Repression regains a foothold at the Writer’s House in Tbilisi

This spring, the Writers’ House in Tbilisi inaugurated the Museum of Repressed Writers, a permanent exhibition dedicated to the Georgian writers whose lives and careers were destroyed by Stalinism. Less than six months later, the former director of the House has been replaced by a political appointee loyal to the illiberal ruling Georgian Dream party. About 100 leading figures from Georgia’s literary world have now boycotted the institution due to “the dangerous authoritarian tendencies” the Ministry of Culture has displayed. The irony has been lost on no one.

The Writers’ House, with its carved wooden balconies and voluptuous Art Nouveau swirls, has been the centrepiece of Georgian literary society for over a century, its triumphs and tragedies tracing the political contours of the country’s history. In the 1920s, before the grip of Stalinism had tightened, the House was the unofficial headquarters of the nascent symbolist poetry movement known as the Blue Horns. At the height of Stalin’s purges in 1937, celebrated poet Paolo Iashvili, dismayed at the denunciations and show trials of his colleagues, left a meeting of the Writers’ Union of Soviet Georgia taking place in the living room, went upstairs, and shot himself with a hunting rifle.

The secretive appointment of Ketevan Dumbadze, a member of parliament for Georgian Dream, as the House’s new director, suggests the old authoritarian instincts are reasserting themselves. Dumbadze supported the proposal for a Russian-style “foreign agents” law targeting media and NGOs who receive more than a fifth of their funding from abroad. Her appointment earlier this September has been met with apprehension by supporters of the house, who are sceptical of a leader “with no proven expertise or interest in the cultural field at all,” says Natasha Lomouri, the House’s former director.

But the imposition of a new chief at the Writers’ House is only the most recent scandal following the appointment of Tea Tsulukiani as culture minister two years ago. After first embarking on a series of mass firings across museums, the film institute and cultural archives, Tsulukiani then set about appointing prosecutors, lawyers and, in one case, the former head of a penal rehabilitation centre as the new directors of national cultural institutions. “Loyalty and total agreement” is how one former museum director described the characteristics of those who were allowed to remain in office. 

Autocrats fear the arts precisely because they can’t control the response and, as under most authoritarian-lite governments, Georgia’s cultural world has been a reliable canary for the oxygen left in the country’s democracy. When I worked as a reporter in Russia, I found it sinister confirmation of culture’s potency that Vladimir Putin’s regime spent so much effort trying to control it. It’s a grim bellwether of Georgian Dream’s political trajectory that things appear to be heading along a similar track. 

This sits oddly with Georgia’s aspirations towards EU membership. Last year, Georgia was given only a conditional prospect of candidate status, falling behind Ukraine and Moldova, and handed a list of reforms it would have to enact to make it eligible. Some progress has been made but its attempts to rush through the foreign agent bill, flirtation with anti-western conspiracy theories, and resumption of direct flights from Moscow, have called the sincerity of its bid into question.

Despite its size (Georgia has a population of around 3.7mn people, one million of whom live in Tbilisi), the country has a vibrant cultural scene. Initiatives such as Gallery Artbeat, an exhibition space in a converted apartment building, and LC Queisser, a gallery supporting experimental and emerging artists, have thrived precisely because of a lack of government interest or support. Nimble and adaptable, these seem immune to changes in political sentiment. 

But Tbilisi’s more storied cultural institutions, such as the Writers’ House, are too visible and too historic to enjoy the same discretion. As the centre comes under renewed scrutiny, it will have to buttress itself against repression — the old enemy — once again.

nadia.beard@ft.com