8
Timothy K. Blauvelt
In a turn of events that shocked Georgian society in the spring of 1977, several of the most prominent Georgian dissidents were arrested in Tbilisi. Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the son of the renowned Georgian writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, and the musicologist Merab Kostava were both co-founders of the Georgian Helsinki Group. The Georgian KGB held the dissidents for more than a year, producing a criminal case file that reached 58 volumes, and tried and convicted them the summer of 1978. Gamsakhurdia agreed to a public repentance and received a mild sentence of two years’ exile in neighbouring Dagestan. He was allowed to return after one year, while Kostava was exiled to Siberia for multiple terms. Although not a public show trial, the two men were well connected in the upper echelons of the Georgian party and intellectual elite, and the details of the case were widely known in Georgian society and beyond. Gamsakhurdia’s repentance was recorded and broadcast on state television. Although Gamsakhurdia sacrificed a significant degree of political capital and personal credibility because of his atonement, the arrests and trial were a shocking event and gave a kind of renewed credibility to a radical Georgian nationalist discourse, both in Georgia and beyond, and strained the relationship between the Party and Georgian society. Using archival sources, memoirs, and interviews, this chapter will attempt to examine the context of the period in order to try to understand why the regime decided to break the previously existing status quo in its relationship with the more non-conformist wing of the Georgian intelligentsia through this crackdown at that particular time.
Local ethnic cadres and the monopoly on mobilizational resources
In an innovative article published in 1991, just as tensions in the national republics were mortally shaking the foundations of the USSR’s federal structure, the political scientist Philip Roeder proposed an institutional framework for understanding both the construction and the consequences of Soviet ‘nationality policy’ and the mutually beneficial relationships that emerged between the central leadership in Moscow and the local elites in the national republics (Roeder, 1991, pp. 196–233). By assigning to the local ethnic elites in each of the ethno-federal territories a monopoly over ‘mobilizational resources’, the policy was a strategy to harness political nationalism and ethnic grievance to the goals of the regime. Local elites, or ‘cadres’, were given control over local political appointments and also over the institutions responsible for codifying ethnic identity, such as the local language press, media, publishing houses and schools, higher educational institutions, research institutes, artistic ensembles, and also the means to mobilize the population, such as public spaces, halls, theatres, loudspeakers, and banner and poster printing. The point of giving such control to the local cadres was to prevent alternate ethnic elites from emerging who might challenge regime-approved national and political narratives with unsanctioned and potentially threatening ones and from being able to articulate them through independent ethnic protest. The official institutions of the State and Party were the only arenas for professional, artistic, and intellectual activity (in order to be employed as a writer, for example, one had to be a member of the official Union of Writers, otherwise one could be accused, as was Josef Brodsky, of ‘parasitism’). Independent associations to pursue such activities were banned, forced underground, and deprived of the resources to communicate the outcome of their efforts with the population.
In practice this policy made such local cadres into a kind of gate keepers, with control over access to elite status in official structures and to the intelligentsia, which they could then use to create powerful ethnic ‘machines’ at the local level but ones that are beholden to the centre and that had a strong incentive to maintain the status quo and ‘resist the articulation of agendas that might be subversive of the existing federal institutions’. By the late Soviet period, the regime became the victim of the success of its own policy: these local ethnic machines became so entrenched and adept at articulating the criteria of ethnic membership that they became difficult to remove or replace, as no viable ethnic alternative elites remained, and were also able to use the mobilizational resources allocated to them by the State and Party to make their own demands on the centre. This is arguably an important factor in explaining the public demonstrations that took place in Georgia in protest against the proposed change to the article about language status in the republic’s new draft constitution, and it was becoming a regular occurrence in ethnopolitics by the late Perestroika period when Roeder was writing.
What was more, the policy allowed for the successful development of an elite class from the indigenous professional political and intelligentsia: ‘the very success of affirmative action policies created a large group with the skills to constitute themselves as independent political entrepreneurs’, at the same time that the regime’s capacity to meet the demands for mobility opportunities for up-and-coming young elites was diminishing. Under conditions of the period of ‘stagnation’, or ‘zastoi’, time servers continued in their positions indefinitely into late old age, and reductions in budgetary allocations from the centre made it difficult to maintain the existing rewards system and to create new professional opportunities for new aspirants.
