What’s going on with rapper Bera Ivanishvili, the frost-haired ‘prince’ of Georgia?
The 26-year-old son of an oligarch has been called a ‘TikToking thug’ after a government corruption scandal, writes Serena Coady
Once upon a time, at the eastern end of the Black Sea, a prince lived in a shining castle. Or rather, a $50m ‘glassle’ that dominated the Tbilisi skyline. The prince had a record label, a model wife, 4 million TikTok followers, and famous friends such as Zendaya. His abdominals came in a pack of six, as did the languages he spoke. A halo of diaphanous hair covered his head, making him look like a snow angel with gym membership. But he was not pure of heart. The oligarch’s son ruled vengefully.
Bera is the son of Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest person. His father is worth one Picasso, and $4.8bn. Georgia’s GDP is $15.9bn. Bera’s ‘prince of Georgia’ nickname is no term of endearment, but a reference to the country’s uneven distribution of wealth.
Bidzina Ivanishvili served as Georgia’s prime minister between 2012 and 2013, but through his vast wealth and connections, continues to reign as the country’s unofficial shadow leader. Georgia has been in a political crisis since Georgian Dream – the political party founded by Ivanishvili – won the parliamentary election on October 31, 2020. It was its third victory in a row. The opposition, the United National Movement, claimed there were irregularities in the vote, and rejected the official outcome. To pressure the incumbent party into a new, transparent election, the opposition refused to take up its 40 parliamentary seats.
On 23 February 2021, Georgian police stormed the headquarters of the United National Movement in Tbilisi and arrested the party’s leader, Nika Melia, who has long been considered a threat by Georgian Dream. Officers used tear gas, pepper spray and batons against party supporters, who live-streamed the incident while attempting to prevent the police from entering. Melia denied the charges – that in 2019 he had incited violence during protests against the government’s controversial invitation of a Russian lawmaker into the Georgian parliament – and was detained pending trial.
Before the arrest, Georgian prime minister Giorgi Gakharia resigned. He said he could not support his officials’ decision to arrest Melia, and that it would lead to “unacceptable” risk. He hoped that by standing down he could “contribute to reducing polarisation” in Georgia.
The arrest pushed the country deeper into crisis. Both EU and US politicians and human rights groups criticised the arrest and called for the release of the political prisoner. In May 2021 – six months after the boycott, and in a deal brokered by the EU – Melia was released and his party returned to parliament. “We will enter parliament to liberate the Georgian state captured by oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili,” Melia said.
Ivanishvili founded Georgian Dream in April 2012. Thanks to the billions he had acquired during the era of privatisation following the Soviet Union’s collapse, a fanfare ensued. His then 17-year-old son Bera (stylised as BERA, because it’s louder) released a rap anthem before the vote. In the music video, the people of Georgia – taxi drivers, piggybacked toddlers, and playground-dwelling adolescents – race through Tbilisi’s streets in support of his father’s party. Bera raps in solitude.
Ivanishvili won the vote and became Georgia’s 10th prime minister. One year later, he resigned. There was no need for an official title – he could still maintain power and support his economic interests without the encumbrance of leading a politically fractured, poverty stricken country. Teona Zurabashvili, a policy analyst at the Georgian Institute of Politics, refers to this as “state capture”. “State capture is a type of severe political corruption that gives private-sector groups specific access to state funds, [leading to] significant negative social consequences. Georgia’s current corruption situation – state capture – refers to former prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili and his financial and political interests,” says Zurabashvili.
According to Transparency International Georgia, an anti-corruption organisation, Ivanishvili maintained an informal influence on the Georgian government from the end of his term as prime minister until 2020. “During this time, Ivanishvili was at the top of his party’s capture of the country. Through informal governance – by appointing his confidants, and individuals whom he had employed in key positions in his private companies in the past, to various branches of government – he used state institutions for personal and political purposes,” says Zurabashvili.
In a February 2021 statement, Ivanishvili said he had left politics to become a “normal citizen”. Members of his inner circle still hold senior government positions. “The officials holding the key official positions in Georgia are accountable not before the Georgian citizens, but to their ‘patron’ Ivanishvili. That’s a dangerous tendency. It allows Ivanishvili and [those loyal to him] to access public funds at the expense of Georgian citizens, undermines healthy political process, and disturbs democratic development,” says Zurabashvili. Georgia’s current prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, is Ivanishvili’s closest friend. Before becoming prime minister, he held top positions at Ivanishvili’s companies, JSC Cartu Bank and Cartu Fund.
In March 2021, opposition-minded television channel TV Pirveli aired recordings of conversations between Bera, Garibashvili and Anzor Chubinidze, the head of Georgia’s Special State Protection Service, in which they discussed plans to punish minors who criticised Bera on social media. Chubinidze then visited the homes of minors, humiliated them in front of their parents, and forced them to publicly apologise to Bera online. The prime minister supported these interventions and can be heard laughing along with Bera. “After the release of the tapes, Georgian people have drawn parallels between the situation and the French film The Toy (Le Jouet), in which a little boy accuses the father of being wrong [for] ‘buying’ people to get what he wants. But the sad story is that the main actor is the head of the Georgian government,” says Georgian journalist Tamara Svanidze. Following the leak, the Georgian Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into the legality of recording and distributing private conversations. There has been no investigation into the mistreatment of minors.
