It’s 6 A.M. on June 23, 1983. We’re at home, at 17 Vedzini Street, Tbilisi. There are three of us—my wife Inga, my brother Dato, and I. All of us are sleeping. There are two staircases in our building: One leads to the landing we share with our next-door neighbors, the Yashvilis, and the other leads to the landing we share with the Kochoradzes. Our window faces this staircase, and I can hear some commotion coming from beneath the window. This noise wakes me up. From the window, I can see the Kochoradzes’ staircase and the silhouettes of several serious-looking men. I quickly get dressed and wake up my wife. Meanwhile, we hear a cautious knock on our door.
I try to wake up Dato, but it’s not a simple task. He came home late last night, usually sleeps very deeply, and in general doesn’t like to get up early. He opens his eyes, but there is no reaction to my words: “Get up!” Then I say the magic phrase—“They’re here!”—and he understands everything. I open the door, and about six people burst into our apartment while another six secure the staircase. Only twenty seconds have passed between my waking up and this invasion. The lightning speed alongside the prosaic, businesslike character of these events gave everything a surreal quality. What we’d been expecting for so many years had finally happened—just like waiting for death. And after that, our life-after-death began. The Georgian State Security drew a line that fractured our lives, dividing them into two periods—before and after 6 A.M. on June 23, 1983.
Colonel Gersamia was in charge of the uninvited guests. I already knew this man—he’d interrogated me once before. World history knows many famous brothers—Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Auguste Louis Marie Nicholas and Louis Jean Lumière, George and Andria Balanchivadze, the Kennedy brothers, the brothers Karamazov, Rocco and his brothers . . . but modern Georgian society knows only the Gersamia brothers.
In Soviet Georgia, these brothers had their own family business: One brother worked in the KGB, and the other was a judge. One brother arrested the criminals, and the other sentenced them—he had a strong preference for capital punishment. And there was no conflict of interest. Up to their last breath, both brothers boasted about their joint efforts, how together, hand in hand, they arrested and executed people, and that if they had the chance, they’d do it again and again—arresting and executing. After discharging their duties, they went proudly, hand in hand, into the next world. Their “glorious work” reached its peak in the eighties.
Such was the evil spirit that flew into our family home on the morning of June 23, 1983, presenting a search warrant and introducing us to two witnesses—who are the subject of a separate conversation. They lived in the far-off neighborhood of Saburtalo and, independently from each other, happened to be on a walk at six in the morning near Mtatsminda, where the KGB taskforce asked them to be witnesses to a search.
We’d waited for our arrest just as one waits for death, not seeing any life afterward, so when the uninvited guests came and proceeded to search our apartment, the fact that we were still alive came as a surprise and made us laugh. The shock and fear went away and our courage and sense of self-esteem returned and increased gradually in the presence of those people who, in carrying out their jobs, were so far from truth and honor simply because the very business they were in was so disgraceful.
They took Dato away while the search was still underway. Digging through our books for two hours without any result, these responsible and competent officers failed to uncover anything—I mean, if we were awaiting our arrest, why would we have kept any material evidence at home? By the end of their search, all they could find were two “scary” books—Grigol Robakidze’s The Snake’s Skin and Irakli Abashidze’s book about Khruschev’s travels through India, which the old Stalinist Gersamia considered anti-Soviet. I couldn’t help but laugh, which made the colonel mad: “What are you laughing about? Do you think this is a time for levity for you brothers?” I think he was mentally comparing us, unworthy brothers, to “the esteemed Gersamia brothers.”
“Why? Can’t I laugh? Do I need to ask permission from the man who thinks that Irakli Abashidze’s book is anti-Soviet?” I asked, continuing to chuckle.
“Now, young man, get dressed and follow us, if you please,” the colonel commanded with an expression on his face that was very easy to decipher. One could read an entire sentence on this long-serving executioner’s face—a somewhat modernized version of the final line of Florian’s fable: He who arrests last laughs best.
