Like so many other films of the "period of stagnation", "Repentance" was left "on the shelf". So fearful was Abuladze that his film would be destroyed that he is reputed to have kept the only remaining copy under his bed. When Mikhail Gorbachev and glasnost arrived and the old guard in the Soviet filmmakers' union was unanimously ejected in 1986, a Conflict Commission was established to review these shelved films. With encouragement from the then-Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, "Repentance" was released, first in Georgia and then across the Soviet Union, where it attracted record audiences and became the flagship film of the whole glasnost process.