March 5, 1956, Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia: “I am Khrushchev, I am Khrushchev” shouted a group of university students as they ran around Lenin Square in the center of the Georgian capital Tbilisi. They were yelling at a boy known as Kika, who was dressed up as the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev.

A few other people were gathered at a nearby apartment, standing near its curved staircases. Not far from them, two young men held a fat pig while others tried to shave it. 18-year-old Sasha had just moved to Tbilisi but he was given the honor of hanging a portrait of Khrushchev around the pig’s bloody neck. Soon the pig joined the angry crowd on the square. It ran widely, the portrait flapping around its necks as it left a bloody trail on the street.

As soon as I told her where I was headed—Dnipro—it was as if someone had flipped a switch. Alla became so excited, her eyes started to sparkle. It felt like she had been waiting for decades for someone to go there for her. 

Before I could ask her why Dnipro was so important, she raced out of my apartment. She quickly returned with a small piece of paper, which she gently pressed in my hand. “Go to this address,” she said, “and check on a man named Sasha. Tell him I still love him.”

I have known Alla my whole life—she has lived in the building since she was one, and knows everyone who lived there. I have spent countless hours with her, hearing her stories about growing up in Tbilisi, the capital of what was Soviet Georgia. I knew of her late husband, her daughter and her granddaughter.

But I had never heard of Sasha. Before long Alla captivated me with tales of her first marriage, a real fairytale of love and loss, mysterious disappearance, political repression, decades of silence and unrequited love. 

Young, handsome, full of life—he became her everything. Their love story seemed pulled from the scenes of her favorite movie: romantic walks near the river, kisses in the rain, flowers “from a secret admirer” delivered to the university. 

The storybook romance started to go wrong not long after they married, however. Alla found out she was pregnant and the two eagerly awaited the birth of their child. But a routine trip to the doctor put an abrupt end to their plans: there was something wrong with the pregnancy and Alla had to have an emergency abortion or risk dying herself.  

Not long after that, Sasha took part in the massive anti-Soviet protests. On March 5, 1956, he was one of a group of students who released a pig into the central streets of Tbilisi, a simple act with tragic consequences. 

For his role—hanging a portrait of the new premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, around the bloody neck of the pig—Sasha was forced to leave Georgia and return to his native Ukraine. 

In September 2019, a week after I learned Alla and Sasha’s tragic story—and about 63 years since the two were forced to part—I found myself standing in front of a rusty iron gate in Dnipro bearing the address Alla had given me. The house was near the main train station, on a street named after a curving road. 

As I raised my fist to knock on the gate, which still bore some traces of the old blue paint that used to be popular in Tbilisi, I felt a jolt of nerves. I thought my heart would jump out from my chest, almost as if I expected 19-year-old Sasha would answer the door. 

I took a deep breath and knocked.

At first, no one responded. After several attempts, a woman opened the door a crack and stuck her head out. 

“Who are you? What do you want?” She was clearly confused to see me standing there, and suspicious. 

“Hello, I am Giorgi from Tbilisi. I am looking for Uncle Sasha? Does he live here?”

“Who? Wrong address! Go away before I call the police,” she said, as she slammed the door and dogs in the yard started to bark. 

That was not what I had expected. But I didn’t want to give up so easily on my mission for Alla.

A few days later, still clutching her piece of paper in my hand, I returned to the address—this time joined by three Ukrainian friends to help in case my broken Russian was a barrier.

She said Sasha’s life had been tragically altered by that pig in 1956. 

His decision to put the photo around the pig’s neck put him at the center of what was likely one of the first political art performances in Georgia’s contemporary art history. Sasha was dismissed from the university and forced to leave Georgia immediately. 

Almost as soon as he arrived, Dnipropetrovsk was designated a secret, “rocket city” and all people—and information—flowing out in or out was controlled. Sasha, a young man with a “revolutionary background” could not communicate with Alla. 

The town reopened during Perestroika in 1987 but by that time Sasha had already remarried, had a son and become a sculptor.

When I returned to Tbilisi, I told Alla everything I could about Sasha and his life after he was forced to leave her.

After I finished, she told me she thinks she saw Sasha one more time, right before the end of the Soviet Union. She was working in a building not far from the site of the 1956 protests. 

“The guard downstairs would control everyone who came or wanted to come upstairs. We were not allowed to have any guests,” she recalled.

“Once, I look up from my papers on the desk and I see him, Sasha. He was like a ghost, appearing out of nowhere. I still don’t know how he managed to get to my office. He looked at me so intently, it was as if he was trying to make sure I was real. We spoke a few words. Or, really, he said a few words because I was in shock. He said there had been KGB agents among the students at the university. He even named them. Before he could say more, some colleagues entered the room. When I turned back to him, he had already left.”

Or that is how she remembered it. Did that brief meeting actually happen or was it just a mirage brought on by the days of Perestroika?

When she finished speaking, Alla looked out the window, at the first real snow to come to Tbilisi that year. Frozen flakes were dropping on the tree branches, which already held the hope of the coming spring. 

At that moment, I felt like everything had stopped moving. There was total silence. The only sound seemed to be my own heavy heartbeat. 

“What is love, Alla?” I asked.

“Love is waiting. And when it comes, waiting for when he comes back home,” she replied with a smile and tears in her sky blue eyes.