TBILISI, U.S.S.R. -- "Georgia is a nation of warriors," said Merab Gelashvili, and half a dozen would-be warriors gathered in the republican parliament building chimed in with their assent.
But these young men would be warriors for Georgia, only Georgia. They will not, they say, serve the Soviet empire that sprawls to the north, west and east from this little, ancient, spectacular, troubled republic.
"I categorically refuse to serve in the occupying army," said Mr. Gelashvili, 18, a history student at Tbilisi State University.
"I'll join the Georgian army with pleasure and defend the interests of Georgia."
The next day, inside the fortress-like headquarters of the Transcaucasian Military District across town, Col. Gen. Anatoly K. Nikolayev bemoaned the results of last autumn's Soviet army draft.
Of the 12,000 draftees called up in Georgia, only a shade over 10 percent actually reported for duty -- the lowest response among the 15 Soviet republics.
"Mainly," General Nikolayev said, "those who showed up were of the non-Georgian nationalities."
In view of the glorious history of Georgian soldiering, the turnout is particularly painful, he said.
"Georgia," General Nikolayev explained, "is a nation of warriors."
The coincidence of phrasing seems to sum up the dangerous state of Georgian-Soviet relations: Everyone is willing to fight. The only disagreement is what and whom to fight for.
The Georgian parliament and the Soviet army headquarters seem like different countries: different languages, different heroes, different visions. A visitor to both places comes away with the feeling that they are headed for a collision.
As in most of the non-Russian republics, free speech and free elections have transformed this republic of 5.4 million people, who live in a mountainous territory the size of West Virginia.
Georgia has turned decisively away from seven decades of Soviet communism to its roots in 2,000 years of rich culture and history, to 17 centuries of Orthodox Christianity, to the fabled 11th century rule of King David the Builder and the classic 13th century poems of Rustaveli.
No republic has been so uncompromisingly defiant and contemptuous of decrees and demands from the Kremlin.
If Lithuania has been more directly targeted by the Gorbachev regime, that appears to be for reasons of political and military strategy. Many Georgians fear that their time is coming.
Georgia's transformation had two critical moments.
The first came April 9, 1989, when Soviet troops attacked peaceful demonstrators with shovels and toxic gas, killing at least 16 people. For many Georgians, that night was the end of illusions about the possibility of reform producing a free and normal existence within the Soviet Union.
The second came last October, when the so-called Round Table/ Free Georgia coalition led by former dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia won easily in the republic's first contested elections since Soviet rule began in 1921. The vitriolic campaign featured shootings, car bombings and other manifestations of the intense spirit of competition and revenge that characterize Transcaucasian politics.
Since then, Georgia has plunged into a crisis, focusing on South Ossetia, a mountainous territory in the north of the republic inhabited mainly by ethnic Ossetians.
It is a conflict that illustrates Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's oft-stated fears about the dangers of bloody chaos resulting from the breakup of the union. In fact, it illustrates the Kremlin views so well that many Georgians, including Mr. Gamsakhurdia, say the clash has been artificially incited by the hand of Moscow.
The South Ossetians, fearful of what they see as Mr. Gamsakhurdia's Georgian chauvinism, moved last fall to secede from Georgia, saying that they needed to stay in the Soviet Union to be protected from discrimination and violence. Mr. Gamsakhurdia responded by having the Georgian parliament dissolve South Ossetia's autonomous status -- which the Georgian president had promised before the elections to preserve.
In the subsequent three-way conflict among Georgian police and volunteers, Ossetian police and volunteers, and Soviet troops, at least 30 people have been killed in several weeks of on-again, off-again shootouts.
Georgia has cut food and power to the South Ossetian capital, Tskhin
vali, reducing the city of 42,000 to a freezing, starving armed camp.
Both Mr. Gorbachev and the Soviet parliament have threatened to declare a state of emergency in South Ossetia, in effect removing it from Georgian control. Mr. Gamsakhurdia says that the Soviet president has threatened to detach from Georgia both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another autonomous region on the Black Sea, if the republic refuses to stay in the Soviet Union.
Whatever the real role of behind-the-scenes Kremlin incitement,
the Georgian nationalists unquestionably have contributed to the conflict that threatens to tear the republic apart. The chief minority groups, the Ossetians and the Abkhazians, who have their own autonomous area on the Black Sea, have feared Georgian chauvinism and forced assimilation since long before Mr. Gamsakhurdia came to power.
Partly because minorities boycotted the elections, non-Georgians are hardly represented in the parliament: Only nine of 245 deputies are non-Georgians -- less than 4 percent, compared with their 30 percent representation in the population. Their non-representation seems to make it difficult to break a vicious circle of discrimination and hostility.
Yet for most Georgians, the threat from the Soviet Union -- crystallized for many in the soldiers' ghastly violence against unarmed women in 1989 -- overshadows any doubts about Mr. Gamsakhurdia's controversial leadership.
The overriding conflict is between Georgia and the Soviet empire, between the patriotic paramilitary forces now to be united officially in a Georgian national guard and the powerful presence of the Soviet army.
"Georgians have never liked the empire," said Tengiz Abuladze, a Georgian film director whose anti-Stalinist film "Repentance" was one of the first sensations of the glasnost era.
"There is no anti-Russian feeling in Georgia," he told an interviewer. "But there was always, is now and always will be an anti-empire feeling."
After Soviet troops attacked demonstrators at Lithuanian broadcasting facilities Jan. 13, Mr. Abuladze sent President Gorbachev a curt telegram.
"To the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate," said the handwritten message, printed in Georgian newspapers. "The road you have turned onto, in an embrace with the 'black colonels' [conservative military officers in the Soviet parliament], leads to hell. Come to your senses!"
It was signed: "Former People's Deputy of the U.S.S.R., member of the Communist Party until 1991."
Most Georgians see no harm to their own security in the 10 percent turnout for the Soviet military draft -- on the contrary.
"No one's attacking us and no one's expected to attack us," said Tengiz Kitovani, 52, a sculptor and member of the Georgian parliament. "The only threat comes from Russia."
Despite this threat, the feeling on the streets of Tbilisi is of independence already achieved. Newsstands hawk every imaginable emblem of Georgian statehood and patriotism. Particularly popular lately are felt banners bearing an idealized portrait of Mr. Gamsakhurdia and one or another of his sayings.
But make your way onto the grounds of the Transcaucasian Military District -- past the guards and barbed wire and signs saying "Halt or you will be shot!" -- and you are in another world.
Here Soviet power still reigns. "True to the Behests of Lenin," a slogan rarely found anywhere anymore, is painted in huge letters on a building wall.
Inside, General Nikolayev seems a model Soviet officer, a military professional who has given his life to the army and prefaces each reply by saying, "I'll answer that as a soldier."
What is the cause of Georgians' draft resistance? General Nikolayev gives three reasons: "the incorrect policy of the new Georgian leadership"; "moral pressure" from nationalists on young men, who are told that if they serve in the Soviet army they are "enemies of the nation"; and the "anti-army campaign in the press."
The root of the problem, he said, is "the mistakes of perestroika."
The idea of reform "was a necessary and wise idea for the Soviet Union," General Nikolayev said. "But there was no precise plan of implementation. It was impromptu. That leads to the loss of discipline and eventually to anarchy. And history shows that where there's anarchy, there appears violence."