Zhora—also known as Georgy Pavlovich Khomizuri, Ernest Garaev, Nekoba, Aparek Gulaguri, and Twenty-Six—was a man of numbers, just like the composer Bach in the poem by Carl Sandburg:
He was born to wonder about numbers.
He balanced fives against tens
and made them sleep together
and love each other.
In the afternoon at a quarter after two, Zhora might run up to you and, full of excitement, inform you that in one minute, you’d be exactly one million minutes away from the age of Jesus Christ! In the middle of the night, he might wake you up only to tell you the great news—in exactly forty-four seconds, there would be 44,444,444 seconds left before your release!
He woke up twos and fours
out of baby sleep
and touched them back to sleep.
He smothered the entire prison camp with his calculations. He drove us insane, terrorizing us with six- and seven-digit numbers. Naturally, in order to complete such a monumental task, he was constantly scribbling calculations. He knew by heart the birthdays not only of all the prisoners, but also of their wives and children, as well as the arrest and release dates of every political prisoner (not only in our prison camp, but in all the political prisons throughout the Perm region). For example, he knew that May 21 was the birthday of Andrei Sakharov, Masha Khomizuri, Misha Skripkin, and the Georgian Republican Party; that it was the one hundred first day of the year (the one hundred second in a leap year); that on May 21, 878 AD, Syracuse was conquered by a Muslim sultan; that on that day in 1674, the nobility elected Jan Sobiesky as King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania; that on May 21, 1972, a mentally ill Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-born Australian and, by the way, a geologist (being a geologist himself, Zhora would stress this fact), vandalized Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, and so on. His vast knowledge had neither beginning nor end. Like a supercomputer, he was always plugged in, constantly doing calculations, running himself ragged. It’s important to mention that even though his calculations were accurate, no one knew the purpose of his faultless precision. No one had any idea why it was so important to know how many minutes, hours, or seconds were left before this or that event. Though I shouldn’t say no one knew—Zhora himself must have had some idea!
He knew love numbers, luck numbers,
how the sea and the stars
are made and held by numbers.
He loved all numbers as his own children, but he believed that one numerical combination was predestined for him by fate. It was the number twenty-six.
He devoted his first significant manuscript to shattering the myth of the twenty-six Baku commissars, showing it to be a pure fantasy, a piece of Soviet propaganda.3 That myth had left a deep and lasting impression on the still young researcher, as yet uninitiated into the world of mysticism—many facts simply didn’t add up. First, of the twenty-six Baku commissars, twenty-seven were gunned down; furthermore, there were only nine commissars among them, only two were really from Baku, and so on. The more he investigated the myth of the twenty-six Baku commissars, the more he would repeat: “Shahumyan-Dzhaparidze-Azizbekov-Fioletov.” (As he discovered, the leadership of Armenian-Georgian-Azerbaijani-Russian Bolsheviks was just a tribute to internationalism; the real leaders were the Armenian, Georgian, and Russian Bolsheviks: Shahumyan, Dzhaparidze, Korganov, and Petrov). From then on, Zhora couldn’t free himself from that number, which, in his mind, was truly capable of inflicting disaster.
It seemed that the menacing number twenty-six was everywhere, alongside its gloomy associate, the menacing number thirteen. Even in Khomizuri’s Yerevan phone number, the first two digits were two and six, and the sum of all the digits was twenty-six, and when his number was changed, the sum of the new digits was still twenty-six! When the phone number was changed again—the sum of the digits didn’t change! “This is mystifying!” Zhora used to say, truly upset. My Tbilisi phone number added up to just one short of twenty-six! A calendar year consisted of twenty-six weeks multiplied by two! And Leonid Brezhnev’s age was only three years short of twenty-six multiplied by three! Anyway, it’s twenty-six again!
In the end, driven by an affection for Zhora, our prison community decided to reward his remarkable loyalty to the number twenty-six by creating a new numerical constant and naming it after him, one Khomizuri, which would be denoted by the capital Latin letter H. Then, following a very difficult derivation done by the political prisoner Vadim Anatolievich Yankov, a remarkable mathematician and topologist, we would designate one seventh of a Khomizuri a Zhorik, denoting it with the lower case Latin letter h. (It was my idea to use Latin letters.) The difficulty of Yankov’s derivation was in the sequence—from the number twenty-six, he added the two digits (2+6=8), then subtracted one from the sum (8-1=7) and introduced one seventh of that (7/7=1), to make one Zhorik. The major challenge here was understanding the middle step. When asked why he subtracted one in the middle of his derivation, Yankov would take out a self-made chalkboard and a huge stylus, and then for three hours straight, he would write, erase, and get into fights trying to prove this step. If we still couldn’t understand even after three hours of laborious math, he would scream that simplifying it any more for laymen was beyond his capacity.
