Schools are a good example of the texture of life here. Teachers supplement their small salaries, which often go unpaid, by requiring their pupils to take private lessons and pay for them.
Then in the universities, which, students say, sometimes demand thousands of dollars in bribes for admission, professors insist that students buy textbooks that they have published and bring them for autographs as proof, outsiders say.
"That's the atmosphere in the universities, which are supposed to have the highest moral standards," Usupashvili said. "There's no sense in fighting against police corruption when a professor in a university is forcing students to take private lessons and to buy their textbooks."
If someone important calls a professor and says, "This is my relative; you've got to give him special marks," Usupashvili said, only 5 out of 100 professors would refuse.
Three years ago Shevardnadze commissioned an anticorruption action plan that was published under his name and contained the following exhortation: "If we fail to avoid this national disaster, if we fail to cure the nation, public and state from the horrible, poisoning malady of corruption, Georgians as a civilized nation and Georgia as an independent, democratic state will have no future."
Usupashvili, an author of the report, said none of its recommendations were carried out.
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