"They Hunted Protestors”
A St Andrews Alum Turned Georgian Dissident
Before the gas masks, and the burning coffins, and the fireworks whooshing at the parliament building, Marika Mikiashvili studied at St Andrews. She was born in Georgia and completed her undergraduate degree in Tbilisi, the post-Soviet country’s capital, before coming to St Andrews five years ago for a Master’s in Security Studies — this was the only place she applied. After her degree, she came back to Georgia and spent a year with an NGO, going to remote villages in Georgia’s mountains to teach school children about their democratic rights. After a year, though, she was frustrated. NGO work wasn’t enough; she wanted “immediate change” in her country’s politics.
So Mikiashvili took the “financially reckless” decision to quit NGO work and join the foreign affairs team of Droa, a small pro-EU Georgian party. For a couple of years, her job was fairly routine. Then, as Georgian politics made international headlines last year, Mikiashvili was thrust into the spotlight. There had been regular anti-government protests in Georgia for years, but “this, that’s ongoing right now? It’s nothing like ever before.” It started in April 2024, when the Georgian government announced a new ‘Foreign Agents’ law that its critics (including Britain, the EU, and the US) condemned as an anti-democratic “Russian law.” In the demonstrations following that law, Mikiashvili gave “around five hours [of] interviews” every day to outlets like CNN, France 24, and the BBC. Nowadays, her “24/7 job” is social media. Between last April and now, her following on X grew twenty-fold — she guesses she’s one of around “five” people who regularly posts about Georgian politics. “It just snowballed,” she told me.
In October 2024, Georgia held elections. Electoral observers and the EU alleged they were ‘stolen’ by the ruling Georgian Dream party. Mikiashvili agreed: “even the regime supporters know the elections have been rigged.” She described the “carrots and sticks” manipulation methods of Georgian Dream. “In the run up to elections, the government [...] said that they would know whom each individual would be voting for,” she told me.
On 28 November, the European Parliament called on Georgia to rerun its elections. The same day, the Georgian Dream Prime Minister announced Georgia’s EU accession talks would be delayed for the next four years. “Technically he said until 2028,” Mikiashvili said, “but everyone understands that essentially it means never.” That announcement was met with fury by many Georgians — 80 per cent of whom want European integration. “That same evening, large-scale protests began […] it was simultaneous in every Georgian city and town.”
Before the protesters, Mikiashvili started a PhD at a university in Tbilisi — she’s now put her doctorate on hold. The university’s administration are “very much involved with the regime,” and she found writing her thesis on Georgia’s European integration “impossible.” “How can you write an essay about something blowing up around you?” she asked.
Protesters organised themselves quickly. “We were defending ourselves with barricades, with protective gas masks,” Mikiashvili remembered. “People were quite fast and effective in forming the self-defence squads and counter-attack squads or neutralising the tear [gas] by putting it in water bottles.”
But the police “hunted” protesters, she said. “[Police] dragged them out of shops where they sheltered, they dragged them out of theatres where they sheltered.” When the police arrest you, Mikiashvili said, they “throw you into a police van and then beat you there for twenty minutes, half an hour.” Some protesters have been threatened with being “buried alive,” Mikiashvili said.
“The first few days and the first few crackdowns, I was there,” Mikiashvili told me. For most of December, however, she was ill, and decided to stay home to cover the protests on social media. “I understood that I could not run for my life and tweet live,” she said.
In the past, anti-government protests had mostly happened in the evenings. Now, people went out for the whole day. People organised a seven km-long human chain that snaked through Tbilisi. A clip of protesters shooting fireworks at Georgia’s parliament building went viral on TikTok. Daily marches happened by profession or by hobby. “There was even a Harry Potter-lovers’ march, a yoga-lovers’ march. Anything that you might think of, had its own march,” said Mikiashvili.
It’s been two months since the fateful November evening. Georgian Dream is still in power; protests have mostly dropped out of international news. Is Mikiashvili worried they aren’t getting anywhere? “The protest sentiment has not decreased,” she told me. “I don’t think it can decrease at all […] [there’s] no concession that they can give us.” There are still tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets each night, she said. “There’s this general feeling in the country that it’s just like it was on day one.”
There has been some response from the West. In late December, the US sanctioned Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder of Georgian Dream. “Ivanishvili holds the entire country in his pocket for Russia’s benefit,” Mikiashvili said. The sanctions were a “morale boost” for the opposition but didn’t go far enough. “We are, of course, hoping for more,” she said.
Does Mikiashvili have advice for students here, three thousand miles away from her home? If you want to do what she does, you must be “very passionate,” she warned, and make sure you have a network for both emotional and financial support. Students, especially if they’re from Eastern Europe, are “welcome” to reach out to her.
As we finished up the interview, Mikiashvili asked me to mention how much she loved her time at St Andrews. She stressed how much happier she is now, right at the heart of politics, instead of estranged in the mountains. “Setting grounds for [a] free country, for future generations? It is very fulfilling for me,” Mikiashvili told me. “I know many people who are happy in life, they have a lot, but they are still searching for this sense of fulfilment […] I am very lucky in that regard.”
You can find Marika on X
@Mikiashvili_M or on Bluesky
Photo: Manraj Gill
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