It is one thing to overthrow a president, quite another to put in his place a stable and successfully functioning alternative government. It is only in mature parliamentary democracies that oppositions replace governments after peaceful elections, and in a manner that barely disrupts the daily life of the citizenry.
Unfortunately, Georgia, the former Soviet republic sandwiched between the Russian Caucasus Mountains and Turkey, is not a stable, mature democracy. It is surrounded by, and also embraces within its borders, areas of seething ethnic tensions - Chechnya to the north inside Russia, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia within the country itself. And it has a troubled political history.
Absorbed into imperial Russia in the 19th century and thereafter swallowed up by the Russian Soviet communist empire (to which Georgia contributed Josef Stalin), the country was independent for just three years - from 1918 to 1921 - prior to the collapse of communism in 1991. Independence in April that year did not usher in a settled state, however. Although Mr Zviad Gamsakhurdya was appointed president by the then ruling Supreme Council, a decision endorsed by the electorate, he was driven from power later that year by, as he saw it, a ragbag band of the defeated old communist nomenklatura. Their leader was Eduard Shevardnadze.
The fact that Mr Shevardnadze, who deserves to be remembered kindly by history for the progressive role he played as Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister, has now been driven from office by the opposition has a certain predictable symmetry about it. Last weekend's very largely peaceful events have an echo of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, even if the immediate prospects for Georgia are not as good as those facing the central European country in 1989. Yesterday, Georgia's interim president and leader of the opposition, Ms Nino Burdzhanadze, a lawyer, promised to hold fresh presidential and parliamentary elections with 45 days. She is supported by another opposition leader, the young, US-trained lawyer, Mr Mikhail Saakashvili, who has been groomed by the US ambassador in Tbilisi, Mr Richard Miles.
But the opposition leaders will need to exercise caution when tempted by the blandishments of the US. Mr Shevardnadze was once a favourite of Washington and did much, if not all, that was asked of him - but it did not save him in the end. To be fair, the US is not responsible for the corruption and lawlessness that is endemic in Georgia. However, if Ms Burdzhanadze and Mr Saakashvili emerge victors at the elections, they will need to fashion a government and policies that suit Georgia first and not anyone else's interests in the region.
A country with a Mediterranean-type climate and an abundance of agricultural land and forest, and which is rich also in minerals and oil, should not suffer the poverty that is commonplace in Georgia and should not see some 20 per cent of its five million people leaving to seek a life abroad.