After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Kvinitadze, now major general, served as a Deputy Minister of War for the Transcaucasus federal government before becoming the Commander in Chief of the army of a newly independent Georgia in 1918.

In 1919, he commanded the Georgian troops that defeated Muslim revolutionaries in the Akhaltsikhe province, and occupied, on 20 April 1919, the hitherto Turkish-held city of Artvin.

He helped establish a military school in Tiflis and served as its Commandant before being made Commander-in-Chief of Georgian army again early in May 1920, when the Bolsheviks attempted a coup d'état.

After Georgia's defeat in the war in March 1921, Kvinitadze left for France, where he first worked as a clerk for Pathé Records and then ran a small business producing matsoni.

[4] Kvinitadze's Russian-language book My Memoirs from the Years of Independence of Georgia, 1917–1921 (Мои воспоминания в годы независимости Грузии, 1917–1921) first appeared in Paris in 1985 and was published in a Georgian translation in 1998.

In addition to being a military chronicle written by a participant of those events, Kvinitadze's memoirs are a political commentary, directing harsh criticism at the Mensheviks, accusing them of undermining the state and alienating the Georgian people with their socialist and internationalist rhetoric, incompetence and failure to defend the country against the anticipated foreign intervention.