Ten minutes later MVD Interior Ministry troops and Army paratroopers launched an unprovoked attack on the peaceful demonstrators. In the ensuing massacre, Radio Liberty announced, sixteen people had been killed outright, almost three hundred were badly wounded, and thousands were overcome by thick clouds of an unnamed “toxic gas.”
The final Radio Liberty bulletin I heard before catching the bus to the base that morning confirmed that three wounded demonstrators had died in Tbilisi hospitals, bringing the total killed to nineteen. The gravely wounded were now estimated at 260, with 4,000 treated for serious gas inhalation. Eyewitness accounts stated that the Army and MVD troops had beaten many demonstrators with heavy clubs and slashed others with sharpened military trench shovels.
There was no mention of the massacre on that morning’s ail-Union news summary from Moscow.
At breakfast I asked the men in my squadron if they had heard reports of a massacre in Tbilisi. They all shook their heads and shrugged. All except Major Petrukhin. Obviously he was still a devoted listener to Radio Liberty. He looked grave and troubled when I mentioned Tbilisi. But he refused to acknowledge amid the bustle and clatter of the breakfast dishes that he had heard the same shocking reports.
By that night, however, no one could pretend that the massacre had not occurred. The official Moscow news media belatedly reported there had been “unfortunate loss of life” when “violent nationalist demonstrators’” assaulted security forces in central Tbilisi and those forces had responded with “legal actions” to disperse the crowds.
Georgian television, however, revealed a far different sequence of events. Although I couldn’t follow the Georgian language commentary, a Georgian pilot in our ready room translated, his face drawn into a tight mask of rage. Among the nineteen victims killed, he said, there were pregnant women and several young boys and girls, whose heads had been crushed or who had been dismembered by the troops wielding sharpened shovels. Others had died of gas poisoning. The hundreds still in the hospital had suffered irreversible lung damage from the dense clouds of the mysterious gas the troops had sprayed into the tightly packed ranks of demonstrators.
Despite the warnings for Soviet officers to avoid confrontations with Georgians in town, I went into Mikha Tskhakaya that night to meet Malhaz. I had my suitcase full of those sexy posters and I needed money, no matter what the mood among the civilians. As I expected, Malhaz was cold toward me, but relaxed a little when I offered my obviously sincere condolences for the shocking massacre.
Then he reached under his counter and handed me a sheaf of photocopies. These were unofficial press photos of the massacre scene. They needed no translation. The wide sidewalks fronting Rustaveli Prospekt were littered with shoes, discarded placards, women’s purses, and overturned strollers and baby carriages. I saw none of the bricks or cobblestones that the Tass bulletin read over Vremya had proclaimed the “rioters” had used to attack the security forces.
By the next day the authorities’ attempts to suppress news of the massacre had failed completely. Despite a curfew throughout the republic, throngs of angry Georgians had demonstrated in almost every town and city. The commander of the Transcaucasus Military District, Colonel General Igor Rodionov, appeared on television appealing for calm. The Army, he said, is “in complete control of the situation.” Instigators of the unrest had been detained. “The extremists wanted blood and attacked the security forces,” the general read awkwardly from a prepared text. All further demonstrations were banned. “Patriotic comrades,” Rodionov concluded, “we must put this event behind us and refrain from anti-Socialist nationalism.”
He made no mention of the men, women, and children who had been slaughtered. He did not speak of the gas that had been used under the shade trees of Rustaveli Prospekt.
The next morning the first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Dzhumber Patiashvili, and his chief subordinates resigned in disgrace. Patiashvili stated the massacre could not be denied. It was, he said, “our mutual grief.” Before resigning, he declared ten days of public mourning for the victims.
The Politburo then announced that Patiashvili had been replaced as the republic’s Party leader by another Georgian, Givi Gumbaridze. He was the head of the KGB in Georgia.
As after the Chernobyl disaster, Mikhail Gorbachev had initially remained silent. He had been on a State visit to England in the days before the massacre. Either Gorbachev had been unaware that his Defense Minister, Marshal Yazov, had been preparing a major military operation against the peaceful demonstrators of Georgia, or he had used his absence as a plausible means to deny his involvement in the massacre. Whatever the truth, I sat before the television in the pilots’ ready room on the night of April 12, watching Mikhail Gorbachev address the nation from Moscow. He offered no sympathy to the families of the dead and wounded. Instead, he spoke harshly, shaking his finger as he warned against “extremism by adventurist elements.” Gorbachev’s statement had been followed by the first official videotapes from Tbilisi, which showed the streets patrolled by BMP armored troop carriers. The intersections of Tbilisi’s stately boulevards were barricaded with more armor, and troops in steel helmets and bulletproof vests searched civilian cars and pedestrians.
Gorbachev’s message was clear. Despite glasnost, despite perestroika, anyone questioning the authority of Moscow would be crushed. And the Soviet military was the chosen instrument of repression.
Around me in the dim room, my fellow pilots were glum and silent. I knew better than to speak to them here.
Back at my apartment building, I again encountered Valery, who had just returned from Tbilisi. We went to my kitchen to talk. He immediately described the massacre that his father and others had witnessed that terrible night in central Tbilisi.
After the patriarch’s warning, other speakers had taken their bullhorns and urged the crowd to remain calm. “It was late,” Valery said, his voice thick with anger. “Many of the women were already walking home, carrying their small children. Then it began.”
The streetlights suddenly were cut and the city center went completely dark, Valery related. People heard the throaty rumble of BRT armored cars and the snarl of tracked BMP armored personnel carriers. These armored vehicles converged on the demonstrators from several directions. Rank after rank of paratroopers and MVD troops charged the crowds, which had already been dangerously compressed by the advancing armor.
“They had no place to run,” Valery added. “The troops pushed them up against the stairs of the Council of Ministers. It was like driving livestock to a slaughter.” The flesh on his left chin was pulsing uncontrollably, a tic I had first noticed two years before when Valery had described some of his worst experiences in Afghanistan.
“The troops separated about three hundred people, Sasha,” Valery continued, his voice flat and slow, as if he were tiredly recounting yet another combat operation. “They pushed them directly toward the armed squads at the top of the stairs. Don’t you see? They were trying to simulate an attack on those guards. It was a provocation planned to trigger the massacre.”