AN EXHIBITION OF ACHIEVEMENTS

TBILISI, Tiflis

Books on Soviet Georgia – “the Italy of the Caucasus”, with its great food, hospitality, archaeology, architecture, landscape and laid-back attitude to graft – liked to claim that it has 360 days of sunshine a year. The week I spent in the Georgian capital in January 2015 just happened to be on the exact seven days that the weather was overcast, damp and clammy, without the crisp, clear (if easily lethal) quality of the winters in Georgia’s overbearing northern neighbour. My experience of the city was perhaps irrevocably affected by this; a city literally cast in an unflattering light. Tbilisi is an exciting city, full of daring and precipitous townscape, heroic infrastructure, and a brusque yanking together of the ancient and futuristic. It is energetic – “vibrant”, to use the estate agent euphemism, with real street life, great bookshops and bookstalls, street art, cafes, and this being Georgia, amazing food; in short, it boasts all the fruity things that Minsk will never have, and had them in the Soviet Union, too, though no doubt to a lesser extent. An enormous gap between the rich and poor is a nearly totally ubiquitous feature of the former Soviet Union, whether you’re in affluent Tallinn, middling Yekaterinburg or impoverished Chișinău. But I have never seen anywhere where the gap was so enormous and at such close proximity as in Tbilisi. At times, the city is genuinely shocking – a modern surface that suddenly and frequently opens a portal into hell. This seldom gets mentioned in descriptions of the city, which I can only put down to the effect of the sunshine. A series of starchitect baubles have been placed atop an unnerving self-build dystopia which had been built on top of a functional Soviet city which had been built around a romantic Asian city of galleried houses piled on top of each other up a mountain. That is all unique, but the way that the effects of social and economic collapse and glassy architecture magazine megaprojects overlay and intensify each other is something that could happen to anywhere. In Tbilisi, Western Europeans might think they’re seeing something exotic and untamed and local, but it’s likely that what they’re actually seeing is the near future of their own cities, what will happen to them when planning dies, when wars become endless, when migrants are left to fend for themselves, but with the affluent carving out their own spaces in the same fabric. Tbilisi railway station, rebuilt in the 1980s, is a partially renovated example of the late-Soviet-futurist genre, a cantilevered cruiser-like curved concrete volume on top of a low entrance pavilion, which has recently had a shopping mall placed into it. In that volume on top you can also find a small hotel. Staying in it is quite the experience, as the windows of the cheaper rooms look out not onto the street outside, but into the mall itself, with its multiple levels of dubious Chinese goods and questionable cures. Outside here is a quite normal large Soviet city of wide streets and mixed use retail/apartment buildings with Neoclassical dressing; there are a lot of broken bilingual neon signs in Georgian and Russian on the buildings, which date the shops to before 1991.

Outside Tbilisi Station

A sprawling market spreads itself out here all the way to the boulevard of David Aghmashenebeli Street; when you reach the junction with it, the market descends into the colonnades of one of the Stalinist street blocks, and people stand behind desks with random choppings of animals bleeding into the wood – a red lamb chop here, a severed sheep’s head there. Flies flit around them. But then, as you turn onto the grand boulevard, very suddenly everything changes. By which I mean, everything. The streets are properly paved, the buildings are clean, the shops are international, the vistas are clear. You have walked around three yards between these two places. It’s like teleporting.

David Aghmashenebeli Street has a clutch of art nouveau buildings and eclectic-style hotels and theatres, similar in their florid style to those in Kutaisi, but bigger, and commanding much larger public spaces. They have been so heavily restored, with their metalwork buffed and the masonry painted more often than cleaned, that it feels almost as extreme in its wealth and cleanliness as the teeming market just round the corner does in its poverty. By McDonalds, it expands out into the lavish Stalinist Marjanishvili Square, enclosed by two huge, identical flanking blocks of hotel rooms, shops and high-end offices and retail, with decorative towers, airy open galleries and spacious colonnades on the ground floor. It makes very clear that a gap between those at the top and those at the bottom is by no means a recent, neoliberal invention in this city.

