In Georgia, Watching a Young Democracy's Spirits Flag

But even Georgians who did not vote for Saakashvili felt a chill when, over U.S. objections, France and Germany voted in May to deny Georgia a NATO "membership action plan" for fear of angering Russia.

"Europeans don't remember," my neighbor sighed the day the vote was announced, as he poured me a glass of homemade white wine in his kitchen. "To the common Russian, it is not important to say, 'We make cars' or 'We make refrigerators.' But it is important to them to be able to say, 'We make guns.' It doesn't make them feel good to know that people like them. It makes them feel good to know that people are afraid of them."

The Georgians are afraid of them, but they are also intertwined with them. Russia has been Georgia's savior and tormenter, its subjugator and protector. The Soviet Union kept them in bondage, but it also supplied them with food, jobs, education, a market for their goods. And it freed them from responsibility.

"We always had sugar daddies," my colleague Giorgi said as we sipped strong Turkish coffee one spring day in the school cafeteria. "They would come, kill, rape, take over the land, but you always had a shepherd, always had an overseer, someone who decided for you. So in a way we're not grown up. We are like 17-year-olds who cannot operate in real-life settings -- you know, you move out, and you find that life is not fair, the outside world doesn't necessarily love you the way your family does. So what's the solution? As soon as we lost one shepherd, we started looking for another. So the U.S. is like a substitute for Moscow."

During my year here, the government clampdown on the media continued. The main opposition television station was shuttered, and its owner, a rival to the president, died mysteriously in exile. Even my most eager students descended into cynicism. "It's all very well to learn about Watergate, but when we get jobs, I can guarantee you that our editors will never, ever let us investigate the government that way," said Natia, 22.

"And if we did," added 23-year-old Tuta, "they wouldn't air it."

It was hard to stay optimistic as, over the course of the year, graduates of our program quit their jobs one after another. One came to our class and played us television spots he had produced that showed police violence and intimidation from the November crackdown. His editors did not run the stories, so he resigned.

But for all their frustration, my students didn't want another revolution. Most Georgians I know just want a little stability. Right now, though, it's hard to see how they will get it. The Russians seem in no hurry to leave, and if Georgian leaders banked on Western armies coming to the rescue, they miscalculated badly.

When the Russians seemed close to attacking Tbilisi, my friend Mamuka, a gaunt, gray-haired journalist and Saakashvili devotee, dusted off a Kalashnikov he'd kept from Georgia's war in Abkhazia 15 years ago, stuck it in the back of his Mercedes and sent me a text message saying that he was ready to die fighting. He has put the gun away now, but as we drove into the shattered town of Gori last week, past blackened orchards and bombed-out apartment buildings, his face was pale with despair.

"You are very humiliated, yeah?" he said, explaining how it now feels to be Georgian. "Your pride is broken." Earlier in the week, he said, he had thought of suicide. "Now I am thinking only of revenge."

But what, I asked, had he and his friends expected from Russian strongman Vladimir Putin?

"Everyone said, 'They will bomb Tbilisi and then say, "We don't know whose plane it was." ' Nobody said it would be open war between Russia and Georgia."

As I write, the Russians have retreated farther from Tbilisi, though they're still hunkered down in other towns. U.S. and Russian warships pass uncomfortably close to one another in the Black Sea, while on Rustaveli Avenue, the booksellers sell their books, and the teenagers lick ice-cream cones. Mikho's family didn't flee to Armenia. But now they know where their passports are.

bahrampourt@washpost.com

Tara Bahrampour is a Washington Post staff writer and the author of "To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America."