Monument to Galaktion Tabidze

Location: Kutaisi, Georgia

Completed: 1990

Sculptor: George Shkhvatsabaia

Genre: Soviet monument, former USSR

Known simply as Galaktioni, Galaktion Tabidze (1892-1959) was a 20th-century Georgian poet, whose work greatly inspired future generations of Georgian poets. Galaktioni managed to survive Stalin’s Great Purge in the mid-to-late 1930s when many of his contemporaries did not. However, the period sent him into a deep depression and alcoholism and he eventually committed suicide in a Tbilisi psychiatric hospital where he had been since early 1959.