Documentary : In Tbilisi, Victory Is Bittersweet : * Georgians emerge to survey the wreckage and shake their heads after Gamsakhurdia’s ouster silences guns.

For Georgy Biashvili and many of the others, it was not a victory to celebrate; it was a Christmas Eve without any Thanksgiving.

Hands jammed in his pockets and smoking a cigarette elegantly perched in a holder, Biashvili, 20, a university student, stood on a glass-strewn street of Tbilisi on Monday afternoon and gazed in stoic silence at the blackened hulk that had been his home.

The building had been so badly gutted that, looking through the smashed ground-floor windows, you could see the bright blue winter sky where the roof should have been. It was a flashback to pictures of Beirut, or some war-torn European city during World War II.

Biashvili and his wife of three months lost everything they had when their apartment was caught in the cross-fire between enemies and allies of Georgia’s President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who reportedly fled to the Caucasus Mountains with family and supporters early Monday.

“I am in absolute despair,” Biashvili, a tall, good-looking young man with jet-black hair, said after slowly taking the cigarette holder from his mouth. “Lord, at the moment I wouldn’t say any of this was worth it. Then I get hold of myself. I tell myself that it all really depends on the decisions our new government takes.”

Monday was supposed to be a carefree and happy day in Georgia, a time to get together with the family and, if you were devout, to break the fast that you had been observing over the past few days. It was the night before Christmas by the Georgian Orthodox calendars, one of the most joyous seasons of the year.

Instead of feasting or reveling, speechless throngs picked their way around the smashed cars, broken masonry and general rubble of Rustaveli Prospect, which had been turned into a no-man’s-land during a two-week struggle for power. It was most Georgians’ first look at the destruction, the worst suffered by their mountain capital in almost two centuries.

The roof of Middle School No. 1, one of Georgia’s oldest, has been blown to smithereens. The Ministry of Communications is now just a few blackened walls. The low, pastel-green facade of the art museum has been pockmarked by bullets.

Tbilisi, which charmed such lovers of beauty as author Alexander Dumas and poet Alexander Pushkin, has had its heart torn out.

And now what? Many Georgians asked that question as they surveyed the wounds.

Biashvili was not very optimistic. Neither the ousted president Gamsakhurdia nor his enemies, Biashvili said, sound to him like genuine democrats. His wife, a flaxen-haired, 18-year-old Russian from Moscow, was numbed by what had happened.

“We and thousands of others have nothing left, nothing,” Svetlana Biashvili said. “Our only hope left is the new government.”

To celebrate the end of the fighting, opposition soldiers fired their rifles into the air Monday morning outside the heavily damaged Parliament building. But even their happiness was dulled by the realization of the vast damage that they and Gamsakhurdia’s men had done.

“For the love of God, stop shooting!” one opposition soldier cried out. “Haven’t we had enough of that already?”

Iago Khubuluri, 40, a stubble-chinned carpenter from Tbilisi who had enlisted in the fight against Gamsakhurdia, made an arc with his free hand, the one not holding the Kalashnikov assault rifle, and took in the still burning Parliament, the mangled cars on the cobbled street outside, the ransacked offices.

“This is the bitterest thing that can be expressed by a human tongue,” Khubuluri said when asked if all that wreckage had been worth it. “For the sake of freedom, we have had to sacrifice all of this.”

If you came to Tbilisi in recent weeks, you had to learn a new way of walking in this city once devoted to the pleasures of the grape, choral song and lyric verse. You slinked along, shoulder pressed to the wall, and kept your eyes trained on the roof opposite for snipers.

It was as if the end of Soviet rule had brought something akin to Lebanon’s craziness to this little segment of what had been Moscow’s ethnic jigsaw puzzle of an empire. Any teen-ager or potbellied middle-aged man who had a yen to carry a gun was welcome to become a direct participant in the political process.

