Konrad and Alexandra (PDF) - Rolf Gross

Another sunny day. How unusual for April! I spent the morning, over a very slow breakfast, looking at Alwexandra'spicture and musing about Eliso and our improbable meeting. I should have been shaken by this coincidence, itsmathematical odds were infinitesimally small, but I had got used to such happenings. They now occurred to me as if theywere most natural events. Did I believe in coincidences? I had to laugh, by now it was no longer a question of believing, Iwas entirely convinced that interpersonal events could mock any calculable probability.Around ten I was startled from my thoughts by a highly agitated Eliso storming in. "Something terrible has happened inTbilisi. We broke off the rehearsal."She dashed to the TV and turned on CNN news. Pictures of a confusing disaster scene. A short take in a morgue, rowsof bodies under white cloths. People putting flowers on a staircase. Police and military trying to control a mob ofgesticulating, screaming people. Then a switchback, a group of young women sitting in front of a colonnaded building.The commentator: "For two days these young women had been on a hunger strike for Georgian independence sittingpeacefully on these stairs before the government building, knitting, singing, reciting poetry."I realized that the scene was on Rustaveli Prospect in Tbilisi. On these same steps had once stood the chief of theGeorgian Communist Party under a Lenin portrait receiving the ovations of the October Revolution Parade. Now therehung a banner with a Georgian inscription. Eliso translated with a trembling voice. "We demand an independent, freeGeorgia."The news coverage changed to a night scene. Keel lights illuminated the girls on the steps of the government building.Crowds of spectators. TV crews filming.The commentator: "The first night passed without an incident. But on the second night the power in the central district oftown suddenly went dead. Under the cover of darkness an elite commando of the feared Russian Ministry of InternalSecurity waded into the scene."The video changed to frames that looked like negatives. Ghostlike soldiers were hacking at the girls with army spades.Pandemonium. Everybody was running, pursued by Russian soldiers. The take was only a few seconds long."These shots were taken by a bystander with an infrared-sensitive video camera. In the morning of the 9th of April thebodies of twenty young women, all under twenty-five, and one young man, were found laid out in the morgue of the Tbilisihospital."Tears were streaming down Eliso’s face. When CNN changed to other news I turned off the TV. And then she startedshouting at Gorbachev. Rowing her arms, her face distorted by years of hatred, she tore apart the man whom the Westconsidered the "Good Man in Moscow" if not the new Russian saint. "Perestroika is a farce, and Gorbachev is amurderer. He ordered this massacre to scare Georgia back into submission."This appeared an exaggeration to me. I shook my head. How could Gorbachev have ordered this massacre? Eliso wasnot to be quieted down, with renewed anger she continued. "You think Gorbachev will bring freedom and democracy tothe Soviet Union? You do not understand this man, he is a Russian Communist as intent on saving the Communist Partyand the power of the Soviet Union as any of his predecessors. Perestroika is at best an illusion and at worst asmokescreen behind which the old Russian imperialism lies in wait. As you see, ready to forcefully break the back of anyrepublic which tries to secede from the union."She looked into space. "This massacre will unmask perestroika, and that will be the end of it. After everybody will haveunderstood what happened today, the Soviet Union is going to fall apart. Deda Sakartvelis will put an end to RussianEmpire."Eliso’s prophesy would be proven true. The death of the twenty Georgian girls set the stone rolling. Within a year theBerlin Wall came down, Eastern Europe was free, and Transcaucasia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Baltics had splitfrom the Union. Gorbachev was powerless to stop this process---in the end he decided to help it on. He would be giventhe Nobel Peace Prize by a grateful West.And Georgia would, for the second time since 1917, declare its independence from Russia—and within another year skidinto a terrible, humiliating, fratricidal war…The End218