They kept Dato until evening in the office of the head of the KGB’s department of investigation, where the following individuals were present—the department head, Alexander Mirianashvili, the investigator Gia Tsintsadze, and a Russian Chekist from Perm. At 8 P.M. Dato was transferred to a cell in the basement with two other inmates. One of them was a young man arrested in connection with the “Jewish case”—a high-profile case that shocked the entire Soviet Union in the spring of 1983, when a whole army of Jewish businessmen were arrested throughout the country, unleashing fantastic rumors that they had exported all the Soviet Union’s gold to Israel and filling the public imagination with new pearls of anti-Semitic Chekist folklore. The second inmate was a career criminal who’d already served nine years and liked to point out that it wasn’t him but his partner who had cut off the head of their third accomplice. Later, the same gentleman happened to end up in a cell with Johnny Lashkarashvili. The presence of such a criminal in the KGB infirmary was strange, to say the least, and Dato, despite his youth, instantly figured this inmate out. In their cell, Dato undertook a traditional Georgian occupation—teaching, beginning with a series of lectures on the history of Georgia (in similar circumstances I would lecture on Latin and Greek mythology).
The series of daily interrogations began, but the results were upsetting. Over the course of six months, the KGB, with its team of investigators, couldn’t get answers to any of its questions in the David Berdzenishvili case. Bravely and of his own free will, Dato claimed the right to be silent, a right that the state would grant its citizens only twenty years later. My brother never boasted about it. No one ever heard him say anything like: You know how brave I am. The KGB couldn’t make me talk for six months!
Dato would come to all the interrogations, but he would answer only two questions:
“Are you going to give any evidence?”
“No.”
“Are you going to provide an explanation for why you’re refusing to talk?”
“No.”
Once, his investigator, who had almost given up on my brother, asked him only for the sake of protocol whether Dato had anything new to say, and Dato answered yes, that he had some news. The investigator grew excited, gave Dato a cigarette, cleared his desk, and took out a pen to write down “the news.” Dato then told him he had a toothache. At that moment, he saw the real face of the usually polite and “kind” KGB officer.
To verify his suspicion about his cellmate, Dato used a simple test: He gave his cellmate obvious disinformation, and when in the course of an interrogation the investigator mentioned that nonsense, his suspicion was confirmed. The Chekists had to transfer their criminal informant from the cell. Before that episode, neither Dato nor his provocateur cellmate had slept for ten days. The KGB treated those they arrested and their own agents with equal cruelty, especially when one witty and intrepid inmate was able to uncover their agent.
When it was time for us to be transported, all the founders of the Georgian Republican Party—Vakhtang Dzabiradze, Vakhtang Shonia, and Levan and David Berdzenishvili—were sent as a group to the Rostov prison. After Rostov, we were separated: The two Vakhtangs were sent to Perm, while Dato and I went to Dubravlag in Mordovia. After our arrival in Barashevo, my role as the responsible older brother was established. My main task was to keep the young and rebellious Dato out of trouble, but I can’t say that I achieved any real success in that mission.
The workday in prison began at seven in the morning and lasted until four in the afternoon. Most inmates used the lunchtime as a marker—one o’clock in the dining hall. We all tried to finish our daily quota by then because that way we would have free time after lunch, which we could use to prepare ourselves for our future freedom—by writing letters, reading books, creating an illusion of privacy, and reflecting. Some inmates saw the workshop as a real hell. It’s true that the job of a sewing machine operator required certain skills, and for people lacking such talent, handling a sewing machine was a very challenging business. Zhora Khomizuri, who hated sewing machines, our workshop, and everything associated with collective labor, suffered most acutely in our prison. In his opinion, the sewing workshop—its unheard-of cruelty, the horrifying nightmare of it all—was created by Chekists to get even with dissidents for their days and years spent with a typewriter.
“It’s simple,” Zhora used to say. “A typewriter, a typing machine, a machine . . . from that machine to a sewing machine . . . an eye for an eye, a machine for a machine—this is their diabolical and well-thought-out plan. I think this idea could have only come from Beria. Even Stalin couldn’t have come up with something so evil!” Zhora continued without showing any pity for his fellow countrymen.
From the beginning, Dato didn’t like sewing very much. So he told me that I’d have to complete his quota since he’d never be able to master the skill and would have to spend all his time in solitary. But then he began watching experienced sewers. He learned from Polyakov how to concentrate on the work, he picked up different sewing tips from Papayan, he learned organizational skills from Anadenko, and he figured out the secret of attaching the thumb of the mitt with the help of Butov. As a result, my brother eventually became a very skillful sewing machine operator.