Thanks to the thriving black market in arms (and, according to all available evidence, to Soviet soldiers looking to earn some fast cash), the belligerents acquired tanks, armored-personnel carriers, howitzers, rockets, rifles and grenades. A tank, according to one Georgian who had served as a major in the Soviet army, cost 750,000 rubles, or the equivalent of about $7,500. Ammunition was extra.

During breaks in the combat, the fighters--who confusedly seemed to wear the same kind of green uniforms, Soviet-issued helmets and watch caps--tried out their English and French on foreign correspondents covering the battle, or asked them for cigarettes. An anonymous Los Angeles Lakers fan among the belligerents scrawled Magic Johnson’s name on a downtown wall during a recent lull.

For $2 or so, a Georgian motorist would happily take a reporter to the fringes of the war zone, although he had to be on the lookout constantly for a place to buy gasoline if he made many such trips.

A “Good afternoon, I’m from the Los Angeles Times” in accented Russian--plus a parka that was obviously not of Soviet manufacture--was enough to get by patrols and roadblocks of both sides and even into Gamsakhurdia’s underground headquarters in Government House.

There has always been a lot of Latin-like machismo in Georgian men, a race that has produced both the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the liberal-minded former Soviet foreign minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze. And many of the combatants seemed to swagger about self-consciously like characters out of the bootlegged foreign adventure movies they had seen.

Victory only added to their panache. “Every single one thinks he’s Rambo,” a Russian reporter said.

But there was a difference--fighters from both sides in Tbilisi seemed capable of delivering passionate monologues about why their cause was the democratic one. In the end, however, the side that had more guns won the argument.

For the wartime visitor with enough dollars or a major Western credit card, the Georgian capital has been like Beirut in another, unexpectedly agreeable way. It has a worthy successor to the Commodore Hotel, the favorite hangout of the Western press before a Lebanon assignment carried a heavy risk of abduction. On a hillside across the Kura River from battle-scarred Tbilisi proudly stands Metechi Palace, an 11-story Hyatt Regency look-alike.

The story here is that an Austrian millionaire had a Georgian-born wife who persuaded him to build the hotel a few years ago to honor Tbilisi with something better than the dingy Iveria Hotel, which the fighting shut last month.

Whatever its origins, the Metechi provides creature comforts that are a pleasant shock under the circumstances--first, because this has been for many days a battle zone and, second, because Tbilisi has also been part of the Soviet Union for seven decades.

Although the fighting closed the Metechi’s gourmet restaurant and nightclub until further notice, the contrast between the hotel and life outside is jarringly surreal.

One cold afternoon last week, this correspondent bolted across the square near National Guard headquarters, a stronghold of the rebels, as bullets from Gamsakhurdia’s sharpshooters splattered on the cobblestone and ricocheted with a whine. A five-minute ride to the Metechi and I might have been in an airport Sheraton in the American Midwest.

A woman in a black cocktail dress was playing Scott Joplin ragtime on the piano in the atrium lobby. Waiters bustled around taking drink orders. Guests back from the war front (and the fighting seemed to have driven away virtually everyone except journalists) were offered a menu in a second restaurant ranging from goulash soup to fine Georgian wines.

But for correspondents the single most persuasive reason to stay at the Metechi was its telephones. Regular phone service from Georgia to the rest of the world was cut during the fighting, but each room in the Metechi has a phone that connects via a satellite and a ground station in Innsbruck, Austria, to almost anywhere in the world. Even Moscow.

For $16 a minute, a journalist can call through to his home office over an admittedly weak line and shout out the developments of the day to his editor.

Even that system was not battle-proof, however, and on Sunday the parabolic dish in central Tbilisi that beams the telephone signal up to the satellite was smashed by bullets and knocked out of commission.

CNN, Reuters, Associated Press and some other news organizations thought they were prepared for that contingency since they had brought their own compact satellite communications equipment.

But on Monday, right as details from Gamsakhurdia’s flight from power were becoming known, the electricity in the hotel failed, blacking out the portable transmitters. As harried journalists screamed at the hotel staff to restore the power, the woman in the black cocktail dress returned to her grand piano, sat down on her bench and began to play, appropriately enough, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.