“But surely,” I said, “you can see that things are improving now. Right?”
“Yes,” he conceded, “we all feel that a change is taking place, a definite change. How far it will go, where it will lead—we don’t know. I don’t think that even Khrushchev knows.”
When we finally said goodbye hours later, my student friend was crying. He embraced me. He asked, with tears, if I could please promise him that Georgia one day would be free of Russian control, and that America would help Georgia. I wanted to say yes, if only to make him feel better, but I said no—I could make no such promise.
In the hotel lobby after dinner I met a group of Czech tourists, and we went for a walk around town. No Intourist guide accompanied us. The Czechs spoke with amazing candor, as though they were not from a country that is a member of the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance controlled by the Soviet Union. We spoke in English. They did not know Russian and seemed in no rush to learn it. They said they had to travel in groups; individual travel was strictly forbidden. They did not need passports to travel to the Soviet Union, and they were surprised that Soviet citizens needed internal passports to travel from one republic to another, from Russia to Georgia, for example.
It was a short walk from the hotel to the central square, but it did not take long for the Czechs to express their “shock at the poverty, misery and unhappiness” of the Georgian people. They described Tbilisi as “shabby.” I disagreed. I thought it was one of the best-looking cities in the whole country.
“In comparison to Czechoslovakia,” one tourist said, “the Soviet Union is a very poor country.” In the last few years, since Stalin’s death, the standard of living in Czechoslovakia had improved “100-fold,” I was told.
“Look,” another tourist remarked, “we are here now. This we could not do two years ago. Now we want to travel west. We want to go to Paris or London. We want Prague to be a part of Europe again. Now we have the feeling it is a part of the East, and not the West, and Prague is the West.” Bluntly they stated that their government was an “Eastern imposition.” In parting they said, “Let us pray that times will get still better, and we can even travel to America. We all know what Wilson’s call for national self-determination did for us, and we never forget the kindness of America.”
I sat on a park bench near the hotel. An old woman was seated nearby. She looked at me once and then twice and asked, “You are a Russian stilyag?” Stilyag was the unflattering name for a sharply dressed Russian.
“No,” I said and smiled. “I’m an American.”
“Good,” she replied, obviously pleased. “We don’t like Russians here, and we certainly don’t like those two fat fools.”
She seemed proud of her candor. I assumed that the “two fat fools” were Khrushchev and Bulganin.
I was determined on my last day in Tbilisi to ride the old trolley up a mountain to the very top, 650 feet from ground level. When my guide and I left the hotel at 8:00 a.m. the sky was still gray and the clouds heavy over the surrounding peaks, but the city was already active. The trolley had been a Tbilisi landmark for half a century. The seats were rickety, but the conductor, a nice-looking woman with a ready smile, seemed perfectly competent to get us to the top and back. Halfway up we saw an attractive white church standing solitary on a mountain perch. I realized immediately that it was the place where Stalin’s mother, who died in the early 1930s, was buried, as well as the Russian poet Alexander Griboyedov. The conductor promised that we could stop there on the way down. At the top was a restaurant and, behind it, a lovely park. “In the evening,” my guide told me, “many young people come here. It is so dark, and so quiet, and so beautiful, that we lose track of time, me and my girl friend.” He blushed.
The view was spectacular, even on a cloudy day. I could see the Kura River twisting through the city, stone bridges arcing from one riverbank to the other. The old part of Tbilisi, carved into the mountainside, came into stunning relief, the newer part much less so. From this altitude the cars looked like beetles and the people like ants. “This is truly a pretty city,” I said, turning to my guide. “Yes, it is,” he replied. “It is also a city of legends.”
“Legends?” I said. “Tell me one.”
“What the old women say, including my grandma, is that many years ago, in the fifth century, the king of Mtskheta was hunting in this area. One day he spotted a stag and fired an arrow into his chest. Blood spurted from the wound. The stag rubbed up against a tree, got the arrow out of his chest, and then leaped into one of the warm springs around here. A few minutes later, the stag jumped out of the water and raced into the woods. There was no sign of blood, no wound, nothing. The king was amazed and decided to move his capital to Tbilisi, the city of miraculous warm springs.” He then added, “The Russians, when they came here, could not pronounce Tbilisi very well. They changed the name to Tiflis, but now it is once again Tbilisi.”
We walked over to a mound of heavy rocks. Water trickled out of them. “Another legend,” the guide continued, “is that deep in the night blind people come here, and let the water from these rocks drip, drop by drop, into their eyes, and then they can see again.” He must have seen a look of skepticism on my face. “It is the legend,” he assured me. “The Georgian people are a simple people who believe in legends and superstitions. Not so much in the city, but in the countryside.”
On the way down, as promised, we stopped at the white church. Up close it was not as beautiful as it appeared from afar. Built in the twelfth century, the church hid a small graveyard. Side by side were two tombstones, romantically linked—one to the poet Griboyedov, the other to his young bride. Griboyedov, serving as Russian ambassador to the Persian court in Teheran, was killed by an anti-Russian mob, and his bride arranged for his body to be returned and buried in Tbilisi, the city he loved. On top of his coffin was the figure of a young woman leaning against a cross, tears in her eyes. Beneath her was an inscription in which the unhappy bride asks an unanswerable question: “Your works and deeds are immortal in the memory of Russia. Then why has my love outlived you?”
Buried nearby was Stalin’s mother. Her gravestone was simple, made of black marble. A small crowd had gathered around it, a tribute as much to her son as to her. Apparently this was a common sight.
With the clock ticking down on my stay in Tbilisi, I wanted to visit one more place, Tbilisi State University, where the pro-Stalin rebellion had originated the previous March. I took a cab to the handsome, tree-lined campus. Classes were just then beginning for a new academic year. Girls entered the large courtyard, walking arm-in-arm with other girls, pretending to ignore the glances of the young men standing to one side and whispering to one another. I heard only Georgian with an occasional Russian expression thrown into a conversation. Everything seemed perfectly normal, a campus like any other, yet the previous March it had sparked a bloody rebellion against Soviet authority. Anti-Soviet resentment lingered among many of the students, I was told, but they appeared to be corralled behind a common need to be practical and get on with their lives.