However, forced isolation in the shoddy Soviet economy meant that by the late 1980s, Georgian products were hopelessly uncompetitive on world markets. Even more disastrous have been the moral and cultural effects of Soviet rule. Georgian products were those most prized on the Soviet black market, which grew enormously during the Brezhnev years but which was still legally banned. Under Soviet rule, this contributed to Georgians surprisingly high real living standards. However, it also bred a contempt for law.
Corruption is a way of life.
There are only two ways to survive here. To become financially strong yourself, or to place yourself under the protection of someone who is stronger. But there is no way to be a citizen, there is only a kind of feudalism, in politics, government, business. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, tension among Georgians and the aspirations of Georgian ethnic minorities combined with manipulation from Moscow to produce disastrous conflicts in the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In October 1993, Georgia s defeat in Abkhazia led to a new revolt in western Georgia by the followers of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, deposed in a coup in January 1992 and replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Georgian communist boss and Soviet foreign minister.