To maintain political authority?

I am reading news about the situation in Georgia and I try to understand what is standing behind it. I have to say that I am not an expert, I just try to analyse and guess what is going on. There are two sides of the coin, there are too positions in this issue. Russia claims that Saakashvili wants to keep the power and makes clever steps in order to maintain it at the same time "provoking Russians" (3 Russian diplomats were sent out of Georgia yesterday as persona-non-grata). On the other site I can imagine that Russian special forces are interfering into the domestics politics of the neighboring country. What is definitely clear, people don't want and don't like violence. My question is will they remember about Saakashvili's violence with the demonstrators or rather the Russian troops in Abkhazia in early 1990s and now?