Georgia's Soviet legacy

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 144-151

  Fairbanks Jr , Charles H ^a  

^a HUDSON INSTITUTE   (United States)

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EID: 77249084644     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (3)

1. To understand the extent of election fraud, one must approach without credulity the reports produced by the OSCE and similar monitoring groups. Such reports typically employ the recently invented conceit of incrementally "better" or "worse" elections. The effect is to blur the deep dichotomy that separates outcomes which approximately report the people's votes (even with the violations likely in a recently totalitarian society) from those that express the government's will to determine the result. In fact, some press-conference statements and preliminary reports from OSCE and allied groups have been greatly influenced by delegation heads and governments acting for diplomatic reasons. The final reports (which come too late to have much practical influence) are more forthright. As a whole, international monitoring activities are immensely useful to democracy, but they risk being discredited by efforts to blur the truth, as has happened from Boris Yeltsin's reelection in Russia in 1996 to Hamid Karzai's attempt to falsify his way to a first-round victory in Afghanistan in 2009.
2. Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), is still crucial for understanding the Soviet political legacy.
3. Gachechiladze is quoted in "Opposition Says It Aims to Thwart First session of new Parliament," Civil Georgia online magazine, 26 May 2008. Available at www.civil.ge/eng/ article.php?id=18394&search=.