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We went to the government offices to try to see the President. Aslan Abashidze had packed the local bureaucracy with his clan members. He is a small man with a large ego and a noble surname: his grandfather Mehmet played a significant role in brokering the agreement between Lenin and Atat�rk that settled the border here. He likes to receive visiting dignitaries on the new tennis courts that are the pride of his fiefdom. I sought an interview with him several times but was told that he was busy and I should wait another day. I never saw him. His offices were generically Communist: enormous white-marble hallways and dark-red carpets. At the front entrance, by a metal detector and a cheap little table, a group of tough-looking young Georgians lurked with mobile phones and sidearms. They rubbed their unshaven cheeks as they inspected my Atlantic Monthly business card. Outside the office was a militiaman, also unshaven, with broken shoes, buttons missing from his uniform, and one of those grandiose visored caps favored by the Soviet military. His breath stank, and he asked me for a cigarette. The official face of government here was uncivil, untamed. Batumi was tacky and crumbling, nostalgically European and mock-Mediterranean, with an exotic hint of Tartary.

O understand the Caucasus, a good place to start is with the region's most famous twentieth-century personage: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin. According to a 1948 book by the Russia expert Bertram D. Wolfe, the difference between Aleksandr Kerensky, the enlightened social democrat who took power after the Russian Revolution; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin; and Joseph Stalin was the difference between the West, the semi-West, and the East. Kerensky and the Menshevik social reformers were extreme Westernizers; Lenin, a Russian from the Middle Volga region, was a "blend of Westernizer and Slavophile"; Stalin was a Georgian from the Caucasus Mountains. In April of 1941, when Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Japan, freeing the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, raised a glass to the treaty's success and, with hara-kiri in mind, declared that if the treaty were not kept, "I must give my life, for, you see, we are Asiatics." Stalin replied, "We are both Asiatics."

Of course, Stalin's despotism cannot be attributed solely to the culture and geography of his birthplace. Stalin's utter indifference to human suffering was a personal trait, not a cultural one. At the funeral of his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, Stalin told a friend, "She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings." But to say that the Oriental influence was merely incidental to Stalin's character is to ignore essentials. The monumental use of terror, the grandeur of his personality cult, and the use of prison labor for gigantic public-works projects echo the tyrannies of ancient Assyria and Mesopotamia. The liturgical nature of Stalin's diatribes, which became the standard for official Communist discourse, derived from the Eastern Orthodox Church, in one of whose Georgian seminaries Stalin studied as a youth.

Many of the methods Stalin employed, such as playing nationalities against one another until all were devastated, bore the influence of his early life in the Caucasus. What ultimately differentiated Stalin from the rest of Lenin's inner circle -- Leon Trotsky, Nikolay Bukharin, Grigory Zinovyev, and Lev Kamenev, all Jewish except for Bukharin, and all from European Russia and Ukraine -- and what allowed him to destroy them all was that they were cosmopolitan idealists and Westernizers, however savage and cynical their methods. Stalin saw the world anthropologically. For him a Jew was a Jew, a Turk a Turk, a Chechen a Chechen, and so on. Such thinking was, and is, far more common in the Near East than in the West. In the Caucasus, tribe and clan, not formal institutions, have always been the key to politics.

Georgia is a small country by American standards, with 5.5 million people, comparable in area to West Virginia. But it is the most sprawling and ethnically various state in the Caucasus, with a long, complex, and bloody history. Situated in the geographic and historical crucible where Russia meets the Turkic and Persian Near East, the mountain ranges of the Caucasus have allowed the Georgians to remain linguistically intact over the millennia. Though they make up only one one-thousandth of humanity, the Georgians created one of the world's fourteen alphabets. Its crescent-shaped symbols emerged around the fifth century B.C., possibly from Aramaic, the Semitic dialect spoken by Jesus. Saint Nino, a slave woman from Cappadocia, in central Anatolia, brought Christianity to Georgia in A.D. 330, when she converted the Georgian Queen Nana after curing her of an illness. The Greek colonies around Batumi may have been converted as early as the first century, making the Christianity here among the world's oldest forms, combined as it was with the Greek pantheon, Iranian Zoroastrianism, and various Anatolian cults.

The Georgians were caught in that archetypal East-West conflict between the Persian and Greek empires that forms the subject of Herodotus' Histories. Later, in the early Christian centuries, Georgia became another East-West battleground, this time for the conflict between Persia and Rome. A pattern emerged that continues to this day: although Georgia was superficially influenced by the West (Greece and Rome), its political culture became profoundly Eastern. The difference between Rome and Persia (and later between Byzantium and Persia) was the difference between semi-Western imperial officialdoms that were nonhereditary, and thus early prototypes of modern states, and a Persian society underpinned by tribal and clan relations. In Georgia it was the Persian clan system that proved more influential, and that system's remnants are visible today in the power of regional mafias and warlords. Despite the influence of European Russia in the nineteenth century, Georgia can be considered part of the Near East.

