On Georgia – Maya Jaggi in NYRB:

‘John Steinbeck traveled to Soviet Georgia in 1947 and marveled afterward that Georgian poetry was read there “by everyone,” that Georgian poets “were buried on an equal footing with their kings.” Steinbeck, however, was likely unaware of Paolo Iashvili, a leader of Georgia’s Blue Horns, a group of Symbolist poets that was part of a doomed starburst of modernism in Eastern Europe. Iashvili had shot himself dead ten years before Steinbeck’s visit, as Stalin’s Great Terror of 1936–1938 killed writers and attempted to wipe them from memory. The Russian writer Boris Pasternak, who had stayed with Iashvili in Tiflis (as the capital, Tbilisi, was known before 1936) and had translated his poems for rapt readers in Moscow, wrote to Iashvili’s widow, Tamar, that the forty-four-year-old’s suicide “gripped me by the throat.” In Old Tbilisi, a small museum has taken shape on the site of Iashvili’s desperate act eighty-five years ago. It tells the story of a literary purge that tried to tame an intelligentsia and brings light to bear not only on the Soviet past but also on modern Russia’s memory wars, Georgia’s European dreams, and fights for artistic freedom that have intensified with the invasion of Ukraine. Tens of thousands of Georgians marched under blue-and-yellow banners in solidarity with Ukraine after the invasion this February, which brought back memories of Russia’s 2008 invasion of their own country. One fifth of Georgian territory—in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia—is now occupied by Russian forces. South Ossetia’s creeping borders, less than an hour from Tbilisi, are known as the “moving Berlin Walls.” Many Georgians fear that, unless Ukraine wins, their own independence is under threat.’ (…)
‘One in four of Georgia’s writers died in the purges between 1921 and 1938. Many who escaped torture and bullets were broken in the Gulag, along with the families of the purged.
In her foreword to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Anne Applebaum writes of an “era whose lessons and warnings we are still trying to absorb.” The Museum of Repressed Writers, occupying two rooms in the Writers’ House of Georgia, is due to open next month. Natasha Lomouri, the director of Writers’ House, told me that she senses “so many similarities in trying to tame artists” in Georgia today. “They’re not sent to gulags or shot, but the instinct to control is as strong.”’

(…)

‘Georgia, a parliamentary republic, has been among the freest post-Soviet countries, not least for artistic expression. Yet democratic backsliding was cited in the European Union’s refusal this June 23 to grant Georgia the unconditional candidate status given to Ukraine and Moldova. The oligarch and former prime minister Bidzina Ivanish- vili—whose glass compound on the slopes above the city resembles a giant eye—announced his exit from politics in January 2021. However, according to Transparency International Georgia, he “keeps a firm grip on…executive government…free of democratic checks and balances.” The defining policy of the Georgian Dream party he founded, which has been in power since 2012, is a “pragmatic” rapprochement with Moscow—a policy increasingly under scrutiny since the Ukraine invasion. Three quarters of Georgia’s population of less than four million favors EU membership, and many are bitterly skeptical of the ruling party’s ostensible commitment to join the EU and NATO. Huge rallies in June and July blaming the government for the EU rebuff were held under the banner “Home to Europe,” in tune with popular graffiti: “Never Back to the USSR.”’

(…)

‘Upstairs, in a darkened room of the Museum of Repressed Writers, visitors circle four quadrants of a display whose crisp text charts successive waves of purges between 1921 and 1960, when 140 Georgian writers were executed or deported. During the Great Terror alone, seventy writers were shot, along with at least 12,000 other Georgians—and as many sent to the Gulag. No female writers were executed, the novelist Tamta Melashvili told me, because they were “so marginalized they didn’t even count,” but the publisher Lida Gasviani was arrested and shot. The display’s opening words are by Titsian Tabidze’s cousin, Galaktion Tabidze: “What made our earth red?/And what makes our sky black?” Galaktion survived the purges that killed his wife, Olga, in the camps, and leaped to his death from the window of a mental hospital in 1959.’ (…)

‘There are other reasons why this past has not been processed. “Like every nation, Georgia likes to see itself as a victim,” I was told by the Berlin-based writer Nino Haratischvili during Georgia’s Fantastic Tavern, an online festival that I directed last year on the centenary of the Soviet invasion. Her epic novel The Eighth Life: For Brilka (2014) explores a country trapped in the repetitions of history.
“I was always wondering,” she said, “who were the executioners? They were also Georgians.” Iashvili rode out on a white horse in Tiflis to greet the Russian invaders. He negotiated the handover of its grandest mansion to writers and enjoyed privileges. As union secretary in 1936, he purged “Trotskyist” proletarian writers. “All those guys weren’t in the resistance,” the novelist and screenwriter Archil Kikodze said. “We had too, too many collaborators—we still have.”’