After the square, the scale is closer to Kutaisi, with little apartment buildings in the various styles available to the late-nineteenth-century bourgeois architect in the Russo-Persian-Ottoman borderlands, alternately Neoclassical, Baroque, Turkish or some combination of these. Inserted into that street are two very indicative monuments; one block which is a direct copy of the Old England department store in Brussels, a florid black wrought-iron block whose projecting bay almost resembles the cantilevered wooden terraces and balconies you see on the older, eclectic buildings; the other unusual block is the former House of Political Education, a standard modernist box which has been enlivened by a multicoloured smalti mosaic in orange, blue and green, an abstract jungle of geometric foliage. Astonishingly, it was designed in the 1970s by Zurab Tsereteli, now best known for his ridiculous monumental sculptures in Neoclassical-Disney style, such as the Peter the Great statue on the Moskva river that we have already encountered. There are other early works by the artist in the city, and they show a deeply unexpected shift in official art from free, light, colourful abstraction under Brezhnev to pompous, figurative monumentalism under neoliberal capitalism.

Stalinist planning, modern living

And then… it stops again. The houses are beaten up and bent, the paint is flaking off, the balconies are dangling, the pavements are broken. It makes no sense whatsoever. A piece of graffiti reads “BON JOVI”. A cafe in the only restored building (again, so heavily that it looks unreal) calls itself “EURO MAIDAN”. We’re back in the Street of Crocodiles. And then, suddenly, as you cross the bridge over the River Kura, you spot a massive new building, a series of glass blocks with wilting, petal-like roofs kept up by spindly concrete columns, something that has given rise to the nickname “the Mushrooms”. This is a large Public Service Centre, to the design of the Italian starchitect Massimiliano Fuksas. Architecturally, the shift is, again, nosebleedingly sudden – poverty into Euro-Muscovite wealth into poverty again into something faintly resembling contemporary Maastricht. It also reveals something unexpected about Saakashvili’s architectural programme – the Euromimicry which continues after his departure. The Public Service Halls, of which several were built across Georgia, are civic centres, combining under one roof libraries, courts, advice centres, as part of the effort to show a public face of government that isn’t corrupt, slow-moving, obstructive, intimidating, Soviet.

Tsereteli, the early years

Many places in the post-Soviet space could seriously do with such a project. For all his neoliberal market-knows-best politics – which included harsh labour laws, the dismantlement of what little social safety net survived from the USSR, flat taxes which benefit the wealthy, and privatisation of public services – Saakashvili’s projects were, without exception, state-driven. This is mostly because, with a major exception that we will come to, oligarchic capital is not so much a presence in a country that mostly lacks the abundance of resources that has allowed a parallel First World infrastructure to emerge for the extremely rich in Russia. Saakashvili, just like the dictators around him, recognised that the state can act where business can’t, here. So the civic centre in Tbilisi by Fuksas serves some sort of useful purpose underneath the biomimicry of its fussy engineering. I can’t comment on its functional success, but as a building this riverside complex is a reasonably convincing approximation of an Award-Winning Contemporary Building, based on computer-aided engineering allowing a series of long glass volumes overlapping each other to be sheltered only by what appears to the eye to be thin concrete supports propping up flopping roofs, like teflon jellyfish.

On this side of the river is Rustaveli Avenue, the other main flat street in a city which is otherwise defined by extreme topography; it was laid out specifically as the colonial city centre in the nineteenth century, and was originally known as Golovin Avenue, after the local Tsarist commander-in-chief. For Georgi Chakhava, the designer of Tbilisi’s most interesting twentieth-century building, this place is a mistake, an example of “Steppe Urbanism”¹, wide and straight and level, in a city whose historic centre, as we’ll soon see, is defined by galleried houses stepping across precipitous slopes. What Chakhava describes as the properties of the steppe are of course the properties of mainstream European urbanism, and it is not a value judgement, or an assent to Russia’s clearly colonial approach to Georgia over the last two hundred years, to point out that until the last few years, “Europe” has come to Georgia almost solely via Russia. Either way, Rustaveli does what it is meant to do very well, standing as the exemplary governmental street of a capital city with the appropriate confidence and grandeur, and because of the city’s complex history, it achieves this without homogeneity, but rather a series of exciting experiments in style, none of which dominate the others. It begins at Freedom Square, where one of those Biblical figures on a gilded column that for some reason are considered symbolic of freedom in the post-Soviet space (this one by, of course, Zurab Tsereteli) stands in front of the polychrome brickwork of the City Hall – which was built as the office of the Viceroy of the Caucasus in the Russian colonial period. The buildings around include a luxury mall, a bank that was once robbed by the Young Stalin, and a hole where a 1960s glass building was. The hole has exposed something unexpected at the back of a grand classical apartment block: every available surface has been covered with balcony extensions, one atop the other, to the point where there is a second layer of building atop the original. The effect is a stage set where at one corner someone has violently torn down the curtain.

