Resurgent Nationalism in Outlying Regions Challenges Soviet Leaders : Republic of Georgia Symbolizes Rising Push for Sovereignty

The singing was soft, lyrical, haunting. The words were those of one of the nation’s great poets calling on the people to unite for the coming struggle. And the strong resolve was evident as the crowd grew and joined in the heartfelt singing.

Gathered before the Parliament building of the southern Soviet republic of Georgia were about 1,000 proudly nationalistic Georgians who were demanding that the army move an artillery range away from a 6th-Century monastery that they regard as an important part of their cultural heritage.

“The Soviet army is reducing our heritage to a pile of rubble,” one activist, Zurab Chavchavadze, told the crowd. “And if it does, what can we as a nation say to our fathers and to our children? Now, we must take a stand. Is this our country, or does it belong to some occupying army?”

Straightforward Issues

While the speeches were impassioned, even fiery, as is customary in Georgia, the issues, on the surface, were straightforward and very typical of Soviet regional politics today:

People wanted to preserve from further damage the Davit Garedzha monastery, about 30 miles east of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. The army, after years of requests, had promised to act but apparently had reneged, shifting the target area away from the monastery complex itself but still firing as close to it as 2 miles. As the artillery shells explode, the fragile frescoes on the monastery walls crumble under the vibration.

And the republic’s government, which itself had won the army’s commitment to move the artillery range, was now being asked to demand that the military honor its pledge.

“Are these leaders of ours, these representatives of ours, truly Georgians?” Chavchavadze demanded. “Or are they Russian puppets?”

Dilemma for Kremlin

This was the real issue, and it reflects a dilemma facing the Soviet leadership around most of the periphery of the country in areas where non-Russian nations were incorporated, sometimes willingly but often not, in what today is the Soviet Union.

From the strife-ridden republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, which border Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains, to the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, across much of Soviet Central Asia to parts of the Ukraine and Byelorussia, resurgent nationalism is challenging Soviet rule, or at least the way that they have experienced it for many years.

“We want, first of all, the restoration of Georgian sovereignty and independence,” said Zviad Gamsakhurdia, an outspoken nationalist and longtime political dissident here. “Everything must start with the restoration of that which was taken from us--our sovereignty, our independence, our territory, our cultural heritage, our very nationhood.”

Gamsakhurdia, a former political prisoner, quickly ticked off the nationalists’ demands: full use of Georgian as the republic’s state language; active protection of Davit Garedzha and other national monuments; establishment of a nuclear-free zone throughout the heavily militarized Caucasus; restoration of Georgian nationality to smaller ethnic groups deported from the republic after World War II and their right to return here; an end to policies that bring non-Georgians into the republic and transfer Georgians to jobs in other parts of the country; stronger measures to protect the environment, including a halt to construction of a new dam and hydroelectric station, and the restoration of territory taken from Georgia after the establishment of Soviet rule here.

Sovereignty Lost

“Our nation is being taken from us, and no longer so slowly and just bit by bit,” Gamsakhurdia said.

In Georgia, as in most other parts of the country, Soviet authorities seem determined not to be provoked into repressive actions by such rhetoric. Instead, they appear to be trying to get ahead of the rising nationalism by granting as many of the demands as are reasonable, acknowledging and correcting mistakes, particularly those of earlier eras, and tolerating demonstrations and protests for which the participants would have been jailed five years ago.

Standing on the steps of Tbilisi State University, surrounded by several hundred students who had gathered in a protest simultaneous with the one at the republic’s Supreme Soviet, as its Parliament is called, Gamsakhurdia had the fervor--and the following--of a man ready to lead a rebellion.

“We must unite, strengthen our ranks, set our goals and stop delaying,” said a younger member of the Chavchavadze Society, an activist group formed a year ago to campaign for a series of nationalist goals. The society is named for Prince Ilia Chavchavadze, a 19th-Century Georgian nationalist leader.

Structure of State Assailed

“The issues of the monastery, of other cultural monuments and even of our language and religion, however, are side issues,” the member said. “The real issue is the structure of the state--and that must be changed. We are not advocating secession from the Soviet Union; we are advocating Georgian sovereignty and the freedom to establish our own forms of government.”