As a result, in our political prison even military criminals with a relatively low level of education knew that one year consisted of exactly two Khomizuris and one Zhorik (2H1h) weeks; that Brezhnev’s age was three years short of three Khomizuris (3H-3); that according to data from January 1, 1985, Zhora, Levan Berdzenishvili, Johnny Lashkarashvili, and Rafael Papayan each had one Khomizuri of teeth, but according to data from January 1, 1986, the above-mentioned persons had only two Khomizuris of teeth among them; that the number 13 brought misfortune because it’s not a full Khomizuri but only half; that the universally acknowledged champion of foul language in the camp, the creator of the Soviet multivitamins Undevit and Decamevit, Arnold Arthurovich Anderson, was two Khomizuris old when he was arrested for passing the formula for Decamevit to his brother in West Germany and was sentenced to half a Khomizuri; that the daily quota of the work mitts that we had to sew was three and a half Khomizuris plus one (92 pairs), and so on.
According to Zhora, the alphanumerical abbreviation of our prison camp ZhKh 385/3-5 should be read as Zhora Khomizuri 1+1+ (he said those were Zh and Kh) +3+8+5+3+5=26, or in other words, Zhora Khomizuri Khomizuri as in Homo sapiens sapiens.
Outside our prison at that time, no one knew Georgy Khomizuri as a dissident. In rather narrow geological circles, he was known as the star of the Institute of Petroleum and Gas, as a very good geologist, and as the author of a detailed monograph about geosyncline. However, in the whole of the Soviet Union, there was not a single dissident or dissident-supporting person who did not know about Ernest Garaev and his books.
Ernest Garaev was one of Zhora’s pseudonyms, which he had in abundance—starting with the anti-Stalinist Nekoba (ne-Koba)4 and ending with Aparek Gulaguri, which, while formed from the word Gulag, sounded to his ear like an archaic Georgian name from the Xevsurian region. His most important works published in samizdat were under the nickname Ernest Garaev: The History of the CPSS Leadership (only facts, no commentaries), The Myth of the Twenty-Six (the real history of the twenty-six Baku Commissars), and The Chronology of the Great Terror. I used to tease him that he’d picked the name Ernest not because of his great love for Hemingway, but out of respect for Ernesto Che Guevara—a reference to his Trotskyite, extreme left-wing past. He never confirmed my claim, but he didn’t deny it either.
Georgy Khomizuri was a Georgian, born in Baku. As a child, he was abandoned by his mother and was brought up on Sakhalin Island by his proud and solitary Georgian father. He lived in Moscow for one Khomizuri before he was arrested in Yerevan in 1982. But most importantly, he was a fierce warrior: Not once in the two hundred eighty-three million eight hundred twenty-four thousand seconds he had to spend in prison and exile by decree of the Soviet KGB did he regret his choices. He was sentenced to six years in a maximum-security prison and three years of internal exile. His fellow dissident Rafael Papayan was sentenced to four and two years, respectively. Under somewhat unclear circumstances, their third fellow dissident, Edgar, got away. Despite this fact, Zhora always spoke with respect of his vast knowledge. It’s interesting that in the Yerevan group, which consisted of two Armenians and one Georgian, the KGB unequivocally attributed its leadership to the anti-Soviet Georgian. As Zhora used to say, the KGB officers were people too, and they certainly knew Stalin’s worth, so they were good at guessing who would be the leader among the Christians from the Caucasus.
We, the Georgians and Armenians, had our own friendly collective: the Christian Federation of South Caucasian Nations. Actually, there was no need to use the word “Christian,” but a very bad man, Akhper Radzhabov, a spy who sold the technical drawings of the SS-20 missiles to the Americans in Yugoslavia, happened to be an Azerbaijani and, therefore, a South Caucasian. Hence, the word “Christian” served as a way to keep Radzhabov out of our Federation. And there was no possibility of exchanging him for a “good Azerbaijani” either because no one from Azerbaijan had been convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.
