This New York Times piece has been making the rounds this weekend, pointing out, for those who didn’t already know, that Mikheil Saakashvili and Vladimir Putin don’t get along all that well.  But the highly emotional angle between these two heads of state is also indicative of something more … How it may still be difficult for many Russians to come to terms with the inconvenient fact of Georgian sovereignty when there are still so many childhood memories of family vacations spent there, adoration for its food and traditions, and an unescapable sense of ownership.

With the two men now so at odds that they are not speaking, their
mutual dislike has in some ways come to define the current state of
ties between Russia and Georgia. Mr. Putin, the former president who is
now prime minister, has unabashedly told the Russian people that he
would like Mr. Saakashvili hung by his private parts. Mr. Saakashvili
is said to have mocked Mr. Putin as “Lilli-Putin,” a reference to his
height.

“They hate each other,” said Zurab Abashidze, a former
Georgian ambassador to Moscow. “I heard, many times, very emotional
statements from Saakashvili and from people around him about Putin. And
unfortunately, this personal element in the political life of Russia as
well as Georgia is still very important.”

In Tbilisi, the Putin
fixation is so entrenched that it is an undercurrent in the protests
being held this month that are demanding Mr. Saakashvili’s resignation.
Mr. Saakashvili’s aides have spoken darkly of plots that they insisted
were being hatched by Mr. Putin’s henchmen to provide arms and money to
the Georgian opposition.

The Putin-Saakashvili relationship also
cannot be divorced from their nations’ shared history, which over
hundreds of years has given rise to all sorts of affinities and
complexes. (Perhaps the foremost Soviet leader was an ethnic Georgian
named Iosif Dzhugashvili, who ruled in Moscow under the name Josef
Stalin.)

Russians retain deep affection for Georgian culture,
society and food, but at the same time the old guard in Moscow
sometimes views Georgia as a wayward province. Mr. Saakashvili sought
to rupture the traditional bonds by flamboyantly allying Georgia with
Washington, even naming a main road after George W. Bush.

“We
always have in Russia the image of the big brother towards Georgia,
Ukraine, Uzbekistan — it’s the big brother complex,” said Aleksandr G.
Asmolov, a psychology professor at Moscow State University. “As soon as
the older brother sees the little brother begin to misbehave, to get
into mischief, truly sharp discord occurs.”

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