Another pattern that emerged in classical times and continues is Georgia's internal disunity. After a millennium of conflict, in 1555 Georgia was divided between an Ottoman Turkish sphere of influence in the west and a Safavid Iranian one in the east, while the mountains to the north cut it off from its fellow Orthodox Christian Russia. Iranian oppression was so extreme that in the early seventeenth century the population of Kakheti, in eastern Georgia, dropped by two thirds because of killings and deportations. In 1801 Czar Alexander I forcibly incorporated Georgia into the Russian Empire. What happened next was more dramatic than much of the preceding history taken together.

The czars quickly put Georgia on the road to modernity. Its population rose from 500,000 to 2.5 million in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There were costs, however. The Georgian Church and nobility became subservient to Russian institutions, and Russian absolutism sparked peasant revolts.

The Armenians played the role in Georgia that the Jews did elsewhere: that of urban middleman shopkeepers and entrepreneurs. Under Russia's modernizing rule the division of labor between rural Georgians and urban Armenians was accentuated. At the beginning of the twentieth century Marxism became attractive to Georgians because it provided both an analysis of and a solution to their condition that were non-nationalist on the one hand and opposed to czarist officialdom and the Armenian bourgeoisie on the other. Georgia, not Europe or Russia, was the real historical birthplace of mass-movement socialism, with support not just from intellectuals and workers but from peasants, too.

Utopian rhetoric by local Marxists notwithstanding, the weakening of czarist rule at the start of the twentieth century led to ethnic conflict among Georgians, Armenians, and Azeri Turks -- exactly what would recur in the late twentieth century, when despite universalist calls by dissident intellectuals for democracy and human rights, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to chaos and ethnic cleansing. And there is another frightening similarity. In 1918 a weakened and defeated Russia spawned three new states built on old ethnic identities in the Transcaucasus: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. All were destroyed in the 1920s, as Russia reasserted itself under the Soviets. Were Russia to reassert itself again under a new autocracy, the West would have to prove as muscular here as in Bosnia and Kosovo to keep these states alive.

Georgia embraced Russia in 1801 because Russia offered an opening to Europe along with protection against Turkey and Iran. Had the czars and the Menshevik socialists, with all their flaws, been allowed to continue and evolve in power, the Caucasus today might be a model of civility. What nineteenth-century Georgian would have thought that the Turks and the Iranians, however fundamentalist, would prove less destructive than the Europeanized Russians?

Another lesson of this tragic story is that although history, culture, and geography are the only guides to the future, they are still not determinative -- because of extraordinary individuals. Turkish influence would have been better for Georgia than Russian, because Atat�rk took a backward Turkey and made it modern, while Lenin and Stalin took a directionless Russia and made it backward.

WAS walking in a park beside the Black Sea in Batumi with Eka, my translator, when a rainstorm forced us to take refuge in a caf�. It was a small place, with blank walls, an old and wheezing refrigerator, loud electronic music, and a group of men in tight black jeans, smoking and talking on mobile phones. We sat as far from the sound system's speakers as possible. To pass the time, I asked Eka about the first democratically elected President of post-Soviet Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

"The whole phenomenon with Gamsakhurdia was psychosexual," Eka began. "Zviad was like a rock star. You can almost see the psychological scars on the faces of his female followers: by their expressions you know that these women are ruined, as though they were his concubines. Most are single or have unhappy marriages. They expect Zviad to come back from the grave on a white horse -- I'm not kidding."

This was the central narrative of Georgian politics in the years during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The region's leading Communist-era dissident -- "the Havel of the Caucasus," as Gamsakhurdia was known -- led Georgia into bloody chaos; the former secret-police chief and Communist Party boss of Soviet Georgia (and a former Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union) Eduard Shevardnadze brought Georgia out of that chaos and into a condition of semi-stable partial democracy. In Georgia an idealistic dissident all but destroyed his country, and a realistic old secret-police man rescued it. This happened not because dissidents are bad and secret-police men are good, or because realism is better than idealism, but because of Georgia's particular circumstances and because of the personalities of Gamsakhurdia and Shevardnadze. The story of Zviad Gamsakhurdia shows that Shakespeare is a better guide to politics than any political scientist. This is what happened, according to those I talked to in Batumi and later in Tbilisi:

Gamsakhurdia was the son of the great Georgian writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia. In the 1970s the younger Gamsakhurdia, a lecturer in American literature at Tbilisi State University, led a protest movement against Soviet oppression that resulted in his imprisonment and exile. His dissent was a matter of radical nationalism, not moral opposition to communism; his nationalism was inspired by his literary sensibilities and the peasant surroundings of his native Mingrelia, in western Georgia. Then there were personal circumstances. He was the weak son of a famous and bullying father, so although he was a national hero, he lacked confidence. This vulnerability, combined with his good looks and literary reputation, made him attractive to women. His jealous wife, Manana, described by everyone I spoke to as a low-class, unattractive woman who dominated Zviad much as his father had, was enraged by this. Rarely has there been a political leader more susceptible to delusions of grandeur yet so easily manipulated.

