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 You can read the Wikipedia entry on Georgia here.

The history of modern Georgia is the history of the struggle of ordinary Georgians for freedom and democracy. Three times in the last twenty years, politicians have come to power and promised freedom, only to let Georgia slide towards corruption and repression. Georgians see their country as a European nation, and seek greater integration with the EU, just like the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians and others who escaped Soviet domination at the end of the 1980s. They share the same European values, and seek the establishment of a European democracy at peace with itself.

Georgia's capital, Tbilisi

For seventy years, Georgia suffered under the tyranny of the Soviet Empire. On February 25, 1921 the Red Army entered Tbilisi, overthrew the moderate social democratic government and its democratic republic and installed a Moscow-directed communist dictatorship, led by Georgian Bolshevik Filipp Makharadze. The Georgian people rebelled in 1924, but were brutally suppressed by the forces of the Soviet Army. Georgia was then merged into a single Transcaucasisan state alongside Armenia and Azerbaijan. This split in 1936 and Georgia became the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Ioseb Jughashvili, better known as Josef Stalin, was born in the Georgian town of Gori and later rose to the highest position in the Soviet state, but Georgians suffered under his tyranny just as did people elsewhere in the USSR.

During the Second World War, fought in the Soviet Union from June 1941 to May 1945, almost 700,000 Georgians fought in the Red Army against Nazi Germany.

About 350,000 Georgians died in the battlefields of the Eastern Front.

Georgians continued their struggle for an independent state in the 1960s, and two of the most prominent members of the movement were Merab Kostava and Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

Gamsakhurdia was hugely respected moral figure, notable for his translations of Shakespeare into Georgian (at a time when many ordinary Georgians feared their language was being neglected in favour of Russian). Dissidents were heavily persecuted by Soviet government, and their activities were harshly suppressed.

Like so many other parts of the Soviet Union the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1984 and his subsequent attempts to reform the broken Soviet system were like the lifting of the pressure cooker lid - people struck for their freedom and in Georgia they struck before anywhere else.

On April 9, 1989, there was a peaceful demonstration and a series of hunger strikes in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. The protesters demanded the restoration of Georgian independence.

But Soviet special forces opened fire and this killing of peaceful protestors marked the point at which no one reasonable could have hoped to keep Georgia in the USSR.

Twenty people were killed and hundreds were injured. Now the struggle was for freedom and within hours ordinary Georgians showed their defiance by openly displaying the flag of the democratic republic suppressed by the Bolsheviks in the centre of Tbilisi, all but daring what they saw as an occupying army to shoot at them. April 9th is now marked with a memorial park in Tbilisi and an annual day of remembrance.

On April 9, 1991, shortly before the collapse of the USSR, Georgia declared independence.

On May 26, 1991, Zviad Gamsakhurdia was elected as a first President of independent Georgia. However, he was soon deposed in a bloody coup d'état and urban war - known as "the Tbilisi war" from December 21, 1991 to January 6, 1992. Tanks rumbled on Tbilisi's major streets and for the second time that century Georgia's hopes of democracy seemed to turn to ash.

The coup makers held the capital but the country became embroiled in a bitter civil war which lasted almost until 1995.

Gorbachev's former foreign minister (and former first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party) Eduard Shevardnadze returned to Georgia in 1992 and joined the leaders of the coup to head a triumvirate called the "State Council". Shevardnadze was respected in both the west and in Moscow and so was able, eventually, to bring the war to a conclusion. In the end democracy seemed to triumph - though the cost to Georgia of the war was huge, and is still felt today. In 1995, Shevardnadze was officially elected as president of Georgia.

Shevardnadze promised to bring in a large number of "new faces" - generally men and women in their late twenties and early thirties untainted by the Soviet machine - and hopes were high for the new beginning. Many of these new faces are still important figures in Georgian politics today - still arguing for their ideal of a democratic, western-orientated Georgia. But allegations of corruption - more often aimed at the president's extended family rather than the president himself - grew louder and louder.

And in 2003, Shevardnadze (who won re-election in 2000) was deposed by the Rose Revolution, after Georgian opposition and international monitors asserted that the November 2 parliamentary elections were marred by fraud.

Mikheil Saakashvili, a former member of Shevardnadze's ruling party, was one of the principal leaders of the revolution. There was no bloodshed as Shevardnadze recognised he could not mobilse the army or police, but Saakashvili had made it clear he was prepared to fight if that was the only way to secure Shevardnadze's exit.

Mikheil Saakashvili became President of Georgia in 2004 - winning an overwhelming mandate (even Shevardnadze claimed to have voted for him). But the early optimism of his reign began to fade.

In November 2007, a peaceful protest was held in Georgia. Government forces beat fleeing protesters with truncheons and wooden poles, firing rubber bullets and water cannons. The government then seized independent media outlets and declared martial law. No investigation of these events has ever happened, despite over 500 injuries. (Read more here http://georgianmediacentre.com/node/19).

In August 2008, Saakashvili fought a disastrous war against Russia over the disputed territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He claims it was in response to a specific Russian attack, though British MPs recently described it as a "politically reckless" move driven by long term Russian provocation rather than the single act of war claimed by the president.

The war was a disaster for Georgia and only strengthened the hands of the secessionists as it saw the effective military occupation of 20% of Georgian territories by Russia, and the deaths of hundreds of civilians as well as the closure of key markets to Georgian produce.

On the anniversary of the Tbilisi massacre, April 9, 2009 a series of peaceful demonstrations began. Since then, more than 80 people attending protest demonstrations have been seized and beaten by masked government forces.

Protesters have been shot with plastic pellets and rubber bullets - even though their use was (then) illegal.

The Georgian democratic opposition have called on the government to respect the rule of law and call early Presidential elections to end the current political crisis.

Ordinary Georgians remain true to their dream of democracy: it seems impossible to believe any leader could extinguish that, no matter how hard they try.