Local elites, local nationalism, and the local status quo
In the Soviet periphery, especially from the period following the death of Stalin and the de-Stalinization of the mid-1950s, the national intelligentsias made use of official Party and State institutions, such as Writers’ Unions, institutes of ethnography, history, literature, linguistics, and archaeology, to formulate officially-approved national narratives, ones that at times may have pushed the limits of tolerance of their own ethnic leaders. In his article, Roeder argued that the ‘monopoly on mobilizational resources’ aspect of Soviet nationality policy was intended to block the emergence and dissemination of primordial conceptions of ethnic identity. Much of the literature in the years since Roeder’s article, however, such as seminal works by Victor Shnirelman (2001) and Terry Martin (2001), have pointed out that for a number of reasons, the official Soviet concept of ethnic identity inevitably became intrinsically primordial. Such primordial assumptions permeated the regime-endorsed national discourses with a particular focus on ethnogenesis and autochthony. It is a particular paradox of this history that during the second half of the Soviet period, some titular intelligentsias resumed the nation-building projects where their predecessors left off during the ‘age of nationalism’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, working inside the official institutions, created and paid for by the Soviet State and Communist Party.
Yet, while the official nationalist discourses could be surprisingly primordial among the titular nationalities, especially when enunciated in their local languages, there were some limits and topics that were out of bounds, such as overt criticism of Russification, corruption in the Party and top levels of government, the repression of religious organizations or corruption within them, neglect or abuse of national monuments, contamination of the local environment, or hostility towards smaller ethnic minorities within their territories. In practice, the more irreconcilable ‘dissident’ intellectuals often came from the same social strata as the regime-invested intelligentsia and nomenklatura and were closely connected through various overlapping social ties. The line between those ‘outside’ and those ‘inside’ could sometimes be surprisingly permeable. The ‘inside’ elites were often the primary consumers of the underground literature produced or distrusted by the ‘outsiders’, and sometimes assisted in their production through various means.
The top leadership in the ethnic territories had to maintain a constant balancing act between the aspirations and appetites of their own constituencies and the patience and tolerance of the central leadership in Moscow. Although a risky strategy, at certain points it was in the local leaders’ interests to engage the radical outsiders in a common front (this was visible in the united front movements in the Baltic republics and in Armenia in the late Perestroika period). Even during the more stable and bountiful era of the 1970s, the local leadership usually tried to maintain a status quo within their nomenklatura and intelligentsia constituencies. Even if the more radical voices represented an abstract threat to the governing consensus, over the span of the ‘zastoi’ period it was rare for the local leadership to ‘rock the boat’ by actively cracking down on them.
The setting: Georgian dissidence up to 1977
One of the paradoxes of the dissident Georgian national independence movement is that it found inspiration in the bloody events of March 1956, when the Soviet Army opened fire on crowds of mostly young people protesting against the newly-declared policy of de-Stalinization. In these first mass public demonstrations in the USSR for decades, many Georgians saw the official criticism of Stalin as an inherent denigration of Georgia as well, and they took to the streets. Many of the future Georgian radical dissidents, including Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Merab Kostava, then high school students, were among the young protesters; the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown became an impetus for their activization against the Soviet regime.
The two claimed to have begun their path to ‘thinking differently’ years before, at the age of fourteen, forming an underground nationalist group called ‘Gorgisaliani’. In December 1956, nine months after the March events, a criminal case was brought by the KGB against Gamsakhurdia, Kostava, and five other schoolmates for distributing anti-Soviet proclamations calling for a free and independent Georgia. As Gamsakhurdia later wrote in his memoirs, the KGB had been on to the group long beforehand ‘and knew our every step, but they were hesitant to arrest us, taking into consideration the authority of my father as a writer and public figure and the love of the people toward him, and also the possible reaction of Georgian society’. The KGB staged a provocation against them in December 1956, Gamsakhurdia wrote, using ‘unofficial, secret methods’, when soldiers from the 8th KGB division in street clothes drew them into a fight, seriously injuring one of the group members. (Gamsakhurdia, 1996, pp. 18–19). All of the seven arrested were eleventh graders in prominent Tbilisi schools and living at prestigious addresses. Three of them were members of the Komsomol.
