By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Rodney Dennis remembers opening the boxes and seeing a whitish residue shrouding the documents like mange.

"The archive was in terrible shape," Dennis said. "They were the moldiest papers I've ever seen in my life."

Now retired, Dennis was at that time (1974) curator of manuscripts in the Harvard College Library. The dilapidated archive had just been airlifted from Paris, seat of the government-in-exile of Georgia, then a Soviet republic. The displaced Georgian patriots had finally decided that they needed help caring for their precious state papers, and Harvard had come to the rescue.

Today marks the end of Harvard's caretaking responsibilities. At five o'clock, in a private event at Houghton Library under the auspices of Nancy Cline, the Roy E. Larsen Librarian of Harvard College, President Neil L. Rudenstine will hand over the 82 cartons of papers (in much better shape now than when they arrived) to a delegation of Georgian officials, including Tedo Japaridze, the Georgian ambassador to the U.S.; Peter Chkheidze, the Georgian ambassador to the United Nations; and Guram Sharadze, a member of the Georgian parliament and chair of the State Commission for the Return of the Archives. The archive will then be shipped back to the land of its origin, independent again after 70 years of Soviet domination.

"I feel very good about it," said Richard Pipes, the Frank B. Baird Professor of History Emeritus, who wrote about Georgia in his book The Formation of the Soviet Union (1954) and was instrumental in bringing the archive to Harvard. "I've always hoped that Georgia would achieve its independence, and now that it has, the archive belongs there."

Georgia, an ancient civilization in the Caucasus, was annexed by Russia in 1801. In 1918, after the Russian Revolution, Georgia declared its independence. At first, the Soviet Union recognized Georgia's sovereignty, but in 1921 the Red Army marched in and brought the region under Communist authority, violating a non-interference treaty that the Bolshevik government signed in 1920. The treaty is part of the archive.

Members of the Georgian government fled to Paris, bringing with them the written records of those three years of self-rule. Stored originally in the French National Library, the papers were later moved to the Chateau Leuville outside the city, where the ravages of mold and mildew took their toll.

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Stalin succeeded Lenin and was succeeded in turn by Khruschev, and independence for Georgia seemed no closer than it had in the 1920s. In France, the Georgians who comprised the government-in-exile grew older, and their state papers continued to languish in the damp rooms of the Chateau Leuville.

But help was on the way. In the early 1960s, Pipes was in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship. There he met with Noi Tsindzadze, a prominent member of the Georgian government-in-exile, who asked if Harvard would take the archive for safe keeping.

Douglas Bryant, then University Librarian, was enthusiastic about the idea and made all the necessary arrangements, including requisitioning a U.S. government plane to pick up the documents at Orly Airport and fly them to Boston. At the last minute, however, the Georgians changed their minds. The archive remained in Paris.

The plan was revived in the early 1970s -- perhaps, Dennis speculates, because the Georgians were alarmed by recent political unrest in France and the possibility that a socialist government sympathetic to the Soviets might force them to give up the archive.

This time the documents made it to Harvard, landing at Logan one hot day in 1974. Meanwhile, Bryant had secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to properly care for the archive.

The first step was a trip to the New England Document Center in Andover, Mass., where the papers were fumigated and treated to halt further decay. The library then hired a special curator, an elderly Georgian exile named Prince George Nakashidze, to catalog the collection.

Dennis said he remembers sitting with Nakashidze in Houghton Library and listening in fascination as he told stories of his experiences in the Soviet Union, of prison trains steaming through the forests of Siberia and stopping every few hours so the prisoners could get out and chop down trees to fuel the engine. Nakashidze worked on the project for several years, using a manual typewriter fitted with a custom-designed Georgian typeface.

A copy of the archive, occupying 204 reels of microfilm, will remain in Houghton, where it will be available to scholars. The Georgian delegation is giving Harvard microfilm copies of four additional boxes of papers that remained in Paris, so that the library's microfilm collection will now be complete.

Why is the archive so important? Pipes explains it this way: "It's as if Britain had won the Revolutionary War, and the members of the Revolutionary government had gone into exile. All those documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the deliberations of the Continental Congress, would be extremely precious, and after independence had been obtained, we would want them to come home."

According to the original agreement with Harvard, the archive was to have been returned to Georgia in 30 years, whether or not the state had gained its independence. But when Georgia became an independent republic after the breakup of the Soviet Union, negotiations were opened for the archive's early return.

Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgia's president, appointed Sharadze to make the necessary arrangements. Sharadze has been planning the exchange with Leslie Morris, the current curator of manuscripts, and Jeffrey Horrell, acting librarian of Houghton Library and librarian of the Fine Arts Library.

Another party to these negotiations is Guivy Zaldastani, a Georgian living in Boston. Zaldastani, a retired businessman who earned an M.B.A. from the Business School in 1951, is the current chairman of the Committee for the Protection of the Georgian Archives, originally established by the exiled Georgian government in 1921. Zaldastani will participate in today's ceremony.

"It's a very important event, and a very nice event," Zaldastani said. "We should all be proud of Harvard for protecting and caring for the papers of a foreign government in exile for all these years."