Dato sewed very fast. The sewing experts—Butov, Anadenko, and Papayan—were able to finish one hundred pairs by noon. Sometimes I could keep up with them, but Dato broke all the records and finished his quota by 11 A.M. As he explained, the mitts he produced were not of the highest quality (“I sewed on the borderline of the rejects,” he explained), but they were within the norm. One day Dato outdid himself, significantly improving on his own record. When at 10:15 A.M. he finished his quota and stopped working, the sweatshop ex-champion, Odessa dissident Pyotr Butov, submitted a written complaint to the prison administration, claiming that Berdzenishvili-junior was turning out low-quality products. Butov was a real Soviet dissident, and as such he upheld Soviet laws and took a personal interest in the quality of the products the inmates manufactured for their Motherland. I must mention here that at the same time that we were working in the sweatshop, next to us in the female political prison ZhKh 385/3-4, the women inmates were doing the same; as our invisible neighbor, the renowned Russian poetess and dissident Irina Ratushinskaya recounted in her book Grey Is the Color of Hope; they were very concerned about the quality of their products—because the simple Russian people, builders not Chekists, would be using their work mitts.
As any inmate who respects himself and others would do, Pyotr Butov provided Dato with a copy of his complaint. Inmate Butov operated openly and, as he believed, honestly.
All the political prisoners in Barashevo were very confused by Butov’s unexpected action—lodging an official complaint. The “democrats” broke into two groups: One faction, led by Anadenko, justified Butov’s action. The other faction saw his complaint as a denunciation of one prisoner by another and considered such an act immoral and unacceptable. Zhora Khomizuri, an elder in the Christian Federation of South Caucasian Nations, was in charge of the second faction, which sought to protect the moral code of the inmates, and his position was very strict. In a speech, he even mentioned the poet Nekrasov and his famous lines: “You do not have to be a poet, but you are obliged to be a citizen.” However, in order to shame his opponents, he changed the lines to: “You do not have to be a Chekist, but you are obliged to be a snitch.”
Being referred to as a Chekist and a snitch upset Butov tremendously. He considered it a capital offense and for a long time broke off all contact with us, the inmates from the Caucasus. This event found its proper place even in Barashevo’s language: Johnny Lashkarashvili, a big fan of linguistic experimentation, suggested the Georgian neologism butiny to commemorate the controversy surrounding Butov’s complaint. The phrase “It’s a butiny!” became especially popular.
The Odessa dissident and patron of the largest underground anti-Soviet library, Pyotr Butov, couldn’t have predicted the consequences of his actions—as the seed of this destructive complaint had been thrown into very fertile soil. Even before these events, the prison administration had given Dato the cold shoulder—we felt it as soon as we arrived at the prison. The local administration was heavily influenced by the Georgian KGB, which couldn’t forgive Dato for his six-month silence at the pretrial detention center when he refused to give any testimony, driving the Chekists mad. Representatives of the Georgian KGB also visited us in Barashevo, “warmly welcoming us,” then, so as not to give the wrong idea, openly threatened us by saying that our case was not over yet. “Gorbachev and Shevarnadze come and go, but the KGB was, is, and always will be!” The KGB was not a frequent visitor to our prison. Only a few were so honored, and after their visit our “political capital” in the prison instantly increased. (Later, the KGB would honor the Petersburger Misha Polyakov with a visit.) It was the Chekists who explained to the prison warden, Major Shalin, that despite a relatively light punishment, the founders of the Georgian Republican Party, especially the younger Berdzenishvili, were very dangerous people and warranted special attention and supervision. The administration reacted to Butov’s unusual missive and assigned someone named Flor Vasilievich to the case.
Flor Vasilievich was a free man. Nevertheless, for years, without budging, he’d worked in our sweatshop alongside the inmates. He had a God-given, unalienable right, which gradually turned into an obligation as the years went by. Every night he would leave the prison, buy a half-liter of the cheapest vodka, go to his one-room cell in an apartment building on the other side of the prison gate, and drink half of his vodka alone, while snacking on half a pickle. After that, he would think about the vanity of this world, asking himself about the meaning of life, only to search and fail to find a satisfying answer. Such deliberations would tire him, and he’d fall asleep right there at the table, only to be woken up the next morning by the radio and that enemy of sweet Morpheus, the unrelenting anthem in a major key. This anthem was created in 1943 through a collaboration between the composer Alexander Alexandrov and the poets Sergey Mikhalkov and Gabriel El-Registan. Later in 1977, the anthem was revised by the same Sergey Mikhalkov. The revisions undertaken by the renowned author and father of two filmmakers consisted entirely of removing Stalin’s name from the lyrics.
