Those Georgia Rebels

The sunny, Transcaucasian Republic of Georgia might be described as the Sicily of the Soviet Union: a warm, wine-growing land whose 5 million, mostly dark-eyed inhabitants are known far and wide as clannish, passionate and shrewd. They are also notoriously unconcerned with the principles of socialism where making money is concerned. The Georgian penchant for private enterprise has long troubled Moscow, and lately its concern has been increasing. Over the past few months, a series of fires and bombings have racked Tbilisi, the capital, and, usually in typical veiled fashion, Communist officials admit that the region's entrepreneurs are fighting fiat with fire in resisting a 3 1/2-year crackdown on their ruble-rousing ways.

The most recent incident occurred on April 12, when a bomb blew out windows in the building housing the Georgian Council of Ministers. Another explosion at an aircraft factory last fall injured two guards. A fire gutted the city's major children's store on the eve of the 25th Communist Party Congress last February, and other arson attacks have damaged the opera house, two film studios, a sports complex and the laboratory of Tbilisi's Agricultural Institute. The incidents, complained the Georgian party's Central Committee, were the work of "carriers of the evils of the past, striving to express their dissatisfaction in a most infamous fashion."

Blind Eye. The carriers seem to be resisting the broom-wielding administration of Eduard Shevardnadze, an austere former police chief who was made regional party boss in 1972, when private corruption threatened to engulf the entire local Communist organization. With officials turning a blind eye, profiteers had, among other things, been looting several large factories and selling their products on the black market. Capitalist-minded peasants had been loading flowers and produce aboard Aeroflot flights to Moscow, where they could be sold at large profit.

Shevardnadze instituted a thoroughgoing purge; at one party meeting, the story goes, he asked his colleagues to vote with their left hands, then demanded all the expensive foreign watches revealed on their raised arms. But Shevardnadze has not been able to curb all the wheeling and dealing in Georgia. Recently, Georgian Minister of Home Affairs Konstantin Ketiladze called for a "merciless fight" against profiteers and warned that "readers should not be under the false impression that the problem has been solved." The Kremlin's economic planners need no convincing: Georgia, where much of the people's effort is devoted to nonofficial pursuits, is a chronic laggard among Soviet republics in the official rankings of labor productivity.

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