The docent, who looked tired, sat down on a bench, caught his breath, and suggested I return tomorrow. I told him that by tomorrow I would be in Tbilisi.
From Baku the train ran south for almost four hours, by which time the sun had fallen behind the rising rim of the Caucasus, and we had begun our westward ascent to Tbilisi, nestled among the highest mountain peaks of Georgia. It was a capital city of warm springs, passionate nationalism, and an adoring pride in the dictator, Stalin, a native son whose legend was being brutalized everywhere else in the Soviet Union but not there. The train ride, though long, was thoroughly enjoyable, largely because my compartment mate was a chubby young Azeri woman named Maria, who unashamedly admitted that “pull” was the key to a satisfying life in the Soviet Union.
Her father was a prominent doctor in Baku who knew everyone and readily exchanged favors with other bigwigs in Azeri society. Her mother was a housewife who had never had to work, and her sister was in her second year of studies at Baku University. Maria was a French-language teacher in a small town in southern Azerbaijan, and she felt she needed a change.
“There is no fun there,” she said, her head shaking slowly from one side to the other. “What is a young girl to do? After work, I like fun, but there is none there. In Tbilisi, there is a lot of fun.” Her father’s friend, a communist with connections, was at that time using his clout to get her shifted from this small town to Baku. At least that would be a step up. She was confident he would succeed. “I know that someone must live and teach in such small towns, but it doesn’t have to be me.”
“Have you no guilt feelings?” I asked.
“Not at all,” she replied. Her tone was even, unemotional, like the Armenian’s the night before. “If I didn’t use pull, someone else would. Pull is the best way of getting anything in Russia. I think it is the only way.” She told me that corruption was “rampant” at the university. Students gained admission not because they deserved it but because their parents enjoyed special privileges resulting from their social rank or political position. “They bought admission, like buying an apartment,” she said. “Many of our young people are this way. I admit this. I am not ashamed. I have no conscience. I do not believe in God. In our family, we do what is good for us. That is the way it is here.”
When we arrived the following morning in Tbilisi, the sky was dark gray and the temperature was in the low seventies. After weeks in the merciless heat of central Asia, I was thrilled, but Maria was unhappy. “Tbilisi needs sun,” she grumbled. “It is beautiful only in the sun.” She was right, as I was to learn during my time in the Georgian capital. In fact, Tbilisi was picture-postcard beautiful. It was situated on the banks of the Kura River, which ran through a valley surrounded by the skyscraping peaks. Many stone bridges crisscrossed the Kura. Small houses looked as if they had been chiseled into the face of the mountain. Georgians seemed taller than Russians or Ukrainians, certainly taller than the Uzbeks or Tajiks. Most men sported mustaches, and women appeared stylish, well dressed, confident of their looks. Trolley cars clanged up and down hills, little different from those in San Francisco, and private cars honked incessantly on the main streets, unlike those in Moscow, which made their way timidly through the comparatively thin traffic. It was obvious that the standard of living was higher here than in the Soviet capital.
At the railroad station in downtown Tbilisi, I was surprised when I was greeted by a smiling Intourist face rather than the usual frowning one that had accosted me in other Soviet cities. A ZIS limo was waiting, and it whisked me to the Intourist hotel, where I was ushered into a giant suite with a gorgeous view, at the modest price of $15 a day, meals extra. The Intourist guide told me there was one other American in the hotel, a photographer from California named Max. He had scheduled a trip to Mtskheta, Georgia’s ancient capital, a thirty-minute-drive from Tbilisi along a narrow mountain pass. “May I go with him?” I asked. Maria had urged me to see Mtskheta, which she described as “exquisite” and “romantic.” Fortunately the photographer welcomed company, and off we went. He had a specific assignment—to photograph the ancient icons and frescoes; I simply wanted to see the city.
The ride to Mtskheta was instructive. Farmhouses dotted the landscape. If there were any collective farms in the neighborhood, I did not see them. Fat, healthy-looking cows mooed as we drove by. In Mtskheta we could see clouds hugging the mountain peaks, a gray mist making everything look unreal. A large church, the largest I had ever seen in the Soviet Union, stood incongruously on a small square in this very quiet town. The church was built in the eleventh century on the ruins of a smaller church built in the fourth century. Mtskheta was Christianized in A.D. 337, almost 700 years before Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus decided to Christianize the people who would later be known as Ukrainians and Russians. In the smaller church was an icon of Christ, brought there by Georgian pilgrims who had returned from the Holy Land centuries earlier. Another icon, hanging on a bare wall, showed Christ’s eyes watching you at all times, no matter where you were in the church. I could not help but notice that the icons in Mtskheta were more beautiful, more sophisticated than any of the Russian icons I had seen (at least until Andrei Rublev arrived on the artistic scene in the fifteenth century).
Mtskheta was the capital of Georgia for 300 years, but in the fifth century, after it was leveled and many of its citizens massacred, it was decided, for reasons of security, to move the capital to nearby Tbilisi, which has remained the capital ever since. Tbilisi has always been considered a jewel of a city, a rich marketplace at an attractive intersection between Asia and Europe and a strategic hub for warriors from Mongolia, Persia, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire, at different times a prize for Tamerlane, a Persian shah, or a Russian czar. Looking around on that rainy day I could understand why. It was indeed a jewel, measured by everything from location to scenery, culture to art, beauty to people—most of all, people, who strode through their history with unparalleled pride. I asked a Georgian professor whether he had ever been to Western Europe, or China, or America, and he said no, adding with bewilderment, “What is there to see there that isn’t better here?”
After a lunch of veal shashlik accompanied by Georgian wine, my new photographer friend and I visited the Chavchavadze Desyatilyetka (desyatilyetka means “ten-year school,” mandatory for all Soviet students). Wherever I went in the Soviet Union I always tried to spend a little time at schools with students. Since they represented the future of their country, I wanted to understand their thinking.
There were 1,000 students in this school, half at the elementary and half at the secondary school level. Roughly 250 students had been graduated the previous year. Half of the graduates went on to university, the other half directly into the workplace. All classes were conducted in the Georgian language, but everyone had to study Russian eight hours a week.
We spoke to the principal, an attractive Georgian woman who spoke Russian with a distinct accent. She was especially absorbed with the educational mandate of the 20th Party Congress: to place greater emphasis on teaching technical subjects without lowering overall academic standards. “This is part of our desire to raise the technical proficiency of our youth,” she explained. Khrushchev wanted more engineers and physicists, and this was his way of achieving that goal. I had read about another new goal—increasing the number of boarding schools.
“Will the Chavchavadze Desyatilyetka be one of the new boarding schools?” I asked.
She replied, “Not likely”—there was no room for expansion. But she was nevertheless convinced that within ten years all Soviet schoolchildren would be housed in boarding schools. Already 285 such schools had been opened in the last year. In four years, by 1960, she estimated, the number would theoretically skyrocket to 1 million boarding schools. The Kremlin’s point was to indoctrinate young people with a communist-centric view of the world. That had not yet been achieved, and my own guess was it never would be.