With the anthem blaring, Flor Vasilievich would wake up, eat the remaining half of his pickle, and go straight to the prison to wash his face in the “smoke shack” along with the inmates. Then, at half past six, again with the inmates, he’d drink the special prison tea, also called government tea or the tea of the people’s commissars, which was, more precisely, just boiling water with the color of tea, and he would never miss the free breakfast. Flor Vasilievich had his breakfast, lunch, and dinner with us inmates, and he wore the same clothes we did, the same boots and foot cloths. In this way, he managed to save “big” money, which he spent on everyday necessities—makhorka, matches, and vodka. Flor Vasilievich was undoubtedly a happy man. He organized his life so well that he didn’t want for food, drink, or interaction with interesting people, he had a completely sufficient degree of freedom, and he didn’t exhaust himself with overly agonizing reflections on the meaning of life.
In the ZhKh 385/5-3 prison, Flor Vasilievich was the head of the Technical Quality Control Department. We inmates sewed mitts for construction workers, and Flor Vasilievich checked their quality. For that he would take a mitt and check whether the stitches were at the permitted distance from the edge and of the proper length (the longer the stitch, the faster the mitt could be made), whether the distance between the two parallel seams fell within the permitted distance, whether the rubber palm was correctly sewn on, and whether the thumb had been properly attached. From a stack of ninety-three pairs, he’d take three or four of these work mitts, measure everything with a ruler, and if he found no unlawful deviations, he’d affix a seal and move on to the next stack. If it happened by chance that he found a defect, he’d mark the entire stack as rejected and the worker wouldn’t make his quota. And that was Flor Vasilievich’s entire job.
On the third day after Butov’s complaint, Flor Vasilievich meticulously examined Dato’s pile and rejected it. My sewing machine was strategically situated: From my workspace, I could easily observe Dato, Dmitro Mazur at his layout machine, our pattern shop, and, most importantly, Flor Vasilievich. So, as soon as he rejected Dato’s pile, throwing the mitts on the floor, I quickly made my way to the technical quality control shop. I tried to get there before Dato, fearing that my brother, with his unrestrained behavior, might attack Flor Vasilievich and make a real mess of things.
“What’s the problem, Flor Vasilievich?” I asked, trying to remain as calm and polite as possible.
“I’m very glad you came by instead of your brother,” Flor Vasilievich said happily, realizing that his conversation with Dato wouldn’t have been easy.
“What does he want?” asked Dato, who had suddenly shown up in the shop. The inmates began to gather around us.
“Stay out of it, Dato,” I said, warning my brother. “I’ll take care of it calmly and quietly.”
“The quality of the work mitts produced by inmate Berdzenishvili does not satisfy the technical requirements,” Flor declared with a phrase that he had probably spent all night memorizing. “That’s why I can’t accept his stack.”
The administration’s plan was simple: Flor wouldn’t accept Dato’s quota today, or tomorrow, or ever. For not fulfilling his quota, Dato would be denied the right to shop in the prison store, then to see his family, then they’d transfer him to solitary, and from there—to a maximum-security prison. Then, finally, he’d receive an additional sentence. I clearly saw this path etched on Flor Vasilievich’s face.
“Why are you doing this, Flor Vasilievich? My brother is almost a child, don’t you have children of your own?” I asked, raising my voice.
“The quality of the work mitts produced by inmate Berdzenishvili does not satisfy the technical requirements,” Flor said, repeating the unforgettable phrase in a shriller voice.
“And I’m telling you that my brother’s mitts satisfy the technical requirements,” I said in a voice that I wasn’t especially fond of—you could clearly hear in it the metallic tones of the Caucasus region.
“Here, see for yourself,” Flor said, giving me one of Dato’s work mitts, on which the two seams were . . . well, not exactly parallel.
“What is the permitted distance between the seams?” I asked.
“From two to five millimeters,” Flor declared victoriously.
“Can I borrow your ruler, Flor Vasilievich?”
“Please,” Flor said happily because now the conversation was turning away from the touchy subjects of children and morals to that of technical details, where he was like a fish in water.
Flor brought a ruler and measured the mitt. Then he took another one from the pile and measured again. Then another one. And another. For half an hour Flor measured the work mitts, trying to find an obvious flaw. An unimaginable miracle was happening right before our eyes: All the work mitts produced by Dato met the technical requirements even though at first glance none of them appeared to be sewn correctly.
A weight fell from my shoulders. Now they wouldn’t be able to increase Dato’s sentence. The KGB was powerless. I thought that we were actually following our father’s parting words, which he said to us during our trial (making the judge very angry): “Try your hardest not to get your sentences increased!” And here we were. We had listened to him and we were trying!
