Abstract
A new museum in Tbilisi honours purged poets from Georgia’s Soviet past.
On 20 March 2023, I returned to Tbilisi, Georgia, a city I have visited many times over the past two decades. A dramatic change had taken place, and not only in the city’s physical profile. It was a tense period in Georgian politics, soon after the government agreed to withdraw its controversial Foreign Agents Bill on 9 March, following intense protests throughout Tbilisi. Had it passed, the bill would have required any Georgian organisation which received more than 20% of its funding from a non-Georgian source to register as a so-called “foreign agent”. The terminology itself was disturbing and evocative of the Soviet political atmosphere, in which every outsider was treated as a potential spy. As Zviad Kvaratskhelia, the director of leading Georgian literary publisher Intelekti, explained to me, the term “agent” has a particularly ominous resonance in the post-Soviet context. Zviad was relieved that the bill was withdrawn. “It brings us back to the days of Soviet repressions and purges,” he explained, “when merely expressing dissent put your life at risk.”
Among the many signs of change was the newly remade Writer’s House, on the premises of the former Soviet Writer’s Union, which now houses a museum on the first floor. On the floor above the museum is the Writer’s Residency, with each of its rooms named in honour of famous writers who passed through Georgia during the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Boris Pasternak, Alexander Dumas and John Steinbeck. On the floor below is a series of meeting halls, which lead to a sculpture garden.
The building, on 13 Machabeli Street in the Sololaki neighbourhood of Old Tbilisi, was constructed between 1903-1905 in the Art Nouveau style by the renowned German architect Carl Zaar. It combines European grandeur with touches of Orientalist aesthetics. In 1911, on his deathbed, cognac manufacturer Sarajishvili bequeathed the house to his wife, with the proviso that she would reserve a major portion of it to an exhibition space for Georgian folk arts. Three days after the Bolsheviks seized power, Sarajishvili’s mansion was turned into an artist’s collective. In 1923, it became the headquarters of the newly formed Georgian Writer’s Union.
In addition to serving as a venue for formal and informal literary meetings, such institutions were a source for writers’ livelihoods: they furnished them with a regular income in exchange for specific literary outputs: translations of authorised writers, poems praising Stalin and edited collections of poems celebrating the new Soviet era. Many poems from this period are preserved in their original versions on elegant stationary bearing the blue Writer’s Union’s letterhead, suggesting that they were composed - or at least revised - on this very premises (see opposite).
The mastermind behind the purge of 1937 was the Mingrelian Georgian Lavrentiy Beria (d. 1953), head of the NKVD. As Stalin’s henchman, Beria implemented Stalin’s most vicious and brutal plans, including the genocidal deportation of the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars and many other punished peoples. Beria took a special interest in persecuting poets, particularly the ones who refused to be incorporated into his network of spies and informants.
The Writer’s Union was the epicentre for many of the accusations that infected the air during these years, and the meetings that took place in this building often laid the foundation for a chain of accusations that would end with the writer’s execution. Beria personally interrogated and tortured many of his victims. It was this legacy that led Galaktion Tabidze - a cousin of Titsian who survived the purges - in 1953 to call Beria a man who “has shed so much blood / that he has turned into blood” and to denominate him someone so full of evil that he “turned even Eden / into a desert” - words taken from a poem of his which is translated and published below. At the time that the purges were taking place, such words could not be publicly uttered. Ironically, Beria was himself executed in 1953, after which it was permissible to criticise him.
Writers declared as enemies of the state, such as Georgian symbolist poet Titsian Tabidze (far left), who was shot in 1937 after being charged with anti-Soviet agitation by the NKVD, were scratched out in photos
CREDIT: Museum of Georgian Literature
The newly opened Museum of Repressed Writers, on the premises of the former Soviet Writer’s Union, powerfully intervenes in a long history of silences. The museum consists of a single extended exhibit, and puts multimedia techniques and materials to good use to give new life to this subject. As the museum’s director Natasha Lomouri explained, the museum has been in planning for many years, and overcome many obstacles to its construction. Its aim is to honour the poets who have been suppressed in Soviet textbooks as well as in world literary histories.
The exhibit is spread across three rooms. You first enter a hallway with blue panels in Georgian and English before being ushered into a dark room covered in portraits and poetry. On one of the most prominent ones, in oversized Georgian font, Galaktion poses his famous questions: “Who did this? Why? For what?” Other panels are covered with lists of executed poets and their suppressed poems. The exhibit concludes with an art installation of long winding white sheets hung from the ceiling, with the words of the repressed poets emblazoned on them.
