Mikheil Saakashvili

He poked the Russian bear, and his tiny nation got mauled. But Saakashvili, President of Georgia, stood out as a beacon of hope for former Soviet states now menaced by the imperial ambitions of 2007's Person of the Year, Vladimir Putin. Outgunned on the battlefield, Saakashvili, a U.S.-trained lawyer (above, on a recent visit to New York City), used superior media savvy to cast himself as a modern-day democratic David, fending off the monster from Moscow.

—Bobby Ghosh

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