In Search of Zviad

As a human-rights activist in the 1970s, he was incarcerated in a Soviet psychiatric ward and his name mentioned as a Nobel Peace Prize candidate. Soon after, he shocked supporters by recanting, on national TV, his entire code of beliefs. More than a decade later, he became Georgia's first freely elected President, only to stun everyone again, this time by forging a brutish dictatorship whose excesses provoked his own violent ouster. Last week, after a 20-month exile in which he fought an unsuccessful war to regain power, Zviad Gamsakhurdia carried out his most baffling flourish yet, shrouding his apparent death in the same jumble of contradictions with which he lived his life.

The story provided by his wife and a spokesman was that after being surrounded by government forces, Gamsakhurdia committed suicide as "an act of protest against the existing regime" in Georgia. But did he really? Opponents said that he was killed by one of his own associates. And others raised the possibility -- perhaps farfetched -- that he may still be alive.

The son of one of Georgia's most beloved writers, Gamsakhurdia was imprisoned in 1977 for founding a human-rights organization in Georgia. His televised repentance bought his release, allowing him to run for President in 1991. Once in office, however, he muzzled the press, imprisoned rivals and stonewalled parliament. He was overthrown in 1992. Undeterred, Gamsakhurdia unleashed a civil war that was quieted only after Russian troops joined the fray on the side of President Eduard Shevardnadze, who, when he heard of his rival's death, pronounced that the man had been "a political corpse for a long time." Without confirmation of when, how or even if Gamsakhurdia died, it is not yet certain whether Georgia's knight-errant is a corpse of any kind.