Public service spectacle

The rest of Rustaveli is as “normal” as Tbilisi gets, with only some disquieting moments. There is an opera house in a late-nineteenth-century Orientalist style, there is a Stalinist cinema that could be anywhere from Kaunas to Bishkek; there is the former Marx-Engels Institute, a design by Alexey Shchusev that was saved by a preservation campaign only to be – in current plans – transformed into the entrance to a thirty-storey speculative tower – and there is the old parliament, marked by a giant order portico of thin stripped classical columns; in front of that is a moving memorial to those killed in the 9 April 1989 protests, a Georgian nationalist demonstration that was attacked by Soviet troops, who killed one woman, causing a stampede that killed nineteen more people. The memorial evokes the crush, through a square of arms pressed together; it is an unusually subtle and disturbing image for the usually more sentimental “victims of Communism” genre – until you spot that there’s a stylised angel just behind it. Opposite is an excellent National Museum and a poor Museum of Communism, which somehow manages to discuss the Sovietisation of Georgia while seldom ever mentioning the name of Josef Stalin (he is still distressingly popular round these parts). At the end of Rustaveli you can find one of the city’s few 1920s buildings, a printing house which is a basic asymmetric Constructivist block with pointed arches to the windows to indicate that you’re in the Orient. The National Museum has much more interesting contributions from the 1920s Georgian avant-garde, with a small but significant selection of reliefs and paintings by little-known artists. The gaps between buildings offer a view of the hilltop TV tower, a spindly spike on stilts, and a Stalinist viewing gallery, much photographed in the 1930s as an image of Soviet luxury.

Rustaveli Avenue rear end

Constructivist Orientalism

At the end of Rustaveli, the scale leaps up into three huge buildings: one is the most interesting of Tbilisi’s Art Nouveau structures, arranged around stone swags and silver domes; and in the same warm yellow stone is the grandest of the city’s Stalinist buildings, the Academy of Sciences, which rises to a towering spike, once capped by a Red Star, and though that was removed, there’s no mistaking the period. Like many Stalinist buildings it shows a complete mastery of disparate forms (a little Orientalism, a little classicism, a Gothick-Moorish silhouette) and a dominating sense of scale. Next door is Rustaveli Metro Station, its façade decorated with scenes from Georgia’s epic poem, composed in the twelfth century by the eponymous Shota Rustaveli, The Knight in Panther’s Skin. Opposite this piece of medieval-modernist Georgian infrastructural folk art, is a Radisson Hotel with a supermarket selling seemingly only German goods. The Radisson was once the Hotel Intourist, and as Georgia collapsed into ethnic warfare in the 1990s, it effectively became a refugee camp, a vertical shanty town. Its erasure and replacement with a proper Western hotel was one of Saakashvili’s first projects; it also involved demolishing the speaker’s platform below, a bizarre structure of concrete arches known locally as “Andropov’s Ears”. The mission was accomplished, insofar as the Radisson really does look like any other Radisson anywhere else in the world (specifically, to my eyes at any rate, the one in Bristol).