According to Gamsakhurdia’s account (1996, p. 20), the regime showed leniency because angry crowds surrounded the editorial office of the official Party newspaper Komunisti (Communists), because the recent publication of Konstantine Gamsakhurdia’s novel The Right Hand of the Great Master in France drew attention to Zviad’s father and his faltering health, and because of the intervention of several important Georgian writers who pressed the Georgian First Secretary Vasil Mzhavanadze ‘to request from N. Khrushchev that we be released’. In reporting to Khrushchev, Mzhavanadze ‘not wishing to again complicate things in Georgia during the period of the “thaw”, uttered “it’s bad enough that we should be afraid of children” and gave the order that we be freed’. The Georgian Supreme Court in April 1957 issued 3–5 year suspended sentences and released them, even though ‘our liberation caused an extremely negative reaction among Soviet military officers and the KGB’ (1996, p. 20).
The following year, Gamsakhurdia, Kostava, and Temur Metreveli, now university students, were again arrested for resisting arrest following another ‘provocation’, this time a fight with police officers on Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi. After being held in a pre-detention cell together with hardened criminals, Gamsakhurdia was sent to a psychological institution for several months, while Kostava and Metreveli were sent to the Ortachala Prison. Zviad wrote that his father threatened the Chairman of the Georgian Council of Ministers that he would commit suicide in a central square if the ‘persecution of his family did not end’, and the prisoners were released.
Perceiving inescapable surveillance and harassment from the regime, Gamsakhurdia and Kostava abandoned their anti-regime activities for the next fifteen years, concentrating on their families, education, and careers. Gamsakhurdia graduated from Tbilisi State University and pursued a career as a scholar of Western European literature, becoming a fellow of the Georgian Writer’s Union, and of the Institute of Literature of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. Kostava graduated from the Tbilisi Conservatory and became a teacher at Specialized Music School No.2, the Balanchivadze 3rd Musical School, and Music School No. 58 in Tbilisi, and the editor of a journal on Georgian language and literature in schools.
In the period of détente in the early 1970s, the two renewed their involvement in dissident activities. In 1974 they founded the Georgian Initiative Group for the Defence of Human Rights, and began cooperating with the community of human rights activists in Moscow and with Amnesty International. They published exposes in the samizdat (underground publishing) journal Khronika tekushchikh sobytii (Chronical of Current Events) about issues such as corruption and embezzlement in the Georgian Orthodox Church; the use of violence against political detainees in the prison system; the degradation of national cultural monuments, especially the monastery complex at Davit Gareji, which the Soviet Army was using as an artillery range; and the plight of the Meskhetian Turks, a Turkish speaking minority deported from south western Georgia to Central Asia in November 1944. In January 1977, following the signing by the Soviet Union of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, they founded the Georgian Helsinki Group, on the model of the Moscow Helsinki Group.
The publication in Georgia of samizdat journals such as sakartvelos moambe (The Georgian Herald) and okros satsmisi (The Golden Fleece), a series of appeals about the number of issues directed to the Georgian Central Committee throughout 1976, and Gamsakhurdia’s activities in Moscow and Leningrad, where he travelled on a regular basis (Kostava, with much more limited resources, apparently travelled less frequently), were a particular challenge to the authorities. In addition to interacting with leading Moscow-based dissidents, transporting samizdat materials back to Georgia, and communicating with US Embassy officials, Gamsakhurdia was also involved in printing large quantities of high-quality reproductions of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and other banned literature that was distributed in Georgia and also transported to Moscow for distribution there and elsewhere in the USSR.
The decision to arrest and try Gamsakhurdia, Kostava, and several other dissidents in Georgia in 1977 and 1978 seems to have had several immediate and longer-term causes. The following sections will examine the possible motivations of the local authorities in Georgia, the central authorities in Moscow, and of the dissidents themselves in an attempt to disentangle the relative significance of the different possible explanations.
