Last month, on an evening during the London Book Fair, I was invited to the Royal Asiatic Society to receive a “lifetime achievement” award for contributions to Georgian language, literature, and history. Bestowed by the Minister of Culture, Tea Tsulukiani, the award included a silver flask, apparently blessed by the Patriarch Ilia II, and was meant to be presented by the director of the Writers’ House, Ketevan Dumbadze (who had not arrived). When I was called to the lectern I began with a warning to the audience that I could not possibly accept the award, for personal, cultural, and political reasons.

When I first visited Georgia about fifty years ago, I was quite naive. I thought I would go to the literary museum and research the correspondence of Russian poets such as Pasternak, Brodsky, and others, with Georgian poets, who found consolation in the relative freedom of speech you had in Georgia in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. But there were certain things I didn’t realize.

The first was that in the 1920s Soviet Union, people didn’t correspond freely because they knew their letters could get them into severe trouble. I read what Georgian writers had written to each other about Russian poets until I realized they weren’t going to say anything important because the secret police had ways to find out what they thought. Much later I did learn what they thought when I read the transcripts of the NKVD-organized sessions in 1937–8 in the Writers House, where poets had to denounce each other and reveal what they’d said to each other, but these transcripts were secret until 1989 when the files were declassified.

I was fortunate that back in 1973 every time I went to the literary museum they said, “Oh, I’m sorry, we lost the key,” or, “The director is not in.” Eventually one of the women who worked there said, “Look, we’ve had a phone call from the central committee. We’re not allowed to show you anything.”

So I went off to the university. I thought, I’ve come for three months, I can’t go home with my tail between my legs. I suspected that language would perhaps be politically less dangerous than literature. I landed in the university department of Georgian language and I was very lucky to be given a teacher, Shukia Apridonidze, who must have trained up several dozen foreign kartvelologists. An extraordinary teacher and competent linguist, she allowed only Georgian in her own home; her mother couldn’t stand the idea of Russian being spoken. There were very good reasons for this: her grandfather, a minister in Georgia’s first independent government, didn’t sleep from the 1930s through the 1950s, expecting an arrest from Stalin’s police.

I realized that since there weren’t many Englishmen around I was quite desirable for reasons that had nothing to do with my virtues—the main reason being that they had plenty of translators from Georgian into Russian, a few into German, but then only East Germans. They wanted someone to make Georgian literature available in the West.

My predecessor in British Georgian studies, the remarkable Professor David Marshall Lang, had just disgraced himself in two ways. First, he was revealed to have accepted gifts from the KGB under the First Secretary Vasil Mzhavanadze’s government, which systematically plundered the museums for gifts to compliant foreigners and party officials, as well as for Victoria Mzhavanadze, his corrupt wife. All this was exposed by the new leader, Eduard Shevardnadze. Professor Lang had taken an interest in Armenian, which was a much greater sin in Georgia at the time. Much later, we learned that Professor Lang—who was a remarkable scholar, an extraordinarily good translator, very knowledgeable about medieval literature, but not an easy man to be with—had the fortune (he thought), or misfortune (you might think), to make friends with a young cavalry officer in Tabriz during the war. They were both intelligence officers and this friend was Aleksei Inauri, the future head of the Georgian KGB. Lang had an extraordinary collection of information and trophies, and he didn’t betray British secrets, if he knew any, but he did write letters in Britain to assert that Georgia was very happy as part of the Soviet Union, that the dissidents like Zviad Gamsakhurdia were in fact exiles living in Paris, purporting to be an opposition that didn’t actually exist.

It was not until 1989 that the KGB’s “Mitrokhin” papers reached the West, and we realized that Professor Lang was “Agent Jim” to the Georgian KGB. For any foreigner in Georgia, there was a clear danger of being trapped by gratitude for people’s hospitality. Conversely, I was very lucky in that I met the wrong sort of people. I met the young Gamsakhurdia (the first president of the newly independent country), his inspired comrade Merab Kostava, and other future dissidents of the Helsinki Group. Once you were associated with them, respectable communists didn’t really want to know you. I avoided political entanglement and ended up working with Georgian literature; people wanted me to translate, and they found I could manufacture verse quite quickly. It is a bad habit I still have.