The Academy of Sciences

Medieval Metro

Rustaveli was always intended to be a European façade, a normal capital city street, and in adding his own effort of clearance and tidying Saakashvili was continuing an old project. It is in the side streets around that you can get a taster of the “real Old Tbilisi”, before its Russification/Europeanisation/Sovietisation (delete according to preference). These low-rise galleried houses and flats are fascinating and intense in their decorative excess and overwhelming neglect, with the tresses of the long-haired maidens obligatory on Art Nouveau buildings drooping and dissolving into the slop of the plaster; with the damp and petrol fumes in the air, the place feels literally poisoned. In good weather, of course, such as the city has most of the year, these tightly packed alleys would offer shade rather than claustrophobia. And if some houses look, with obvious cracks in the middle and tottering sides, like they’re falling down, that’s because they are. An earthquake in 2002 had particularly severe effects on the Old Town, and efforts to clean it up and repair the buildings were best described as “incomplete “in 2015.

However much it isn’t for the faint-hearted, the Old Town is absolutely fascinating, and an essay in how to build cities in extremely unsympathetic topographical conditions, a series of loops going up the steep hill, caked in graffiti stencils (one that appears often is the sad face of Saakashvili, with the legend “where now?’), with access to the buildings as often from wooden stairwells and decks as from straightforward doors on the street. Holes in the wall dispense (usefully captioned in English as well as Georgian and Russian) “GEORGIAN BREAD”, which is very good. Old Tbilisi seems to have been left almost completely untouched by the Soviet Union; this is as complete an 18th and 19th century streetscape in its own way as St Petersburg, just with despotic planning replaced by benign anarchy. The public buildings are, of course, mainly religious – a brick synagogue, in good condition, a florid Iranian mosque (with a bathhouse nearby) and half a dozen churches, stony and conical. Walk up the spirals and you’ll come to a fortress and to Mother Georgia, the only real Soviet contribution to the ensemble, in the Giant Female Warrior genre otherwise seen in Kyiv, Volgograd and Yerevan. Clad in titanium, she holds a sword and a teacup, to show that she is as welcoming as she is vigilant.

Exotica

The Lisbon of the Caucasus

You could imagine this wonderful, if appallingly dilapidated, townscape gradually tidying itself up into a sort of Caucasian Lisbon, retaining its faded grandeur but smartening into a top Creative Class destination. That’s obviously what the city’s authorities want; as we’ve seen, Saakashvili regards hipster districts of New York to be a model for post-Soviet “civil society”. However, the means of going about it are typically blunt. Several streets just by the river have been completely rebuilt into Disney versions of the Old Town, still obviously with the same architectural features of dangling wooden galleries and cantilevered bays, but with all of the patina, the texture, removed, often along with the residents, who own their properties as a result of post-Soviet “instant privatisation” of housing. At the centre of the Disney Tbilisi is a statue of the great film director Sergei Parajanov, an Armenian born and raised in the city. This Old Town, mostly until comparatively recently inhabited by Armenians along with Jews and Georgians, is the sort of ethnographic space that he charted in his major films, each of which created a colourful, eroticised and abstracted portrait of particular folk cultures, of the sort that Soviet ethnographers catalogued, reified and celebrated – Ukrainian Hutsuls in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, medieval Armenia in The Colour of Pomegranates, the Persian culture of Azerbaijan in Ashik Kerib. Late in life, Parajanov, who was jailed for several years under Brezhnev for his bisexuality, spoke sadly of the ethnic conflict that engulfed the Caucasus, and of how “only a Stalin” could unite it. Here in the statue, he leaps out of a wall to grinningly greet tourists in a mini-Caucasian theme park.

Mother is watching

Here’s Parajanov!