A hierarchy of causality
Both Gamsakhurdia and Kostava were complex personalities. Their very decision to become involved in visible activities to criticize and ultimately undermine the powerful and repressive Soviet regime set them apart from the vast majority of the population. Kostava had a particular interest in the ‘anthroposophy’ philosophy of Rudolf Steiner that centred on the study of the spiritual world beyond sensory perception. In his later writings and speeches Gamsakhurdia also veered toward the mystical, most notably in his conception of the ‘spiritual mission of Georgia’. A number of Gamsukhurdia’s acquaintances commented on his tendency towards conspiracy theories and paranoia. In his memoirs, the Russian dissident Andrei Amal’rik (1982, p. 344) wrote that ‘something in [Gamsakhurdia] pushed us away, the constant persecution left on him a trace of gloominess and hysteria, he imagined everywhere provocations and KGB agents, which took on a truly pathological character – although they really did arrange provocations against him’. Perhaps even more so than other dissident leaders, he was known for his Manichean outlook, and viewing both the world and the people around him in terms of black or white, good or evil, friend or foe.
Such traits are perhaps characteristic of the underground milieu more generally. As Amal’rik pointed out, the secret police regularly staged provocations and attempted to penetrate dissident groups with recruited informants. Anti-authority groups have a propensity towards an ‘enclavist’ political culture: because of antipathy towards unequal power relationships and institutionalized decision-making institutions, in-group disagreements hold a constant threat of splitting, which in turn can often paradoxically result in a kind of authoritarianism by a charismatic leader who is seen (or sees him/herself) as the interpreter of the collective will in order to maintain unity (of group and of purpose) against the backdrop of a real or imagined threat (see Blauvelt, 2001, pp. 6–7).
While such psychological (and group psychology) factors may be a general inclination among underground dissident groups, such characteristics seemed particularly noticeable in Gamsakhurdia and some of his close associates. They seemed to have played a role in his disastrous presidency from 1990 to 1992, particularly in his inability to maintain coalitions and the rapid breakdown of relations with even close allies. The experience of slights and provocations from the regime seems to have been a decisive factor in pushing him to become more radical in his actions after the death of his father in 1975. He seems to have found the refusal of the authorities to cooperate in restoring his father’s house museum particularly irksome.1 This was detailed in the first of the series of statements that he addressed to the Georgian Central Committee in 1976.2 The Georgian KGB apparently held a series of meetings about Gamsakhurdia’s situation and recent actions, together with representatives of the Georgian Union of Writers.3
The local authorities in Georgia during the early 1970s seemed well aware of dissident activities but were disinclined to take action against them at that time. Gamsakhurdia noted in his memoir that for the first five years of his renewed activeness in Tbilisi the KGB did nothing to interfere. The KGB summoned him only once, in 1974, and Kostava was detained for one day in 1974, when the KGB conducted a search of the room of the visiting Moscow mathematician Yuri Gastev in the Hotel Sakartvelo in Tbilisi (Gamsakhurdia, 1996, p. 50). The indictment decree filed on the day of Gamsakhurdia’s and Kostava’s arrest in May 1977 dated the beginning of the suspects’ criminal activities (‘the production, reproduction and distribution of materials containing slander towards the Soviet governmental and societal order’) only from 1975.4
The Georgian party and government leadership during this period was itself in the throes of monumental internal conflict and change. From 1972–1974 Interior Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, with the backing of the powerful KGB chief Yuri Andropov, led a campaign to remove and replace the previous Georgian First Secretary, Vasily Mzhavanadze, and his entire entourage through an investigatory campaign to expose massive corruption. The history of this internal ‘war of clans’ for power in Soviet Georgia remains an understudied phenomenon. It was accompanied thousands of arrests and incidents of bombings, arson, and perhaps even political assassination. Despite Shevardnadze’s victory in the power struggle, Aleksi Inauri, a close associate of CPSU First Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, and who played a key role in the removal of Khrushchev in 1964, remained in place as head of the Georgian KGB, considered by observers to be a counterweight in Georgia against Shevardnadze.5 By the conclusion of these events in 1974, in any case, Shevardnadze and his clients were eager to consolidate their support among the Georgian nomenklatura and intelligentsia elites.
