Georgia Crippled by Anarchism, Fear of Russia : Caucasus: The economy is in shreds. Nearly every province has rebelled--or could. The problem may be its citizens’ indifference.

Privatization of property in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, according to one joke making the rounds in this irrepressible Caucasian nation, is a gunman waving your car down in the street and demanding that you hand over the keys.

The trouble is, such jokes have become real in this country, taken over six months ago by Georgian leader Eduard A. Shevardnadze, beloved by the West as Soviet foreign minister for freeing Eastern Europe from Moscow.

He is having far less success as a peacemaker in his own land: Georgia is now crippled by conflict with Russia and by its own anarchic spirit.

The economy is in shreds, almost every province has an actual or potential separatist rebellion and on one recent night in this picturesque capital, nobody seemed surprised when army officers and mafia chiefs fought it out with pistols and fists in the lobby of the city’s best hotel.

Diplomats say that people in this fiercely individualistic nation of 5.4 million are just not taking their situation seriously enough, somehow believing they are only caught in a short nightmare from which they will all wake up soon. They also warn that Shevardnadze is about the only force holding the country together.

“Formerly one of the richest republics of the Soviet Union, the country stands on the brink of catastrophe in the spring of 1993,” are the stern words of a German official report. “Without normalization with Russia . . . and unless Georgia can get access to raw materials and energy before the second half of the year, the economy will collapse.”

Economic figures are frightening and getting worse, the report said. Annual gross national product per person has dropped to about $60, falling 45% last year alone. Prices went up eightfold last year but wages only half that. Trade is drying up.

Agriculture is staggering too, despite Georgia’s idyllic situation. Specialization under the Soviet system concentrated on tea, citrus fruits, wines and cognacs, not the grains and oils now needed. Too many animals are being slaughtered, and food processing has dropped to half normal levels.

The country has no foreign currency reserves. It cannot draw on already allotted International Monetary Fund credits for lack of a reform program.

Georgia is increasingly dependent on a trickle of foreign aid: about 200,000 tons of wheat and feed grains from the United States, a $50-million trade credit from neighboring Turkey and a 70-million-ECU ($87-million) credit from the European Community, largely backed by Germany in gratitude for Shevardnadze’s role in allowing its reunification.

The Americans have also given more than $1-million worth of medicine, baby food and other emergency relief supplies.

But because of either fierce pride or an obliviousness to their country’s deep problems, Shevardnadze’s countrymen, unlike many other former peoples of the old Soviet Union, aren’t pressing the world for handouts. “The charming thing about Georgians is that they don’t want to take assistance, even though they desperately need it,” one American official in Tbilisi said.

Worst of all, Russia this month cut off its supply of rubles to the Georgian banking system, forcing Shevardnadze to start issuing coupons instead. Existing rubles will be quickly spent elsewhere on gray-market imports of fuel and food, leaving Georgia even more vulnerable.

“We are under financial blockade,” Shevardnadze said in an interview. “What is happening . . . is planned in Moscow. They are trying to preserve us in the old space. They want us to be under the influence of Moscow.”

Georgia had been ruled for nearly 200 years by Russia and the Soviet Union until it declared independence in April, 1991. A month later, it elected mercurial independence activist Zviad Gamsakhurdia as president. But he was deposed eight months later by an impromptu alliance of forces angered by his authoritarian tendencies.

Shevardnadze, 64, who had ruled Soviet Georgia as Communist Party first secretary during the regime of Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev, was called on to save the country.

A poll held along with general parliamentary elections in October last year gave him 93% approval as chairman of Parliament and the country’s chief executive, a post to be held until new parliamentary elections under a new constitution are held in 1995.

In a country whose ruler’s first problem, Shevardnadze admits, is the fractious “nature of the Georgian people,” there are 25 parties in the 234-seat Parliament. The largest has 20 members and many have just one representative. But most Georgians still support their leader. “Shevardnadze is doing a very good job. His first big achievement was to stop the civil war. The elections were democratic and free. Only people here know how difficult that was to do,” said Peter Mamradze, 40, a former astrophysicist who is now general secretary of the Georgian Greens Party.

In some provinces, Georgians still long for the charismatic ex-President Gamsakhurdia, now in exile. Other provinces are dominated by warlords like Defense Minister Tengiz Kitovani, once a little-known sculptor.

Such warlords could easily switch sides, with devastating effect. Kitovani commands the loyalty of up to half of the enthusiastic but ill-disciplined 15,000-man army. Some Georgians are calling for Shevardnadze to take a stronger lead and form his own party.

“Shevardnadze wants to avoid conflict,” said Georgy Chanturia, leader of the big National Democratic Party that is trying to organize a parliamentary bloc to support Shevardnadze. “He is very soft, gentle. He acts as if Georgia was already a highly developed democratic country. We are really in a revolutionary situation. All these supporters of Gamsakhurdia are multiplying and see peaceful measures as a sign of weakness. He should have taken some very strict measures. . . .”

Such talk sits uneasily with the casual image cultivated by Chanturia, 33, and already talked of as a future president. His wife, Irina Sarishvili, 30, one of the country’s most prominent Parliament members, spoke more moderately.

“Shevardnadze has to make a kind of balance. He tries to make emotions calm. Without him we could be a banana republic, just shooting at each other,” she said. “But in reality, we know that everything depends on what happens in Russia.”

Georgians fear that a rise of nationalist sentiment in Moscow will increase what Shevardnadze calls Russia’s imperial ambitions in the Caucasus. If one thing unites the Georgians, it is rejection of any return of rule from Moscow, sometimes to the unrealistic point of rejecting everything Russian.

“There are many things that Russia did well. Certain Western standards came,” said Alexander Rondell, chair of the international relations department at Tbilisi State University. “It was a devil’s design, but we were an integral part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. If we want to be a truly independent state, we should use links to other republics. People were deceived by populism. Now it’s a bitter awakening.”

Angered at the Georgians’ fierce desire for total independence, Moscow is again stirring up the separatist forces that have plagued the history of this mountain nation.

Russia first gave moral support to the ethnic minority homeland of South Ossetia against Georgia, a situation currently in a state of sullen truce while a mission from the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe tries to broker lasting peace. Since last August, Moscow has also backed rebels in the rich Georgian autonomous republic of Abkhazia along the Black Sea border with Russia, to the point of ordering air raids against Georgian positions.

Russian Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev hinted last month at a special Russian relationship with Georgia’s second autonomous republic of Adzharia on the Black Sea border with Turkey. The region is now ruled by a former Communist who professes loyalty to Shevardnadze, but things could change.