In the Federation, the level of financial integration wasn’t as high as in the Jewish Kibbutz (each of us could spend his five rubles as he saw fit), but once a month, when buying food in the prison store, some coordination among the members of the Federation did occur.
The Federation had its own Constitution, whose father and only author was Georgy Khomizuri. Naturally, there was a written text of the Constitution that Zhora had composed in Russian and that Rafael Papayan translated into Armenian and Levan Berdzenishvili into Georgian. (I offered to translate it into Latin and Ancient Greek as well, but this only infuriated Zhora—“It’s not a toy for you to play with. This is the Constitution, a serious document!”) All three texts existed only in the original versions that were in Zhora’s possession, though only the Russian and Georgian versions had legal status. Because Papayan had graduated from a Russian high school and the University of Tartu, Zhora didn’t trust his Armenian. According to the Constitution, an Elder was to be in charge of the Confederation (before Henrich Ovanesovich Altunyan’s transfer from Chistopol Prison, Zhora was the oldest person in the Federation), and only Georgy Pavlovich Khomizuri could be elected Elder. That’s exactly how it was written in the Constitution: “Only Georgy Pavlovich Khomizuri of Georgia, born February 9, 1942, in the city of Baku, qualifies as a candidate for the position of Elder. In the event Georgy Pavlovich Khomizuri should refuse to run for this position, the members of the Federation must elect him as Elder.” To support this not-so-democratic principle, some evidence was presented, such as the text of the Georgian folk song “Georgian, Take up Your Sword!” (or in Zhora’s translation, “Georgian, Take out Your Sword!”), and a few episodes from Stalin’s biography from the Tbilisi period, especially those moments that showed the relationship between Stalin, nicknamed Koba, and the Armenian Bolshevik Simon Ter-Petrosian, nicknamed Kamo, highlighting the strict subordination between those two not-so-law-abiding citizens, along with other equally convincing evidence.
According to the Federation’s Constitution, the election of the Elder should be preceded by a pre-election period, during which the candidate should bribe his voters with a cup of tea (one matchbox of black pekoe tea and one liter of water should be steeped for fifteen minutes in a thermos, then the tea should be “married”—that is, the tea should be poured into a cup and then back into the thermos three times, trying not to spill any. Only after this procedure does the tea attain its true taste) and one whole Prima cigarette, which was such a luxury the prisoners usually broke their cigarettes in two. In our prison store, Prima cigarettes were expensive—fifteen kopecks. For the same money, you could buy a box of makhorka, which had the ability to darken the lungs ten times faster per capita than a box of Primas. Therefore, it was a commonly-held opinion among the prisoners that makhorka was more efficient, more cost effective, and more practical.
Election day was on Sunday (an election was held every week or two Khomizuri times a year), and the Elder’s tea party, followed by the awarding of one Prima cigarette, took place every Saturday at 8 P.M., which brought our Saturday routine even closer to heaven: work until noon (sewing heavy-duty mitts with a thumb and a rubber palm pad); then the banya, or Russian sauna, with bowls and buckets, banya ladles and soap, not with showers and shampoo, like in Western prisons; then a movie (usually about Stalin, the Young Pioneers, Komsomol members, and Communists; although once, by mistake, they showed us Bergman’s Autumn Sonata); then the Elder’s tea party; and finally, the obligatory news broadcast Vremya, which covered rulings by the Politburo, combine harvesters, incessant earthquakes in Japan, and endless tornadoes in the US.
In 1986, our wonderful Saturday rituals were temporarily stopped when Zhora, along with some other prisoners, was transferred to solitary confinement in Saransk, the capital of Mordovia. The reason behind the transfer was simple: It was torture by milk and eggs, i.e., erosion—the psychological testing of a Soviet man by means of luxury and comfort.