In a letter to the newspaper Tskhovreba (later republished in his memoir), Gamsakhurdia describes how Shevardnadze paid a visit to his father Konstantine’s household in January 1974, telling the younger Gamsakhurdia that ‘we would do things in Georgia in a way that [your] father would think proper’. Zviad recalled welcoming Shevardnadze and the changes he promised to bring, and even proposed a toast in his honour: ‘We place our hopes with you, Batono Eduard, with your appointment we trust that the once abandoned Georgia will find salvation’ (Gamsakhurdia, 1996, pp. 36–37). The very next day, Gamsakhurdia wrote, to his great surprise he was summoned to the KGB for an interrogation about his links with the dissident movement in Moscow and threatened with arrest. He assumed at the time that the KGB was acting independently of Shevardnadze, although as time went by Shevardnadze ‘intensified the campaign against our movement’, and in Gamsakhurdia’s opinion, abandoned support for Georgian interests in favour of imperatives from Moscow (Gamsakhurdia, 1996, p. 37). Shevardnadze apparently made similar visits to other intellectual notables in his first years in power, including the writer Nodar Dumbadze. Even if Gamsakhurdia only imagined this immediate personal animosity from Shevardnadze from early on, there do not seem to have been further overtures from Shevardnadze’s side to develop a continuing positive relationship.6
In Gamsakhurdia’s own telling, because of the status and failing health of his father, the local KGB ‘procrastinated, they studied our connections and resorted only to covert repressive measures, but they did not touch me officially’. Even when they were able to unmask one of the printers working in the ‘Znaniye’ (Knowledge) Society and the state Statistical Administration who was illegally producing materials for the dissidents, the KGB was content to gather evidence instead of taking action: ‘With him they were also cautious, they did not bring him up on charges, even though they knew what materials he was reproducing (and reproducing such materials in any other republic would have resulted in immediate arrest)’ (Gamsakhurdia, 1996, p. 51).
Internal Party documents highlighted fears about the extent of support for the dissidents and their ideas in important layers of Georgian society. A memorandum from the Georgian Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Department to the Georgian Central Committee from around the time of the court’s decision in 1978 expressed concern at the extent of support for ‘dissidents’ (always indicated in quotation marks in the report) ‘among representatives of the creative and scientific intelligentsia and the student youth’.7 It also expressed surprise that illegal materials had been replicated using the resources of a number of official institutions, including the Scientific Research Institute of Economics and Economic Planning of the Georgian SSR Gosplan, the Tbilisi Mathematics School, and the ‘Znaniye’ society, despite the oversight of the administration and Party organizations of these institutions, and consternation that ‘certain members of the Union of Writers of Georgia displayed political near-sightedness and immaturity in taking the path of defending Z. Gamsakhurdia and M. Kostava’.8 All of this had been allowed to happen, the authors of the memorandum argued, because ‘the opinion had taken hold that the vociferous invectives of the “dissidents” against the Soviet way of life and Socialist construction as a whole could not interest wider layers of the population because of their falseness, lack of substantiation, etc’. This assumption, however, ignored human psychology, as ‘people are always interested in what their friends say, as they are in the reaction of enemies, especially when such people still live in our society (and some of them have famous names)’. The ‘dissidents’ were able to weave together falsehoods with elements of reality that they took from ‘critical assessments given at Party plenums, conferences, aktiv meetings, and speeches of the leaders of the republic’ and use these to their own advantage.9 In other words, they had access to elite-level information, and were able to manipulate and disseminate it. This was further enabled by the ‘passive position of certain Party, Komsomol and societal organizations’ that lacked vigilance, oversight, and made poor use of their working time.10 Special attention was to be paid to the situation in the writers’, artists’, composers’ and cinematographers’ unions.
