The Other Russian Invasion | The Press

Former journalist and MP Paule Robitaille has been traveling around Europe for a few weeks. Every Saturday between now and Christmas, she depicts for the Debates section the concrete impacts of the invasion of Ukraine on Europeans.

(Tbilisi, Georgia) Black-and-white images jostle in my memory of poets-turned-warriors carrying old guns slung over their shoulders, gathered in Lenin Square one damp evening in December 1991. The great nation of Georgia was finally about to shake off the invader: the Russian empire become the Soviet Union which had sent thousands of their own to the slaughterhouse.

I remember the president, Ziad Gamsakhourdia, a furious nationalist, at the head of an embryonic country in the crosshairs of Moscow. A terrible civil war ensued. The heart of the capital was completely devastated.

So I come back to Tbilisi 30 years later in the middle of the night. The city shines! I see a skyscraper. The wonderfully lit historic buildings have had a makeover. The Georgia and European Union flags are waving side by side. It is the great Georgian dream to be part of the great European family. Gamsakhourdia has become a hero. I tell myself that Georgia really got rid of the invader and I have a thought for its poets.

The next day, however, in the city, I hear Russian everywhere… All the cafes seem to have been invaded by an army of hipster, average age 25, who speak Tolstoy’s language. At Groovy Roasters, the clientele, the staff, everyone is Russian-speaking. Alexei, the 26-year-old barista, a redhead with green eyes, takes a break in the sun sitting on a window frame. The Muscovite who took part in several anti-Putin protests left Russia in September. “I was afraid of dying at the front in this meaningless war. “His father, he, of Ukrainian origin, left to fight … for Putin. It revolted him. The family is broken.

They would be at least 100,000 Russians in Georgia. For this small country of 3.5 million inhabitants, it is nothing less than an invasion. They occupy hotels and apartments alongside tens of thousands of Belarusians and Ukrainian refugees.

Their presence gives a boost to the country’s economy. Over $1 billion has flowed from Russia to Georgia this year, five times more than last year. While the whole world fears a recession, here, the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP) will increase from 5% to 10% in 2022. The lari, the national currency, has never been so strong.

I met a programmer, a chemist, a cryptocurrency expert, an aeronautical engineer, an economist, entrepreneurs, a psychologist and two 19-year-old manicurists. They all explain to me that returning to Russia would mean prison at best, the front, torture or rape at worst.

The voice of the tsars

Couldn’t this fabulous brain drain benefit Georgia? Isn’t this influx of Russians great news?

But there ! If I hear the language of Tolstoy and see foolish fools, my Georgian friends always hear the language of the tsars, the Soviets and Putin and see FSB agents everywhere.

“What if it was a Trojan horse?” If Putin’s Russia had infiltrated them? Didn’t you know that Tbilisi is a nest of spies? a well-known political analyst tells me.

To the trendy young urban Russians have recently been added the men from the provinces who flee the mobilization, not necessarily anti-Putin, who arrive with the attitude of the colonizer as if the Soviet Union still existed. In short, Russian versions of the former president of Air Canada Michael Rousseau, to the power of 10.

So anti-Russian graffiti abounds. At the entrance to cafes, signs warn that pro-Putin will be thrown into the street. We refuse to serve customers in Russian, just to remind us that Georgia is a sovereign country.

And then, the Russian army occupies, in the north and the west, Georgian territories. The last offensive dates back to 2008. These incursions have displaced hundreds of thousands. These Georgians squat in misery in Tbilisi while Russian exiles have fun in techno bars and raise the price of rents by 75%. It bothers.

“Let them do like the Iranians, let them go back home and take to the streets!” It is not up to the Ukrainians to rid the planet of Putin. Let them take their responsibilities! “, continues the political analyst.

Still, Iran is not Russia. A majority of Russian society, in full delirium, remained behind its president. Tens of thousands of dissidents languish in prison. One hundred thousand men died at the front in nine months in Russia. Can we really blame these young people for fleeing a country that does not look like them?

But who am I to judge? If Ukraine loses the war, Georgia could be the next victim. In the land of warrior poets, Vladimir Putin’s imperial epic feeds old demons. There are no good Russians. They are all in the same “shitty boat”, we read on the wall of a bar in the capital, ironically, one of the most popular with this youth in exile.