These attempts to test Zhora were, however, bound to fail because from childhood, he couldn’t stand milk, and he had such a severe allergy to egg yolk that he couldn’t even touch a cookie. On the first day, when they brought some milk for Zhora and his cellmate, Mikhail Tolstykh from Petersburg, Zhora returned his glass saying that he didn’t drink milk. The whole next day, Tolstykh complained about Zhora’s selfishness: “Okay, you don’t drink milk, but I do!” Zhora acknowledged his mistake; but on the second day, he refused an egg, saying he was allergic. Tolstykh got upset once again: “You know, I don’t have that allergy!” At this point, Zhora lost his patience and told him: “It’s possible that for you, I might be able to ‘like’ milk, but don’t push me about eggs. First, this is a question of principle, and second, the cholesterol from two eggs a day is bad for your health.” Basically, they didn’t get along with each other—a principled and emotional Georgian and a cold, not-so-principled man from the banks of the Neva. They’d never been good friends, but after returning to the prison, they barely said hello to each other.
For a long time, I hadn’t known about Zhora’s egg allergy, which is not surprising—how would I have known that? It’s not like we were ever offered eggs or any other protein-filled crap. On October 23, 1986, I celebrated a big birthday, my thirty-third, and invited not only the five members of the South Caucasus Federation but also the “democrats”—Mikhail Polyakov from Leningrad, Vadim Yankov from Moscow, and Alexey Arenberg, the plane hijacker. The spread I managed to put together was fantastic: hot tea, five very small round candies for each guest, sandwiches with fish pâté on black thrice-baked bread, and, as Zachary, aka Johnny Lashkarashvili, would say, “the pièce de résistance of the evening”—Adjarian khachapuri baked in Grisha Feldman’s famous oven. Instead of flour, which is the main ingredient in khachapuri, I used my portion of a special May 9 white bread, which, after being scientifically dried for months, was beaten into a powder and mixed in with the dough. For the other ingredients, I used left-over butter that Johnny Lashkarashvili had been saving from his hospital ration for even rainier days, a piece of suluguni cheese that came in my five-kilogram parcel from Inga Karaya (after having served half our sentence, we were allowed to receive one parcel a year), and egg powder acquired in exchange for two packs of makhorka. When it was time to divide the khachapuri, Zhora received a piece with some egg and asked Arenberg to exchange it for his piece without any egg. When the latter categorically refused, Khomizuri boldly lied, saying that this dish was traditionally prepared with pork, making Arenberg, an Orthodox Jew, run from the table (to tell the truth, Zhora had never really liked him, and later we learned that Arenberg was a scumbag who had been helping the administration add more punishments to our friend, the most honorable Misha Rivkin). That’s how we learned about Zhora’s allergy. And after five minutes of deliberation, Polyakov and Yankov amicably divided Arenberg’s piece between themselves.
Zhora studied Georgian with a terrifying (I can’t think of another word for it) and unstoppable enthusiasm, but it didn’t come easily to him. Within a week, he’d learned how to read, and in a month, he was reading the Old Georgian Mrglovani and Nuskhuri scripts. The Mrglovani alphabet even inspired the creation of his own theory, in which, of course, the number twenty-six had special significance. With great zeal, he translated the Georgian poet Galaktion Tabidze, but it brought him a good deal of grief. He would often say that the translation wasn’t working—and who has ever truly succeeded in translating Tabidze—but then he would add in Georgian “Isev vdgebodi da mivdiodi” [Again I rose and set off], and return to his translation.5 He could recite Rustaveli in Zabolotsky’s Russian translation for hours—he’d had the book since his time in the Yerevan isolation unit and wouldn’t lend it to anyone. First, he would recite a passage in Russian:
Alas, O world, what would you? Why do you whirl us round—what is it that ails you? All who put their trust in you must weep unceasing tears, even as I do. You uproot, you carry off—whence? Aye, and whither? . . . But the man abandoned by you is not forsaken of God.6
And then he would add in Georgian: “Vakh, sopelo . . . ”
Zhora didn’t approve of the translation by Konstantin Balmont, even though he loved Balmont’s poetry. Zhora believed that Balmont’s translation was too exalted, and he was mad at Balmont for pretending that his place as a translator was next to Rustaveli himself. Zhora completely denounced the translation by Shalva Nutsubidze. He used to wonder how a historian of philosophy, or even a philosopher, could translate a poet. He would get upset and say that this translation was written in the Georgian Russian language, and that Satan’s hand (he meant Stalin’s) was definitely involved. Once I told Zhora a long story about Shalva Nutsubidze, his sister, Simon Kaukhchishvili (my wonderful teacher who told me the story in the first place), The Lord of the Panther-Skin, Stalin, and, of course, Lavrentiy Beria. The most provocative part of the story was not when Comrade Stalin approved Rustaveli’s Russian translation, saving both Shalva Nutsubidze and Simon Kaukhchishvili from imprisonment, nor was it when Lavrentiy Beria invited Georgian scientists, whom he’d saved from prison, to get wasted at his house. The most impressive part was when Shalva Nutsubidze, who was already quite drunk, left the manuscript of his translation of The Lord of the Panther-Skin at Beria’s apartment and had to go back for it. When the two Georgian academics returned to Comrade Beria’s to retrieve the book, a dumbfounded Beria uttered this historic statement: “I’ve seen a few people leave me on amicable terms, but this is the very first time I’ve seen people return here from a safe place of their own volition.”
