Eight Pieces of Empire

by Lawrence Scott Sheets

  BUT WHY HERE? Why Gamsakhurdia? Why Georgia?

  The corset of Oriental love rites applied here, stoked no doubt by centuries under Persian and Ottoman rule.

  Westerners knew little about the complexities of Soviet Russian sexual mores. We were hoodwinked by the prudish facade of Communism. But those who spent significant time in Moscow or Leningrad knew firsthand about the hedonism and promiscuity afoot. It was not for nothing that late Imperial Russia’s ladies of the court equated copulation with Rasputin as communion with the Almighty, or that Soviet theoreticians in the 1920s propagated that sex was “a drink of water.” These notions found fertile soil.

  And if Soviet Russia was difficult to understand, Georgia’s erotic essence was practically unfathomable to the outsider. Here was the confluence of Occident and Orient, patriarchic mores, and mountaineer traditions. Even during Soviet times this included bride stealing, meaning simply gathering a favored female off the street and keeping her away from her family for a night. Even if there is no physical contact, the night away can technically negate her virginity, virtually ensuring marriage to the wife rustler. The practice continued many years after the Soviet collapsed and was not technically made illegal until the early 2000s.

  “Chained libido, political repression, virginity,” said Eka, an artist, explaining the deity-like, erotic Zviadist phenomenon. She pronounced “virginity,” using the Russian word destvennost, as if it were a profanity—for Eka was an exception, a maximalist, one of the few who embraced her sexuality openly. She illustrated the Georgian tendency to excess by pointing to the scores of people who preferred to dart in between speeding cars along Tbilisi’s main Rustaveli Avenue, as if getting a thrill from nearly being mowed down, rather than walk a few yards to use a nice, safe underground walkway.

  Eka was definitely an exception. Or was she? When I first arrived in Georgia to live in 1992, the Oriental Persian-Ottoman-influenced mores meant that young women should avoid accidental eye contact with a man, often by quickly turning away, as if avoiding a sin. My first cameraman for Reuters, Gigi Mdivani, one day noticed me observing young women as we drove down Rustaveli in his very used Opel. There was no doubt I was looking out of physical interest, but there were also pure aesthetics involved. At the time, many Georgian women dressed extremely well, often in elegant hand-tailored dresses from good-quality cloth. It was a stark contrast to the cheap-looking, acid-washed, East German–inspired jeans I often saw in places like Moscow. Cleavage, however, unlike in Russia, was a big no-no.

  “You spend too much time looking at ‘our women,’ ” scolded Gigi. “You can’t look at them like that.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “I’m just looking.”

  “We are Asiatics,” replied Gigi, putting a halt to the conversation, but not to my gawking from the open window of the Opel. “Our women are not like Russian women,” he said with a sneer.

  Gigi pointed to the ruins of the Intourist hotel on Rustaveli Avenue, then gutted and blackened after the war that had driven Gamsakhurdia from power a few months earlier.

  “You see that hotel? In the Soviet period, all summer it was full of Russian women. They came here, and our men surrounded them with attention. Flowers. Wine. Feasts!” It was a story I came to hear often. Legions of relatively well-off married Russian women were known to frequent Georgia for requisite week-or-two flings in the subtropical summer.

  Outwardly more libertine than their Georgian sisters, the Russians came for an early version of female sex tourism. Georgian women would not have been caught dead alone in the lobby of the Intourist hotel without a male escort or “brother”—as Georgians referred to any male cousin or even distant relative. The freewheeling Russian women used Georgia as a place for guaranteed action: Georgian men were legendary for their chivalry, but casual dalliances with Georgian women were almost unheard of—well, at least they went unreported. A trip to Georgia for middle-aged Russian women indeed meant wine, bouquets, the endless Georgian feasts known as the supra, countless compliments, and, of course, furtive sex. The Russian ladies went home north happy. The Georgian men wore their conquests as feathers in their caps.

  It was the perfect combination, at least for the Georgian males and the Russian females. If the Georgians had wives, the infidelity was expected to be accepted—grudgingly or not.