That’s the past – what of the future? Cross the river again, through a glass bridge by the otherwise fairly obscure but big-in-Georgia architect Michele de Lucchi, whose sanitary towel-evoking form has led to it being nicknamed “the Always Bridge” (they’re good at derisive names for buildings in Tbilisi), and you come to the recently constructed Rike Park, a public space that shows the ambition, schizophrenia and horror vacui of “Project Georgia” maybe better than anywhere else. It is surrounded by a gorge, onto which are some typically dilapidated Old Tbilisi houses and two crowning structures, which suggest a profound shift in taste as “Project Georgia” progressed. The earliest, again by De Lucchi, is a totally typical post-Soviet governmental building that could be in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, an illiterate combination of fibreglass Roman columns and a glass dome, in the usual attempt to combine the image of the White House and Norman Foster’s Reichstag, an image of power that is banal and tediously authoritarian, set, here, in such a position that it can survey the surrounding city. It’s also not even used for its intended purpose – after Saakashvili was voted out, the new government decided to move back to the city centre. Next to it, though, is something else. A set of bent squares of raw concrete, this is a private house similar to, but not apparently actually designed by, the work of Jurgen Mayer H, the German firm who have so impressively branded the “Project”. Below these is the park.

Sanitary Tbilisi

Rike Park is not a very restful park. It contains a theatre and art gallery in two intestinal glass tubes, again by Fuksas, a statue of a grand piano, a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan, and a set of giant chess pieces. There is evidently some symbolism here but it’s hard to work out what exactly it is, or who the pawns are. A cable car will take you back to the Old Town, giving a panorama of that extraordinary hilltown; just outside it, you’ll see a sprawling private house, with a flying saucer, a 2000s Britain-style swooping roof, some steel and a lot of green glass. This is the overdesigned lair of Saakashvili’s nemesis, Bidzina Ivanishvili, an oligarch who made billions in the usual para-legal manner in post-Soviet Russia (not, tellingly, in Georgia) and who essentially runs the governing party. Who are of course called “Georgian Dream”. Just like in the old days, you don’t expect a change at the top to involve a change in ethics.

Bad Taste Palace

Star politician, star architect

Tbilisi is exciting

One puzzling side-effect of the architectural attention paid to Georgia, as it rebranded itself with the aid of Dezeen and ArchDaily, was people noticing – assisted, importantly, by an active local branch of the international modernist preservation group Docomomo – the extraordinary architecture that was built here in the late-Soviet era. Most of all, two buildings are now almost famous: the expressionist cathedral that is the Palace of Weddings, and the tumbling Constructivist skyscraper of Georgi Chakhava’s Ministry of Highways, which now finally gets its due both via a restoration to house the Bank of Georgia and through appearing on thousands of Tumblrs, Instagram accounts and Pinterest boards. The building is as remarkable in person as it is on a smartphone, and might even be more so. Made up of two vertical, and what can probably best be described as five “horizontal towers”, it clings to a gorge fronting the river; both from above, where the horizontal blocks plunge vertiginously into the air, and from below, where it becomes a modernised image of the precipitous cantilevered pile-up of the old town, it is a profoundly physical piece of architecture. It is however a pain in the arse to get to, without a pedestrian approach from the ground, and with the elevated part in a messy suburb. Walk around it, as you will have to in order to eventually find a place to safely cross the road (the Ministry of Highways was evidently not talking to a Ministry of Pedestrians), past two yellow parasols that were presumably once part of a bus stop, and there’s another, lesser known awesome building, the Georgian Radio Headquarters (now “Radio Fortuna”), which also responds to the sharp topography by forming itself into overlapping upper and lower sections; but this one is more obviously in a “national” style, with Babylonian-Soviet sculptural reliefs, and raising its long upper volume on almost classical columns. Further on is a national heroic monument of some kind, with gorgeously carved but sadly to me illegible Georgian letters and a man fighting a lion, bulging, organic and macho, it sums up the Georgian Soviet-National style well. Then, you can cross the road.

