Giorgi Kvinitadze

Commander-in-chief, the defence of Tbilisi in 1921

1874–1970

Giorgi Kvinitadze (1874-1970) was born in Dagestan into the Chikovani family; he took the name Kvinitadze later. He finished the Konstantinovskoye infantry school, fought in the Russo-Japanese war, went through the General Staff Academy and by 1916 was a colonel, chief of staff of a Caucasian rifle division.

In the Democratic Republic of Georgia he was commander-in-chief twice. In 1919 his troops took Artvin, he served as chief of staff in the war with Armenia, and in May 1920, during the Bolshevik attempt at a coup, he defended the military school building together with the cadets.

In February 1921, when the Red Army entered Georgia, Kvinitadze took command again. He was appointed on the sixteenth and on the twenty-fourth he ordered a withdrawal: the army faced complete encirclement, and he chose to save the troops and the city. Then came France, work for Pathé and a matsoni trade, memoirs written in 1922 and published in Paris only in 1985. In 2021 his remains were reburied in the pantheon on Mtatsminda.