As we sped down Georgia’s main highway, the spine of the country linking east and west, Vato Bzhalava, who had helped set up this trip, showed me a video. He had made it as plainclothes policemen bundled him into a van during last spring’s anti-government demonstrations in the capital, Tbilisi. By chance, journalists who were livestreaming the protest also filmed the moment, and his friends saw the footage. This was lucky. Georgia is a small place; one way or another everyone knows everyone. Messages got through to the police: “Don’t beat up Vato!” They did not. Others were not so lucky. Vato is a moustachioed thirty-four-year-old researcher at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies (GFSIS). We were on our way to Akhaltsikhe, a small town eleven miles from the Turkish border. Signs giving the distances to Tehran and Ankara flashed by. Close to the turnoff for Stalin’s birthplace at Gori, we passed within a third of a mile of the southernmost tip of South Ossetia, the de facto Russian-controlled territory that broke away …