Little of the Awesome Ruined Soviet Architecture of Tbilisi can be found in the city centre. You can reach one cluster of it via the excellent Metro, to Isani station, whose billowing concrete shell roof is not dissmilar to, but significantly more elegant than, those of Fuksas’ Public Service Hall. It has been all but destroyed by poor quality restoration. This is modernist Tbilisi, and the first thing you notice is the extreme balcony surgery. What brought this into being was an accounting fiddle with the Five Year Plans under Gorbachev, where the local planners intended to use the already existing habit of self-building extensions and cantilevering buildings over each other to achieve the Republic’s housing targets purely through residents building their own housing onto their existing state-provided prefabricated flats.² That this comes from plan, and not accident, is visible in the steel frames that cling to the 1960s flats, into which the new extensions are inserted – relatively high-tech, as self-building goes (of course, even then it’s a deeply unwise thing to do in a country prone to earthquakes, which have sent these extensions toppling). What you can see in all the suburbs of Tbilisi, however, is the result of the refugee crisis caused here by the 1990s wars in the breakaway “republics” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which ethnically cleansed their Georgian population at the climax of the conflict. The image of Soviet modernity – the provision of mass-produced housing, practically for free – became an image of state collapse or of individual “resilient” endeavour, or both. These have only been cleansed from the Hotel Intourist, so in every suburb of Tbilisi they are the first thing you see when you look at any building.

Around the Ministry of Highways

Ancient Brutalism

One street of them leads to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, laid out in 1961. As we have seen in Moscow (there is another, very similar, in Kyiv), these were a Soviet typology that was somewhere between Trade Fair, Expo and Propaganda Theme Park, where the amazing things about the planned economy would be showcased to dazzled visitors. The degree to which Soviet Georgia ever built the smooth Fordist economy depicted here is moot; Georgia did well out of the post-Stalin USSR, with a high standard of living, and higher than average levels of consumption and car ownership (along with the usual Soviet state provision) that belied a relatively low level of industrial development and economic growth, a disparity usually explained by Georgia’s centrality to the Soviet “second economy” of private plots, graft and deal-making.³

Balcony surgery

Unreal as it is, the society imagined and depicted here is attractive. Unlike the Ukrainian and Russian examples, the Exhibition of Economic Achievements of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic is not Neoclassical or Baroque, and is devoid of marble or gilding. It is a showcase instead of Soviet modernism, here deployed to similar ends of propaganda narratives and optimistic gateways. The entrance to the complex is through a thin concrete arch, beautifully engineered, and through that, Japanese gardens around ponds are fringed with low glass blocks, decorated with reliefs and mosaics themed around the Soviet economy. On a polychrome smalti mosaic are cogs, satellites, rockets, blueprints, held up by confident and faceless men and women; on a green stone relief, curvaceous peasants milk cows, play pipes, pick pomegranates and harvest crops. It is not dissimilar to Parajanov’s ethnographic world, except here combined with an image of the noble past passing unstoppably to the Communist future. Can it honestly be said that these images of a conflict-free and pristine socialist path are significantly different from those of Georgia’s European path? Not really, although without doubt the socialist version was much more fairly distributed. Both also utilise a flashy modern architecture of vaulting engineering and structural dramatics, both are statesponsored, and both are largely a matter of enclaves. Both of them also rested on repression.

We are planning

Atom, cog, plane

Walking back to the Metro station, you come to an unfinished tower, into which people have already inserted their flats, a building that is a squat before it has ever had the chance to be anything else. The housing pressure on the capital is clearly immense, even twenty years after the end of the wars over Abkhazia and Ossetia, and the state clearly doesn’t intend to do much about it. Just opposite, the police station seems to be watching this unconcerned. The one typology which never featured in all the glossy photo stories on the New Georgia is the police stations, which is curious given that they were probably much more crucial to Saakashvili’s successes than the galleries, civic centres and glossy airports. Big, green glass buildings (for “transparency”, though you can’t see inside) in a cheap, wipe-clean idiom that recalls British PFI architecture, there are more of them in Tbilisi than I’ve ever seen in any capital city, on corners, overlooking the crumbling apartment buildings and chaotic street markets and the tiny little enclaves of “Western” hotels and shops. This massive beefing up of state power had the desired effect, in that corruption did indeed go down – unlike the level of arrests, with zero tolerance policies leading to an increasingly huge prison population. The regeneration of New York, the inspiration, relied as much on an aggressive police force and a massive rise in incarceration rates as it did on sourdough bakeries and boutique art galleries. Here, Georgia has followed the model faithfully. It was the stick, not the carrot, which worked for Saakashvili until his eventual defeat, and to design the stick, there is no need to commission interesting European architects.

Squatting a work in progress

A very big police station