Review | The Blitz: A Georgian Daughter’s Rise as a CFO in the post-Soviet Era

★★★☆☆

Tamar Gakharia’s memoir is a simple account of a woman overcoming domestic violence to build a better life for herself, her children, and her country.

In the opening pages of her memoir, Gakharia compares the collapse of the Soviet Union to the German bombing campaign against the UK in World War II.

‘‘We have been coming out of this blitz together, my country and me, for my entire life, experiencing years of almost constant crises and upheaval, while also finding strengths we did not know we possessed, in parallel’, she writes, going on to compare each new hardship either Georgia or herself encounters as yet another blitz to overcome.

It is reminiscent of many business memoirs, wherein the author demonstrates how hard work can lead to success in whatever form they wish, asking the reader to emulate and learn from them, no matter the difference in background or opportunities. At least Gakharia recognises the unfairness of this inherent concept and the element of luck that can be involved, noting early on that a large number of her childhood friends ‘ended up lost, involved in street crime, gambling, or addicted — not because they were bad people, but because they could see no other opportunities. They did not have a family that would sacrifice everything for them the way my family did for me’.

Beyond operating on the edges of a standard business memoir, Gakharia clearly writes for an audience unfamiliar with Georgia — even for those only aware of the US state — her work appearing as just another drop in the bucket of post-Soviet memoirs written about rejoining the capitalist West via surviving the turbulent 1990s. What gives the book some merit, however, is its focus on Gakharia’s experiences overcoming domestic violence.

Indeed, the casual reader who picks up this book based on the blurb is likely to be surprised by the memoir’s real focal point — that of a woman growing up in a patriarchal society and finding herself tied to an abusive husband who eats up her dreams.

Though the men in her family support her and offer themselves up as good role models, Gakharia still finds herself trapped in a society where men are given much more power, and where the authorities do little to help out.

She recounts with humour her teenage experience of being stalked, eventually needing to rely on her male family members to exert violence in order to solve the problem. With less comedy, she describes how she was love-bombed as a young university student into giving her entire self over to a man who wanted even more. We see how even her husband’s mother takes his side, despite the evidence of abuse she has seen, and how the police say they can do nothing as it is an issue between family members.

All of these experiences led Gakharia to where and who she is today, breaking free from the boundaries set upon her to find joy in hard work and climbing the corporate ladder, becoming CFO of the CBS Group, an investment management company representing a number of crucial Georgian assets.

It is an inspirational story in this regard, even if not the most poetically written. Perhaps it is because Gakharia writes in her second or third language, English, that much of the prose is straightforward and unadorned, with noticeable repetition as if she does not expect the reader to keep up.

The inclusion of professional, magazine-style black-and-white photos throughout the book is also a bit of a bizarre choice, particularly the inclusion of a photo of Gakharia smiling with joy immediately after describing her husband firing a gun at her before beating her unconscious. It’s a jarring disconnect between the themes at hand.

All things considered, Gakharia knows how to tie her memoir to the current events at hand, noting that Georgia is ‘facing another blitz that will wipe away everything we have been working so hard to build, the free society where people can pursue their dreams without fear’, though she describes the conflict as between Russia and the West in their desire to exert control.

‘All we want is to be prosperous and free’, she writes in the mid-point of the book. If nothing else, it’s a worthy desire, whether that be to escape an abusive relationship or a political quagmire.

Book details: The Blitz: A Georgian Daughter’s Rise as a CFO in the post-Soviet Era by Tamar Gakharia, 2025, Forbes Books. Buy it on Amazon here.

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