In his speech to the 11th Plenum of the Georgian Party Central Committee on 27 June 1978, soon after the closing of the Gamsakurdia and Kostava case, Georgian First Secretary Shevardnadze expressed ‘pretentions’ towards historians, publicists, journalists, and propagandists, ‘in a word, all of those who could have and should have planned for the maximum counter-propaganda effect from this court case’. The propaganda effort should have emphasized that it was ‘bourgeois propaganda that does not hesitate to use espionage, blackmail and bribery for its dark purposes’, Shevardnadze complained, ‘while in our newspapers they couldn’t even to describe those conditions that so eloquently characterize the methods of the enemy and under which the so-called Georgian “dissidents” sold out to that enemy’. The official press had been derelict in failing to emphasize that ‘in most cases those acting under the “flag” of dissidence are people with swollen ambitions, embittered and ego-centred self-opinions, and overcome with chauvinism and extreme nationalism’. Like the Agitation and Propaganda report, Shevardnadze was concerned in particular that the dissidents and those supporting them came from the Georgian intelligentsia, ‘workers of the cultural, the so-called ideological front’. Such people, ‘whose professional and civic responsibility was the consolidation of our ideals of the Communist spirit, of citizenship and internationalism’ had acted ‘openly, almost in view of their colleagues, the heads of institutions and official organizations’, and nobody stopped or reported them. Worse – members of the Georgian Union of Writers had been reluctant to criticize or condemn the dissidents for fear of being seen as ‘bad patriots’ by their peers, and instead ‘behaved like ostriches’.11
Based on Gamsakhurdia’s memoir, it seems likely that the real trouble for the regime was caused not by the Georgian dissidents’ activities within Georgia but rather by their mass production and distribution of contraband literature in Moscow. Gamsakhurdia was detained at Domodedovo Airport while returning from Moscow to Tbilisi in May 1975. In order to ‘divert attention’, in Gamsakhurdia’s view, things were arranged such that a case was brought not by the Georgian KGB but by the Lithuanian KGB. Gamsakhurdia, Kostava, and others were summoned later that month to an interrogation in Tbilisi led by a Lithuanian KGB investigator named Maslauskas. Even then, in Gamsakhurdia’s telling, the local Georgian officials were reluctant to cooperate:
Later on, certain acquaintances of mine in the republican prosecutor’s office told me the following: Maslauskas went to the Tbilisi City Prosecutor and requested permission for a search of my apartment. The prosecutor answered that he could not decide such a serious question himself, and sent Maslauskas to the republican prosecutor, E. Takidze. Then [the Tbilisi prosecutor] quickly got in his car and got to Takidze before Maslauskas could in order to warn him. Takidze received Maslauskas and told him that such an action could have very serious consequences since [Konstantine Gamsakhurdia] was very sick and a search of his home could attract the attention of all of Georgia and of the international community, and might lead to serious unpleasantness. Thus, here Maslauskas received a refusal.
(Gamsakhurdia, 1996, p. 52).
In other words, officials of the Georgian state directly intervened to prevent a case from being brought forward.
Konstanine Gamsakhurdia died several months later, in July 1975, and although the persecution of Zviad Gamsakhurdia intensified after that (he was removed from his teaching position at Tbilisi State University), he was still able to travel to Moscow. There, in June 1976, he was detained again after receiving materials at the Hotel Ukraina from an American Embassy official, and accused of pinching a woman on the Metro. This accusation was broadcast internationally by TASS (the Soviet Telegraph Agency), and a KGB official allegedly offered Gamsakhurdia the opportunity to emigrate, which he turned down. He was released with a warning to cease his dissident activities (Gamsakhurdia, 1996, p. 55).
In late 1976 and early 1977, several hundred copies of two editions of the samizdat journal sakartvelos moambe were distributed. These described the state of fulfilment of the conditions of the Helsinki Agreement, included information about the activities of the KGB and the persecution of dissent in Georgia. They also ‘unmasked’ several KGB informants among the Georgian ‘red’ intelligentsia, calling them out by name. Several articles appeared in the local official press denouncing Gamsakhurdia as a traitor, agent of imperialism, and a madman. This appears to have been a signal that the regime had decided to act. At a hearing of the Georgian Academy of Writers on 1 April 1977, Gamsakhurdia was excluded from the organization by a unanimous vote.12 Several days later, on 5 April, Gamsakhurdia and his colleague Irakli Kenchoshvili were denounced for anti-Soviet activities and propaganda by an expanded session of the Scientific Council of their place of work, the Shota Rustaveli Institute of Georgian Literature. Two days after that, on 7 April, Gamsakhurdia and Kostava were arrested in preparation for the 1978 trial.
