A Monument to the Terror

Visiting Georgia's Museum of the Soviet Occupation is like watching a perfectly staged, cathartic tragedy.

By Melik Kaylan
Tuesday, September 4, 2007 12:01 a.m.

TBILISI, Georgia--Upon entry, the museum feels more like a mausoleum, which is as it should be. You walk into a large, bunker-like space, dark but strangely welcoming, oddly calming. With the sad intimacy of a voyeur peering from darkness to washes of light, you peer at the wall-mounted exhibits. Searing bouquets of memory, they seem to rise at you. After all, the Museum of the Soviet Occupation here is a kind of mausoleum, one that chronicles the merciless quashing of a national destiny for over 80 years--that of Georgia by Moscow under the Soviet system and beyond, from 1919 to the Rose Revolution in late 2003. It may sound like a grim prospect, but the experience of touring the single space for an hour is a humanizing and stirring one, never depressing, rather as if one had just watched a perfectly staged, cathartic tragedy. And it ends in a resurrection of hope with scenes from the Rose Revolution's democratic triumph.

You tour the cavernous oblong clockwise, returning to the entrance. Looking from there, two near exhibits cut across your line of sight, the first and last, leaving a narrow middle view to the far end, where you can discern a menacingly lit table with a clunky old telephone just visible on it. This, you realize, would be your first glimpse of the distant commissars who signed your death warrant, peremptorily, after you walked across just such an endless room. A beastly metal object squats inside the entrance, a fat Maxim machine-gun of World War l vintage, black and oily. It points at an extraordinary display, the first exhibit, a life-size wood-slatted cattle car pierced with holes and fiercely lit from within. The myriad light beams come at you like dawn rays. Something awful happened during the night, the exhibit suggests, and here is the morning-after stillness. You imagine the bodies inside and even the chatter of birdsong nearby. This is how the Red Army executed in bulk, 100 people at a time.

You walk around the cattle car into the main space, and along the wall stretches a line of photos, documents, letters, manifestoes--all human scale, digestible, affecting, like an album of mementos. There's a Declaration of Independence document from 1919 by the short-lived Democratic Georgian Republic. The republic, like so many others in the Russian orbit, was squashed in the 1920s by the onset of the Terror, which continued unabated into the 1930s. Black-and-white photographs of bewhiskered, often uniformed figures--executed officers, politicians and clergy--stalwarts of ancien régime manhood, follow intermittently. Such images can seem lazy and repetitive, but here are so modestly and poignantly presented, so fragile as objects, that they sadden the heart. As do a collage of death warrants on aging sepia paper, and pictures of soon-to-be executed Georgian Royal family members. And a short silent film loop shows a grainy alleyway scene, a bullet-to-the-head sepia murder of a citizen with a puff of pistol-smoke.

There was no resisting the omnivorous human thresher: The Terror simply cut down Georgian society en masse, with some 72,000 people shot and 200,000 deported to the Gulag out of four million. The artifacts of repression left behind have a malevolent mute power: three primitive steel doors, hanging by chain, from prison cells, their brutally solid metal keys in a glass case.


One particular exhibit seemed deeply poignant to this visitor: a 1936 public letter to the U.S. Congress by a regional assembly. The document reads in part, "This is our strongest appeal to your country. . . . You have the power to assist us in this time of hardship. . . You are the only ones who could do something for us. . . . Although we don't have proper arms we will defend ourselves by any means with swords and daggers." Equally poignant was a grouping of photo-portraits of eliminated 1930s intellectuals with the utterly modern glamour of that time, the lush dark hair, the dangling cigarette above open-necked shirt, the defiant sophistication. They looked uncannily like various American counterparts, a young Robert Taylor here, a Wallace Stevens there. They would have disappeared suddenly in their youth.

By the time you reach the table at the far end, you understand the lethal iconism of the commissars' table, usually staffed by three officers of the Cheka, the predecessor to the KGB. So many condemned eyes no doubt gazed in despair at the bureaucratic folder with typed names, and beside it the rubber stamp and paperweights--then were marched away, possibly to a place like the exhibit just beyond: a cutaway section of a peeling concrete room with a trapdoor in the ground from an old Tbilisi prison. The victims were kept in the basement among the buried dead until they too were shot and buried there.


The Museum of the Soviet Occupation opened last year on May 26, 2006, on the top floor of the National Museum building on Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi's main boulevard. It has received surprisingly little attention except among countries that suffered a fate comparable to Georgia's, such as Poland and the Baltic states, countries that are now free enough from Moscow to undertake such a backward chronicle. The idea germinated from a 2005 visit by Rose Revolution parliamentarian Nicholas Rurua when he visited a similar place in Riga, Latvia. Mr. Rurua, a graduate of Tbilisi's Theater Institute, brought the idea back to Georgia's youthful President Mikheil Saakashvili, who fast-tracked it immediately, as is his wont. It took a mere three months to complete. Many of the exhibits came from Tbilisi's KGB archives, which the Russians evacuated in 1993 during Georgia's Shevardnadze era. A Georgian patriot KGB officer, however, managed to save a great deal, and ultimately provided the material to the museum.

The story goes that Vladimir Putin considered the display highly provocative and asked President Saakashvili why Georgia would do such a thing. After all, the most prominent butchers were themselves Georgian, such as Stalin and Beria. Mr. Saakashvili responded that the Russians were free to open a museum about how Georgia had oppressed them. The Georgian no doubt knew well that such an exhibition would offend his menacing northern neighbor with a former KGB officer at its helm, but he went ahead anyway. Perhaps he calculated that it was the best way to stop any of it from happening again.