ABSTRACT
There was still plenty of trauma and human suffering to go around. Back in Tbilisi, Alexis and our colleagues from the foreign media hack-pack
who had descended on the Georgian capital to cover the disaster celebrated my survival by chiding me for having decided to be “the last man out” of Sukhumi, which simply was not true. My putative employers at the New York Times, meanwhile, had decided that the story had already changed sufficiently to render obsolete any copy I might offer. I had left when the city was falling, had I not? It had now fallen, ergo, I was not in a position to write about that, now was I? Besides, the New York Times Magazine had already commissioned a tear-jerking story about the trials and travails of Eduard Shevardnadze’s return to Georgia, his heroic behavior during the siege and fall of Sukhumi, his abject flight from the city, and his arrival in Moscow the next day as a supplicant to Boris Yeltsin, when Shevy was forced to bend knee and kowtow to the Russian president to allow Georgia to join the Kremlin-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States.
