There is a German word, Freitod: literally, “free death.” It is not an easy word to describe Paolo Iashvili’s suicide. Nothing about a death under political terror is entirely free, and no account should make self-destruction beautiful. Still, the word captures something that “suicide” does not. Iashvili’s death has long been understood as a last refusal of the Soviet regime. It was still a suicide, born of fear and intimidation – but it was also the last decision the regime could not take away from him.
It is the evening of 22 July 1937. At 13 Machabeli Street in Tbilisi, inside the mansion now known as the Writers’ House, the Georgian Writers’ Union has summoned its members.
Writer Sergo Kldiashvili later recalls that not many people are present. David Demetradze, the union’s chairman, presides. The writer Akaki Beliashvili is being pressed to admit that he has spoken disrespectfully of Stalin. Beliashvili denies the accusation. Demetradze demands a confession. In the third or fourth row, Kldiashvili sits beside the novelist Alexander Kutateli and Paolo Iashvili.
Later accounts differ over the meeting’s formal occasion. One describes it as a special session honouring the Soviet security apparatus. Kldiashvili’s eyewitness recollection is more specific: the immediate business is condemning Beliashvili’s alleged offence.
Iashvili has arrived carrying a double-barrelled shotgun, explaining that he has brought it to sell. He appears unsettled. Before the meeting, he pays Ripsime, the buffet manager, a debt of seven roubles. He speaks apologetically to the poet Simon Chikovani and says that he will soon prove himself an honourable and courageous man. Then he takes his seat. Kutateli gives him a cigarette.
At home, Iashvili has left farewell letters for his wife, Tamara, and his daughter Medea, known as Mediko. In the letter to Mediko, he says that he has spent the night awake, watching her sleep, but has already made up his mind. He asks her not to blame anyone for his death. Near the end come instructions: study, work, tell the truth, love your homeland.
Back in the meeting room, as Beliashvili continues desperately denying the accusations, Iashvili rises. He walks slowly towards the door and leaves the hall. He goes upstairs.
A few minutes later, the sound of the shotgun shatters the meeting.
The authorities arrive and lock the doors. Kldiashvili recalls seeing Titsian Tabidze, Paolo’s closest friend and fellow poet, with his face in his hands. Those still in the hall sit in silence. According to another account, the novelist Mikheil Javakhishvili says that Iashvili has proved to be the bravest among them.
‘Freedom for Zviad Ratiani’
Within months, Tabidze, Javakhishvili and another prominent Blue Horn, Nikolo Mitsishvili, would all be arrested and executed.
Eighty-nine years later, people return to the same part of Tbilisi. On 22 July 2026, they gather at Ezo – “courtyard” in Georgian – near the Writers’ House, but not inside it.
Poets, writers, academics and ordinary readers sit together over wine. They read eight poems from the legacy of the Blue Horns, the modernist group that Iashvili co-founded. They discuss its members, their artistic rebellion and the catastrophe of 1937. Beside the poets a poster reads “Freedom for Zviad Ratiani.”
Ratiani, a prominent Georgian poet and translator, is serving a two-year prison sentence for his participation in protests against the Georgian Dream government.
At the end of the evening, Georgia’s fifth president, Salomé Zourabichvili, offers a single sentence: “It is a disgrace for the entire country that this event is not being held at the Writers’ House.”
To understand the force of those words, one must understand what the Writers’ House represents.
The Blue Horns – Tsisperqantselebi in Georgian – emerged in Kutaisi in 1916 as a literary group centred on the magazine of the same name, edited by Iashvili. Among the central figures were Titsian Tabidze, Valerian Gaprindashvili, Kolau Nadiradze, Sergo Kldiashvili, Sandro Tsirekidze, Shalva Apkhaidze and Nikolo Mitsishvili. The writer and public intellectual Grigol Robakidze was an important mentor.
‘It is a disgrace for the entire country that this event is not being held at the Writers’ House’ – Salomé Zourabishvili
Their name joined two worlds. Blue represented European Romanticism and Symbolism. The horn was local – a traditional Georgian drinking vessel. Their project worked in much the same way: they wanted Georgian poetry to become a part of the European modernist world while preserving the language, history and national character.
Many of them had studied or travelled abroad. Iashvili encountered modernist and avant-garde circles in Paris; other members returned from Russia and Germany with knowledge of contemporary European literature.