  THERE WAS NO doubt that Gigi’s proclamations of Georgian female chastity carried some truth. Brides were indeed expected to be virgins, or at least be known as virgins, at marriage. Of course, this would have been the case in the United States or many other Western countries just a half century prior as well.

  There were whispers about the doctors who did gakerva (literally, “sewing up”). In other words, hymen restoration.

  The doctors expert in this art fulfilled an important function, no doubt. Not only did they do “repair jobs,” enabling new husbands to rest easy after their wedding nights, they also issued postexam “certificates” testifying that a woman was a virgin, to ensure that her groom-to-be would not return her after the nuptials, like an ill-fitting pair of shoes. This avoided not only scandalous embarrassment but relegation to the purgatory of permanent spinsterhood.

  I searched for such a doctor.

  After considerable giggles and hesitation, my assistant Nino found me just such a physician. “She’s willing to talk to you, but only on the condition of anonymity,” whispered Nino. Even then, the conversation was an elliptical one, with the doctor describing her “work” in the third person. (It was obvious that she was the one doing the sewing, but, technically, the practice was illegal, I was told.) So shrouded in semiexaggerated secrecy was my visit that I agreed not to even ask the name of the “doctor.”

  I had prepared, on Nino’s advice, warm-up questions on broader medical issues. Of course, the doctor, whose name I never did learn, knew what I was there for. After the requisite mutually understood bluffs, we got down to business.

  “It is extremely delicate work—a jeweler’s craft,” she softly told me, without ever admitting directly that she was one of “four doctors in our city who are real experts.” Her eyes lit up with the pride of an eagle, with the mystery of a shaman. “You must understand … it is not like taking out an appendix, es saiuveliro samushaua … a jeweler’s craft.…”

  Less admirable defilers of her craft, “in it only for the money,” she said, preferred simply to issue bogus “virgin certificates.” “Quacks,” she lamented. Even so, said the mystery hymen doctor, this was of “social benefit.” A young girl could be “scarred for life with the stigma of a harlot” for not producing blood or pain for her new husband. “Of course, our men are too backwards to understand that the hymen can be broken by nonsexual means as well.”

  I was gratified to hear her note this basic medical reality, which would not have been acknowledged by quite so many people a half century ago in the United States either.

  The virgin doctors were a viable recourse for those having encountered premarital sex, but so male-dominated was the social scene that many young women I managed to talk to about the situation were convinced that Tbilisi’s legendary gossip machine meant they could not risk any perceived impropriety.

  “I don’t want to, but I have to be,” said a doe-eyed acquaintance, Lika, of her virginity—still intact at age twenty-six. “If I am not a virgin at marriage, no man will have me. My parents will be forever shamed.”

  “But they don’t have to know,” I replied, “unless you tell them.”

  “You don’t understand. They will just know,” sighed Lika. “There is a general saying that if two people know a secret, everyone knows. Here in Tbilisi, we say if one person knows a secret, everyone knows.”

  As such, it was nothing to hear of thirty-something, forty-something, even fifty-something virgins. Hence the widespread theory about pent-up erotic passions, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, and the Black Stockings.

  There were, of course, the sexual miscreants, but they fell into two broad categories: If they were
Georgian and unmarried, the women were branded as sluts. If they were ethnic minorities, say, local Jews or Armenians or Slavs, then they were given a green light to mess around.

  Divorce was the other way to sexual freedom. One friend, Medea, said that at age nineteen, she married a guy as just such a path to liberty. It lasted six months,” she said. “And then I was free.

  “There is no stigma for divorced women who want to have liberty, to sleep with whom they want. I know lots of girls who got married and then divorced just so they can have sex.”

  And then there were those young women who simply shunned all the rules and regulations, like Eka.

  At nearly six feet tall, stunning, and often clad in sheer black dresses, she was unmistakable passing down Rustaveli Avenue.

