Georgian Vote Shows Support for Shevardnadze

Here in Josef Stalin’s birthplace, where they know a good deal about strong leadership, Georgians streamed to the polls Sunday to demonstrate their support for former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, running unopposed to become Georgia’s elected leader.

Shevardnadze, seeking the chairmanship of Parliament, is expected to win massive backing. Preliminary election results are not expected before later today, but by Sunday night it appeared that more than 80% of the eligible voters in this troubled Caucasus mountain republic had cast ballots.

“People are hoping for something,” said Georgy Zesashvili, deputy chairman of the Central Election Commission.

About 1,600 refugees from the war-torn western region of Abkhazia, packed into a hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, showed their agreement with Zesashvili by voting 99% for Shevardnadze, elections officials said. That tally was the only one available late Sunday.

Meanwhile, the ethnic conflict that has turned thousands of Georgians into homeless refugees continued, with Georgian authorities reporting that one of their military helicopters had been hit by ground fire over besieged Abkhazia but managed to land. One passenger was reported killed and two others wounded.

Tamaz Navareishvili, a former deputy chairman of the Abkhazian legislature, reported by phone that separatist forces were massing near Sukhumi, Abkhazia’s capital and one of the last Georgian strongholds in the Black Sea coastal region. Navareishvili said an attack might be only hours away.

In Tbilisi, Defense Minister Tengiz Kitovani also said that an Abkhazian attack was imminent.

Casting his own ballot early in the morning in Tbilisi, the debonair Shevardnadze thanked the Georgian people for participating in the election and acknowledged he was voting for himself.

He said his first order of business if he is elected chairman of a revived Parliament will be to end the ethnic separatist revolt in Abkhazia. He said a meeting on the subject has been agreed to “in principle” with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who has called for a get-together Tuesday.

Shevardnadze, however, appeared to rule out a face-to-face meeting anytime soon with Abkhazian leader Vladislav Ardzinba, whom the Georgians accuse of treacherously violating a truce agreement with an offensive that caused a humiliating Georgian rout this month.

Sunday was the fourth time in the past two years that voters in this crisis-rocked country of 5.5 million people have been called to the polls to decide important issues. The strong vote for Shevardnadze that seemed a foregone conclusion would reflect a collective desire to turn the page on the nightmare of Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s presidency.

Gamsakhurdia, a nationalist militant, was overwhelmingly elected by universal suffrage in May, 1991, but he soon turned broodingly authoritarian or even, as many of his opponents viewed it, dangerously paranoid.

Gamsakhurdia was overthrown in January by a coalition of free-lance militias and opposition political parties. The coalition then invited Shevardnadze to return to Tbilisi, where the former Kremlin official assumed leadership of a State Council created to run Georgian affairs.

Denounced by Gamsakhurdia’s supporters as the beneficiary of a putsch similar to the one that targeted his longtime friend Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former Soviet president, Shevardnadze hopes to be able to cite Sunday’s election results as proof that he has a democratic mandate. As recently as last December, Shevardnadze, a former Communist Party leader of Georgia, was bitterly criticized in his homeland as a crafty “silver fox” who was supposed to be sabotaging Gamsakhurdia’s efforts to create a country independent of Moscow.

Now many Georgians hope he can work economic miracles and bring civil peace.

That was the prevailing view in Gori, the town where Stalin was born. Bigger than life, a dark-gray granite statue of the Soviet dictator still dominates Stalin Square in the mountain-ringed town of 70,000.

As Gori residents lined up to vote, almost literally in the long shadow cast by the stone likeness of Stalin, some waxed nostalgic about the old times, while others said their country needs to return to basic values.

“You didn’t have bread lines in Georgia under Stalin,” Archil Grishashvili, 32, a foreman in a railroad-tie manufacturing plant, said admiringly. “Sure, maybe some people were killed, but everybody else lived together.”

The humble brick-and-wooden cottage where Stalin, son of a shoemaker, was born Dec. 21, 1879, was converted long ago into a veritable shrine. Across the street at Gori’s middle school No. 9, people went about a rite Stalin never would have expected in Georgia--free elections.

Voters were given a slip printed in blue ink that asked them to decide whether Shevardnadze should lead Parliament.

They also had to choose three parties from a long list of rival political groups; the winners will share proportionately in the 150 legislative seats to be filled from 10 large multi-member districts.

There was yet a third ballot for each of Georgia’s single-seat constituencies.

The complex electoral system was drawn up to safeguard the interests of the many Georgian political groups, but it seemed fated to block any one party from achieving a working majority in the 235-member legislature.

Among the half-dozen parties expected to score the highest were the pro-Western, pro-market National Democrats, the environmentalist Greens and the Peace Bloc.