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Europe, it notes, ‘though the smallest of the four quarters of the earth, is the most distinguished for its power, its wealth and its knowledge’.

First up is Scandinavia and Sweden, with a population of ‘three millions’. Its capital, Stockholm, is ‘a fine city, containing 80,000 inhabitants…the surrounding scenery is beautifully romantic’. Norway, with its ‘million inhabitants’ who live ‘cheaply by fishing and are robust, well made, patient under hardships and distinguished for their hospitality to strangers’. It’s not so keen on the Laplanders, who are ‘low in stature, thick set, habitually filfthy. Not enjoying the blessings of education they are extremely ignorant and superstitious’

Moving eastwards to Russia, where the ‘nobility are in general very wealthy and live in great splendour; but the peasantry are in the most abject state of slavery; they can neither read nor write; they live in houses of the most wretched description; and are bought and sold with estates; yet with all these disadvantages they , they are robust, and patient under hardships’.

France, the most populous country with 33 millions, enjoys a ‘fine situation near the centre of Europe’, and Paris is distinguished ‘by the magnifence of its public buildings but many of its streets are narrow and dirty’. The British love/hate relationship with the French is clear; they are: ‘A gay, active and lively people, graceful in their deportment and very polite; posessing however not an inconsiderable share of vanity’

The Prussians are ‘a brave people; the higher classes are well-informed and courteous, but the peasantry are uncultivated and superstitious’. Sadly the Austrian nobility are ‘haughty and oppressive, but the middle classses are moral and industrious and greatly attached to reading and music’. The Swiss are ‘a robust people, noted for the simplicity of their manners and their love of liberty’, while the Poles are ‘gallant, and those subject to Russia made a brave attempt to assert their independence, but unfortunately without success’.

Moving inwards, Holland is ‘a very flat country’, with Amsterdam, the capital, ‘chiefly built on wooden piles and contains many magnificent buildings. It has broad canals nd good coach roads, with 200,000 inhabitants’. The Dutch are ’slow and heavy but remarkable for their cleanliness, frugality and industry’. Belgium makes ‘good corn and wine’ and Brussels is ‘one of the most elegant cities in Europe’. Of course they can’t resist mentioning it is just a few miles north of Waterloo, famous for ‘the great battle in whch Bonaparte met with his overthrow’.

Heading south finds more praise and scorn. The ‘fourteen millions’ in Spain are: ‘grave and haughty people, posessing elevated notions of honour; but they are indolent and revengeful’, while pity the Portuguese,. with their: ‘Swarthy complexion with dark hair and eyes’, and where, ‘the peasantry are very poor, living in wretched huts, almost without furniture and their diet consists of mainly bread and garlic’. In Italy there are 17 millions Italians, who are ‘discreet and polite people but extremely effeminate’.

As ever Turkey’s position in Europe is unclear. The Turks ‘appear completely different from other inhabitants of Europe; the men instead of the close dress of Europeans wear loose robes and turbans instead of hats’ and while ‘Turkey abounts with natural advantages, owing to the depotism of its government and the baneful infleuce of its religion, it cannot be considered a great nation’. Greece, which was ‘long in state of bondage to the Turks’ recently due to it’s ‘own bravery and the support of the great Christian powers has established its independence’.

Safely back over the channel to England and its 13 millions, of whom: ‘The intelligence, industry and enterprise of her people have raised her to a pitch of greatness enjoyed by no other power’. London may be ‘considered the first city of the world’. The book is also keen on the Scots: ‘temperate in their diet, of robust and healthy constitutions and by superior management made very productive’, noting that there is ‘less crime’ there too. The rest of the British Isles fares less well, with the Welsh: ‘Brave and hospitable but inclined to be hasty in their temper and priding themselves extravagantly on their pedigrees and families’; the
Irish: ‘Hardy, active and brave; the lower classes however are in general ignorant and superstitious and in a wretched state of poverty’

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The hot topic among opposition politicians and activists the last few weeks has been the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Who is this guy? A victim of property redistribution? A champion of democratic freedoms? Or a front for “comprador capital,” squeezed out by a nationalist administration? At a forum for left-wing political organizations held in Moscow last weekend, the discussion focused on Khodorkovsky, although the topic listed in the program was “Internationalism or Nationalism?”

The argument that Khodorkovsky is the victim of a government attempt to rid Russian business of foreign influences simply doesn’t hold water. The Putin team has done all it can to drag Russia into the World Trade Organization and to increase the role of foreign capital in the economy.

Khodorkovsky’s arrest could be put down to a run-of-the-mill battle to redistribute property if not for two things.

The first is Putin’s announcement that the legal and economic results of privatization will not be reviewed. This means that the oligarchic structure of the economy, dominated by raw materials quasi-monopolies, will remain in place no matter who owns them. In a twist of fate, the very fact that the quasi-monopolies are protected against nationalization leaves the heads of these corporations defenseless in any conflict with the regime. The Kremlin has vowed to defend the private property, not the owners themselves.

