With a scorching Georgian summer drawing to a close, and October 1 parliamentary elections around the corner, the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili—the only serious threat to President Mikheil Saakashvili’s current hold on power—is finally deigning to give interviews. Here is how one unfolds. You fly to Tbilisi and check into a hotel (provided, full disclosure, by the campaign) without knowing when and where the meeting is going to happen. That evening Kakha Kaladze, the former AC Milan defender and now Ivanishvili’s right-hand man in his Georgian Dream coalition, calls you and asks if you’re alone. Once he’s ascertained that you are, Kaladze, wearing a Georgian Dream T-shirt, meets you in the hotel lobby and, after a few minutes’ worth of exploratory questions, names the time and place: tomorrow, at noon, in Batumi. Batumi is four hours away from Tbilisi—five if you get stuck in the bovine rush hour, when herdsmen drive their cattle up and down the single-lane highway that links the capital with the coast. At quarter to eight the next morning, a laconic driver named Mirab picks you up in a black Mercedes G500. A few hours into the drive, Mirab begrudgingly lets on that you’re not actually going to Batumi at all. You take out your phone and start tapping out panicky texts home. At that very moment, the real destination appears on the horizon: Ivanishvili’s summer residence near the Black Sea town of Ureki.

“There wasn’t even running water here. The beach, the canals, the hotels, the road—Bidzina built all that,” says Mirab, gesturing out the window with his left hand at the town’s well-kept façades. “He’s a straight guy, straight up,” he adds unexpectedly, as if arguing with an invisible opponent. “All legal.”

Mirab has been driving cars for Ivanishvili going on twelve years. Over that time, Georgia’s richest man—his current net worth, $6.4 billion according to Forbes, equals almost half of the country’s GDP—has left his mark on practically every aspect of life here. He has paid for schools, restored museums, bought boots for the army (“They were running around in slippers,” he told a New York Times reporter) and gas for police cars. He has paid, unbeknownst to anyone until recently, for the construction of the Georgian Orthodox Church’s main cathedral, Tsminda Sameba, whose gold-plated dome looms above Tbilisi on roughly the same level as the spheres and rhombuses of Ivanishvili’s own residence. He has taken over theaters and paid the actors’ salaries. Rumors have it that in better times he frequently lent millions to Saakashvili himself.

None of this, however, compares to what Ivanishvili has done for his native village, Chorvila, in the district of Sachkhere. The streets of Chorvila are as clean as Zurich’s; nearly every house boasts a new roof and a fresh coat of paint. The services of the village hospital are free. Many, if not all, residents receive a monthly “grant” of 200 lari (about 120 dollars) on top of their regular salary—which most of them draw from Ivanishvili’s businesses anyway. Once a year Bidzina skips the formalities and simply grants wishes, like Santa Claus, handing out televisions, DVD players, and kitchenware. 17,000 Chorvila houses had free gas stoves installed; Ivanishvili’s wife’s nail stylist got a free house to go with hers. Their fine waterworks notwithstanding, the residents of Ureki might feel a bit slighted in comparison with the Chorvilans.



The G500, meanwhile, turns onto a nondescript country road leading to something like a state border: a gray wall, automatic gates, a guard booth. In a sense, that’s what it is—the place where Saakashvili’s Georgia ends and Bidzinaland begins. The gates swing open, and suddenly the car is on a vast boulevard lined with palm trees. A live zebra nonchalantly prances alongside.



After the zebra, nothing surprises you much: not the taciturn servants in Georgian Dream T-shirts; not the golf cart that takes you across acres and acres of lawn and orchard to a round glass building by the sea; nor the building itself, which recalls the banquet hall of a grand shuttered resort (the staff call it the “restaurant”); nor the single table set up in the emptiness of the “restaurant” with a Georgian breakfast spread and a dish of vitamins (B12, cod-liver oil). The only surprise left in store is the place’s owner and primary resident.



Bidzina Ivanishvili descends the stairs and practically jogs toward you. He is short and lean, with an ex-gymnast’s build and a graying buzzcut overgrown into spikes. He is wearing a Tommy Hilfiger polo shirt three sizes too big, black Boss jeans, and a relatively cheap Rado watch. The conversation begins in English, then slips into Russian; Ivanishvili knows both well, though not as well as he’d like. This wouldn’t stand out so much, however, if the man who has taken it upon himself to lead an entire country weren’t so visibly nervous.



“You seem to have some personal safety concerns, judging by the circumstances of this interview,” you say.



“Not really. The security like to show off in front of journalists,” Ivanishvili replies in his off-kilter Russian. “They think it works. I don’t.”



He pauses for a moment and explains:



“Any private security is a joke in a country where you’re up against your own government.”



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Contemporary Georgia, like the glassy modernist architecture that’s sprung up all over it, tends to reflect the eye of the beholder. The U.S. looks at it and sees a stronghold of recognizable values, from Christianity to the Chicago school, in a far-flung and inscrutable region. Moscow’s rulers see—or at least say they do—a rogue state under the yoke of an entrenched dictator. The Russian opposition, in part to spite the Kremlin, imagine Georgia as a sort of ideal Russia from a more fortunate parallel universe—one with flavorful food in rustic restaurants, incorruptible officials in designer offices, a subtropical climate, and wine so cheap it is practically free. Liberal Moscow, as the media entrepreneur Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper succinctly puts it, “lives in a kind of Inner Tbilisi—this magic city where everything is fine.” Even the prison-torture scandal that shook Georgia in September, significantly strengthening Ivanishvili’s chances, appeared to support every point of view: the barbaric treatment of the prisoners befit a dictatorship, while the government response—the broadcast of the incendiary videos on national TV, followed by the immediate canning of high-ranking officials—was pure Western Europe.