They published magazines, organised public readings, issued manifestos, founded artistic cafés and became established literary personae. Literary life was not simply something they entered; it was something they staged into existence.
Writer Otar Chiladze later summed up their achievement concisely and perfectly: “They acted out a nonexistent poetic life on the stage of a nonexistent theatre.”
The poets’ moral choices
By the early twentieth century, Georgia had thriving literature, but no established modern literary scene. The Blue Horns set out to create one but they did not get far.
The Red Army invaded independent Georgia in 1921 and absorbed the country into the Soviet system. At first, the modernist movement continued through its own momentum. The Blue Horns tried to accommodate the new regime in various ways, presenting their project as aesthetic rather than political. After the suppression of Georgia’s 1924 anti-Soviet uprising, they had to discontinue their periodicals. As the Soviet regime hardened, the existence of independent artistic groups became untenable.
The poets faced hard moral choices. Some acquiesced to the demands of the state. Some wrote poems celebrating the construction of the socialist state. Robakidze left the Soviet Union. Others retreated, made compromises or tried to protect one another. Survival could later be taken as collaboration.
By 1937, simply knowing the wrong person could put you at risk. Not denouncing someone could make you the next suspect.
At a Communist Party congress that May, Lavrenti Beria – then the local ruler of Soviet Georgia – warned that writers remained attached to old sentiments and to the “enemies of the people.” Some writers were already arrested. Others were subjected to public shaming at Writers’ Union meetings. Iashvili was repeatedly interrogated by the NKVD and pressured to confess to involvement in a supposed plot.
During the Great Terror, arrests and executions became routine. Scholars, writers and artists disappeared into prisons or were shot. Those who survived learned that even friendship could be dangerous. Research cited by the Writers’ House has counted approximately 140 writers subjected to some form of repression from 1921 onward. The victims’ work was removed from public view, their names became dangerous to mention, and their families were persecuted.
The Writers’ Union condemned Iashvili after his death, treating the suicide as an anti-Soviet provocation. Their response showed that they understood it for what it really was: an act of defiance.
This is the limited sense in which Freitod applies. Iashvili did not defeat the regime by dying, but by choosing to die at the Writer’s House, he left little doubt about the message he meant to send.
The Writers’ House therefore is inseparable from Iashvili’s life and death. Built for the philanthropist David Sarajishvili in the early twentieth century, the mansion later became the centre of Georgian literary life.
This is why its silence on 22 July 2026 matters, as Zourabishvili pointed out. Not engaging in any commemoration is to sidelining what was done to Georgian writers – and ultimately to the Georgian people. It is telling that the commemoration was taken up by writers, at least some of whom are themselves now facing exclusion and direct repression.
This was not the first time the Writers’ House had become a site of political conflict. In 2023, the Ministry of Culture appointed Ketevan Dumbadze – a former ruling-party member of parliament – as its director.
Around a hundred writers, translators and publishers protested the decision, warning of political interference and threats to uncensored literary activity. Many began a boycott. Critics have since described the institution as politicised.
Yesterday and today’s resistance
An institution shapes collective memory not only through what it preserves, but through what it places on its calendar. It may display letters, photographs and first editions while remaining silent on the date that gives those objects their meaning. A museum can explain how writers were suppressed in the past. A public commemoration goes further: it asks what their resistance means today.
What is lost when a country’s cultural institutions fall silent about the people and dates that shaped its history? The public remembers that people died, but forgets how institutions, professional bodies and frightened colleagues were made part of the machinery.
The Blue Horns matter because they understood culture as a form of freedom: the freedom to renew a language, to turn towards Europe, to contradict inherited taste, to create a literary world where none yet existed. Remembering them is a reminder that culture cannot survive on obedience.
It is in this context that a group of people have decided to take the commemoration of the Blue Horns’ legacy further. In an open letter published on the platform Gvakhsovs (“We Remember”), a group of citizens have proposed that 2027 – the 90th anniversary of the 1937 repressions – should be widely commemorated and fully dedicated to the Blue Horns.
The organisers are asking people to share ideas for how they’d like to see the Blue Horns’ legacy honoured throughout 2027. Separately, students from Ilia State University, have organised to bring flowers to Paolo Iashvili’s grave on 22 July. Carefully but steadily, the idea of reclaiming the legacy that was intended to be erased from Georgians’ collective memory is gaining momentum – ands says something important about where Georgia stands today.
On 22 July 2026, the poems of the repressed poets were heard anyway, a few steps from the house.
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