They knew, of course, that Salamov intended to provoke them to the point of landing a discharge, at which point he would simply emigrate to Hungary and go into private business with his wife’s prosperous family. His tactic seemed to be working. Like me, he was grounded and pressing his superiors hard for a favorable resolution to the whole painful situation. Major Soloyov and his invisible crew of knockers were reportedly working around the clock, keeping Salamov and his suspicious alien wife under constant surveillance.
So much the better for me. I had delicate preparations to make in the coming weeks, and I certainly did not want to have to worry about every fellow I saw on the street wearing a leather jacket.
The next afternoon, Sunday, April 9, I was alone in my kitchen, listening as usual to the news summary on Radio Liberty. But this news bulletin was hardly normal. There were preliminary reports from Tbilisi that “Soviet security forces” had violently dispersed pro-independence demonstrations before dawn that morning. At least six people had been killed and scores more injured. Early eyewitness accounts were confused, the calm Russian- speaking reporter in Munich conceded. But it was clear that “several hundred” Army and MVD Interior Ministry troops, supported by armored vehicles, had converged on Lenin Square and attacked peaceful demonstrators.
I carefully tuned the set when the signal began to fade. Then the familiar buzzing thump of shortwave jamming began. Quickly I snapped on the alligator clip of my wire antenna and managed to boost the signal from the Munich transmitters so that I could hear the announcer clearly, despite the attempts to jam the broadcast.
The commentator was now giving a background report on these latest independent demonstrations in Tbilisi. For the past week, several thousand demonstrators had gathered on the wide boulevards of central Tbilisi, some demanding greater autonomy, others actual independence from the Soviet Union. Senior Georgian Party officials, including First Secretary Dzhumber Patiashvili and the Georgian Minister of the Interior, Shota Gorgodze, had repeatedly declared the demonstrations illegal and ordered that the crowds disperse. The Communist officials’ refusal to even discuss the issue of Georgian autonomy from Moscow seemed to incense the demonstrators. That morning at least a thousand more joined the peaceful demonstration, waving pro-independence banners and singing the republican anthem.
Despite the size of the crowds, there had been none of the mass anger and minor violence that had often marked the independence demonstrations in the Baltic Republics. Instead, the leaders of the Georgian movement had responded with a different tactic: The day before, several hundred had declared a hunger strike. Surrounded by supporters, they had gathered beneath the budding shade trees on Rustaveli Prospekt and Lenin Square, fronting the handsome neoclassic building of the Georgian Council of Ministers.
The Radio Liberty commentator noted that the Tbilisi demonstrators had combined the spontaneous passion of the Georgian people with unusual mass coordination. Their banners were printed in Russian, Georgian, and English. A typical placard read: “Down with the decaying Soviet Empire.” Many people waved the black, white, and claret flag of the once-independent Georgian Republic.
By Monday morning Radio Liberty’s reports were more detailed and alarming. Approximately six thousand demonstrators had been massed along Rustaveli Prospekt and on Lenin Square at four o’clock Sunday morning, still singing their republican anthem and waving banners. The crowd had been swelled by thousands of rugby fans, who had left a match at the big Tbilisi stadium to march to Lenin Square. There were hundreds of children among the demonstrators, some infants in their mothers’ arms. It was a warm spring weekend night, and the crowd was in an exuberant, almost joyful mood. Speakers with bullhorns mounted the steps of the government buildings on the square to address the crowds. One, the local patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, warned the demonstrators that the Communists were planning a violent military crackdown. But few people in the crowd seemed alarmed. They should have taken the warning seriously.
Ten minutes later MVD Interior Ministry troops and Army paratroopers launched an unprovoked attack on the peaceful demonstrators. In the ensuing massacre, Radio Liberty announced, sixteen people had been killed outright, almost three hundred were badly wounded, and thousands were overcome by thick clouds of an unnamed “toxic gas.”
The final Radio Liberty bulletin I heard before catching the bus to the base that morning confirmed that three wounded demonstrators had died in Tbilisi hospitals, bringing the total killed to nineteen. The gravely wounded were now estimated at 260, with 4,000 treated for serious gas inhalation. Eyewitness accounts stated that the Army and MVD troops had beaten many demonstrators with heavy clubs and slashed others with sharpened military trench shovels.