As usual in these cases, everyone has a point. It would be silly to deny Georgia’s growth since the Saakashvili-led revolution of 2003: prior to it, for example, the government had fallen short of its projected budget by 30 percent for four years in a row, and tried to hush it up. (In 2002, sick of Georgia cooking its books, the IMF refused to deal with it). Just six years of liberalizing reforms lifted the country from 112th to 12th place in the World Bank’s “ease of doing business” ranking. The change, in the cities at least, is palpable. Street-level bribery is a thing of the past. Astride the river Mtkvari in central Tbilisi glimmers an outrageously expensive bridge whose shape has earned it the nickname The Tampon. (Ivanishvili, trying to channel public sentiment early in the campaign, has promised to demolish it as soon as he comes into power). Donald Trump’s name is all over casino-happy Batumi.



It would be almost as silly, however, to deny that all this growth was achieved at the usual post-Soviet price: by concentrating as much power as possible in the hands of one man and purging the field of competitors. “Misha,” as Ivanishvili calls Saakashvili, “has succeeded in eliminating the opposition almost entirely. He bought some of them off, created three or four opposition parties. Business is totally under his control. TV used to be free, now it is completely under his thumb.”



“You have to hand it to him,” Ivanishvili continues. “He’s a professional liar. And he pulled the wool over the eyes of a lot of people who came for a short visit and didn’t have the time to go into details.” In his account, Georgia’s image in the West is the handiwork of Washington lobbyists hired by the regime by the dozen, but even that’s coming apart at the seams. “The West realized this a long time ago, both America and Europe, but nobody could care less.”



Ivanishvili claims that “everyone hates [the president] because the country’s gotten so much poorer,” but opinion polls tell a somewhat different story. Georgia is fine with Saakashvili—it is just ready to see a new face in government. While Ivanishvili is not running to replace Saakashvili directly, whichever party wins Parliament will be able to elect a prime minister next year when new constitutional reforms take effect. Whether an eccentric billionaire fits the bill is almost beside the point: after 2008’s war with Russia and the subsequent consolidation of power, only a billionaire could breach Saakashvili’s political monopoly. And only an eccentric would want to.



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Bidzina Ivanishvili was born into a mining family in 1956. “Since the whole village was poor, we didn’t realize our own poverty,” he recalls. “I was happy.” After reaching Tbilisi on the 50 rubles he borrowed from a neighbor, he got a job at the only place that didn’t require a residence permit, as a cleaner at the Kamo mechanical foundry. Bidzina, then 17, swept iron shavings in a turnery by day, and studied economics and engineering at night. After graduating with honors and getting promoted to a deputy department head, he left for Moscow: “Russia was the only place you could make a career then.” He learned Russian, of which he hadn’t spoken a word before college, as he went along.



While at graduate school, Ivanishvili met Vitaly Malkin, alongside whom he would spend the next two decades. Both tutored on the side—Vitaly taught physics, Bidzina math—but Malkin had already discovered his inner entrepreneurial streak. “I remember him buying twin-deck tape recorders at Berezka [an exclusive store for Westerners and apparatchiks],” Ivanishvili says, with barely discernible reverberations of reverence in his voice. The two friends bonded after a classic perestroika-era incident. During an attempt to exchange rubles for the vouchers Berezka used as currency, Malkin got scammed—someone had slipped him a wad of cut-up paper in between the bank notes. “We got to the store,” Ivanishvili recalls, “took the money out of our pocket, and there wasn’t so much as ten percent of what he thought there was. I laughed my head off when I saw him. He would stick his hand back in his pocket for the hundredth time and still couldn’t believe there wasn’t any more money there.” When both of them realized what had happened, Bidzina, as a “proud Georgian,” in his words, suggested they go back and settle matters. Malkin refused; Ivanishvili insisted. “I had a serious fight with those guys,” Ivanishvili remembers with visible relish. “Gave one of them a black eye.” They were surrounded and beaten, but the very sight of two geeky graduate students coming back for their money left a strong impression on the nascent mafiosi. As Ivanishvili puts it, “we lost, but we left that place winners.” The adventure paid off a couple years later, when Ivanishvili and Markin, who by then had their own business, started running into the former grifters from Berezka in expensive private cafes: “I kept seeing familiar faces everywhere… And they would call out, ‘Hey, Boris!,’ like we were friends. That helped us a lot later on, dealing with the criminal world.”



AgroProgress, Malkin and Ivanishvili’s first cooperative venture, appeared in 1988 and traded in computers and push-button (this was back when you had to specify this) telephones. The incongruous name was the legacy of an older cooperative that built greenhouses: it was easier to join an existing one than to register your own. Ivanishvili insists they managed to avoid the mafia by taking the “highbrow” line—their biggest clients were colleges and research institutes who bought from them wholesale, and racketeers had yet to figure out that computers were a profitable market. By the time they did, around 1990, Ivanishvili, Markin, and one of the two original owners of AgroProgress had moved on and partnered up to open the Rossiiskii Credit bank. (The other AgroProgress owner said he was rich enough already, and continued to build greenhouses. In 2012 Ivanishvili would sell his share in Rossiiskii Credit for $352 million.)