Big LoveWhy Americans swoon for the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.
Posted Friday, Aug. 15, 2008, at 6:10 PM ET
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StumbleUponGeorgia's charm doesn't end with Saakashvili. Few sights are as beguiling as barrel-chested Georgian men greeting each other on the street with the traditional cheek kisses. Georgian toasting is a triumph of rhetorical theatrics. Then there is Georgian hospitality. The mother of a friend I had visited shined my shoes while nobody was looking. Before arriving in Tbilisi, I called a Georgian friend to ask if I could stay in her three-room apartment "for maybe 10 days." I stayed three months.
My friend's boyfriend was an important presidential adviser with a late-night pizza addiction. Receiving delivery was an ordeal: The delivery man, schooled in the pre-Rose Revolution tradition of refusing payment from high government officials, would knock on the door, drop the pies, and try to make a run for it. The adviser, dedicated to ending a culture of corruption, usually was able to head him off, money clutched in his fist.
So there are many reasons to like Georgia. But for the Americans trafficking in Georgia-thrall, enthusiasm for the country of 4.8 million can be extreme. In Tbilisi, the picturesque Georgian capital that is now a precarious 40 miles from the Russian occupation zone, I met American expats—veterans of any number of other-country postings—who quit their jobs rather than accept a new country. Of course, at the government level, assiduous courting of Americans is all part of the plan. Saakashvili has been reaching out to American politicians, especially Republican ones, since he took office. When I spent time with the president, he was obsessive about influencing American opinion-makers in the press, and his chief of staff complained to me he was spending more time dictating responses to articles in American newspapers than governing Georgia.
For Westerners, Georgian cultural idiosyncrasies can be intoxicating. But for Russians, Georgia is also innerving. The two peoples are badly handcuffed. Russian women falling for Georgian men is a stereotype in both countries, and ethnic Georgians populate the upper reaches of Russian pop culture as celebrated singers and actors. Long before the Russian army rolled into Gori, Russian tourists streamed into the country to enjoy its warm Black Sea coast and to hike its soaring green mountains.
The signature traits of Georgian identity—a romantic, somewhat lugubrious sense of national fate; male machismo; the Orthodox Church; even good toast-making—are claimed by Russians. The two countries rarely resist tormenting each other, and if this week has underscored the lack of equality between the two in hard power, there is an equanimity in national psyche. Both peoples find the cultural aspirations of the other to be intolerable.
American fans of Georgia, a good number of them anyway, have located a far-away dreamscape, a colorful Caucasian people kissing each other on the cheeks and speaking a strange, unique language in a fairy-tale land, where poor men will sell the shirts off their backs to buy a woman dinner. Ironically, a lot of Russians look south and see something similar. Too much love is never a good thing.
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Remarks from the Fray:
When I was in Moscow a couple years ago, the Russians had cut off many Georgian imports. We went to eat at a Georgian restaurant and they had no Georgian wine, one of the targeted imports. The Georgians were peeved and apologetic, but took it all with an air of "this too shall pass." I wonder how they're doing now.
To over-generalize about Russians, they tend toward unwarranted suspicion, thinking anybody who insists on doing things differently is a spy or at least up to no good. They do not value ethnic and cultural diversity, and that's an understatement.
Of course, this is to be expected from people who lived through Stalinism. Peasants in the countryside are still suspicious of foreigners and urbanite Russians to a stunning degree. Russian soldiers and police are likely to be rude and even abusive to foreigners, and some of them make money on the side by helping pickpockets steal from tourists.
I found Russia to be fairly unpleasant, and I wouldn't go back.
--Arlington
(To reply, click here.)
In 2003 with the courage which Americans can identify with in retrospect to the American Revolution, the people of Georgia held what is known as the Rose Revolution. In a tremendous show of unity and non-violence, many people including many young persons held single roses as they marched against the puppet dictator from Russia, President Eduard Shevardnadze after a bogus election. Although the government thought the cold and rain would end the demonstration on the first day, it continued as people shared ponchos and took turns warming themselves in churches. The elections were eventually nullified and free elections were held in which Shevardnadze lost.
Maybe that is why people admire Georgians; they stand for what they believe in.
--TheRanger
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