Georgian cultural institutions today are passionate in their defence of freedom of expression. They understand the dangers that a return to censorship - including the threat posed by the Foreign Agents Bill - would pose to Georgian literary expression. The institutions that are leading the way in giving voice to writers and poets who were suppressed during the Soviet period are confronting the complicity of the purge’s most brilliant and courageous victims while also honouring their memory.
Before leaving Tbilisi, I visit the Giorgi Leonidze State Museum of Georgian Literature, the primary repository of Georgian writers’ manuscripts since its founding in 1930. I ask the museum’s director Lasha Bakradze, himself a prominent cultural critic, why the dossiers of many repressed writers were preserved and on display in the Museum of Repressed Writers while the dossier of my own favourite poet Titsian Tabdize, which would have documented the interrogations he underwent and any confessions he made under torture, is nowhere to be seen.
Nino Makashvili, the wife of Titsian Tabidze, during her school years (front row, far right) alongside her classmates and teacher. The identity of the scratched-out girl is unknown
CREDIT: Museum of Georgian Literature
“Does it exist anywhere at all?” I ask.
Bakradze explains: “There once was such a file. We know that it existed because, as the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1989 and Georgians declared their independence, the new leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia demanded to see the dossiers of all the repressed writers.” Perhaps, Bakradze speculates, Zviad Gamsakhurdia was interested in the fate of his father, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, a bold writer who began his career in the 1920s, at the same time as the executed poets, and yet who magically survived the purges. In addition to being the son of a famous writer who survived the purge, in 1990 Zviad Gamsakhurdia became the first democratically elected president of Georgia. According to Bakradze, soon after assuming power, Zviad asked the officials in his newly-formed government to see the dossiers of all major writers from that period, including the dossier of Titsian Tabidze. He was handed a huge stack of papers, which he stored in his bunker in the building that is now the Georgian parliament. That building was set on fire during the Tbilisi War of 1991-1992 and Gamsakhurdia was banished from Georgia.
After the building was burned, the dossiers disappeared from the historical record, but not necessarily from reality. As Bakradze explained, when Gamsakhurdia’s office was searched soon after the fire, no ashes were visible in the place where the manuscripts had been stored. This suggests that someone managed to get the dossiers out in time, or perhaps they were removed long before the fire. From this Bakrazde concluded that the dossiers may still be intact somewhere, perhaps in the possession of someone who prefers to keep them hidden from view, such as Zviad’s wife Manana Archvadze-Gamsakhurdia, well-known for her hostile relationship with the current Georgian government. Bakrazde still hopes that the dossiers are preserved somewhere, and will be discovered someday.
A photo of Georgian writers taken in 1930 in Simoneti, in the Imereti region of Georgia. The poet Paolo Iashvili, who committed suicide in 1937 at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, is scratched out
Bakradze concluded this story about the missing dossiers by quoting from Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic novel The Master and Margarita. In that novel, which was written between 1928 and 1940, but only published long after the author’s death in 1967 due to censorship, Bulgakov’s main character tries unsuccessfully to burn his own manuscript, following its rejection by potential publishers. Overcome by despair concerning his fate as a censored writer in a repressive system, Bulgakov himself committed this act of incineration: he burned the first draft of his novel, before rewriting it later and giving it a second life. In the novel, the professor’s beloved Margarita rescues the manuscript from the fire, and he eventually reconstructs the charred fragments. Even the devil Woland, who is an ambiguous figure throughout the novel, wisely informs the professor that manuscripts don’t burn. Bulgakov’s effort to infuse his own personal story of despair and its resolution into his novel offered a kind of catharsis to which many Soviet writers - particularly those who were officially repressed - could relate to.
In this case the devil was right. The Master and Margarita survived, despite several attempts to destroy and later to censor it. The lesson of Bulgakov’s novel - and of Bakradze’s account of the missing dossiers - is torn from the darkest pages of Soviet existence. In Georgia today, the writers who were repressed during the 1937 Purge live on in the memories that later came to light long after their arrest and execution. They also haunt the erased and defaced photographs, many of which were taken at the Writer’s Union, in which the eyes and faces of suppressed poets are either scored out or entirely erased. The Museum of Repressed Writers and the Georgian Literature Museum gives these erased poets a second life.
Translated by