Georgia: Luxury Hotel Goes Up on Stalin-Era Secret Prison Site

Secret prison cells from the Stalin era have been discovered on a Tbilisi construction site for a $90-million luxury hotel for the international Kempinski Hotel chain. The cells, located in the city's former Institute of Marxism and Leninism, are believed to be the first of their kind to be found in Georgia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Construction workers stumbled upon the cells in September when they were demolishing the Institute's basement for construction of the Kempinski Hotel on the site, said site security manager Davit Kvikvelidze.

Made up of several cage-like structures inserted into the walls of an underground area located beneath the basement, the cells were not visible on the building's blueprints and did not come to light during an earlier inspection of the building, said a representative of the hotel developers, the United Arab Emirates-based Abu Dhabi Group.

Workers also came upon another unsavory discovery -- cemetery gravestones used to build the Institute's interior walls and columns. The gravestones are believed to come from three Tbilisi cemeteries destroyed during the 1920s and 1930s.

Giorgi Seturidze, the chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi Group in Georgia, called the discovery "a shock." The Geneva-based Kempinski Hotel chain, which will manage the 240-room facility when it is completed in 2012, would not comment on the discovery.

Work on the Institute, a branch of Moscow's Institute of Marxism and Leninism, began in 1934, and was reputedly a pet project for Lavrenti Beria, who at the time served as first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Regional Committee of the Transcaucasus, as well as head of the Communist Party of Georgia and of the Party's Tbilisi City Council. He later went on to head the vast Soviet secret police apparatus.

Beria was said to come to the Institute's construction site every day, noted Dr. Timothy Blauvelt, a political scientist who teaches a course on Soviet history at Tbilisi State University. The project was part of a "massive construction" boom that took place in Tbilisi during the 1930s, he said.

"Beria was trying very much to show Stalin what he was capable of," Blauvelt said.

The Institute, a combination museum and Communist Party archive, opened in 1938, the year Beria left Tbilisi for Moscow to act as deputy head of the NKVD, or the state security apparatus.

The specific purpose of the building's cells remains unclear. Former Institute archivists, who worked in its basement, claim that they never knew or saw anything that indicated the building contained jail cells.

The Institute's construction, however, coincided with a need for greater prison space in Georgia.

A secret 1937 telegram from Beria to Stalin, published in the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs' October 2008 Archival Bulletin, addresses "abnormalities" in overcrowded Georgian prisons. From October 1936 to October 1937, the NKVD arrested "more than 12,000" people in Georgia; Tbilisi contained "more than 2,000" prisoners, Beria stated.

The number of prisoners who could have been held in the Institute's cells is not known, however. Abu Dhabi Group employees would only state that "several" or "a lot of" cells have been found.

A EurasiaNet reporter who visited the subterranean site could only see a series of small pits, large enough for one person, located behind caging in the walls. The area contains no windows, light or ventilation. Larger cells with iron doors and locks have been found, but are not accessible, said site security manager Kvikvelidze.

The identity of those held in the cells is similarly not known. Most of the Georgians arrested during Beria's tenure in the 1930s "were political prisoners, and from the elite," said Blauvelt. "Either from the intelligentsia, from the party, even from previous generations of the secret police that had lost out to the power struggle with Beria's network."

Although secret prison cells from the era have been found in Russia, none have previously been discovered in Georgia, he added.

How long the Institute's prison cells were used is not known. The Institute closed in 1991, after Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union. It later housed the Georgian parliament and the Central Election Commission, before President Mikheil Saakashvili's government privatized the structure in 2006.

Despite the historic find, the building, the work of Lenin Masoleum architect Alexei Shchusev, is now slated for demolition.

The city-block-length Institute was constructed using a "light concrete" that makes it unstable, said Abu Dhabi Group Georgia CEO Seturidze. Over 68,000 square meters of hotel rooms, apartments, conference rooms, and spa and shopping areas will now be included on the site as part of the new Kempinski Hotel.

The hotel, however, is expected to retain the original building's architectural "footprint," Seturidze said. Its columned façade features socialist-realist friezes depicting scenes from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and four portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. A final design decision, though, has not been made.

The Abu Dhabi Group is considering including a "corner" exhibition about the Institute's history and the prison cells on the hotel's first floor, but no plans exist to preserve the cells themselves, Seturidze said.

"[I]n our country, we have lots of things from that time," he added. "This is just one more hidden prison."