But I was still interested in the dissident politics of Georgia, the people who had the courage to come out and protest against the government, sometimes at great risk to themselves. And I did a little bit to help. I discovered that if you wanted to smuggle anything out of the Soviet Union, it was best not to use the British Embassy, which was staffed by the KGB. Better to use the Australian embassy, which the KGB was not interested in whatsoever.

I met a number of literary stars like Otar Chiladze, whom I liked very much. And like most Georgian writers, he amazed me because by day his house was full of visitors and family. I asked him, “When do you write these novels? It must be that you don’t sleep, you must do it at night.” I became interested in his work. It was extremely difficult to translate, but I managed. I have found in life that if you don’t know anything you should translate, or better, write a book. Just as if you don’t know a language very well you should teach it, because that will force you to concentrate on it. For thirty years, I complained about the absence of a decent Georgian–English dictionary. I had the ganmartebiti, the great eight-volume Georgian dictionary, which was a miracle because it was commissioned by Stalin and the editor, Arnold Chikobava, had to provide quotations for every word that he included: when you quoted, you had to know that someone you were quoting was all right, had not been shot and not been arrested, but also that they were not going to be shot or arrested, or you would have to rip the page out and print the whole dictionary again.

I’ve seen that dictionary’s first volume in what’s left of Stalin’s library, with Stalin’s blue-pencil notes everywhere to Georgian words whose meaning he had forgotten. I realized how clever that dictionary was, but it was a dictionary of literary language and not colloquial language. It hadn’t kept up with slang. But finally the British Arts and Humanities Research Council decided to support dictionaries and they began distributing money. And I got enough money to find a team in Georgia to help me; they were remarkable people. Two of them have already died, unfortunately. We sent out researchers to go to various people and places—film producers, prisons, drug addicts’ hangouts—and find out how people spoke. We even found out what women say to each other when no men are present, and the idioms of Jewish Georgian, and so on. That was one of the most interesting things I’ve ever done in my life. It took six years, it was very hard work, but we have finally sold the last copy.

Since then, I’ve become much more worried about Georgia. The thing I immediately noticed in Georgia, which I liked enormously, was people’s courage. The very fact that men and women were being repressed, sometimes imprisoned and even executed, didn’t always stop them from speaking freely. And the thing that held Georgia together was the power of personal and family relations; if the young relative of a senior party official was arrested for dissidence, the latter would phone the authorities and say, “Find another young man. That’s my godson. You can’t do that.”

Once I was in a car that was run off the road and the person who ran me off the road was a KGB man. I thought, “Now we’re in trouble.” But then my driver and he shook hands. They were cousins. And that is when I thought Georgia would never actually be fully repressed. Later on, in 1978 when the Russian law was proposed by which Russian had to be used for PhD theses and taught in nursery schools, crowds came out, even women with children, and Shevardnadze had to phone Moscow for permission to step back and annul that law, thanks to the sheer power of public opinion.

I noticed the same thing during Mikheil Saakashvili’s regime. In fact, the fall of Saakashvili was most impressive because the public came out in a way that has never happened in any other country. When films of prison torture appeared, people came out in the streets to support the prisoners; what happened in Georgia was the manifestation of public civic spirit. And that was enough, I think, to turn the electorate against Saakashvili, who was an extraordinary mix of evil and good. Even in his regime, there was exceptional tolerance. After the killing of his prime minister Zurab Zhvania and a young Azeri official, it was possible in Vake Park to have someone show a documentary film about it, point out all the inconsistencies, and get away with exposing the government’s cover-up of an extrajudicial execution as carbon monoxide poisoning during an allegedly homosexual tryst. I don’t think you would have gotten away with such an exposé, even in Britain. There was at that time an unprecedented freedom. And since then I’ve found that the unexpected has happened.