  When Eka described the Georgian tendency toward maximalism, she was of course describing herself. A talented young painter, she did nothing to less than excess. At the ripe age of eleven, she addictively read and reread Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, like my Leningrad extortionist buddy Vova and just about everyone else in the former USSR. Instead of doing a few illustrations based on scenes in the book, she painted in excess of 150.

  “The problem here is that young men don’t understand that some of us really want to explore. They assume all we want is a husband.

  “Our problem is that we have been at war too long,” she said, trying to explain what she considered the Georgian approach toward love and intimate relationships.

  When she meant war, Eka meant not only the four wars in four years that Georgia had endured—two wars with ethnic overtones and two short but brutal civil wars—but hundreds of years of being tossed around between different empires—Greeks, Mongols. Ottomans, Persians, Russians.

  “So love is war—a matter of survival, of cunning. For instance, if a woman is single, she will play the coquette, putting her virginal qualities at the forefront. If the girl is married, she will taunt her prey, demonstratively but delicately playing with her wedding ring, slowly sliding it up and down her finger. She will torture the prey through temptation.”

  THE GENERAL STATE of anarchy in Georgia meant increasingly frayed psyches. Extreme behavior was the norm. Even in the mid-1990s, armed paramilitaries still roamed the streets with grenade launchers and AKs. At the entrance to Georgia’s Parliament Hall, there was a sign with a pistol with a red slash through it and a written note asking deputies to check their guns at the door.

  Hard drug use among men skyrocketed, becoming so endemic that even the teetotaler president Eduard Shevardnadze announced that all parliamentary deputies would be scanned for possible narcotics use. Shevardnadze proudly announced on national radio, during his weekly address, that he had been the first to submit his urine for analysis.

  THE DISORDER DID have another side—a nascent, barely noticeable sexual “revolution” started to take root. One bar, called Kazbegi, after one of the country’s highest mountains, was a hot spot for quick encounters. Our tape editor at Reuters, David, bragged to me that so many condoms had been tossed into the toilets there that the plumbing had to be completely ripped out and replaced. To him, this was a sign of progress. Shevardnadze had other ideas. During another radio address, he noted that many parents had called to complain about the bar as a den of sin. The bar was eventually closed down under unclear circumstances.

  Fifty meters from my house, a brave soul opened Georgia’s first sex shop. A sandwich board advertised “sex toys, vibrators, artificial phalli.” A gang with guns (ergo the police) came and ordered the innovative enterprise closed within a week or so. Guns and hard drugs were OK, but there were evident limits to the science of disorder as a method of governance.

  From Eka, I got occasional cognac-induced telephone calls. It was clear she was rotting amid Georgia’s chaos and still-Oriental ways. At last, she elected to vote with her feet: She joined the flood of those leaving the country, ending up in France, where she finally flourished.

  Georgians, unlike their neighbors the Armenians, never had much of a diaspora. Perhaps it was because of the country’s beauty, and the traditional ties to the land, but “for Georgians it is very difficult to live abroad,” one friend told me.

  By the late 1990s, the government announced that 1 million people, or nearly one in five of the entire Georgian population, had left, seeking better futures elsewhere, and the uncertainty behind.

  • • •

  GIVEN THE GENERAL mayhem, few had time to wonder what had become of Gamsakhurdia’s grave. I was one; another was Thomas Goltz, my writer friend whom I had met in Sukhumi in 1993. Now it was April 1995, and we were in Chechnya, determined to find Zviad, or what remained of his grave.

  We set out in search of the mansion. It had been located in the very heart of Grozny, but that area now resembled a torn-up football field rather than a city. Parts of walls or half-intact walls stood here and there, and orientation was difficult. Finally, we located the remains of the mansion. A scorched outside wall of the building was still standing, but the inside was gutted and looted. Was this really the place? Then there among the rubble we found it: a headstone, half blown away by bomb shrapnel, but with an epitaph written in Chechen and Georgian.

