Shops, Cars, Restoration, National Pride Dominate Capital of the Republic of Georgia : With Tbilisi’s Freewheeling Spirit, Soviet Life Is Not What It Seems

This city, capital of the Soviet republic of Georgia, reveals itself the moment you get into a car.

As a mass of traffic presses its way through narrow, tree-lined streets, horns honk, drivers yell and a kind of gleeful chaos takes over. Cars run red lights, even speed the wrong way down one-way streets.

“We have to get there, don’t we?” said an impatient taxi driver, mopping his brow and pointing out the obvious as he headed toward a “no entry” sign. “If you drive honestly in this town,” he explained, “you’ll be killed.”

In Tbilisi, you leave Moscow far behind--that distant and formidable city where police stand officiously at every corner with white batons to stop drivers for crossing unbroken white lines on wide, empty roads.

A Welcome Contrast

Here, in the warm stretch between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, there is a freewheeling spirit, a disorder that comes as a welcome contrast to the constrictions of Soviet life. Like other southern people, Georgians are expressive and expansive: They like to talk, they like to trade, and they are good at both.

There are many other ways to distinguish Tbilisi from Moscow. This city is hilly (perched on the banks of a steep river valley), it is one-eighth the size (1.1 million compared to 8 million) and it does not try to impose its views. Here, for instance, there are no slogans stretching across the tops of buildings, urging people to speed up their work and build communism.

Of course, Lenin is here, dominating the main square. Black cars, massive government buildings and other visible displays of Soviet power are as unmistakable here as they are to the north.

Own Identity

But like other smaller republics in the Soviet Union, Georgia (population, 5.2 million) has managed to cling to its own identity, sometimes in defiance, sometimes in tandem with Soviet reality. The ancient Georgian language is spoken everywhere here, and outspoken national pride tilts precariously on the edge of nationalism.

In the old part of the city, on the banks of the Kura River, instead of great slabs of Soviet concrete, there are houses two stories high, painted different colors, with filigreed wooden balconies. Restoration, now officially encouraged in Moscow, has been going full swing here for almost a decade: This fall, two major streets are covered in scaffolding.

The city center is filled with small shops, sometimes only one room, offering items that attest to the Georgian love of display--for instance, feathery lamp shades or a small round marble table, with a gold-plated telephone permanently fixed on top (price, $1,500).

High Car Ownership

Here there are no lines--not for shoes, not for sausages, not for quality wallpaper and not for wine or vodka, most remarkable at a time when lines for liquor in Moscow stretch around the block. Like other wine-drinking peoples, Georgians are scornful of the guzzling habits of northerners, and will boast that drunkenness here has never been a problem.

This is one reason they resent having been included in Moscow’s yearlong campaign against alcohol, which has removed Georgia’s famed wines from some restaurants and limited them at others.

Georgia has one of the highest per capita rates of car ownership in the Soviet Union--55 cars per 1,000 population (the Soviet average is 40 per 1,000).

A year ago, an article in the local Communist Party newspaper complained that 19- and 20-year-old students were getting cars as presents--”toys on wheels”--from their parents. The private car, the paper Zarya Vostoka complained, is no longer a luxury item in Georgia.

Market Pressure

There are now so many cars in Georgia that, according to one resident, Georgians have recently been forbidden from buying cars elsewhere and bringing them home. The explanation is that the support system--gasoline, spare parts--is already stretched beyond capacity.