Zhora was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Soviet, and so it was no surprise that he hated Stalin more than anyone else in the world. You could honestly say that Georgy Khomizuri’s allergy to the greatest leader of all times and nations, the father of the world proletariat, the generalissimo himself, was significantly stronger than his allergy to eggs.
Our prison terms had one very distinct feature. We weren’t serving time in the scary 1930s, during the war or at the height of the dissident movement, or even during the Brezhnev period of stagnation, but in the era of Soviet democracy, glasnost, and perestroika. While Stalinists were fighting it out on the pages of Pravda, the popular magazine Ogonek published the famous “Open Letter to Stalin” written by the well-known dissident Fyodor Raskolnikov. One day the TV would offer us the typical Soviet hogwash, then the next day, Ronald Reagan would be wishing us Happy New Year from the same screen. Experienced people said that, in those times, being in the camps was especially unbearable. I can’t say anything about it because I wasn’t incarcerated in that era, but I trust those more experienced prisoners.
In any case, we were doing our time in the era of glasnost and perestroika, and this era, like other important and exceptional ones, had its own liberal and enlightened heroes with a completely new image. Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin, a well-known reformer and liberal, was one such hero, whom we got to know from a very different perspective.
While giving a speech in our rec room, Comrade Bakatin, at that time the First Secretary of the Kirovsk Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and later the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Chairman of the KGB, annhilated the dissidents who had been convicted for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda but praised to the heavens the residents of our neighboring maximum security prison, who we called “stripes” (as they wore striped uniforms)—convicted felons, murderers, and robbers—saying that they were decent people, compared to us. At least, they were patriots who never uttered a word against their Motherland.
After this tirade by one of the heroes of perestroika, even the prison warden was frowning, but the holier-than-thou Comrade Bakatin stuck to his position and went on. Johnny Lashkarashvili got up first and suggested that Bakatin clean off the TV screen in our rec room, because “the General Secretary is looking very dark.” Only after that should he talk about love for the Motherland. But Bakatin, who couldn’t make out Johnny’s accent, said that he didn’t understand him. Then Zhora got up and screamed at the top of his lungs:
“Of course you feel closer to murderers and robbers—you’re masters of the same trade!”
A complete transformation came over the renowned liberal’s face. He turned pale (as Rustaveli would say, “went flat”), mumbled, “How dare you!” and ran out of the rec room followed by thunderous applause from the “democratic” portion of the prison. Of course, the spies, traitors to the Motherland, terrorists, and military criminals didn’t applaud, but there were enough of us “democrats” to overwhelm the small room with our ovation. The administration chased after their liberal guest who was so fond of the convicted felons, murderers, and robbers in the neighboring prison camp. But this future leader of the KGB and a giant of Gorbachev’s Soviet democracy, insulted and ashen, ran away so fast that neither the prison administration nor even the swift-footed Achilles could have caught him.
Comrade Bakatin hadn’t managed to get out of the prison when Sureykin, the warden-on-duty, called Zhora out of the barracks and started walking him toward the hole. The entire camp poured out of the rec room and watched Sureykin escort Zhora from our bad prison to an even worse one. At this point I lost my temper and approached Sureykin.
“What’s going on, Sureykin?” I asked the warden-on-duty, who was taken aback. He wasn’t used to being questioned by prisoners—this level of rudeness was unheard of—not to mention being addressed by his surname rather than his title, “Citizen Warden.”
