SUMMARY:

AI editor Serguei Glebov conducted this interview with Levan Berdzenishvili, a classical philologist who in the late Soviet period taught at Tbilisi University and in the post-Soviet years served as director of the National Library of Georgia (1998–2004). The interview presents Berdzenishvili first of all as a political persona: a Soviet dissident, the cofounder of the Republican Party of Georgia (1978), a prisoner in the prison camp for political offenders in Mordovia (1984–1987), a one-time member of the Georgian Parliament (2004–2008), and an opponent of the politics of the current president of Republic of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. Levan Berdzenishvili reflects on the history of the Georgian dissident movement, on the relationship between nationalism and civil rights activism in it, and on the phenomenon of “Soviet internationalism” among political prisoners that inspired him to reconsider his nationalist stance. He regrets that post-Soviet Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine were constructed by another generation that lacked this specific formative Soviet experience. Berdzenishvili proposes his own explanations of current Georgian politics, the causes of the Russian–Georgian war of 2008, and the trajectories of post-Soviet transformations in the region in general.