Georgia on Their Minds

To cure me seemed hard even to Him who created me.

--The Knight in the Leopard Skin Tariel, the knight in the leopard skin, was the great folk hero of Georgia --before Joseph Stalin came along. To the warlike people of the high wine-and-fruit-growing country between the Black and Caspian seas, Tariel was the perfect combination of vice and virtue. He could slash a man in two with a snap of his whip, slay 10,000 enemies in a single sortie, then weep like a woman at the thought of his own cruelty. Stalin went Tariel one better: he shed no tears. Yet all of Georgia wept when its favorite son died.

The tears were quite understandable. Under Stalin, Georgia was more pampered than any other Soviet republic. It received disproportionately large allocations for farms, dams and fac tories, was permitted to preserve a good deal of private initiative at a time when the rest of Russia was being brutally forced into collectivization. After Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, all of that changed. Georgians were dropped from power in Mos cow, and Khrushchev even tore up a few of Georgia's vineyards, replanting them with his favorite crop, corn.

Nikita's successors, Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin, have taken a more sympathetic view of Stalin's historical role. The motive is not entirely clear; perhaps B. & K. are reluctant to let Red China take all the credit for Stalinism, or perhaps it has to do with inner Kremlin politics. In any case, they have not only looked the other way to avoid noticing the statues and paintings of Stalin that still adorn many a Georgian town and hotel, but they have even restored Stalin to the history books. Last week Brezhnev went a long step further toward the rehabilitation of Georgia. He flew to the regional capital of Tbilisi to present the republic with an Order of Lenin.

In a nationally televised speech be fore a mass rally of cheering Georgians, Brezhnev praised the republic for "successes in economic and cultural construction," paid tight-lipped tribute to Stalin for his "distinguished role in the course of the revolutionary struggle."

Did that signal a return to Stalinism on Moscow's part? Not very likely. Brezhnev and Kosygin are willing to give the knight in the leopard skin his due as a major -- but flawed -- figure in Soviet his tory, and are more concerned with keeping peace in the Soviet family than with any fear of resurgent Stalinism.

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