In a country where the vast majority of the population wants these companies to be renationalized, the regime can only be authoritarian. In order to defend private property, the regime has no choice but to ignore public opinion. A wide-open political contest is out of the question. The most the regime can afford is a semblance of participatory government, or “managed democracy.”

But sooner or later the arbitrary rule to which most Russians are exposed every day will affect the upper echelons of society. When the bureaucrats are all-powerful, no one is safe. At some point the defenders of private property start demanding their fair share. Some businesses choose to cut a deal. Others, in particular Khodorkovsky, have tried to establish a dialogue with the people directly in an attempt to free themselves from dependence on the state. This explains why Khodorkovsky has pushed so insistently for greater openness and has founded so many charitable organizations to support education, civil society and even the political opposition.

It was always doubtful how successful this strategy could be. However, the Kremlin sensed a threat and went after Yukos with a vengeance. Khodorkovsky wound up behind bars, though if the charges he faces are taken at face value, the entire Russian elite — starting with the Kremlin — ought to be locked up along with him.

At this point a second factor comes into play, changing the situation dramatically. Khodorkovsky stepped down as the head of Yukos and indicated that he would be happy just to run the foundations he had established to develop civil society. In Marxist terms, the oligarch became a “leader of the bourgeois-democratic opposition.” He remains a member of the oligarchic elite. But the owner of a major corporation who is trying to hang on to his slice of the pie taken from the people back in the early 1990s is one thing; a politician who has issued a challenge to the regime is another thing entirely.

The press frequently compares Khodorkovsky to the famous industrialist Savva Morozov, who bankrolled the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the 20th century. It would be more apt, however, to compare Khodorkovsky with two men who found themselves in a similarly complex situation: Benigno Aquino in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship, and Pedro Joaquin Chamorro in Nicaragua during the Somoza dictatorship. Both were liberal representatives of a traditional oligarchy who opposed authoritarian rule and “managed democracy” in their countries. They were neither radical nor left-wing, but the logic of political confrontation drove them into such a heated conflict with the regime that no compromise was possible.

Today, Khodorkovsky is just about the only person in Russia for whom democratic reform is not just a worthwhile goal, but a matter of life and death. He is surely familiar with the fate of his predecessors: The Aquino and Chamorro clans eventually came to power in the Philippines and Nicaragua, but both men paid for this triumph with their lives.

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The arrival of winter in this troubled land of medieval forts and Soviet-era apartment buildings invariably means one thing: another energy crisis. And so late last year the desperate government turned to U.S. officials for help.

With U.S. funds, a consulting firm was hired to take over the country’s electrical distribution system outside Tbilisi, the capital, but it did not take long for the American consultants to discover why Georgia is a nation that does not work. The power company the firm inherited in May was a tangle of creaky equipment, unpaid debt and widespread corruption. Only 10 percent of customers paid their bills.

The consultants decided to play tough. Delinquent customers would have their power turned off until they began paying. The Georgians’ response proved equally tough. In one region, the governor and his guards stormed a substation and flipped the power back on. A mayor in another area did the same, whipping out a gun and shooting a transmission insulator to prove he meant business. Subcontractors have been kidnapped by their own employees, and the consultants even had to break up a knife fight in the energy minister’s office.

The U.S. firm’s tribulations mirror a broader social breakdown in this country of 5 million. A dozen years after independence, the former Soviet republic in the Caucasus Mountains has become the archetype of a failed state, overwhelmed by poverty, stagnation, graft and separatist divisions.

“It’s just a big dysfunctional web,” said Dean White, a senior partner at PA Consulting Group, the U.S. firm struggling to fix the electrical system.

Years of frustration boiled over in parliamentary elections this month as nearly 80 percent of voters cast ballots for parties other than the bloc led by President Eduard Shevardnadze. And that was only the official tally. The vote was marred by massive fraud, according to U.S. and European observers, and thousands of protesters certain that the government stole what votes it did get have been in the streets of the capital for nearly two weeks demanding Shevardnadze’s resignation.

In the latest escalation, as many as 20,000 protesters marched to Shevardnadze’s headquarters at the State Chancellery on Friday and formed a human chain around the building.

The election may also have signaled a turning point in U.S. relations with Georgia. For the last decade, Washington has given Tbilisi special treatment out of gratitude to Shevardnadze for his role in ending the Cold War when he was Soviet foreign minister.

Successive U.S. administrations have funneled more than $1 billion to Georgia, one of the highest per capita rates in the world. The CIA trained Shevardnadze’s personal guards. President Bush dispatched Green Berets to train Georgians to deal with terrorists camped out in the lush but lawless Pankisi Gorge. “We used to be the darlings of Washington,” recalled Tedo Japaridze, the Georgian national security adviser, who has six aides whose salaries are paid by the U.S. State Department.

But now there are increasing signs that the long-indulgent United States has decided to stop cutting Shevardnadze so much slack.