Although initially cautious, Gamsakhurdia, Merab Kostava, another longtime dissident, and other leaders of the Chavchavadze Society have gone on to found the National Democratic Party of Georgia to campaign for Georgian sovereignty and have mobilized increasingly larger rallies, including one that drew 100,000 to the Tbilisi race course in October and a second in mid-November in which 200,000 gathered outside government offices in central Tbilisi.

The protests, covered extensively by the press, radio and television here, persuaded the Georgian Supreme Soviet to request substantial changes--some of which were made--in proposed constitutional amendments restructuring the country’s political system.

“The call of the times is for freedom, and freedom is not possible in Georgia without sovereignty and independence,” a speaker at the race course rally declared. “Our party is committed to fight for the independence of Georgia, though we know that will be a long and difficult struggle.”

Oft-Repeated Slogan

“Georgia for the Georgians” has become a common slogan at political meetings and on the walls of Tbilisi and other Georgian cities. The problems of “the physical survival of the Georgian people” and “the cultural, political and moral rebirth of the Georgian nation” are widely discussed, even in conservative official journals. And the contentious issues of sovereignty and independence are debated just as widely as possible “solutions.”

How independence or sovereignty would be achieved, what they would mean, how realistic they are even as slogans with which to mobilize the people--those are still difficult questions for the Georgian nationalists to answer at the moment.

“There is little doubt about where we stand,” said Tamar Tcheidze, an outspoken nationalist, “but then there is little doubt in people’s minds about what needs to be done. The questions are priorities and methods, and on those we are trying to unite our people.”

The Georgian Communist Party leadership, like those in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, has remained calm and tolerant of the protests though highly critical of the nationalists. They are trying to meet the broad party commitment to greater democracy and openness as part of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s overall reform program, known as perestroika, or restructuring.

But the monthlong debate over the constitutional changes, which led not only to the mass rally in mid-November but also to a 10-day sit-in and hunger strike by dozens of young Georgians outside Parliament, showed party officials how fragile the political situation here, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, has become as the country moves into the unknown.

December Review

Dzhumber Patiashvili, the Georgian party’s first secretary, called together leaders of the republic’s intelligentsia, highly influential artists and musicians, educators and senior journalists, as well as government and party officials, for a full review of the situation last month and for a moderate, considered response to the nationalist resurgence.

“The younger generation (has) sharply increased social and political activeness and a graphically manifested desire to resolve the problems that have accumulated and are arising in many fields, be they questions of the development of the native language or of ecology or of the conservation of monuments,” the official government and party newspaper Zarya Vostoka said, summarizing the meeting.

“Perestroika has shed light on many chronic problems, which it was formerly the custom not to mention, and on many new problems,” the paper continued. “It is necessary to act more vigorously to eliminate and overcome them and to resolve them within the unity of the republic’s vital interests and socioeconomic development. We must seek to eliminate as rapidly as possible the tension that is rising, rid ourselves more boldly of the style of ‘command politics’ based on orders and to treat democracy and its real embodiment solicitously and carefully. And it must be kept in mind that negative phenomena always give grounds for dissatisfaction.”

Mediterranean Outlook

A fiercely independent people, quite Mediterranean in outlook, the Georgians trace their history back to a kingdom of the 4th Century BC that reached its peak in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Georgia became a protectorate of Czarist Russia in 1783, after more than 200 years of being divided between Turkey and Persia. Russia formally annexed the region in 1801, and it enjoyed a brief period of independence from 1918 to 1921 after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Circumstances of its incorporation into the Soviet Union are now hotly disputed, and the role of the dictator Josef Stalin, himself a Georgian, is central to it.

“We could be considered Stalin’s first victims, because he sent the Red Army into Georgia to make us part of Soviet Russia,” another Chavchavadze Society member said. “There was not much choice in that affair. We had a social democratic government; it was trying to develop a form of socialism different from that in Moscow; Stalin sent in Russian troops, and the government was overthrown.

“No one can truly say that our incorporation into what is now the Soviet Union was a voluntary act carried out under full national sovereignty. And, just by the way, that army is still here.

Question for Leadership

“If the leadership of the Communist Party is serious about correcting the errors of the past, particularly those committed by Stalin, should it not start with Georgia?”

