UN General Assembly
1992

manner that passes understanding, all the woes and contradictions that the Empire fed into its genetic code and constantly generated, and which continue to rack us even now that the Empire is dead. Everything I thought and spoke of, foresaw and predicted has befallen Georgia, my country. And there was no need for clairvoyance, either; all you needed was to know the system you were dealing with. One of the greats once said that predicting important events in the future was no more difficult than successfully guessing the past: if past events leave traces, then, logically, future events must have roots. The system was doomed. In August 1991, there was an attempt to save it using its own typical methods: conspiracy, flouted laws, the use of force. I had on many occasions warned about the possibility of a coup and totalitarian revanchism. If the necessary conclusions had been drawn from these words of warning, then we would have been dealing not with the chaotic collapse of a huge Power, but with relatively painless and controllable transitions to a new