, kidnaped or simply disappear. He has closed down newspapers, blacked out television broadcasts, branded his foes “enemies of the state” and urged his supporters “to liquidate” them, they say.

They also blame him for an incident Sept. 2 in which Georgian Interior Ministry troops opened fire on demonstrators in Tbilisi; the official toll of wounded stands at four but other estimates run to 20.

On Wednesday evening, a stroll down Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s stately central boulevard, proved to be a lesson in pro- and anti-Gamsakhurdia politics.

At one end, at the headquarters of the anti-Gamsakhurdia National Democratic Party, partisans held heated discussions at the barricades that they had set up against possible government attack.

Inside, party leader Georgy Chanturia proudly read a joint call from 27 Georgian parties and political groups, including several members of Gamsakhurdia’s Round Table coalition, for the president to resign.

Chanturia, who looks much older than his 32 years, attributes his weatherbeaten look to the strain of opposition life.

“In Georgia, there is terror,” he said. “They kidnap opposition members--people just disappear. In Georgia, there are 87 political prisoners. Unknown people beat our people up. People are arrested for spreading proclamations.”

A delegation of U.S. congressmen who toured Georgia this week sharply criticized Gamsakhurdia’s human rights record, including the treatment of ethnic minorities. The Russian Parliament issued a similar condemnation and discussed the possibility of emergency rule in areas of conflict. Georgian officials say they fear that the republic’s image as a repressive regime is preventing recognition of its independence.

To National Democratic Party activist Irina Sarishvili, the answer is simple: Gamsakhurdia must go.

“We have no time to wait,” she said. “While he is in power, no one will recognize Georgia” as an independent country.

A few hundred yards away, near the elongated arches of the Georgian government building, the barricades are formed of closely parked buses, and they are manned by Gamsakhurdia’s supporters. Gamsakhurdia ordered the buses deployed himself, apparently worried about a possible armed attack by national guard units he no longer fully controls.

Several rows of loyal guards--dark young men in maroon berets--crowd the government building’s steps for additional security. Inside, spokesmen explain the presidential line.

No opposition members have been arrested, insists presidential press secretary Georgy Burdzhanadze; the 87 alleged political prisoners were arrested for real crimes such as robbery and extortion.

Burdzhanadze said that the Georgian government might actually be handicapped by “too much democracy.”

“Building barricades and closing off the main drag of a city or closing some buildings--in any other democratic country that would not be allowed,” he said.

He pledged that an open trial for the 87 prisoners will be held soon and that press and human rights organizations will be invited.

Officials even have an answer for the opposition’s accusation that its newspapers have been shut down. The reason: a severe paper shortage.

Gamsakhurdia has said publicly that enemies of Georgia’s independence, working out of both Moscow and Tbilisi, are whipping up unrest to keep the republic part of the Soviet empire.

Burdzhanadze accused former Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze of being party to the plot, tying his future to the Soviet Union rather than his native Georgia. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev also wants to keep Georgia in the union, he said.

Under Gorbachev’s reforms, Georgia was the first republic to hold truly multi-party elections last October, and the republic’s Communists were swept from power.

This spring, Gamsakhurdia won 87% of the vote in the republic’s presidential elections, and almost 99% of the populace voted in the referendum for independence.

Gamsakhurdia declared Georgia independent on April 9, but so far only Romania and the Soviet republic of Moldova, formerly Moldavia, have recognized the republic’s statehood.

And that is only the beginning of Gamsakhurdia’s troubles.

Critics say his government is plagued by incompetence, run by nationalists with no expertise. Gamsakhurdia recently dumped his prime minister, foreign minister and other top officials, only to find their voices added to the opposition.

“The power has gone to his head,” the former foreign minister, Georgy Khostaria, said.

“He has changed,” said Tengiz Segua, the ex-prime minister. “He is headed toward a closed dictatorship on the model of Albania.”

The president is also struggling with the mutinous Georgian national guard, which has refused to submit to his orders and reportedly even threatened to intervene if he tried to use violence on the opposition.

And the economy is in shambles, with fuel shortages so bad that they delay airplane flights. Butter is rationed, and in desperation the Georgian government has banned the export of most foods.

To top it all off, as Georgia struggles with the Kremlin for its own independence, various ethnic minorities here are struggling with the Georgian leadership, and a virtual civil war is under way in the province of South Ossetia, whose partly autonomous status Gamsakhurdia revoked earlier this year.

(In Moscow, according to the British news agency Reuters, about 30 Ossetian women demonstrated at a human rights forum of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, saying Georgians were slaughtering their people.)

Soviet Georgia: Another Freedom Bid

Soviet Georgia, the homeland of Josef Stalin, attempted to establish an independent state after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, but the movement was crushed by Moscow in 1921. It has a population of more than 5 million and covers an area of 26,910 square miles. It lies between the Great Caucasus Mountains to the north and the Little Caucasus Mountains to the south, with a short frontier with Turkey. Its warm and humid coastlands, bordered on the west by the Black Sea, are ideal for growing tea and citrus fruits, while grapes are raised in the drier inland valleys. Coal and manganese are its chief mineral resources. Georgia is the site of one of the largest steel mills in the Soviet Union.