Marching Through Georgia.

Mikheil Saakashvili, the President of Georgia, keeps late hours. During and after Georgia's five-day war with Russia this August over the breakaway region of South Ossetia, he spent long days receiving Western dignitaries--Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Joe Biden, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel--and he spent his nights rallying foreign journalists to Georgia's side, often until the early hours of the morning. When I went to see him, at his office in Georgia's new, unfinished Chancellery building, in the capital, Tbilisi, I was told to arrive "sometime after midnight." Saakashvili's adviser Daniel Kunin, an American in his late thirties whose salary, until recently, was paid by the United States Agency for International Development, was there to meet me. Kunin is blond, boyish-looking, and usually cheerful, but his eyes were bloodshot. "I'm afraid it's going to be a little wait," he said.

Saakashvili's office is lined with icons of Georgian Orthodox saints and book-shelves containing biographies of Stalin and the Kennedy family. On a side table is a history of the Winter War of 1939-40, in which greatly outnumbered Finnish forces thwarted a Soviet attempt to annex their country. Saakashvili entered the office after 2 A.M., wearing a dark suit and a loosened tie. He is forty years old--he was thirty-six when he became President, after leading Georgia's Rose Revolution as a charismatic young democratic hero who, with a flower in his hand, confronted Georgia's postSoviet leader. He is known to all as Misha. Nearly six feet four, he has a lumbering gait, and his bulk and restless energy lend a curious awkwardness to his movements. "He can't sit still," one Georgian journalist told me. "There used to be a joke about it: people would take bets on how long he would sit down for--ten minutes, twelve minutes."

"There is an A.F.P. story saying that Condi Rice will announce on Thursday certain measures," Saakashvili said to Kunin. Saakashvili has staked his country's security on its close relationship with the United States, and he had been hoping that the Bush Administration would take action against Russia for sending its forces into Georgia.

"Yeah," Kunin said. "I don't know what they are going to say, though."

"They are going to bomb! From Alaska!" Saakashvili said, smiling. (Governor Sarah Palin had been chosen as John McCain's running mate two weeks earlier.) "Or they are going to shoot their mooses!" Saakashvili asked an aide to bring a bottle of Georgian Saperavi wine and said that he hoped my story wouldn't turn out to be "an obituary." In August, Russia's Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, reportedly told President Nicolas Sarkozy, of France, that he wanted to see Saakashvili hanged "by the balls." (To which Saakashvili replies, "He would not have enough rope.")

The animosity between Saakashvili and Putin made the summer war look intensely personal. "People who have been in the room when Putin and Saakashvili have been together tell me that it has been electric with hatred," Richard Holbrooke, the former Ambassador to the United Nations, told me. "It's about a tiny man from the big country and a big man from the tiny country." (Putin is about five feet six. He is said to have been particularly annoyed to hear his Tbilisi nickname, Lilli-Putin.) When he first became President, Saakashvili said, Putin "was pretty polite, and more and more he would be cynical and aggressive. The Putin I saw in 2006 already behaved like an emperor." Putin, he said, never respected Georgian sovereignty. "Not only Georgia," he added. "He always said Ukraine was not a real country."

The Russians' "arrogance and their nastiness grew in exact proportion with oil prices, and with American problems in Iraq," Saakashvili told me. But as much as Saakashvili talks about Russian high-handedness, the affront is felt on both sides. There is a sense in Russia, Masha Lipman, of the Carnegie Moscow Center, told me, "that Georgia is this tiny country, with a population of four and a half million and a weak economy, who have been provoking them in an arrogant manner because they have a bigger guy"--the United States--"behind them, and that their leader has been emboldened to talk arrogantly in this way." The summer war, Lipman said, was seen as "a standoff against America, with the Russians victorious, as the Americans were unable to defend their client and ally."