  However, it turned out that Zviad’s corpse had moved on again, before our discovery and visitation. Suspecting Russian troops might desecrate the site, a group of Chechens and Georgians had spirited his corpse a few hundred meters away to a secret location and buried him again.

  War washed over Chechnya, receded in 1996, and then rolled over that sad land again in 1999. Years passed before most people thought about Gamsakhurdia’s resting place. It was not until 2006 that Russian troops in Chechnya announced they had found the whereabouts of his secret grave. Once again his corpse was exhumed and, at the insistence of his family members, whisked off to a Russian laboratory for a postmortem—more than ten years after his death.

  Meanwhile, back in Tbilisi, the passage of time had brought in changes. In 2003, a brash young former minister in Shevardnadze’s government had gone into opposition, calling election results corrupt and demanding Shevardnadze’s resignation. The brash young man, of course, was Mikheil Saakashvili, and the movement he led to depose Shevardnadze became known as the “Rose Revolution.” In an act of national reconciliation and to finally get beyond the hot-and-cold state of civil war that had existed virtually from the time of Georgian independence in 1991, President Mikheil Saakashvili called on Russia to send Zviad back to Georgia so that he could be reburied on Mtatsminda Mountain, a sacred area near a cathedral in Tbilisi. Tens of thousands of mourners marched in the procession for this, the fifth burial of Georgia’s first president.

  A WORD ABOUT WAR

  I never planned to become a “war correspondent.” I’m not even sure I knew what one was. There are no “war reporter” schools. There are reporters who cover places that happen to be strewn with conflagrations. I was one of those.

  There are, of course, those who choose the designation willfully and with alacrity, for many reasons—ranging from a sense of duty to inform the world of the latest massacre, injustice, or other outrage—to the addictive high from that first rush of adrenaline after narrowly missing being hit by a tank round.

  As I said, my “inclusion” into the profession was not premeditated and can be traced to a first bloody dustup—in ex–Soviet Moldova, early 1992, pitting the “pro-Romanian” government forces against the Slavic “pro-Soviet” separatists of “the Transdniester Republic.” Mission completed, my editor deduced (incorrectly) that I had an inborn proclivity for covering wars and whatever human stupidity accompanied them. Given this set of “qualifications,” I was sent on to Georgia for the next round of bloodletting, then back to Russia, where ethnic Ossetians—aided and armed by the Russian army—and Muslim Ingush died by the hundreds in a nonsensical week-long melee over a piece of Ingush territory Stalin had given to the Ossetians, who as Orthodox Christians were natural Russian allies. This all happened by chance or pur
e stupidity—I was asked to go, and I agreed to do the job. Then it was back to Georgia, and a host of other places, for more. Slowly, covering wars or bloody conflicts becomes completely normal, or one convinces oneself of this—that one can always stop, always leave, go back to whatever one was doing before “this,” no consequences to mind, spirit, or health.

  By the spring of 1993, I was supposed to be making plans to leave Georgia and to return to Moscow—that was the agreement, actually—but my editor would have none of it: for I had in his estimation somehow now qualified as a “war correspondent.” I was not going anywhere soon, except to the next post-Soviet dustup, and amid the empire’s ashes there were any number to choose from.

  Chaos at Kelbajar helicopter field, Azerbaijan, April 1993.

  AZERBAIJAN: LIFESAVING CARPETS

  It was hard to fathom that we were nearing the site of battles and an unfolding humanitarian emergency. Driving deeper into Azerbaijan, there were no signs of war: no army transports, no armed columns, and no sense of alarm. Moving closer to the point where refugees were reportedly pouring out, we saw only the occasional car or farm tractors, tilling fields. It was not until we got to the base of the mountains, near the town of Khanlar, that I saw the large crowd gathered in a clearing.

  A woman among hundreds flailed her face with dirty fingernails the size of small daggers, blood squirting as she ripped flesh from her own cheeks. Her delirious screams were soon joined by others in a cacophony of ritual mourning, reaching a peak with blood streaming from scores of self-gouged faces, turning patches of melting snow scarlet.