This is the twenty-fourth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe, Turkey, and the Near East to Georgia and Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (Trump devoted this week to denying that there was anything to see in the Jeffrey Epstein files—unless, I suppose, if you’re interested in the sex life of an adjudicated sexual offender who happens to be president.)

I spent three days on the bicycle in Tbilisi and eventually got the hang of cycling on the hills and in the constant traffic. From my hotel, I mastered a few back streets to avoid the racing SUVs with black-tinted windows on Rustaveli, the main thoroughfare, and one afternoon, to my amazement, as I was biking to the Tbilisi Open Air Museum of Ethnography (old wooden houses), I discovered bike lanes on Petre Melikishvili Street. 

At my dinners, I kept hearing the truisms that Georgia was openly for Kyiv in the war over Ukraine, but quietly supportive of Russia, in part because so many wealthy Russian businesses were now operating from offices in Tbilisi. On the sidewalks of Tbilisi, however, there was less consensus and more graffiti of the “Fuck Putin” variety.

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I never could decide what I thought of Tbilisi as a city. Its layout on two hillsides of a broad river makes for an awkward, divided footprint, and the rush of traffic everywhere takes any fun away from walking or bike riding. The new Soviet man only gets around at high speed.

That said, here and there around Tbilisi there are quieter, historic quarters, although I never did warm to the official Old Town, which has streets lined with iconic Georgia houses with wooden balconies hanging over the street (and Putin refugees drinking $8 coffees). 

Occasionally I would head there for lunch or cold water, and I can imagine it’s at its best in warm weather, when everyone eats and drinks outside on terraces. But there was something distracting about having to share small cobblestoned alleys with hulking SUVs on some urgent, oligarchic errand.

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Tbilisi has no shortage of museums, and in between my meetings I would head into the Museum of Fine Arts or the National Gallery, where sometimes I warmed to the art exhibitions (landscape paintings of Georgia) and sometimes I did not (abstract modernism). 

One morning I went to the Parliamentary Library, where there was some commotion over whether I had the right credentials to look at the books (I did, but it took thirty minutes to enroll me as a visiting scholar). 

Georgia first embraced democracy in 1918, when it fled the embers of the Russian empire, although it then spent much of the last 100 years as a Soviet buffer state.

Another afternoon I biked out to the ethnographic museum to look at old wooden Georgian houses, but mostly because it was something that my wife would have loved, and by now I was beginning to get homesick. 

I spent most of my time in two Stalin-related museums. One housed his printing press, from when he was a young party member churning out agitation propaganda; the other was the Museum of the Soviet Occupation, which is inside the Georgian National Museum. After my day of Stalinism (in all forms) in Gori, I was looking forward to both.

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It took me a while to find the Underground Printing House Museum, because my phone was off the internet grid and because the house is tucked away on a side street on a hill past the Sheraton Grand Hotel. 

I got there eventually and locked the bicycle in the courtyard, and while buying a ticket I figured out that the museum director (clearly an older man with time on his hands to volunteer) was prone to endless Stalinist monologues (it’s maybe why he got the job). 

After we spent about fifteen minutes in front of the first picture in the museum, I drifted off on my own and left him in the company of a Canadian couple (on a round-the-world trip) who never seemed to have heard of Stalin. 

The appeal of the house museum is that it has some early printing presses on which Stalin and his comrades issued their proclamations. Beneath the house there are a series of tunnels and secret basement rooms, in which the proletarian printers could hide from the police, if ever they were raided. 

The ruse worked for a while. When Stalin was there printing, Tbilisi was a small town, and this house was a cottage in the countryside, from which young, earnest men were coming and going (admittedly via secret tunnels). According to a caption on the walls (all dialogue is reported verbatim),

In 1906, the gendarmerie received an information, that something unacceptable to them has been happening here. Soon at about 150 gendarmes (policemen) came. Family members and those who worked on the printing machine, received the message too and everyone left the house immediately. The gendarmerie inspected everything, they could not find anything, but suddenly one gendarme took a newspaper, set it on fire and threw it into the well, the newspaper was sucked into the tunnel and they realized that there was something covered there. A firefighter was let down and a printing press was discovered.

After that, the house was blown up, the machine was removed and the place was completely burnt down.

In Stalinist biographies, one of the intriguing theories put forward is that Stalin himself turned in the location of the secret press to the police. Why would he do that? To consolidate his leadership in local party affairs? To settle grudges with his comrades? 

In his biography Stalin, historian Alex de Jong writes: “There is nothing farfetched about the notion that Stalin had reported its whereabouts to the authorities. The motive? A combination of pleasure and of profit.” Later in his career Stalin did far worse things to his compatriots.

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The Museum of the Soviet Occupation is far grander than the printing press museum, and far less idolatrous about Stalinism, as the theme of the museum is to record and commemorate “the victims of communism” from 1924 until 1989, when Soviet tanks made their last appearance in Tbilisi.

The exhibition has a postscript that shows the 2008 Russian occupation of the Tskhinvali region, north of Gori (which briefly the Russians also occupied). 

Near the museum entrance there’s a placard that lists all “the victims of communism,” of which: 80,000 were shot; 400,000 were deported; and another 400,000 died in World War II. And to show that the current conflict with Russia has its origins in such documents at the Treaty of Kars, there’s a petition in one of the cabinets that reads: “Protest lodged  by the population of the Georgian village of Dgvrisi against the adding of the village to the Autonomous District of Ossetia, signed by the representatives of the 80 families, December, 1921.” 

The exhibit has many photographs of famous Georgians who vanished in various purges. One is a picture of Dimitri Shevardnadze, who was the founder of the Georgian Art Museum. Under his picture, the caption reads: “Shot in 1937.” 

Finally, there was this poster from 1921 that struck me as more appropriate for today:

… WHAT DO WE HAVE TO OFFER TO THE CULTURAL TREASURE OF THE EUROPEAN NATIONS? –

THE TWO-THOUSAND-YEAR-OLD NATIONAL CULTURE, DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM AND NATURAL WEALTH.

SOVIET RUSSIA OFFERED US MILITARY ALLIANCE, WHICH WE REJECTED. WE HAVE TAKEN DIFFERENT PATHS, THEY ARE HEADING FOR THE EAST AND WE, FOR THE WEST.

WE WOULD LIKE TO YELL AT RUSSIAN BOLSHEVIKS:

TURN TO THE WEST TO MAKE A CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN NATION…

NOE ZHORDANIA, HEAD OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA

—Speech Made at at the Extraordinary Session of the Constituent Assembly on January 27, 1921

When the museum opened in 2006, the president of Ukraine, Victor Yuschenko, said his country needed something like this, while the Russian Vladimir Putin complained to Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakasvilli, that both Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria (head of Stalin’s NKVD security apparatus) had came from Georgia, which could have been an historical aside or a direct threat. 

Since Putin invaded Georgia two years later (and four months after NATO expressed interest in Georgian membership), I am assuming it was a threat.

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