Consequences and conclusions
Most likely the main driving factor in this case were the decisions taken at the central level in Moscow, either in the KGB or in the Party leadership. Documentary evidence of the decision-making process at this level remain unfortunately beyond the bounds of accessibility of the present study. Although the criminal case file in the Georgian KGB archive ultimately reached 61 volumes, it contains precious little correspondence between the republican and central levels or any sort of internal discussion. The arrests and trial in Georgia were not an isolated incident, and may simply have been part of the larger campaign against dissidents. There were several high-profile trials against visible dissidents in 1978, such as those of Natan Shcharansky and Aleksandr Ginzburg. Some observers at the time viewed a larger strategy in prosecuting such cases in specific places, and speculated that this bore a symbolic element of putting the Georgian SSR in its place, perhaps as a means of signalling impatience with the prevalence of overt primordial nationalist discourse of both the dissident and the official intelligentsia in the republic.13 Indeed, it may also have been a means for the centre to ‘push back’ on the power of the local ethnic machine that Soviet nationality policy itself had enabled, demonstrating that there were limits to what could be tolerated.
It does seem likely that it was the activities of the Georgian dissidents outside of the Georgian SSR, especially producing distributing illegal literature in large quantities for export to Moscow and the other Soviet republics, that attracted the attention of the central KGB and Party leadership and in turn provided the impetus for the Georgian authorities to take action. Although Gamsakhurdia and his associates may have presented a constant nuisance to the local leadership in Georgia and their actions in 1975–1977 upped the ante, it seems unlikely that the decision for their arrest and trial was primarily a locally taken one. Neither the Georgian Party leadership nor the KGB, although keeping a careful eye on dissidents and their activities on their turf and perhaps concerned by the degree of sympathy for their ideas among the intelligentsia and other layers of Georgian society, do not seem to have viewed them as a critical or existential threat. They generally seemed to drag their feet on the issue, content to use subtle provocations and innuendo to encourage paranoia and distrust among the dissident circles, rather than taking direct action that might destabilize the status quo. The leniency of Gamsakhurdia’s sentence after the trial and his public repentance are perhaps further indicators of the local authorities’ preference for subtlety. Ultimately, Gamsakhurdia’s behaviour and poor decisions in this case, both discredited himself and undermined the moral authority of the movement, and ultimately helped the KGB to accomplish its goals more effectively than any heavy-handed crackdown might have.
Yet, as the anonymous authors of the letter ‘From the Georgian Intelligentsia’ addressed to the CPSU Central Committee and USSR Prosecutor argued, some of the topics brought up by Gamsakhurdia in the Georgian samizdat publications in 1975 and 1976 may have threatened to undermine the position of the Shevardnadze leadership, especially in the eyes of the central leadership in Moscow. This was especially the case with Gamsakhurdia’s revelations of the use of violent convicts to torture and extort information from arrestees in Georgian prisons, including many of those arrested in the ‘struggle with negative tendencies’ campaign that brought Shevardnadze to power, and also reports about cases targeting particular political enemies of Shevardnadze and his protection of certain allies.14
