Levan Berdzenishvili is a Georgian politician, author and academic, and served as the director of the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia from 1998 until 2004. Berdzenishvili was born in Batumi in 1953, and is the older brother of David Berdzenisvhili, also a politician. On May 21, 1978, Berdzenishvili and his brother David, together with Vakhtang Dzabiradze and Vakhtang Shonia, founded the Republican Party of Georgia. In June 1983, he was arrested and served several years in prison, as a dissident. Berdzenishvili has described his experiences in an autobiographical novel, Sacred Darkness: The Last Days of the GULAG, published in English in 2019. In the book, Berdzenishvili describes the years in prison as his "best years" because of the "people that surrounded me, people the KGB had