A NATIONAL TREASURE RETURNS TO GEORGIA.

Tbilisi yesterday took delivery of most of the archive of the government of the Georgian Democratic Republic, an independent country from 1918 to 1921, which was suppressed by Soviet Russia and incorporated the following year into the USSR. Georgia’s Social-Democrat leaders took the archive into exile to the West, and most of the records were stored in recent years at Harvard University, where they served as a major source for historical research. Professor Richard Pipes, a top authority on the formation of the USSR, was instrumental in making the arrangements to store the archive at Harvard and then to return it to Georgia. "I’ve always hoped that Georgia would achieve its independence, and now that it has, the archive belongs there," Pipes commented on the occasion.

In Tbilisi the historian Guram Sharadze, head of a state commission appointed by President Eduard Shevardnadze to administer and study the archive, stated that the collection "is of great importance to our country after 70 years of Soviet effort to eradicate the memory of Georgian statehood." (International agencies, October 9)

Aliev Issues Anti-Flattery Instructions.