The town of Kazreti, nestled in the picturesque mountains of Georgia near the border with Armenia, once boasted a cinema, a bank, musical fountains, two schools and a kindergarten. Dance ensembles and volleyball teams from across the Soviet Union would come to perform and compete, and central heating and electricity were free.
“It was a true Communist oasis,” said Davit Jakeli, 52, who worked as a carpenter in a state-run vocational school in the town of about 5,500 people, about 50 miles southwest of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
But after the Soviet Union’s collapse in the 1990s, he said, everything also came crashing down in Kazreti. No longer supported by the Soviet command economy, the unprofitable local gold and copper mines and an enrichment plant were shut, putting hundreds of people out of work. They reopened years later on a much smaller scale under private ownership.
Now there is just one school in the town and the cinema and bank have closed. The fountains, which once adorned a central square, are long gone. Stray dogs roam potholed roads flanked by decrepit apartments.
“It is a huge injustice what happened here,” said Mr. Jakeli, who now resells scrap metal from the courtyard of his home.
Over the past three decades, Georgia, a country of 3.6 million, has been one of the most pro-West of the former Soviet states. Polls still show that more than 60 percent of its residents favor joining the European Union and NATO.
But tensions remain between those who see Georgia’s future in the West, and those, particularly in poorer parts of the country, who pine for a Soviet past that delivered them stable incomes and basic social infrastructure.
Earlier this year, thousands of activists in Tbilisi protested against a law pushed by the government to curb the influence of Western-funded organizations. Critics say the law, which passed in May, will push Georgia into Russia’s arms, and the European Union says it could complicate Georgia’s hopes of joining the bloc.
In Kazreti and other Georgian towns across an industrial heartland that has been battered by high unemployment over the past few decades, the protesters’ demands — and their fears of Russia — ring hollow.
While many urban residents see the Soviet period as a time of occupation and political repression, for many people in rural areas it was a time of plenty, when they had jobs and prosperity. Outside the capital, unemployment is rife, and drug and alcohol abuse is rampant.
Datuna Kaplanishvili, 62, who worked at the ore processing plant in Kazreti when it was state-owned, said the Soviet era represented the best days of his life.
“They don’t see anything clearly,” Mr. Kaplanishvili, 62, said about the young people who protested in Tbilisi. “There won’t be anything here without Russia.”
In half-empty villages and towns devastated by decades of neglect, the prospect of a distant European future looks like a mirage to many.
One such town, Chiatura, was once considered a Soviet workers’ paradise, known for the cable cars that carried workers to manganese mines and residential areas in the surrounding mountains.
The population of Chiatura is less than half what it was before the Soviet collapse, with the mines requiring fewer people to operate them and the town’s social infrastructure deteriorating.
Now, the town center is a shell of what used to be, with shuttered businesses and entertainment venues, and cable cars taking only a few residents to half-empty Soviet-era apartment buildings, many of them with smashed windows.
A daily overnight sleeper train used to connect Chiatura with Tbilisi, and the town itself was served by two trolley bus routes that ran along the banks of its river. Today, the train station stands empty and in ruins. The Tbilisi route was canceled along with all the others; the trolley buses were cut up for scrap metal.
“We used to live well under Communism,” said Mamia Gabeskeliani, 68, who lives in Zodi, a mining village outside Chiatura. “Recently things have turned for the worse.”
Mr. Gabeskeliani said he did not trust either the protesters or the government. “There is one truth and one hundred lies and it is very difficult to differentiate,” he said. “Everyone is saying they are right and pushing their agenda.”
Heightening the despair in places like Chiatura and surrounding villages is the obvious environmental degradation, with open pit mines that have been carved out of forests and giants heaps of residual mining waste.
Some of that devastation dates from Soviet times, but local residents say that successive governments since then have done nothing about the problem, nor have they reined in what they say are rapacious mining companies.
For many people in the old industrial heartland, there is little difference between the pro-Western government that ruled Georgia in the 2000s and the current one, which takes a more neutral stance toward Russia.
The promise of the prosperity that would come with independence has never been realized, and things like newly open borders have merely allowed people to leave the country to work in low paying jobs abroad, hollowing out their towns.
Still, some people from Georgia’s crumbling industrial heartland feel differently.
Kote Abdushelishvili, 35, a filmmaker who divides his time between Tbilisi and Zodi, where he is from, has been trying to convince people in the area that Georgia must become part of the West.
“People became skeptical of the West,” said Mr. Abdushelishvili. “After 30 years we are poor and it is getting worse,” he added.
There is a big disconnect, he said, between the view of Europe by young people in Tbilisi, with its elegant cafes, modern universities and techno clubs, and those in Zodi and hundreds of other towns and villages across Georgia.
For young people in the old industrial heartland, the West is mainly a place where their relatives are forced to go to as migrant workers, he said.
While he is sympathetic to the protesters in Tbilisi and their drive to forge closer ties to the West, Mr. Abdushelishvili said it was hard to convince people he had grown up with why that was important.
“Most people here are conservative,” he said. “People tell them: ‘No Russia, go West,’ but it means nothing to them.”
Valeri Chitadze, who wants to develop his village of Tsirkvali into a tourist destination through organic farming and hiking excursions in nearby mountains, said life is tough for those who have not found a way out of the region.
There are no jobs other than “horrible” ones at manganese mines, no outlets for having fun, like cafes or cinemas, and little in the way of basic service providers like dentists, Mr. Chitadze, 36, said.
He remains convinced, nonetheless, that Georgia’s future lies with the West. “The further Georgia goes away from E.U. integration, the further it will go deep into a black hole,” he said.
Sopo Japaridze, an American-educated workers’ rights activist in Tbilisi, said she wanted to see a closer examination of all sides of Georgia’s Soviet past.
Western-funded organizations and media outlets in Tbilisi focused too much on the dark side of the Soviet period, such as repression against artists and the intelligentsia, she said.
But life in Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union “has degraded in every way,” with many people falling into alcohol and drug abuse, she said, so the benefits of Soviet rule also need to be considered.
“Life was much richer,” said Ms. Japaridze, a co-founder of a podcast about Soviet Georgia. “Not richer money wise, but there was more diversity; it was not as monotonous as it is now.”
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