Georgia and Tajikistan were essentially ruled by criminalized military juntas in the early 1990s. Presidents were installed to act as figureheads. The same insivible bonds of trust that were used to recruit soldiers and coordinate military actions during the war could be – and had been – used to organize coups in both states. Because this fact was well understood by the president and the warlords behind the throne, the president implemented policies to satisfy this critical constituency. Ministry appointments were handed out to cronies, closed-bid privatization schemes were implemented to benefit ma a captains, and arrest warrants targeted businessmen who could not acquire sufficient political protection. At first, the presidents were puppets, with powerful armed groups and underworld financiers holding the strings. A long-time associate of Eduard Shevardnadze, who served in the government during this period, recalled the daily ritual of humiliation and extortion in the following terms:

“Dzhaba [Ioseliani] or one of his lieutenants walked in every day with a bunch of papers for him to sign – usually documents of ownership or deeds and titles to houses and apartment flats.… There were arrest warrants [for political enemies] as well. They didn't walk in with guns, but … there were guns in the building. He had to sign them. He had to sign them all.”

Yet by the late-1990s, both presidents had successfully placed themselves securely in the center of the web of relationships holding their respective states together, and it was difficult for anyone to imagine either state functioning without these men at the helm. The focus of this chapter is on how Eduard Shevardnadze and Emomalii Rakhmanov managed to ascend to the top of their respective political hierarchies.

The analytic narrative presented in this chapter describes how the two presidents, in their weakly institutionalized postwar settings, contended with multiple potential challengers simultaneously. If the logic of the n-player model is correct, there should be evidence of the warlord coalition changing over time to accommodate shifting domestic and international pressures.