In the run-up to the election, Bush publicly encouraged Shevardnadze to hold an honest vote and chose the most influential envoy he could find to deliver the message, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, Shevardnadze’s longtime friend from the final days of the Soviet Union. Baker came in July and pressured the Georgians into adopting a new election code.

To impress upon Shevardnadze the importance of the situation, more American luminaries followed, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), John M. Shalikashvili, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state.

In a last-minute intervention, Bush sent Shevardnadze a letter two days before the Nov. 2 vote imploring him “to conduct this upcoming election in a free, fair, peaceful, and transparent manner” and avoid “violence and intimidation as a political tool.”

The apparently rigged election left U.S. officials steaming. In an interview, U.S. Ambassador Richard M. Miles called the election “a mess” and “marred by massive irregularities and voter fraud.” More broadly, he said: “We’re disappointed at the slow pace of reform in Georgia. There are seemingly enormous difficulties in tackling very basic problems with corruption in this society. We would like to see stronger leadership and faster, more measurable progress.”

AES Corp., an Arlington-based firm that owned Tbilisi’s electric utility, pulled out of Georgia in July in frustration and sold its assets to Russia’s electric monopoly. Two months later, a U.S. aid official declared that, when it came to reform in the 27 former Soviet-bloc countries, “Georgia’s progress has slipped near the bottom.”

Even before the election, U.S. officials made their displeasure plain this fall by canceling a $14 million aid project to rehabilitate a hydroelectric plant and scaling back a program to help the Finance Ministry. They have threatened more aid reductions in February unless Georgia demonstrates progress according to certain benchmarks of reform.

“I think their patience is finished,” said Alexander Rondeli, president of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies.

Talbott said in an interview that the time had come for Washington to apply a tough-love policy to the Georgians. “If they can’t get the problem of corruption, and essentially corrupt politics, under control, then there’s not much hope for Georgia,” he said by telephone from New York. “Shevardnadze has this huge international prestige that he could have used . . . and all the preliminary evidence is that he decided not to do that.”

Japaridze, a former ambassador to Washington, said he sees the shift in the e-mails from the White House that he finds each morning when he arrives at the office. He added that Shevardnadze grasps the situation.

“He knows and understands better than anyone that Washington has a short memory,” Japaridze said in the State Chancellery building, over the shouts of protesters outside. “Yes, he helped bring down the Berlin Wall, and there will be nice words. But politics is about other issues.” Japaridze acknowledged that the election was deeply flawed and added, “We need to do our best to clean up this damage.”

Georgia was supposed to be a model of reform under Shevardnadze, but in recent years has seen mostly misery. Major industries have been taken over by powerful oligarchs, including some close to Shevardnadze. Georgians must pay bribes to get driver’s licenses, passports or university admission, to start a business and to avoid paying taxes or electric bills.

“There’s no segment in Georgian society without corruption,” said Ketevan Rostiashvili, director of the Georgian office of American University’s Transnational Crime & Corruption Center.

Pensioners receive $7 a month, and even that is often months late. Police officers are so poorly paid that protesters have been slipping them food across the barriers each night. Electricity has become such a precious commodity that the elevators in some tall buildings here will not work unless people feed coin boxes installed in them.

The shadow economy represents at least 60 percent of Georgia’s total. And even under the most optimistic growth scenario, according to Roman Tsiridze, an economist, it would take Georgia 12 years to catch up to where Bosnia is today.

One reason for that can be found at the Tbilisi factory run by David Bidzinashvili.

In the communist era, the sprawling factory compound employed 5,000 people and supplied shoes for sale throughout the Soviet bloc. Today, most of the buildings are used for storage and only the part bought by Bidzinashvili for $130,000 in 1990 is still operating, making uniforms for oil companies.

During his busiest season, he employs 380 people.

“We can’t compete with small illegal factories that don’t pay taxes,” said Bidzinashvili. “There are a lot of them, and they can produce as much as we do and they can sell cheaper.”

What’s more, Georgia is still in pieces. The territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain under the control of pro-Russian separatists.

The Pankisi Gorge was until last year the refuge of Chechen guerrillas and Arab terrorists. The autonomous region of Adzharia has its own military and does not defer to Shevardnadze, who is trying to make a deal with its leader to forge a parliamentary coalition.

The ripple effects of those divisions are visible in the heart of Tbilisi. Overlooking Republic Square, just behind a statue of Georgia’s 12th-century hero, King David the Builder, sits the run-down Iveria Hotel, its once proud sign rusted, its cold lobby dilapidated, its balconies covered by cheap plywood or blue plastic sheeting to create more rooms.

About 3,500 refugees from Abkhazia have been camped out at the Iveria for more than a decade waiting for a chance to go home. “We’ve heard promises for 10 years, but nothing has ever been done,” said Lamara Availiani, 69, who lives on the fourth floor in a small room with a cross and an icon on the wall. “We have no hope left.”

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