The opposition called for Garibashvili’s resignation, and an anti-government group protested outside the State Chancellery, calling Bera a “TikToking thug”, but neither of the men has faced any formal punishment. The leak coincided with the most tense part of the political crisis, when the government was attempting to relaunch political discourse through the intervention of the European Council president, Charles Michel. Zurabashvili says the country’s willingness to overlook the incident comes down to poor governance and an apathetic public. “Political culture, lack of trust in a significantly polarised media, social apathy caused by poverty and no clear future of the country, [and] public exhaustion due to the frequent airing of the recordings could be the reasons why the vast majority of the population did not react to the scandal,” says Zurabashvili.
Before the scandal, Bera had fallen out of favour. Almost 20 per cent of the Georgian population live below the national poverty line, and his social media bears the insignia of the oligarch progeny crowd – photoshoots at palm-lined resorts, a white grand piano in a room with at least fifty candles, a wedding that fuses Georgian tradition with Orson Krennic’s neo-futuristic flair. “Confidence in Bidzina Ivanishvili and his family has fallen due to his inability to tackle poverty, unemployment, and social inequality in Georgia. The same has happened with Bera. He lost his reputation as a good child of a rich man, and has turned into a spoiled boy. Especially when the political situation is tense and many people can’t bring food to the table, watching him enjoy a rich life on social media makes people envious,” says Svanidze.
Outside of Georgia, Bera has blossomed. The west’s ignorance of both Georgia’s political situation and Bera’s corruption means his aspirational content – gifted gloves from UFC fighters! Underwater date nights! – has been well received. He has 4.8 million TikTok followers and 1.4 million Instagram followers. He and his wife Nanuka Gudavadze are avid cosplayers – channelling Peaky Blinders, Twilight, and the characters they are most often compared to, Jack Frost and Elsa. Bera’s content verges on the surreal, from scenes of domestic life (his mother swaddling his adult body) to the erotically bizarre – shirtlessly leading a white horse to nowhere.
He has grown his following from 50,000 in 2015 to more than 6 million, making him one of the world’s highest-profile people with albinism. His family is rich and powerful, but his appearance has become his signature, prompting headlines such as: “Georgia’s next leader may be a billionaire zookeeper with albino rapper children”, and “An albino rapper son, a £30m Bond villain mansion and a menagerie of sharks, zebras and penguins”. His father told Forbes: “I have two albino sons, you know! It’s really rare, and I have two out of four!” According to the UN, one in every 17,000 to 20,000 people in North America and Europe has some form of albinism. Role models and high-profile people with albinism are rare, meaning the condition has little visibility beyond the negative albino stereotypes perpetuated in films, including The Matrix Reloaded, Die Another Day, and The Da Vinci Code. Bera embraces albinism, creating videos on the “benefits of being albino” with his younger brother Tsotne (who also has albinism) and luminescent photoshoots with snowy backdrops, albino huskies, and white linen co-ords.
Bera has not given fans any new material in over four months. Social media silence is common practice for public figures in crisis, but for Bera, it’s not likely to be a means of self-preservation or atonement. In a 9 March interview with TV Imedi – Georgia’s second-most-watched channel, and mouthpiece of Georgian Dream – Bera stood by his decision to punish his young critics. “I’m still advocating for the same position and have not changed it since then. I will publicly state via your broadcast that if somebody swears at my family or me, I’ll hold them responsible for it today, too, because my mother and my family are the most sacred and valuable to me,” said Bera. For Georgian men, the mother is a symbol of purity, which Bera used to question the masculinity of his critics, saying: “These people do not really know motherly love,” and “Show me only one brave courageous Georgian male who thinks differently about the current matter.”
Zurabashvili says this moral standpoint is politically motivated. “Bera’s attitude of family protection and punishment perfectly meets the Georgian mentality, or Caucasian mentality in a broad sense. The PR specialists of Georgian Dream are familiar with this and they consider the national characteristics when planning any campaign. This underlies Georgian Dream’s advantage over the opponents,” says Zurabashvili. In a Facebook post, Giorgi Burjanadze, the deputy public defender (ombudsman) of Georgia, wrote that Bera was promoting a dangerous culture of honour and revenge. “Anyone who tells you to ‘defend your dignity’ or have some other violent reaction is an evil instigator of murder. Congratulations to everyone who survived today and is alive in this country... tomorrow you may run into someone stronger and more influential than you and die,” wrote Burjanadze.
After the EU’s mediation, Georgia’s political crisis appears to be on the mend. But the Georgian people recognise the cycle. “Every few months we have a new, but at the same time old, government,” says Svanidze. The leaked recordings affirm that the country still lies in the hands of the Ivanishvili family, but Bera’s willingness to stand by his revenge attacks on his teenage critics points to a deeper issue than political corruption: a violent, fragile masculinity.
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