This is Erivansky Square in the city which was then known as Tiflis, photographed in the 1870s.

And this is Freedom Square in Tbilisi, Georgia, photographed by me this afternoon.

I’m pleased that I was able to stand in almost the same place as the photographer from 150 years ago – note the City Assembly building on the left, and the mountain crags visible down Giorgi Lionidze Street – but the photographer of the 1870s had the advantage of height, maybe on a platform or from the window of a now-vanished building.

On 26 June 1907, this square was the scene of a massive act of Bolshevik terrorism, organized by Stalin and Lenin and executed by Stalin’s Armenian mate known as Kamo. 241,000 roubles were stolen, and dozens of people killed and injured in a bomb and gun attack on the stagecoach transporting money from the main post office to the bank headquarters. The banknotes’ serial numbers were all recorded, so it turned out to be impossible to cash them in Russian banks, and when the Bolsheviks tried cashing them in other European cities in January 1908, they were all detected and most of them were arrested.

Maxim Litvinov, a future Soviet foreign minister, was one of those arrested in January 1908, and expelled from France where he had been living. The French however ruled that the crime was political and refused Russia’s extradition request. Litvinov went instead to stay with his sister, Rifka Levinson, who lived at 15 Clifton Park Avenue in North Belfast. He hung around Belfast for two morose years, smoking cigars, climbing Cave Hill and occasionally teaching Russian at the Berlitz language school. It is rumored that he also worked as a traveling salesman for his brother-in-law’s clothes business, covering the whole of Ireland,

He then moved to England ,where he stayed until 1918, ending his time as the diplomatic representative of the revolutionary government and addressing that year’s Labour Party Conference; he also married Ivy Low in 1916. Back in Moscow, he rose through the ranks, serving as foreign minister of the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1939 and then ambassador to the USA from 1941 to 1943. I doubt that he ever went back to Belfast.

Freedom Square is exciting again these days – it is the centre of the current wave of anti-government demonstrations. But more on that in a future post.