Abstract
Professor Donald Rayfield says Georgia’s foreign agent law meant he could not accept the country’s literary award in good conscience
CREDIT: Dmitry Rozhkov, CC BY-SA 4.0
WHEN DONALD RAYFIELD heard he was being honoured for his distinguished career translating and writing about Georgian literature, language and history, the British professor’s first question was: “Who’s this award from?”
He couldn’t get a straight answer. Eventually he learned that the Award of Gratitude had been granted by the Writers’ House of Georgia – a Tbilisi-based institution that promotes Georgian books and literature abroad – and its director, Ketevan Dumbadze.
Rayfield, an emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University in London, had never met Dumbadze, but her reputation preceded her.
The daughter of the late children’s writer Nodar Dumbadze, in recent years she has been best known as a member of the country’s ruling party, Georgian Dream. In August 2023, the party appointed her to replace Natasha Lomouri, the long-standing director of Writers’ House.
The secretive political appointment was met with an outcry from writers, translators and publishers across the country concerned about her lack of credentials and what implications this might have for an institution that prided itself on remaining independent from the state.
Georgia’s literary community was up in arms for other reasons, too, said Rayfield.
Just five months earlier, Dumbadze voted in favour of the controversial “foreign agent” law, which was widely condemned as an attack on civil society. “When she was appointed, virtually every writer in Georgia resigned in protest,” Rayfield told Index.
The endorsement of this law – alongside the party’s other increasingly repressive laws and attempts to stifle free speech – made Rayfield adamant he could not accept the award in good conscience.
“I would have felt very, very badly compromised if I had accepted it,” he said. “I also didn’t want anyone to think I’d quietly gone there, taken it and gone home again.”
It was for this reason that the 83-year-old, who has lost sight in one eye and seldom travels these days, decided to attend the ceremony at the Royal Asiatic Society in London in March to make his objections known publicly.
After speaking for close to 20 minutes about his life’s work and love of Georgia, he told the audience: “I am profoundly unhappy with what is happening in Georgia today and feel I cannot accept any gift that is associated at all with the ruling party.”
Outside the building, a group of Georgian students gathered with posters depicting demonstrators beaten at pro-European rallies and calling for “Freedom for Illegal Prisoners”.
Dumbadze, who had been expected to fly to London to present the award in person, did not attend.
Speaking out
It was not the first time Rayfield had taken a stand, but his first foray into Georgia’s literary scene was not by design.
He initially fell in love with the Czech language after cycling to Prague at the age of 15, and later went on to study Russian at the University of Cambridge.
He first visited Georgia in September 1973 with the intention of exploring the Russian poetry archives at the Tbilisi literary museum. The Soviet authorities wouldn’t allow him access, so he decided to learn Georgian and went on to translate dozens of pieces of prose and poetry from Georgian into English. In 2006, he edited the most comprehensive Georgian-English dictionary yet to be compiled.
Rayfield soon befriended Georgian dissidents and revered their ability to express their “opinion freely” at a time when free speech was heavily suppressed in other Soviet countries. Despite his growing fluency in the language and familiarity with Georgian life, he said he was always “very wary” of associating with anyone representing the government.
This cautious approach served him well where others fell foul. Rayfield was forced to publicly denounce fellow British scholar Professor David Lang in 1975 in a letter to The Times after Lang published letters in the newspaper criticising Georgian anti-Soviet dissidents, and denying the existence of corruption in the Georgian church and an arson attack on Tbilisi’s opera house. Rayfield later discovered Lang allegedly had links to Aleksi Inauri, the head of the Georgian KGB.
“It was very, very dangerous to get involved with the authorities in Georgia during the Soviet Union, no matter how personal and friendly you think they are,” he said. “It’s a honeytrap. Lang was caught up in that.”
Purges, prison and politics
Rayfield’s deep-seated distrust of the Georgian authorities has only increased as the current regime continues to strip away the country’s cultural and academic institutions.
“The state universities in Tbilisi and Batumi have been completely purged and commissions of specialists have come in,” said Rayfield. “But [they are] not people who know anything about education. A lot of graduates have been thrown off their courses and professors have lost their jobs. These commissions are rearranging the whole place and people are terrified to speak their minds.”
Hundreds of thousands of Georgians have already fled the country, creating “an enormous brain drain”, he said. “It’s all to do with the Georgian Dream Party – or Georgian Nightmare as some people call it. It’s a totalitarian-maker under which hundreds of people have been badly beaten, lost their jobs and been put in prison.”
Despite Georgian Dream’s initial efforts to reduce the country’s prison population when it came to power in 2012, it still has one of the highest incarceration rates in Europe.
In March, former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who was jailed in 2021 for embezzlement and abuse of power, had his sentence quietly extended from six to 12½ years for illegally crossing the border when he returned to Georgia from exile. Saakashvili, who served as president from 2004 until 2013, denies the charges, saying they are politically motivated.
As the ruling party drifts further into Russian-style authoritarianism, Rayfield believes such developments should be of concern to us all.
“The whole business with Saakashvili is being totally ignored, but he’s being slowly murdered in prison,” the academic said. “He’s being treated just like [Alexei] Navalny was treated. He committed a number of serious crimes as president, as well as doing a lot of good, but he never had a fair trial.”
Rayfield’s failing eyesight makes it unlikely he will return to Georgia – a fact he admits has emboldened him to speak out when others cannot. “Most of our Georgian and Russian friends are very careful what they say on the phone and what they put in emails, if at all,” he said.
“It’s just people my age who feel that they don’t care anymore and the authorities don’t care about them, either. This allows people like me to be courageous.”
Ketevan Dumbadze of the Georgian Dream party was controversially named as the director of the Writers’ House of Georgia in 2023
CREDIT: Hundnase, CC BY-SA 4.0
