Things appear to be going from the frying pan to the fire in Russia. As if the recent news of Russia????????s internal human rights strife was not bad enough, now horrifying anti-democratic events appear to be unfolding in the former Soviet slave state of Georgia.

The Moscow News reports that Georgian police uncovered an attempt to destabilize and unseat the government of elected President Mikhail Saakashvili. It reports:

Nearly 30 people were arrested in Georgia on suspicion of plotting a coup against the government, officials said. They say those detained are supporters of Igor Giorgadze ???????? the fugitive former head of the state security service. Lawyers for those arrested deny the coup accusations, saying the arrests amount to political persecution. Giorgadze fled Georgia after being accused of trying to assassinate then President Eduard Shevardnadze in 1995 ???????? a charge he denies. ???????They will be charged under Article 315 of the Georgian criminal code ???????? plotting against the state and overthrowing the government,??????? Georgian Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili told reporters. Among those detained are officials of two opposition parties ???????? the pro-Russian Justice Party and the Conservative Monarchists.

The Russian newspaper Kommersant wrote Thursday that Georgia has accused Moscow of backing the plotters. Vano Mirabishvili announced that an attempted coup financed by Russia had been prevented. The opposition says that a new political era has begun in Georgia as ???????the authorities try to hold on to power through repression alone.???????

On Wednesday afternoon, Georgian security forces broke raided apartments of the leaders of Justice Party, Anti-Soros Movement and Conservative Monarchists Party across the country. Those parties make up the so-called Igor Giorgadze bloc. Police operations were also carried out at the homes of his relatives. After searches were conducted, 29 opposition leaders and activists were arrested. Searches of the opposition groups???????? offices were conducted simultaneously and, according to official accounts, charter documents, computers, money and weapons were seized.

Georgia also accuses Moscow of backing separatists in Georgia????????s breakaway provinces, while Russia has banned the import of certain Georgian goods.

RIA Novosti reports that the pro-Russia party is now calling for general civil disobedience to the Georgian government. It stated:

A Georgian opposition party, Justice, called Thursday for a national disobedience campaign to topple the president and his government as 14 party activists were charged with preparing a coup. The interior minister said Wednesday the country’s law enforcement agencies had information that supporters of controversial former Georgian minister and security chief Igor Giorgadze were preparing to overthrow the government and making arrangements for Giorgadze’s return from exile. In all, 29 people were detained in raids and 14 individuals who remained in custody Thursday were officially charged. But Justice party representative Irina Sarishvili told a news conference that her party would seek to bring down President Mikheil Saakashvili, who himself came to power on the back of popular protests, and his government. “We propose setting up a national disobedience movement and starting large-scale actions with only one demand: that the country’s current leadership resigns,” said Sarishvili, who runs the Igor Giorgadze Foundation in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.

The Herald Tribune reported:

Those detained included Justice Party executive secretary Rezo Bulia and Conservative Monarchist Party leader Temur Zhorzholiani. Also detained was Maiya Nikoleishvili, head of the organization Anti-Soros, which accuses U.S. billionaire philanthropist George Soros of helping bring Saakashvili to power in the 2003 Rose Revolution. In recent months, activists from Justice, Anti-Soros and other groups have launched flashy street protests demanding Saakashvili’s resignation. They received extensive media coverage in neighboring Russia, which has been annoyed by Saakashvili’s efforts to reduce Moscow’s influence and integrate Georgia more closely into the West.

What we know for sure is this: President Saakashvili has publicly declared his intention to lead Georgia into union with NATO and the European Union, something that the Kremlin obviously finds intolerable. Russia has already sought to destabilize Georgia????????s economy by banning the import of Georgian wine and mineral water, but apparently it is not satisfied with the results and has brazenly chosen more direct action against the regime. Thus, as noted above, more recently the Kremlin has been funneling support to various provinces of Georgia where rebel groups are seeking independence, apparently seeing nothing wrong with doing so even while protesting vehemently against any foreign nations giving support to Chechen rebels.

The Russophile backlash against Saakashvili has been particularly venomous and hysterical, clearly indicative of the Kremlin????????s passionate desire to return Georgia to a condition of subservience to Russia. For instance, Russophile pundit Sergei Roy wrote this about the Georgian President, headlined ???????The Psycho Who Would Start World War III???????:

Recently, seven leading medical institutions (Norway????????s Tonsberg Psychiatric Center; Norway????????s National Institute of Public Health; Germany????????s Center for Diseases of the Nervous System at Christian Albrecht University; the Psychiatric Department of Geneva University; Vienna Medical School????????s Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy; Finland????????s Psychiatric Department; and Amsterdam University????????s Department of Clinical Psychology) were asked to evaluate Georgian President Saakashvili????????s mental health. The evaluation excerpts published in various oppositionist papers in Georgia describe Saakashvili as a negative and aggressive person with extreme egocentricity, a hysteroid type tending toward megalomania and an obsessive or maniacal syndrome characterized by a personal conviction of being destined to be the ???????chosen one,??????? etc. etc. There????????s lots of this psychiatric gobbledegook in the published materials, but the diagnosis is clear enough: ???????Expansive type of paranoid dysfunction (according to ICD-IO) combined with narcissist type of hysteroid personality.??????? Beautiful. To me, it translates into one brief word: psycho.

Obviously, there is nothing more classically Soviet, more horrifyingly Stalinistic, than attempting to send your adversaries off to a mental institution. If, however, one were to offer such statements about Russian President Putin, then one would be accused by the Russophiles of ???????russophobia??????? and ???????anti-Slavic racism??????? and of seeking to subvert the sovereignty of Russia.

It????????s not at all surprising to see this kind of thinking arises in a country ruled over by a proud KGB spy. But thinking is one thing, and acting on those thoughts by giving support to a coup d????????etat is quite something else. If Russia has really gotten so carried away with itself because of a modest rise in income due to the price of oil that it is willing to make brazen attempts to recover lost Soviet ???????property??????? like Georgia by blunt military means, then the world is facing an extremely dire crisis.

The Kremlin, of course, has denied involvement (would it admit complicity had it done so?) and Giorgadze????????s followers are claiming that Saakashvili is targeting them to remove opposition to his rule. But what????????s really important here, just as in the case of the belief that Russia????????s own secret police were behind the Moscow apartment bombings (as way to justify another military incursion in Chechnya) and indications that Russia may be aiding both Iran and North Korea????????s efforts to develop nuclear weapons, is that the allegations are credible because Russian policy does nothing to discount them. The Kremlin is in the process of obliterating the last traces of democracy in Russia, and in doing so the last traces of its own credibility ???????? a fact that is perhaps even more disturbing than the outrageous acts of Neo-Soviet imperialism we may be witnessing.

Kim Zigfeld is the publisher of the Russia blog La Russophobe.