The camp “democrats” surrounded us.
“I’m taking Georgy Khomizuri to isolation for punishment,” Major Sureykin replied; taken off guard, he answered by the book.
“What for?” I asked.
“For rudeness,” Sureykin answered.
“Major Sureykin, you and Bakatin don’t know what real rudeness is. Pay attention, you will hear some real rudeness now,” I warned him. “Sureykin, you’re a motherf—.”
Sureykin and the guards Kiselyov and Trifonov, who happened to be nearby, hurried Zhora to the hole and then hurried back to take me there as well. They were so fast that my friends didn’t even have time to get my warm clothes. There were no vacancies in the hole, so they had to put Zhora and me in the same cell. The other cell was occupied by a frequent guest, Vitautas Shabonas. They couldn’t put anyone else in Shabonas’s cell because he was engaged in a very dangerous activity—all day long Shabonas would tirelessly and loudly pass on information about us political prisoners to Bakatin’s favorite prison camp, followed by political demands: “Freedom to the Lithuanian civil right activists Algirdas Andeikas, Yanis Barkans, and Vitautas Skuodis! Freedom to the Georgian independence fighters David and Levan Berdzenishvili, and Zachary Lashkarashvili!”
How could they have one of us share a cell with such a man? We would’ve been a bad influence on him.
Sometime later, and with great pleasure, the warden showed me Major Sureykin’s report. It was such a marvel that even those purveyors of Soviet absurdism Zoshchenko and Kharms would have envied it. I don’t remember everything, but the episode with me and Zhora went approximately like this: “While fulfilling my duties, specifically while escorting Georgy Pavlovich Khomizuri (a Georgian, born in 1942 in the city of Baku, convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda) to the solitary confinement wing, I was approached by Levan Valeriyanovich Berdzenishvili, a Georgian, born in 1953 in the city of Batumi, convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, who rudely addressed me, specifically using the following words: ‘Sureykin, you’re a motherf—.’ I concluded that he did this for the purpose of insulting me—considering the fact that Georgians swear for that purpose only. Because of that incident, we sentenced Levan Valeriyanovich Berdzenishvili, born in 1953 in the city of Batumi, Georgia, to the isolation unit for fifteen days in accordance with the rights bestowed upon me by the law.” Thanks to Zhora, the whole prison knew Sureykin’s report by heart.
After his release, Zhora visited Tbilisi several times to see us. We met his family—his wife Nina, daughter Masha, and son Pavlik. Our families were quickly infected by our friendship. The Khomizuris planned to move to Tbilisi, and their son Pavlik was especially eager—he loved the city and loved calling himself a Georgian. Unfortunately, his plan was not meant to be. Fate struck Zhora again in the cruelest way—at the age of thirteen, Pavlik passed away, and his daughter Masha became a nun.
A die-hard atheist (in the words of his beloved Rustaveli, “a wise man,” that is, one who doesn’t accept divine love of the heavenly sort), a materialist body and soul, a man of numbers and formulas, a professor of geology and mineralogy, Georgy Pavlovich Khomizuri, at the ripe age of two Khomizuris plus two, in order to support his struggle for Georgian identity, was baptized as an Orthodox Christian at the small Church of the Trinity in Tbilisi. Those in attendance—a godfather (yours truly) and a priest—were almost a half-Khomizuri younger than him. And this happened, of course, on August 26, i.e, on the Khomizuri of August, in the eighth, i.e., in the twenty-sixth (2+6=8) month of the year.
3 The Baku Municipality was a temporary communist government established in April 1918 in the capital of Azerbaijan. The twenty-six “Commissioners of the People” who ruled the municipality were all shot on September 20 by counterrevolutionary forces in highly disputed circumstances; the story became part of Soviet mythology.
4 Koba, shortened from the name of the Persian king Kobades, was one of Stalin’s pseudonyms, and ne means “non” or “not” in Russian.
5 This verse was taken from a poem by Tabidze of April 19, 1923, “Me ertaderti mkonda c’ukhili” [I only have but one complaint], which was composed at the time of the popular guerrilla war against the Bolshevik invasion that ended the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia led by Noe Zhordania.
6 Rustaveli, Shota. The Lord of the Panther-Skin. Translated by R.H. Stevenson, State University of New York Press, 1977, p. 114.