Vakhtang Kikabidze

The voice of Mimino who broke with Moscow

1938–2023

Vakhtang Kikabidze (1938-2023), known in Georgia as Buba, was born in Tbilisi. His father, the journalist Konstantine Kikabidze, went missing near Kerch in December 1942; his mother, Manana Bagrationi, was a singer. He enrolled at the university and then at the institute of foreign languages and finished neither: in 1959 he took a job at the Tbilisi Philharmonic, and in 1966 he became the drummer and singer of the ensemble Orera and appeared in his first film, Meeting in the Mountains.

Real cinema began for him with Georgiy Daneliya: Don't Grieve of 1969 brought him the acting prize in Cartagena, and Mimino of 1977 brought the USSR State Prize and fame across the Union in the role of the pilot Valiko Mizandari. There was also Georgy Shengelaia's Melodies of the Vera Quarter. His songs were sung by heart: Chito-gvrito, to music by Giya Kancheli and words by Petre Gruzinsky, and My Years, by Georgy Movsesyan to verse by Robert Rozhdestvensky. He directed as well: the comedy Your Health, Dear! came out in 1981 and Men and All the Rest in 1985. For almost thirty years, from the early eighties on, he lived and worked in Russia, where he filled the halls.

All of that ended in August 2008. On the nineteenth of July, his birthday, he was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship; after the war he declined to accept it and cancelled his anniversary concerts in Moscow, saying that he respected the Russian people but could not accept awards or perform after military action against Georgia. He never went back to Russia. In 2014 he told a Ukrainian newspaper that were he young, he would be at the front; in the spring of 2015 he gave a concert in Kyiv in memory of the Heavenly Hundred; in 2013 he was named an Honoured Artist of Ukraine, and in August 2021 he stood at the parade in Kyiv. At the 2020 election he headed the list of the United National Movement and became a member of parliament, though grave illness kept him from working there. In February 2022 he condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He died on the fifteenth of January 2023 in Tbilisi and is buried at the Vera cemetery beside his mother and his wife.