TSKHINVALI, Georgia  A year after war broke out in this tiny provincial city in the breakaway region of South Ossetia, the roads are still rutted with jaw-rattling potholes and downtown buildings are shells open to the sky.

But great effort has gone into commemorating last year’s war. Near midnight on Friday, precisely a year after Georgia began shelling Tskhinvali, thousands of people gathered in the city’s main square, where a Russian-made documentary was projected on a huge screen overhead. Images of Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, and President George W. Bush were juxtaposed with footage of dead Ossetians, as a floodlit violinist played melancholy music.

Georgia, too, offered heavy symbolism. In Gori, which came under Russian bombing in the war, authorities erected a replica of the Berlin Wall, a pointed commentary on Russia’s foothold on Georgian land. Georgians observed a nationwide moment of silence in the afternoon, and 500 schoolchildren dressed in red and white formed a living replica of Georgia’s flag. A year after the war, the question of who is to blame is still being fought out in public life. On Friday, the presidents of both Russia and Georgia took pains to justify their decisions to send their armies into South Ossetia.

Both have faced pressure over the war; Russia set itself at odds with the West by sending its troops into Georgia and again, more permanently, when it recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Georgia’s other separatist enclave, Abkhazia. Mr. Saakashvili, meanwhile, is blamed by domestic critics for losing control over the territories.