Prelude Beautiful lyrics from a famous song performed by a no less famous singer from Georgia. Or maybe my years are not wealth, but a heavy burden that weighs on me with old age illnesses or heavy thoughts. This is not a simple question. On the one hand, it seems very good - I have lived to be 80 years old. After all, not many people reach such an age, and, probably, we should be glad that I have lived to such an old age, as they say. Yes, logically, we should rejoice, but, unfortunately, there is not enough joy at this age. It’s like I’m sitting on death row, waiting for an angel or a devil to come for me, depending on whether I’m being taken to heaven or hell. I have little hope for heaven. I was brought up as an atheist by our socialist system, and all my life I fought against the “opium” of the people, that is, religion. So, there’s no hope for heaven, and I don’t want to go to hell. It’s better if there’s nothing there. Such not-so-happy thoughts constantly creep into my head. Hence the gloomy mood. Hence the irritability. Hence the depression.

Unfortunately, the younger generation does not always consider this state of mind of the older generation and does not understand why the older generation seems irritable for no apparent reason. By way of self-criticism, it must be said that when we were young, we did not really understand the state of mind of the older generation. But, still, not everything is so bad at an older age. There are joys that are peculiar only to the older generation. We rejoice when our children are doing well. We rejoice at the appearance of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-granddaughters. After all, in each of them there is a particle of grandmothers, grandfathers, great-grandmothers, great-grandfathers. Perhaps this is our immortality. We are leaving, but we remain in our continuation - in children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Perhaps this is the main content of our life: to continue ourselves in our offspring.

Yes, it is a great joy when you live to see your great-grandchildren and at the same time feel relatively normal. I say “relatively” because by this age a person will not have avoided diseases. But for now, I’m getting around on my own and taking care of myself. This is very important.

A lot has changed during my life in this world. I remember when a car appeared on our street, we children ran after it and shouted, "Car! For us, the car was something incredible. In 1937, the first elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were held in the country. For campaigning, the so-called “kukuruzniki” flew around the city, dropping campaign leaflets urging people to participate in the elections. After that, when the plane flew over us, we children shouted for him to drop the papers. How far away it is all now! Much has remained in memory, but many memories have been lost.

Childhood during the war I remember very well June 22, 1941. I was 11 years old. I was visiting my aunt in a village near Tbilisi. I saw all the people running to the center of the village, where there was a loudspeaker. At that time, we did not have a radio at home, and such loudspeakers were installed in settlements. And I ran there too. People stood with their heads down and listened to the radio, and only the announcer’s voice could be heard from there.

He relayed Molotov’s speech about the treacherous attack of fascist Germany on the Soviet Union. It was about 12 o’clock in the afternoon. The day was bright and sunny. There were men and women standing in the square, and there was complete silence. A heavy, unsettling silence. And it was not Molotov’s speech that made a heavy impression on me, but this oppressive, oppressive silence in the square, where there were several hundred people. It was this terrible silence that told me that an event had taken place that really threatens us all with death.

Since that difficult day, my whole life has changed radically, and for the worse. The struggle for survival began. Even before the war, we lived quite poorly. My mother is a cleaner at school. My father is a chimney sweep who drinks a lot of Georgian wines. And there were four children in the family. The size of the room where we lived, if it could be called a room, was 12 sq m. All the facilities were outside.

My brother and I slept on the floor, under the table, there was nowhere else. And despite this poverty, I remember the pre-war years as somehow bright and warm. Perhaps those years were the best years of my life. Before the war, food had already appeared in stores. The main thing was that there was enough bread. And for us, bread was the main dish. As for the fact that we lived poorly, I didn’t think about it, because I didn’t see any other life. Everyone lived at about the same level as we did. Someone can do a little better, someone can do a little worse. There were no particularly rich people on our street. For example, a German family lived in the next yard, they had a piano, and in our understanding they were rich. Or if someone had a gramophone, they were considered rich too. There was no one to envy. Maybe that’s why relations between people before the war were friendly, there were no locks on the front doors. The last piece of bread was shared among themselves. In the evening, all the inhabitants of our courtyard gathered under the mulberry tree and talked about many different issues. It was often said whether there would be a war with Germany. Someone would bring a fresh newspaper and I would be asked to read aloud. And all this calm, peaceful life disappeared in an instant. WAR.

In the fall, my father was called up to the front. We have four children, 13, 11, and two of us are 3 years old, and we all want to eat. How we survived these difficult years, the wars and the post-war years, I write in more detail in my memoirs. At this point, I just want to ask myself, were these years of mine my wealth? No. God forbid anyone to have such wealth. Well, for Kikabidze, of course, the years of his childhood and adolescence were wealth. He did not have to live during the war.

Children of War and the Riches of Life

It is necessary to raise the subject of “children of war” in general. What they had to go through, and not only in the Leningrad blockade, which certainly deserves special attention What did the “children of war” in the Soviet Union must go through? How “wealthy” their childhood years were!