A Georgian historian, Akaki Surguladze, writing in Georgia’s official literary newspaper Literaturuli Sakartvelo, recently proposed a full historical reassessment of the period of Georgian independence and the establishment here of Soviet power, apparently as a step toward finding a basis for national reconciliation.

Georgian nationalism, kept in check during Stalin’s long rule, erupted with massive demonstrations after the late Nikita S. Khrushchev’s denunciation of the dictator in 1956. Those demonstrations are now being reassessed by Georgian historians, who see them now not so much as protests against the downgrading of Stalin, still a controversial figure here, but as essentially nationalist outbursts.

The protests have continued intermittently for the past three decades, with the largest 10 years ago, when tens of thousands of people came into the streets to insist on the primacy of Georgian as the national language here. Although Georgian remains enshrined in the 1977 constitution as the national language, the growing use of Russian as the “international language of communication,” particularly in economic dealings, in science and technology and in many government communications, makes the language issue one of the most sensitive here, as in other Soviet ethnic republics.

Gamsakhurdia, 49, who cultivates the image of the romantic revolutionary with passionate oratory, a mane of gray hair, workman’s shirt and jacket draped loosely about his shoulders, has been in the midst of Georgian nationalism for three decades.

Expelled From Union

The son of a celebrated Georgian novelist, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, he was expelled from the Georgian Writers Union in 1977 for his politics, jailed for two years for anti-Soviet propaganda in a highly controversial case and helped found the Chavchavadze Society last year.

With Merab Kostava, he had campaigned strenuously over the years for human rights in Georgia and the whole of the Soviet Union and compiled reports on police torture here, on neglect of Georgian historical monuments and on corruption in the Georgian Orthodox Church.

As their rallies have brought more and more young people into the streets and the protests have taken on an increasingly nationalist tone, “Gamsakhurdia, Kostava and Co.,” as the official press mockingly calls them, have been sharply criticized for inflaming political passions, misleading Georgian youth and trying to make themselves national martyrs.

“One should rebuff pseudo-patriots in a proper and timely fashion,” the newspaper Zarya Vostoka said in an article on the political situation in Georgia. “They know how to skillfully choose the right moment--from their point of view. . . . These people do everything with the aim of self-promotion. They want some papers and magazines in the West to sing hymns of praise to them. The actions of these ‘patriots’ are directed towards undermining perestroika and party policy and not at all for the benefit of the people.”

Mockingly describing Gamsakhurdia as a “leader of the nation,” another Georgian writing in the national Communist Party newspaper Pravda said that Gamsakhurdia and other dissident nationalists were trying to “sow both discord and strife in people’s minds” with “irresponsible statements and (attempts to) manipulate people with farfetched, invented problems.”

‘Not a Quiet People’

But such robust politics seem to be almost natural here and part of the Georgian character, especially after such a prolonged period of what even Zarya Vostoka describes as “enforced silence.”

“We are not a quiet people,” David Zardiashvili, 26, a construction engineer active in nationalist politics, commented during a demonstration that Gamsakhurdia had organized at Tbilisi State University at the start of a campaign that is now in its fifth month.

“We have a situation here, particularly in terms of the structure of the state, that people do not want, that they think has been here too long, that is really maintained by force and that should be changed by the people and replaced by something that the people do want. . . .

“In every Soviet republic today, there are many different problems, but all with the same root, and that is our own nationalism, which cannot be denied forever. A solution must be found in a new state structure.”

The government is moving on a number of specific issues, including greater use of Georgian as a state language, environmental protection, preservation of monuments, a yearlong moratorium in the construction of a railroad through the mountains of the three Transcaucasian republics in order to reassess its impact, returning a number of churches and monasteries to the Georgian Orthodox Church and the improved teaching of Georgian language, literature and history in the republic’s schools.

Promises From Military

Patiashvili, the Georgian Communist Party leader, who met with students and other activists after their demonstrations over the Davit Garedzha monastery in late September, later won a commitment from Gen. Dmitri Yazov, the Soviet defense minister, to halt the artillery bombardment in the area, as well as air force flights over the complex.

To cope with the multiplying demonstrations and protests, the Tbilisi city council set aside a park for meetings and political rallies.

“We are learning the art of mastering democracy,” Mayor Irakly Andriadze of Tbilisi said. “The lessons of (political) pluralism do come hard to us, but we realize that only a free change of opinions will benefit the common cause we have.”