After Georgia’s declaration of independence in May 1918, he served as Minister of Justice in the government of Noe Ramishvili until the 1919 elections in which he obtained a seat in the Constituent Assembly. After the Bolshevik takeover, he remained in Soviet Georgia and practiced law in Tbilisi. In the 1920s, he was twice arrested by the Communist government, but survived the Great Purge of the 1930s. During the World War II years, he featured prominently as a lawyer for a group of Muslim Georgians charged by the authorities with collaborating with Turkey against the Soviet state.