Although one can only speculate, it is possible that the crackdown on the dissidents played a role in the willingness for Shevardnadze and the Georgian Party leadership to play the role of intermediary (if not of direct initiator) during the April 1978 demonstrations against the plan to amend the official language statute in the new draft constitution (apparently, there were also appeals in the crowd for the release of Gamsakhurdia and Kostava). Shevardnadze was able to bolster his authority within the republic by compelling Moscow to abandon the proposed amendment (See Pogue-Kaiser, 2015). Similarly, the Shevardnadze leadership may have viewed the conclusion of the trial, the harsh sentence for Kostava, and the public humiliation of Gamsakhurdia in the summer of 1978, just a few months after the April 1978 demonstrations about the language statute issue, as a concession to Moscow, or a reassurance to Moscow that there were limits to their tolerance for nationalistic expressions. One might speculate further that the arrests and trial played a role in obstructing the emergence of a ‘common front’ ten years later, during the later Perestroika period, between the intelligentsia and the nomenklatura elite in Georgia along the lines of what took place in the Baltic republics. There were clearly a number of reasons that such a common front did not emerge in Georgia, such as the lack of credible leadership among the party elite, especially following the 9 April 1989 massacre in Tbilisi, and also the differences in the political culture in the Baltics resulting from a much more recent history of incorporation into the USSR and imposition of Soviet rule. Yet, it is conceivable that the Gamsakhurdia and Kostava affair contributed to the distrust felt among the radical dissidents who began to fill the power vacuum that emerged after the April 1989 events and left by the regime-invested intelligentsia and the Party nomenklatura elites. The trial and its outcome probably did contribute to the instability of Gamsakhurdia’s position when he rose to the position of president from 1990. Although the unreserved championing by Merab Kostava helped to resurrect Gamsakhurdia’s political reputation following his public confession and light sentencing, doubts about his character remained among large sections of the Georgian intelligentsia, and such concerns may also have exacerbated his tendencies towards aloofness and paranoia.
Though it is impossible at this point, with the available documentary sources, to evaluate the decision-making processes that went on within the KGB in the late 1970s, it does seem clear that their priorities may have sometimes put them at odds with the local Party and government leadership in the periphery, complicating the balance that the local political networks had worked out with their main local constituents. Ultimately, the existence of the dissident movement was useful for the KGB, as it needed to demonstrate its own necessity and to create work for itself. Whatever the actual role of the KGB in fermenting or provoking dissent in the USSR, in the end the perfidy of KGB surveillance and harassment clearly had the result of corroding the political culture among Soviet citizens for the entire generation, imbuing it with constant suspicion, paranoia, innuendo, and resentment.
Notes
1 Gamsakhurdia’s close associate Irakli Kenchoshvili said that ‘this was a particular and subjective moment, he took personal offense that the house museum was not restored’. Interview by Timothy Blauvelt with Irakli Kenchoshvili in Tbilisi, November 2017.
2 Georgian KGB Archive, formally referred to as Section I of the Archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia, hereafter SHSS arkivi (I), fond 4, opis 51, delo 541, list 2–3. The political scientist Giorgi Tarkhan-Mouravi pointed out that such ‘appeals to power’, in the context of the time, might be considered a form of subservience. Interview by Timothy Blauvelt with Giorgi Tarkhan-Mouravi in Tbilisi, November 2017.
3 SHSS arkivi (I), f. 4, op. 51, d. 541, l. 1.
4 SHSS arkivi (I), f. 6, d. 7726 (29218–58), v. 58, l. 15.
5 Interview with Giorgi Tarkhan-Mouravi in Tbilisi, November 2017.
6 Gamsakhurdia’s close colleague Irakli Kenchoshvili suggested that Shevardnadze may have sensed in this meeting that the Gamsakhurdia family was not likely to be cooperative or ‘willing to be bought off’. Interview in Tbilisi, November 2017.
7 Georgian Party Archive, formally referred to as Section II of the Archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia, hereafter SHSS arkivi (II), f. 14, op. 117, d. 535, l. 28.
8 SHSS arkivi (II), f. 14, op. 117, d. 535, l. 28.
9 SHSS arkivi (II), f. 14, op. 117, d. 535, l. 28–29.
10 SHSS arkivi (II), f. 14, op. 117, d. 535, l. 30.
11 SHSS arkivi (II), f. 14, op. 115, d. 18, l. 45–48.
12 The pretext for most members seems to have been the publication of an article about Giorgi Maglakelidze.
13 Interview with Giorgi Tarkhan-Mouravi in Tbilisi, November 2017.
14 SHSS arkivi (I), f. 6. d. 7726, t. 61, l. 151–154.
References
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