At that time, the country helped the front in every way it could. The question of our existence as a people, as a country, was decided. Therefore, we lived by the law “everything for the front, everything for victory”. We didn’t have a childhood or a youth. These years can hardly be considered “our wealth”.

But that’s not all. When we reached retirement age and believed that we were going on a well-deserved rest and had a happy old age ahead of us, life turned 180 degrees and who was nobody, he became everything. We, who built plants, factories, built cities, defended the country, now we have become nobody. And they threw us a miserable pension, as one throws gnawed bones to a dog. There is no time for wealth here. So our years, which were miserable in childhood, were also even poorer in our old age. So, unfortunately, it doesn’t turn out to be “my years is my wealth”.

And in general, what is wealth? How is this wealth measured?

Of course, each of us wants to live a good life. And what does it mean to live well? For some, it is enough to have a good apartment, a summer house. A car, to have healthy children, so that they do not have bad habits, and in life they stand firmly on their feet. And for others, millions of dollars are not enough, give a billion. So how much money and possessions do you have to have to be satisfied in this life and your years have been your wealth? I don’t think anyone can answer that question.

But there is not only material wealth. To get to know yourself, to get to know the world around you, to get to know the art created by mankind. Literature, music, etc. Isn’t that rich? I have already said that I come from a very poor family, but I did not pay much attention to my poverty and did not worry that I was poor, as some young people do.

Love of reading and music

Since I was a child I’ve loved to read. There was a good library not far from our house. In modern times, the library had mainly classical literature. I read foreign, Russian, Georgian, Armenian classical literature. Of course, what was printed in Georgian. That’s wealth. It is impossible to list the writers of the work that I have read, there are too many of them. I have had a strong craving for reading since childhood. We lived on the outskirts of the city and, as a matter of fact, I had no entertainment other than reading books. I didn’t have the money or decent clothes to go to the cinema in the city center, and then the cinemas were far from our house. We didn’t have TVs, we didn’t even have a radio station. A radio station was installed in our shack sometime in 1948. So books, and only books, were the source of knowledge of the world for me. However, I must say that the radio has greatly expanded my knowledge, especially in music. Amazing music broadcasts were broadcast on the radio – operas by Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Paliashvili, Gounod, Mussorgsky, Puccini, Beethoven, Glinka, Mozart and many others. In the beginning, I didn’t like opera or classical music in general. I didn’t think it was for us, at least not for me.

An interesting event happened in my life. I wrote in my memoirs that I was born in the mountains of South Ossetia in the village of Jvaris-ubani. The fact is that my mother, who already lived in Tbilisi, was in Jvaris-Ubani in the summer, and there she gave birth. At the same time, my father was arrested. Well, it’s 1930! And my mother also has my two-year-old older brother at that time. So, my mother left me in the village with a woman from another neighbour family, and she herself went to Tbilisi. Since she was a healthy woman, her breast milk had to go somewhere, she was hired to breastfeed the son of a woman. That woman was a veterinarian by profession and worked in the market in sanitary control. She checked the quality of meat at the market. After the war she sometimes gave us pieces of meat. So, somewhere in 1947 or 1948, I became interested in who else my mother was breastfeedin. My mother gave me their address, and I went to meet my foster brother. He turned out to be a very good boy. We became friends. His father was repressed, which was quite common in those years. They lived on Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi. The apartment was not very good, but it was near the opera house. It turned out that the inspector who checked the entrance tickets was a good friend of his mother.

So Nodary, that was the name of my foster brother, took me to the opera every weekend and sometimes on other days, of course, to the daytime performances. We went there because this woman would let us in without a ticket. I have no musical education; no understanding of what opera is and what it is eaten with. The first opera I listened to was The Tsar’s Bride. Everything was good, cozy, the seats were soft and comfortable. What was bad was that this royal bride was very vocal and I could not fall asleep for a long time. Finally, I managed to fall asleep. The next time we went to hear Rigoletto. Since I had already adjusted myself to “listening,” I fell asleep instantly. I woke up to the Duke’s aria “Heart of Beauties”. But for Carmen, I was captivated by the music from the overture, and I listened with rapture until the very end of the opera. Then I listened to operas by Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Gounod and other composers. I was so fascinated by opera music that when I later went to a performance of the drama theatre, I missed the music, the musical accompaniment of the performance. And I realized how much music enhances the perception of what is happening on stage.

Much later, I was already an officer and while on vacation in Tbilisi I listened to Paliashvili’s opera “Daisi” (translated from Georgian means “evening dawn”). I came out of the opera house enlightened, cleansed of the dirt of everyday life. I wanted to do something good for people. At that time, I thought that a person who listened to such music as Daisi, Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, or Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto, Grieg’s Peer Gynt, and in general the musical works of outstanding composers, would not be able to do something dirty and disgusting. In my opinion, classical music, if understood, purifies a person’s soul, like a prayer said before God in a state of strong emotional excitement.

I am grateful to those who introduced me to the understanding of such spiritual wealth as opera and classical music, and from the bottom of my heart I feel sorry for those who reject or, at all, do not want to accept such a treasure, and prefer only material goods. What a pity.

