Tbilisi 1989

One of the destinations has been whited out on the placard of excursions that the wide, empty Intourist office will organize from your Tbilisi hotel. You can still go to Metskhita, the ancient capital of Georgia, where within a stone-walled stockade you will see the thirteenth-century cathedral, a great block of green and ochre stone sculpted with vines, beasts, saints, zodiac signs and, reaching to measure the top of a high arch, the proud arm of the architect and his signature. You can still go to Borjomi, ‘world-famous mineral spa’. You can still see Georgian bread being baked, Georgian wine being made, Georgian folkdance being folkdanced. But what you cannot see, though the words can still be made out under the fresh snow of anonymity, is the birthplace of Joe Stalin.

Having held on to some renown here, if only as a local boy made good, Stalin no longer quite fits the mood since April 9, when the Red Army moved in on a peaceful demonstration with spades and ice axes to kill twenty people, most of them young women. Stalin, I was told, was not a real Georgian: he belonged to some mountain herd. The distinctions now are important. The massacre of April 9—‘our tragedy’, as everyone calls it—has inevitably stirred up something more than the natural devotion of a small nation to its literature, its music, its long history of fidelity as the easternmost stronghold of Orthodox Christianity, its even longer history of vassaldom to foreign empires.