Brutal poverty stalks Georgia, where 30 percent are jobless

Now she has used up all the flour. In the tiny bedroom that also serves as the family's dining room and living room, Chebukhchyan's 2- year-old daughter, Anna, sat next to her mother, clutching the last piece of bread.

Chebukhchyan, 31, forced a feeble smile as she wondered aloud how her family is going to make it through the winter.

Neither she nor her husband, Arshak, has a steady job, so food is scarce, and the electricity comes on for just three hours a day in their unheated apartment on the top floor of a moldy concrete building. Arshak's repeated attempts to set up his own business -- a shelter for homeless children, a hairdresser's shop -- have been quashed time and again by Georgia's bureaucratic red tape.

"We're barely surviving," said Chebukhchyan, who wore a wraparound skirt she had fashioned from a blue flannel baby blanket. Peeking from behind warped red plastic furniture in the dark, windowless kitchen, her son Mirab, 7, stared intently at the bread in his sister's hand.

As this nation of 4.9 million people looks to the future just days after protests forced President Eduard Shevardnadze to resign, it faces the legacy of his corrupt rule: foreign debt of $1.8 billion, a staggering 30 percent unemployment rate, an average salary of $20 a month and a moribund economy in which more than half the citizens live below the poverty line, according to the U.N. Development Program.

Acting President Nino Burdzhanadze told top Georgian officials that the level of economic decline the new government has inherited from Shevardnadze is "even worse than we thought."

"We are facing economic collapse," Burdzhanadze, a former Parliament speaker, said in televised remarks. "We have zero in the state budget and we are not able to pay pensions, we are not able to pay salaries, we are not able to pay anything to the army, to the police."

In Rustavi, Georgia's third-largest city, sprawled in the foothills of the mighty Caucasus Mountains 20 miles southeast of the capital, Tbilisi, people greeted with caution the dizzying power transfer that set off euphoric celebrations in the capital.

Many of the 160,000 people who live in Rustavi's monotonous concrete apartment blocks strung with clotheslines found themselves without steady jobs or adequate food when most of the city's nine factories shut down after Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. For the past decade, they say, every change they have witnessed has been for the worse.

Years of poverty and stubborn unemployment have turned the once-bustling city on the ancient Silk Road trade route into a ghost of its former self. Children mope in garbage-strewn playgrounds among broken swing sets. Goats and sheep graze in overgrown soccer fields. Elderly men squat by the side of the road, selling plastic bottles of gasoline that they buy cheaply in neighboring oil-rich Azerbaijan.

Like many other towns outside the relatively prosperous confines of Tbilisi, Rustavi exemplifies the dire situation across Georgia, said Maka Esaiashvili, information officer at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Tbilisi. "All regions of Georgia are similarly vulnerable and poor," she said.

Irakli Zhordaniya, director of Rustavi Steelworks, once the city's biggest employer, said that in the 1980s, the factory employed 13,000 people making steel and steel pipes. Today, the factory has a multimillion-dollar debt and runs at a tenth of capacity, employing 1,500 people, who earn about $75 a month.

"These people understand what business is, what economy is," Zhordaniya said. "Economy is our problem number one."

Because gas supplies are irregular, rusty stovepipes sticking out of apartment windows have become status symbols in Rustavi.

Revaz Tekavadze, 50, a former electrician who has been unable to find a steady job since his factory in Tbilisi shut down in 1992, proudly showed off the square metal stove that dominates the living room in his two-room apartment. Ten dollars buys enough wood to stay warm at night for two weeks.

"We live badly," Tekavadze said, "but at least we're warm at night."

In her cramped bedroom, Chebukhchyan ran her hand through Anna's matted hair and looked at her one-burner portable gas stove, standing idle. "I really don't care who's in power," she said, "as long as they help us live better."