My View on 19th-Century Art

The abundance of talents in music, literature and painting, born in the 19th century, is astounding. Although there were great works of art in the 20th century, it is the 19th century that is unique in its artistic expressiveness. However, contemporary art, nurtured in the 20th and 21st centuries, seems pseudo-art compared to the true works of the 19th century.

My generation has had the good fortune to interact with real art, untainted by the pseudo-art that has flourished so much in recent decades. This, however, does not mean that everything used to be good and now everything is bad. There were also a lot of negative and disgusting moments.

Our upbringing was imbued with the ideology of loyalty to the causes of Lenin and Stalin. We being a young people may not have fully understood what they were doing, but we felt compelled to shout our allegiance to their ideas. A different opinion or doubt could have a negative impact on our lives.

We lived in an era when one person’s opinion determined our preferences in literature, music, and art. Anything that did not conform to this opinion was automatically considered bad and dangerous to society. At that time, our moral and ideological education was the prerogative of the “father of nations.” I remember well how the decisions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) made critical assessments of literary and artistic works. They were exterminated if they did not meet certain ideological criteria.

The Influence of Stalinism on Spiritual Development The end of the 1940s was marked by a struggle against cosmopolitanism and misguided worship of the West. If Comrade Stalin had seen what is happening now, he would not have just turned over in his grave but would have been spinning like a fan. Stalinism played a role in shaping the spirituality of the younger generation in the 1930s and 1940s, and the effects of this influence are still felt today. I digressed from the topic of spiritual wealth, but I realized that a person’s spiritual state depends on the social spiritual environment. I lived most of my life under Soviet rule, where the ideology of Marxism-Leninism profoundly influenced my worldview. We were not given the opportunity to take a critical look at the prevailing ideology. For a long time, I believed in socialism and communism, and my spiritual path was determined by the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Everything that did not fit into its framework was rejected.

As “Communist No. 1” in my field, I professed Marxism as a sacred truth. It’s hard to realize that I spent the best years of my life being constrained by this ideology. It affected the richness of my experience and understanding of the world. To some extent, I digress from the topic of “my years, my wealth”, but I still indirectly answer what kind of wealth our generation had.

The Wealth of Time and Heritage

Perhaps the idea that wealth is measured by the number of years lived is implied in these words? I disagree. The richest person is a newborn. The greatest wealth is time allotted for life, and the more I live, the poorer I become. Soon I will be 80 years old, so I am at the edge of “poverty.” This is how nature works: the old dies out, the new is born and lives. This is right, otherwise there would be complete chaos on Earth.

Death is an inevitable phenomenon for the normal existence of mankind. Elderly people who have reached old age depart for the other world without tragedy. The departure of the young is a real tragedy, and there is no justification for it. A person should live at least 100 years. That’s normal and that’s what I’m striving for. And when young people die, it’s a tragedy.

I have been married to my wife for over 60 years. She cherishes me deeply and makes protecting my health a top priority. She will do everything possible to help me continue living on this earth as long as I can. We feel we have an important reason for this.

One day, one of our grandchildren may have a child of their own. This would be our great-grandchild. Who will take the great-grandchild for walks outside? My wife and I believe it should be us. Both our daughter and the great-grandchild’s grandmother will be working. So it seems we, as the great-grandparents, are needed to help care for the child. Without our support, things may not work out.

I find that having a large family, where others depend on you, can help motivate a person to live longer. When you feel needed by your children and grandchildren, it gives you a reason to prolong your life. I don’t believe those who say they are tired of living and don’t want to live anymore. Most people want to live as long as possible. One shouldn’t fear death either.

I often reflect on life and death. As the older generation, my wife and I will pass away eventually. However, parts of us will remain through our descendants. We have 4 daughters, 3 grandsons, 5 granddaughters, 2 great-grandchildren and 3 great-granddaughters. Pieces of us live on in each of them. That is how we find a kind of immortality.

My family is my pride

Stanzas from the book “The Heart Secrets of the House of Romanov” by Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, grandson of Nicholas I, perfectly convey the importance of earthly goods. It reminds us that even the highest honors and riches lose their meaning in the face of imminent death.

“I’m a spoiler of fate… From the cradle Wealth, honors, high rank To the lofty goal I was beckoned By birth to greatness I am called. But what is luxury, gold, power and strength to me? Is it not the same impartial grave It will absorb all the tinsel glitter. And everything that flattered us here only by appearances, It will disappear like waves in an instantaneous splash."

In September, there was an event related to my 80-year-olds. Although the date itself is not joyful, my daughter organized a family celebration for me in a Georgian restaurant. It was unusual and far from ordinary, not in terms of luxury, but in showing respect and love to the family.

At my anniversary, I felt not only the joy of organized event, but also the deep joy for the warmth and love that children, sons-in-law, grandchildren and granddaughter showed to each other. That relationship meant a lot. Especially considering that usually the relationship between children is not an easy issue.

I am proud of my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. All my children have received higher education, without cronyism and other privileges. This is a true achievement and a reason to be proud.