Gamsakhurdia rose to power as the Soviet Union began to collapse, which was (popular memory in the West aside) before the Berlin Wall fell, not as a consequence of its falling. It was in the Caucasus, not Eastern Europe, that anti-Soviet protests got started in unstoppable earnest. The protests that rocked Eastern Europe in 1989 emphasized democratic freedoms; here they were purely nationalistic. In 1990 Gamsakhurdia defeated the Communists in parliamentary elections; the following year he was elected President. It soon developed that the Georgians had chosen Macbeth. Gamsakhurdia, relying increasingly on his wife, surrounded himself with bodyguards and vicious guard dogs. He imprisoned his erstwhile nationalist allies, and employed Georgian mafiosi for muscle. He showed a fondness for arson, as politics by other means. By late 1991, a few months after his election, Georgia was engulfed in a civil war that made internal travel impossible and ruined what existed of an economy.

In January of 1992 a military council ousted Gamsakhurdia, who fled to nearby Chechnya. Pitched battles followed in western Georgia between troops of the new military council and Gamsakhurdia's supporters, known as "Zviadists" -- a term that suggests how little the civil war had to do with ideas and how much to do with personalities and regional loyalties. In fact the civil war was a battle as much between rival mafias for territory as for legitimate political control.

"Georgians were passionate against the Soviets and passionate against each other," Professor Levan Alexidze, a former adviser to Gamsakhurdia, later told me in Tbilisi. "Gamsakhurdia destroyed the Soviet spirit more than anyone, but in Georgia a civil war may have been necessary, because of the kind of people we are. The real cause of the war is our medievalness: our knights simply quarreled and fought each other." These knights were Gamsakhurdia; the Georgian National Guard chief Tengiz Kitovani, who was described by one observer as "a vulgar thug"; and the commander of the Mkhedrioni ("Horsemen") paramilitaries, Jaba Ioseliani, a dapper professor and convicted bank robber who promised to blow out the brains of anyone who opposed him. Kitovani and Ioseliani were part of the military council that toppled Gamsakhurdia.

From his exile in Chechnya, Gamsakhurdia maintained links with Zviadist sympathizers in western Georgia. He also fell under the influence of the Chechen leader, Dzokhar Dudayev -- another volatile warlord, who in 1994 led Chechnya into a war with Russia that ended two years later with 40,000 dead, among them Dudayev himself. Eventually the increasingly desperate Gamsakhurdia positioned himself alongside Georgia's historic rivals: Muslim Chechnya, Abashidze's Adjara, and even Abkhazia, where a Russian-backed separatist rebellion caused 10,000 deaths and the cleansing of more than 200,000 ethnic Georgians from Abkhaz territory. Because the main road out of Abkhazia into Georgia proper was blocked, half the refugees -- Gamsakhurdia's own Georgians -- had to detour through the mountains, where many died of starvation and exposure. This happened in 1993, when the West was preoccupied with Bosnia. And Abkhazia's was not the only separatist rebellion that brought about ethnic cleansing. Also in the early 1990s South Ossetians were cleansing their territory of thousands of ethnic Georgians.

Kitovani and Ioseliani invited Eduard Shevardnadze back to Georgia from Moscow to provide international legitimacy for their hydra-headed gangland regime. Shevardnadze accepted. Kitovani and Ioseliani came to regret their success: Shevardnadze played the two men and their associates off against one another until all were in jail. Then Shevardnadze brought reformers into government, while keeping enough gangsters in power to prevent the formation of a unified opposition. He consolidated power by trial and error and by surviving one assassination attempt after another.

At the end of 1993 Gamsakhurdia returned from Chechnya for a last stand. In late December of that year, at the age of fifty-four, he died, was killed by an assassin, or committed suicide. Two months after his burial his wife had his body exhumed for reburial in Chechnya. There was even a rumor that Gamsakhurdia had converted to the Islam of his Chechen allies, as he lost all sense of who he was.

Alexidze told me, "Our society is rotten, the mafiosi are strong, and while the West worships laws, we worship power. We leaped from the darkness in the late 1980s. We did not have the kind of social and economic development Central Europe had. So these dissidents were never enlightened."