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In April 1989, Soviet troops broke up a peaceful demonstration at the
government building in Tbilisi. Under unclear circumstances, twenty Georgians,
mostly women and children, were killed. The military authorities and the
official media blamed the demonstrators, and opposition leaders were arrested.
The Georgian public was outraged. What was afterwards referred to as the April
Tragedy fundamentally radicalized political life in the republic. Shevardnadze
was sent to Georgia to restore calm. He arranged for the replacement of
Patiashvili by Givi Gumbaridze, head of the Georgian branch of the Committee for
State Security (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti--KGB).
In an atmosphere of renewed nationalist fervor, public opinion surveys
indicated that the vast majority of the population was committed to immediate
independence from Moscow. Although the communist party was discredited, it
continued to control the formal instruments of power. In the months following
the April Tragedy, the opposition used strikes and other forms of pressure to
undermine communist power and set the stage for de facto separation from the
Soviet Union.
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