Legacy on Display: The Museum of Soviet Occupation in Tbilisi
The monument in Liberty Square, where the statue of St George replaces the original one depicting Lenin. Photograph taken by the author.
Recently, in Tbilisi, I picked up a book of 70 testimonies from Georgian authors, reflecting upon the 70 years of Soviet Occupation of Georgia which stretched from 1921 until 1991. The very first page of the introduction emphatically and pithily summarises the attitude of most contemporary Georgians to this era, declaring that the four words forming the word Union of Soviet (which in Russian has the dual meaning of advice and counsel) Socialist Republic are all outright lies. The Soviet Union, it asserts, was rather an imperialist empire, which occupied its constituent ‘republics’ against the will of their people. In this vein of revising the triumphalist Soviet historical narrative, in 2006 a Museum of Soviet Occupation opened on the top floor of the Georgian National Museum in central Tbilisi.
The exhibit begins with the hopeful but short-lived establishment of Georgia as an independent state in 1918.The Bolsheviks agreed to respect its sovereignty in 1920, but nine months later their army marched into Tbilisi and planted the Soviet flag in the capital. Next came the systematic extermination of the Georgian kulaks (wealthier farmers), the aristocracy, and the clergy between 1921 and 1926, as well as the purges of the ‘intelligentsia’ during the thirties. The exhibit then moves on to cover resistance movements from the fifties through to the eighties, including the violent repression with tanks of with the now seminal peaceful protest of April 9, 1989 (a date now commemorated as the Georgian Day of National Unity). Like the occupation, the museum ends in 1991, with documents recording the independence referendum in which an unequivocal 98 percent of Georgians voted to secede from the Soviet Union and (re)establish a sovereign state.
The exhibit primarily serves as a memorial to the victims of the Soviet occupation. The scale of the Soviet regime’s brutality in Georgia was truly staggering, to the extent that in its aftermath Georgia’s population has still not returned to its pre-1921 level of four million. Between 1921 and 1941, 72,000 citizens were shot and 200,000 were deported; whilst from 1942 to 1952, more than 5,000 Georgians were shot and 190,000 deported. The museum’s efforts to put human faces to the tragedy thwarts Stalin’s (apocryphal) assertion that ‘the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic’. It draws heavily upon family photographs and personal snapshots, including, chillingly, of children who were later murdered. To take a section at random, in the snapshots memorialising intellectuals purged in the thirties, Sandro Akhmeteli, drama director, looks up smiling from his writing desk (shot 1937), Dimitri Shevananadze, artist and founder of the National Georgian Art Museum (shot 1937) sits on a park bench, his puppy rolling in the dust beside him, the very young and boyish symbolist poet Titsian Takidze (shot 1937) poses formally, dressed to the nines in a bow-tie and suit. The cumulative effect of these indexical traces of lives cut short is unbelievably powerful; personally, I had to step away from the displays several times to gather my emotions before I was able to continue bearing witness to these visual records of tragedy.
The museum is particularly effective at conveying the banality of evil which enabled the purges, visually juxtaposing dry bureaucracy with the horrendous violence which it enabled. A desk with a pen in its inkstand, a bust of Lenin, and a decree of execution orders waiting to be signed, stands opposite a wall of photos of the dead labelled with the dates of their executions. Elsewhere, rows of yellowed pages filled with type-written names of the executed are displayed under mug shots of the soon-to-be shot. The eyes of these men and women, old and young, all meet the camera’s gaze unflinchingly, seeming to assert defiantly that their humanity could never be reduced to a mere number or scribble on a list.
Tbilisi’s Museum of Soviet Occupation was the fourth of its kind to be opened, following Riga (1993), Kiev (2001) and Tallin (2003) (all of these museums also touch on Nazi occupation.) For both Ukraine and Georgia, however, occupation is a term that belongs to the present as much as to history. As I write, the windows of the Kyiv History Museum, in which the occupation museum is located, are covered with plywood and sandbags. Its foyer has been transformed into an exhibit of artefacts of the current Russian invasion, such as shrapnel hung from the ceiling. Meanwhile, since the 2008 war, around 20 percent of Georgian territory in the form of the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia remains occupied by Russian troops.
When we consider the Soviet Occupation of Georgia, we’d do well to bear in mind William Faulkner’s assertion that: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ While it’s reductive to totally equate Soviet Russia with Putin’s autocratic state, it’s little wonder that to many Georgians, Moscow’s expansionism in both Ukraine and Georgia recalls the Soviet Union’s disregard for the sovereignty of these states. All around Tbilisi, on car bumpers, laptops, shop windows, and even skateboards are stickers which proclaim: ‘Never back to the USSR’. They may assert that the future of Georgia will never be history, but their popularity reveals the extent to which, at least for right now, this remains in the balance.