Giorgi Saakadze - in Culture

In Culture

Saakadze’s controversial career has always been a source of conflicting perceptions of his role in Georgia’s history. The traditional historiography of Georgia, heavily influenced by Prince Vakhushti and Marie Brosset, continued to view him as a feudal adventurer and ambitious warlord involved in the turbulent whirl of intrigues and disturbances which fill the history of seventeenth-century Georgia.

The first attempt at the rehabilitation of Saakadze was made by his relative Metropolitan Joseph of Tbilisi in his poem The Grand Mouravi (დიდმოურავიანი, didmouraviani; 1681-87). Beginning from the early 20th century, some Georgian authors have also tried to emphasize the positive aspects of Saakadze’s biography, particularly his contribution to the 1625 rebellion which frustrated Shah Abbas’s plan to convert eastern Georgian lands into the Qizilbash khanates.

In the 1940s, Joseph Stalin’s wartime propaganda established Saakadze as a major symbol of Georgian patriotism. In October 1940, Stalin commented on Saakadze, proclaiming that the Grand Mouravi’s hopes for Georgia’s "unification into one state through the establishment of royal absolutism and of the liquidation of the power of the princes" had been progressive. In an apparent move to encourage Georgian nationalism in order to gain the loyalty of the population during the war with Germany, Stalin himself was involved in modifying the script for an epic movie, Giorgi Saakadze, commissioned from the Georgian film director Mikheil Chiaureli in 1942-1943. Stalin dismissed a script by the Georgian writer Giorgi Leonidze and approved the one by Anna Antonovskaya and Boris Chenry, adopted from Antonovskaya’s 1942 Stalin Prize-winning six-volume novel, The Great Mouravi (Russian: Великий Моурави).

The film emphasized that Saakadze, initially an obscure squire, was a victim of machinations at the hands of the wealthy feudal lords who would sacrifice everything, including their motherland, for their own benefit. It intentionally avoided any mention of Saakadze’s own adventures and illustrated him as a popular leader against the external aggressors. In the atmosphere of suspicion and spy mania in the Soviet Union during these years, the movie also served to current propaganda by emphasizing that the treason threatening to the popular leader, and hence to the country, was to be punished cruelly. Ironically, Giorgi Saakadze was also the name of the Wehrmacht's 797th Battalion, one of Georgian battalions formed by the Germans to fight the Soviet Union.