(…)

‘Stalin understood the importance of writers, telling Maxim Gorky and others that they were the “engineers of human souls.” At the State Museum of Literature, the director, Lasha Bakradze, told me that when Stalin took power, the task of writers was to build his cult of personality. As pressure intensified, “wives of enemies of the people” were sent to a special camp in Kazakhstan. “Children, too.” But the terror followed unwritten rules: “From a cleaning woman to the politburo chief…they sat in jail waiting for execution, asking, What did I do wrong?” Among those inexplicably spared was the Blue Horn Kolau Nadiradze, who survived to write a poem on the Red Army invasion (“Snow fell, shrouding Tbilisi in black”). He was Iashvili’s only friend to attend his funeral, in defiance of Beria.
On his balcony draped with twin Georgian and Ukrainian flags, Bakradze recalled The Taming of Literature (1990), a book by his late father, Akaki, that first exposed the carrot-and-stick methods by which writers were made to serve the regime. Now, “we’re trying to decolonize our history,” he said. “It’s not just Putin: Russia is an old-fashioned imperialist country till today.” In a back room, he showed me four shotgun pellets retrieved from Iashvili’s corpse, unwrapping them from an authenticating note in Nadiradze’s handwriting. These potent relics have been preserved, perhaps so that future generations might draw courage and meaning from the poet’s refusal to serve the system any longer by denouncing others. Georgians need to free themselves from “Soviet thinking,” Bakradze said softly. “We have a problem understanding what law is, because Soviet times killed it. If we don’t speak about this terrible time that changed people, democracy will not come.”’

(…)

‘In March 2021 Thea Tsulukiani was appointed culture minister. A former justice minister and a protegée of Ivanishvili, she was also made a powerful deputy prime minister later that year. She soon decreed that every award with public funding must have a representative appointed by the culture ministry on the jury. Last year’s Litera book prize, one of the two top book awards in Georgia, had to be canceled after Tsulukiani made her own adviser a judge: most authors and publishers withdrew and the other four jurors all quit. In response, PEN Georgia put up an alternative “Free Litera” prize. This year, the Litera prize, the Litera award for translators, and the Tbilisi International Festival of Literature—all run by Writers’ House—have been denied public funding.’

(…)

‘The Great Terror ended abruptly, according to Conquest, because it was so successful. Those who dared to use their minds independently were murdered or intimidated. As Vakhushti Kotetishvili, whose sculptor father, Vakhtang, was shot in 1938, wrote in My Earthly Life (2005), “Their main guilt was the ability to think.” Self-censorship did the rest. Purging—whether by the bullet or loss of livelihood and status—favors those whose greatest talent is pandering to power, resulting in mediocre art. But it also obliterates institutional memory, stymieing the country’s development. Among the Red Terror’s urgent lessons (and an argument for solidarity in a system reverting to fear and patronage) is that capitulation is no guarantee of survival. In a plaintive letter from a prison cell, a “poet who never believed in politics” begged to be freed or shot: “I denounced innocent people…. I lost my mind,” Ivane Babuadze wrote in 1925. “Despite my ‘confession’ I was not released.”’

Read the article here.

In 2002 I visited Gori and the Stalin Museum. An elderly lady (a guard who acted as a tour guide in an almost empty museum) appeared to be still in love with Stalin.

This summer I went to Tblisi for a book about refugees. I witnessed a large demonstration in favor of the EU and more important, Georgia becoming a member of the EU.

The Great Terror ended because it was so successful. A sad but delightful sentence, the best sentences are often delightful.

And it’s true, state terror can be extremely successful.

A Russian journalist told me in June in Tblisi: ‘It’s 1917 all over again. We are here, and from here we go somewhere else.’

Whether democracy, a slightly more real democracy, will come to Georgia remains an open question. After all, it’s in decline in so many other countries.