Melik Kaylan: Visiting Georgia's Museum of the Soviet Occupation is like watching a perfectly staged, cathartic tragedy
[Mr. Kaylan writes about culture for The Wall Street Journal.]
TBILISI, Georgia--Upon entry, the museum feels more like a mausoleum, which is as it should be. You walk into a large, bunker-like space, dark but strangely welcoming, oddly calming. With the sad intimacy of a voyeur peering from darkness to washes of light, you peer at the wall-mounted exhibits. Searing bouquets of memory, they seem to rise at you. After all, the Museum of the Soviet Occupation here is a kind of mausoleum, one that chronicles the merciless quashing of a national destiny for over 80 years--that of Georgia by Moscow under the Soviet system and beyond, from 1919 to the Rose Revolution in late 2003. It may sound like a grim prospect, but the experience of touring the single space for an hour is a humanizing and stirring one, never depressing, rather as if one had just watched a perfectly staged, cathartic tragedy. And it ends in a resurrection of hope with scenes from the Rose Revolution's democratic triumph.
You tour the cavernous oblong clockwise, returning to the entrance. Looking from there, two near exhibits cut across your line of sight, the first and last, leaving a narrow middle view to the far end, where you can discern a menacingly lit table with a clunky old telephone just visible on it. This, you realize, would be your first glimpse of the distant commissars who signed your death warrant, peremptorily, after you walked across just such an endless room. A beastly metal object squats inside the entrance, a fat Maxim machine-gun of World War l vintage, black and oily. It points at an extraordinary display, the first exhibit, a life-size wood-slatted cattle car pierced with holes and fiercely lit from within. The myriad light beams come at you like dawn rays. Something awful happened during the night, the exhibit suggests, and here is the morning-after stillness. You imagine the bodies inside and even the chatter of birdsong nearby. This is how the Red Army executed in bulk, 100 people at a time....
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TBILISI, Georgia--Upon entry, the museum feels more like a mausoleum, which is as it should be. You walk into a large, bunker-like space, dark but strangely welcoming, oddly calming. With the sad intimacy of a voyeur peering from darkness to washes of light, you peer at the wall-mounted exhibits. Searing bouquets of memory, they seem to rise at you. After all, the Museum of the Soviet Occupation here is a kind of mausoleum, one that chronicles the merciless quashing of a national destiny for over 80 years--that of Georgia by Moscow under the Soviet system and beyond, from 1919 to the Rose Revolution in late 2003. It may sound like a grim prospect, but the experience of touring the single space for an hour is a humanizing and stirring one, never depressing, rather as if one had just watched a perfectly staged, cathartic tragedy. And it ends in a resurrection of hope with scenes from the Rose Revolution's democratic triumph.
You tour the cavernous oblong clockwise, returning to the entrance. Looking from there, two near exhibits cut across your line of sight, the first and last, leaving a narrow middle view to the far end, where you can discern a menacingly lit table with a clunky old telephone just visible on it. This, you realize, would be your first glimpse of the distant commissars who signed your death warrant, peremptorily, after you walked across just such an endless room. A beastly metal object squats inside the entrance, a fat Maxim machine-gun of World War l vintage, black and oily. It points at an extraordinary display, the first exhibit, a life-size wood-slatted cattle car pierced with holes and fiercely lit from within. The myriad light beams come at you like dawn rays. Something awful happened during the night, the exhibit suggests, and here is the morning-after stillness. You imagine the bodies inside and even the chatter of birdsong nearby. This is how the Red Army executed in bulk, 100 people at a time....