FOR SOME IN GEORGIA, THERE WAS ONLY ONE REVOLUTION
A EurasiaNet Photo Essay by Aldo Castellani: 1/23/04

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The museum of typography in Tbilisi, in the eastern Avlabari district, looks like a shrine of Communist relics: portraits of Stalin and Lenin hang amid red Soviet flags. Some pictures fell off the walls in Tbilisi’s spring 2002 earthquake and are now rotting in the building’s basements. Visitors are not allowed, but the museum sometimes serves but sometimes it serves as headquarters for Georgians of a certain political bent. Members of the Georgian United Communist Party gather in one of the museum’s rooms and yearn for the coming of a man with a strong and decisive personality like Stalin’s. Panteleimon Giorgadze, the party’s leader, met EurasiaNet in the museum in December. His remarks make clear that Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s charismatic 36-year-old president-elect, is not the only popular hero in this desperately poor land.

Central heating in the museum, as in most parts of Tbilisi, has not been reliable since the Soviet era. Georgia’s chronic energy crisis [for background see the EurasiaNet Culture archive] has abated, at least in central Tbilisi, to allow electricity. Some suspect that the electricity stayed on only to smooth the way for the January 4 election that Saakashvili won in a landslide.

In the cold museum, Giorgadze wears the Red Army uniform of a retired general, under camouflage. From time to time, he answered his mobile phone to offer a caller directions to Gori, a town in the Kartli plane about 60 miles west from Tbilisi. On December 21 each year, Communists and other old-timers gather in that town to celebrate the birthday of Joseph Djugashvili, who became Stalin. To some participants in this annual ritual, the "man of steel" never died: "Stalin lives and will live" they repeat, stretching out their fist into the air. A statue of him still stands, like a giant plinth, in central Gori.

Many Georgians, tired of the corruption and intrigue that defines public life, express nostalgia [for background see the EurasiaNet Insight archive] for the dictator. Giorgadze instantly dismissed the idea that Saakashvili and his colleagues, by pressuring former President Eduard Shevardnadze to step aside in November, accomplished a revolution. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. "A real revolution –with or without bloodshed – must lead to a quick changing of the present situation, but there was no changing of the like in Georgia. Everything is going backwards, towards feudal times," he thundered.

To celebrate Stalin’s 124th birthday, about 150 people- mainly elderly men decorated with World War II medals– gathered in Gori. They wore pressed uniforms with stiff hats; many wore thick glasses. Some brought grandchildren with them. Some children wore red handkerchiefs around their necks instead of uniforms and medals from what Russians sometimes call "the great patriotic war."

Giorgadze had reason to be upset at the turn of events in post-Soviet Georgia. The Georgian Supreme Court denied the presidential candidacy of his son Igor in the 2003 elections, who had been Minister of Security until 1995 and then went into exile for allegedly conspiring to kill Shevardnadze. Since then, Igor has lived in Russia, from where he often shows off in the Russian media as an expert of security and international terrorism. According to the general, though, the residency requirement was a red herring: the court disallowed his candidacy because Igor would have been the only serious rival to Saakashvili. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].

Panteleimon Giorgadze lived a life very different from what Saakashvili, a US-educated lawyer, would recognize. He fought in the Second World War as a private, attended the military cavalry college in Almaty, and worked his way up the Red Army’s ranks. His objection to Saakashvili, though, comes across as ideological rather than personal. From behind his thick glasses, Giorgadze calls Georgia’s president an "aggressive, Russophobe ultranationalist". He adds: "Like a good communist used to say, we have to fight mercilessly against nationalists: they are the enemies of their people and they may destroy the Soviet Union. This said Comrade Stalin."

But he also implies that Saakashvili and his ally Zurab Zhvania are somehow too soft to be leaders: "Where do Zhvania and Saakashvili come from? They did not work in a factory; they did not plow nor plant."

So the only justification for Tbilisi’s current power structure, the general has concluded, is a series of high-level machinations. "It was a coup d’état organized by the Americans, who did not want Shevardnadze as a president but wished someone who could be a more serious opponent to Russia." [For background on American policy toward Georgia, see the Eurasia Insight archives].

As vociferous as the general was in conversation, he was silent on the occasion of Stalin’s birthday. He and the others in Gori walked quietly to the dictator’s statue, laid a flower wreath, and spoke to Georgian television reporters. They scattered so quickly that a Stalin impersonator, arriving late, found no audience but some rare cars.

Editor’s Note: Aldo Castellani, a photojournalist, has worked in Georgia since 1999.

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Posted January 23, 2004 © Eurasianet
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