There was no mention of the massacre on that morning’s ail-Union news summary from Moscow.
At breakfast I asked the men in my squadron if they had heard reports of a massacre in Tbilisi. They all shook their heads and shrugged. All except Major Petrukhin. Obviously he was still a devoted listener to Radio Liberty. He looked grave and troubled when I mentioned Tbilisi. But he refused to acknowledge amid the bustle and clatter of the breakfast dishes that he had heard the same shocking reports.
By that night, however, no one could pretend that the massacre had not occurred. The official Moscow news media belatedly reported there had been “unfortunate loss of life” when “violent nationalist demonstrators’” assaulted security forces in central Tbilisi and those forces had responded with “legal actions” to disperse the crowds.
Georgian television, however, revealed a far different sequence of events. Although I couldn’t follow the Georgian language commentary, a Georgian pilot in our ready room translated, his face drawn into a tight mask of rage. Among the nineteen victims killed, he said, there were pregnant women and several young boys and girls, whose heads had been crushed or who had been dismembered by the troops wielding sharpened shovels. Others had died of gas poisoning. The hundreds still in the hospital had suffered irreversible lung damage from the dense clouds of the mysterious gas the troops had sprayed into the tightly packed ranks of demonstrators.
Despite the warnings for Soviet officers to avoid confrontations with Georgians in town, I went into Mikha Tskhakaya that night to meet Malhaz. I had my suitcase full of those sexy posters and I needed money, no matter what the mood among the civilians. As I expected, Malhaz was cold toward me, but relaxed a little when I offered my obviously sincere condolences for the shocking massacre.
Then he reached under his counter and handed me a sheaf of photocopies. These were unofficial press photos of the massacre scene. They needed no translation. The wide sidewalks fronting Rustaveli Prospekt were littered with shoes, discarded placards, women’s purses, and overturned strollers and baby carriages. I saw none of the bricks or cobblestones that the Tass bulletin read over Vremya had proclaimed the “rioters” had used to attack the security forces.
By the next day the authorities’ attempts to suppress news of the massacre had failed completely. Despite a curfew throughout the republic, throngs of angry Georgians had demonstrated in almost every town and city. The commander of the Transcaucasus Military District, Colonel General Igor Rodionov, appeared on television appealing for calm. The Army, he said, is “in complete control of the situation.” Instigators of the unrest had been detained. “The extremists wanted blood and attacked the security forces,” the general read awkwardly from a prepared text. All further demonstrations were banned. “Patriotic comrades,” Rodionov concluded, “we must put this event behind us and refrain from anti-Socialist nationalism.”
He made no mention of the men, women, and children who had been slaughtered. He did not speak of the gas that had been used under the shade trees of Rustaveli Prospekt.
The next morning the first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Dzhumber Patiashvili, and his chief subordinates resigned in disgrace. Patiashvili stated the massacre could not be denied. It was, he said, “our mutual grief.” Before resigning, he declared ten days of public mourning for the victims.
The Politburo then announced that Patiashvili had been replaced as the republic’s Party leader by another Georgian, Givi Gumbaridze. He was the head of the KGB in Georgia.
As after the Chernobyl disaster, Mikhail Gorbachev had initially remained silent. He had been on a State visit to England in the days before the massacre. Either Gorbachev had been unaware that his Defense Minister, Marshal Yazov, had been preparing a major military operation against the peaceful demonstrators of Georgia, or he had used his absence as a plausible means to deny his involvement in the massacre. Whatever the truth, I sat before the television in the pilots’ ready room on the night of April 12, watching Mikhail Gorbachev address the nation from Moscow. He offered no sympathy to the families of the dead and wounded. Instead, he spoke harshly, shaking his finger as he warned against “extremism by adventurist elements.” Gorbachev’s statement had been followed by the first official videotapes from Tbilisi, which showed the streets patrolled by BMP armored troop carriers. The intersections of Tbilisi’s stately boulevards were barricaded with more armor, and troops in steel helmets and bulletproof vests searched civilian cars and pedestrians.