I’ve written far too much in my life and I’m slowing down now. I only write small things. And the last small thing I wrote was on the impact of English on the Georgian language; to my amazement, I saw that Georgian is now doing to English what it had done to Farsi in the eleventh century, importing an enormous number of words, throwing away a lot of them and keeping some of them in the most inventive ways. There are two inventions, imports that I thought were particularly appropriate. One is the word krinji, from the English cringe. An extraordinary importation I notice has gone into a lot of languages; it describes one’s embarrassed and disapproving reaction to what is happening today, cringing. And the other, even more extraordinary, is dasinuli, which comes from English seen. It is used on occasions when you send a message on your phone to somebody and you realize it’s been seen but that your message doesn’t get a response, so you are a dasinuli, someone who’s been gaslit or ignored.

It’s an ingenious verbal invention. And I think, unfortunately, it’s perfect for Georgia today. What has happened now is in some ways worse than Soviet times. During the Soviet era, you couldn’t get out of Georgia. If you didn’t like it, you had to put up with it. You had the choice of protesting in whatever way you could or be subversive, however you could. Nowadays, if you’re a talented Georgian, as London’s exiles and refugees prove, it’s very easy to get out and make a career elsewhere; a disastrous brain drain is underway. And the Georgian government is doomed, no matter what it does, with Putin next door; if they work with him, they are corrupted but if they say no to him, they’ll be attacked. It’s rather like keeping a pet Komodo dragon next door to you. If it slobbers all over you, you die of the poisoned saliva. If you annoy it, it bites you and you die of that.

What has been happening in Georgia makes me very, very unhappy indeed. And now I come to the reasons why I could not accept this award. One is that it comes from the House of Writers, where Ketevan Dumbadze was appointed director to replace Natasha Lomouri two years ago.

The new director, Ketevan Dumbadze, comes from a very distinguished family. Her grandfather was shot under Stalin. Her grandmother spent ten years in Siberia. Her father, Nodar Dumbadze, was the most popular writer in Georgia, particularly among young people. And he showed great courage because in 1984 when the “aircraft boys” tried to hijack a plane to Turkey and returned to Tbilisi, and the Spetsnaz opened fire and killed a number of stewardesses and passengers, these boys were sentenced to death together with a priest they’d known some months previously. They deserved some sort of punishment but not the death penalty. The Union of Writers remained totally silent except for Nodar Dumbadze, who was the only writer to protest against the death penalty for this. Given this distinguished lineage, it is very disappointing that Ketevan Dumbadze should be affiliated with Georgian Dream, an oppressive political party, and then accept her appointment as director of the House of Writers, given the fact that at least a hundred writers—most Georgian writers—signed a letter of protest against Natasha Lomouri’s removal. It’s an organization that should be directed by a fellow writer, not by a member of parliament who voted for Putin’s laws against “foreign agents” and against “propagation” of homosexuality, and who has been appointed by a venal government.

The second reason I had to reject this award is that the former Minister for Justice and now for Culture, Tea Tsulukiani, has been conducting a campaign of replacing experts in museums, galleries, and other institutions with political appointees, often associates of Kotsebi, the Georgian Dream Party, or their wives and girlfriends. The whole Georgian Dream party seems to be a nightmare for Georgia.

When I think of the waves of demonstrations, beatings, protests, fines, and so on, it makes me very sad for Georgia, particularly when I see that there are no new leading dissidents. The dissidents I knew in the seventies had their faults. Gamsakhurdia was clearly unstable. Merab Kostava had his theosophical bent, and Merab Mamardashvili his sexual preoccupations, but they were people who moved others to think and take action. Today there is just a disorganized and very unhappy generation who can’t find a way out, and that’s partly the West’s fault. We take no interest in Georgia anymore, even though we’ve made various promises. This seems to be a feature in Georgian history that goes back two thousand years. They appeal to the West for help against the tyrants that they live next to. And the West used to respond, “Oh, yes, we’ll send you six missionaries with prayer books, so you can endure your suffering.” Today, when you ask for twenty thousand armed men, you get six NGOs who are probably now stalled by USAID.

I am profoundly unhappy with what is happening in Georgia today. And I feel I cannot accept any gift that is associated at all with the ruling party that is keeping Georgia in its current state. My only hope is that the next generation can change things, though I wouldn’t know how.