The situation calmed down, and when everyone decided that the incident was over, I gathered the mitts that, as it turned out, were correctly made, rolled them into a huge and heavy ball, and literally, without any metaphors, threw them at Flor Vasilievich’s head.
Polyakov and Khomizuri dragged me out of the workshop. Flor Vasilievich ran to the administration building and submitted a complaint to the effect that “Berzenishvili-senior threatened to kill my children and then hit me on the head with his younger brother’s products.”
This incident had the following consequences:
I was denied the right to use the prison store.
Both Dato and I were denied the right to ask for up to two rubles a month to spend on stationery supplies, such as postage stamps, envelopes, notebooks, pens, pencils, and erasers.
It was explained to Flor Vasilievich that his children were never in any danger, especially since he didn’t have any.
Pyotr Butov came and brought us a bottle of sunflower oil, as if to say that since you were denied the right to use the prison store, please, take my modest contribution. He never apologized to Dato.
Khomizuri and Anadenko, after long discussions, achieved a compromise: In the future, any inmate’s complaint involving another inmate must be submitted first to the all-inmate secret committee.
Dato began boasting endlessly about how well he sewed his work mitts, and he carried this rather dubious belief with him into the next millennium.
My brother had always been a rebel. It was his idea to start fighting for the right to compose letters in our native language, which we won after a long struggle and began sending letters home in Georgian. Obviously, everyone could exercise this right, and this is how the political prisoners began to correspond in their native languages.
In our prison, the number of visits was strictly regulated. In the course of a year, we were allowed one personal visit from one to three days and two two-hour-long visits around a table with a guard present. Once my wife arrived for a two-hour-long visit and was allowed to see both of us. Dato immediately began fighting for double the time—that is, to extend our meeting from two hours to four because there were two of us, and each of us had a right to his own two hours. He even threatened that if the administration denied the request and our rights were not observed, we’d refuse the visit. We won this battle, even though I was very afraid that they’d cancel our visit altogether, and my poor Inga would leave Barashevo without seeing me. That’s what had happened to Zhora Khomizuri’s wife, Nina Melkumova.
My wife never missed any visits. All my family members used to come to visit us—our mother, my elder brother and his wife, as well as my wife’s brother and sister. As a rule, my elder brother Fridon (aka Mamuka, aka Fore) would bring the entire group to Barashevo.
In another fight initiated by Dato, we established the right not to sweep the prison grounds with a broom, even though the administration had the right to demand this from the inmates. Even on his last day in prison, Dato started a fight. When the guards wanted to transport him quietly to Tbilisi, he demanded to say good-bye to me, and he won.
The year my brother Dato spent in Barashevo was a year of many battles and skirmishes. The administration, after adding the classic line “the inmate did not mend his ways” to his record, demanded that Dato be kept under police supervision. So, after Dato had served his time, he was denied the right to live in Tbilisi, and with that the KGB blessed him with new battles. A political leader emerged from those battles—a man who was able, on his own as a member of the small Republican Party of Georgia, to be nominated as a representative of the city of Batumi, win the election, and become a member of the Georgian Parliament. His signature, along with those of other representatives, can be found at the bottom of the Act of Independence of the Republic of Georgia.
From prison, Dato was transferred to the capital of the Mordovian ASSR, the city of Saransk, and then, escorted by three officers, he was taken to Moscow by plane. In Lefortovo Prison, he was thrown into a huge cell and left there alone. Dato finally walked out a free man from the KGB isolation unit in Tbilisi. By that time, he weighed one hundred thirty pounds. He was so skinny that when he made it home, our friend didn’t recognize him and began asking my wife about Dato in his presence: When is he coming back?
The day Dato walked free in Tbilisi—I didn’t have any supporting evidence, but I sensed that it had happened—I brewed some very strong tea in a special one-liter thermos using my remaining tea supply, made wonderful sandwiches with Volna fish pâté, and invited guests to the feast. Zhora Khomizuri was the toastmaster and Misha Polyakov, Heliy Donskoy, Borya Manilovich, Johnny Lashkarashvili, Rafik Papayan, and Vadim Yankov were in attendance. Pyotr Butov came without an invitation and apologized. That day, June 21, 1985, was very special for another reason. In a certain sense, I, too, was set free on that day—free from the responsibility for my brother. I spent an additional year and a half in the Barashevo prison after that.