‘Moscow for a week’: Georgia’s Soviet-era frequent flyers

Correction Jan. 4, 2022: This article originally misidentified the person in a photograph as Kakha Chachava. “With this salary, I could go to Moscow for a week without having to save money.” Frequent flyers The first frequent flyers in the 1950s were Soviet party officials, but by the 1970s and 1980s, students and young professionals were among those travelling around the USSR. “These flights were aimed at allowing more people to go on vacation.” With snow-capped mountains, reputed gastronomy and popular seaside resorts along the Black Sea, Georgia was a popular destination for Soviet tourists. “In 1977, the dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia was arrested after having Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago published by the Georgian Academy of Sciences,” says Timothy Blauvelt, a history professor at Ilia State University in Tbilisi. In Saakashvili’s vision, “37 rubles”, symbolising a wish for closer ties with Moscow, and the chosen geopolitical path towards integrating within the European Union and NATO are mutually exclusive.