Pangs of guilt tinge many of the interactions I have with the people of
this country. I have been here more than two months and have done little to
learn their language. I know a few sentences of Georgian and a few random words
here and there, but my lexicon is tiny, my grasp of the grammar is rudimentary
at best, and my pronunciation is still mediocre. In every conversation my
Georgian is quickly exhausted and I am quick to fall into Russian, hoping every
time that my “რუსული იცით? (Do you know Russian?)” will be greeted with a “კი,
ვიცი” or a “Да, знаю” (Yes, I know) that signals to me that no longer do I need to
speak in disjointed fragments of single words and gestures, feeling the guilt
of butchering these peoples’ language because of my negligence to study and
work hard to become conversant. Instead I get to speak with them in a language
we often both have a mediocre grasp of, getting our points across, but speaking
a language that is a far cry from that of the Pushkins, Tolstoys, and
Dostoevskys of the Slavic world. The guilt of butchering the Georgian language
is thus replaced with the guilt of communicating with them in the language of
the nation the oppressed them for centuries and still today plays the role of
the aggressor against Georgian sovereignty in the eyes of many.
While at first the
guilt I described was acute, and I was always self-conscious that my use of the
Russian language would stir up something altogether unpleasant in the minds of
Georgians, I often find that this is not the case. Talk of Russia,
especially talk of the Soviet Union is met with more ambivalence than I think
any of us in countries who were on the opposite side of the Cold War would
expect. I have talked to many people both in the villages and in the cities
about how life now compares to life in the Soviet Union, and have been met with
an astounding range of opinions vacillating between two opposite poles. On one
side I have met those who remember the Soviet Union as a time when things were
better, when there was work to be had, when they had freedom to move about the
whole Soviet Union, and when citizens were better cared for. On the other I
have met those who loathe the memory of the Soviet Union, who are ready to move
on and see a day when Georgia is no longer associated with the former USSR, and
who view Russia as a violent oppressor lurking in the dark, waiting to pounce
on Georgia and once again stretch her imperialist arms and engulf the Caucasus.
I don’t pretend to
have a comprehensive understanding of how the Georgian people view the
socio-political climate in the present and how they compare this to life in the
past. I am inevitably addressing this topic from the limited viewpoints that I
have obtained. I’m sure that living in a small village in one of the poorest
regions in Georgia affords me a different set of perspectives than what I would
find living in Tbilisi, Batumi, Kutaisi, or some of the more developed and economically
secure regions of the country, but the accounts that I have obtained should
provide at least somewhat of a sketch of how Georgians understand their past,
their present, and their future. It is also important to note that I am
obtaining these opinions through my own second language and my interlocutors’
second languages (except in rare instances where the conversation was in
English), and so there was a limit to our conversations imposed by a limited
grasp of the language of our interaction, but despite the difficulties this
occasionally imposes, I feel that the spirit of what they were saying to me
remains the same as it would of if we were both speaking fluently.
In the villages I hear
the same story time and time again: “there are no jobs, there is no money, and
all we have is what we can provide for ourselves.” The despair of this
situation even extends to a number of those who are employed but in jobs that
pay a pittance for more work than should be expected of an individual, and,
especially, to those on government pensions, which were described to me as
being woefully insufficient to support anyone in their old age. One day walking
through the village of Supsa, the first village I lived in here in Guria, with
the coteacher of a volunteer at a nearby village’s school we passed by a series
of dilapidated, abandoned buildings, inconsonant in there large size compared
to the surrounding buildings. We were told that these buildings once housed two
of the major industries of the region: one, a textile factory, and the other a
tea plantation (Georgia’s Guria region once grew moat of the tea for the USSR),
but now all that was left were skeletons of these once thriving industries.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent period of resurrecting
a nation out of its rubble these industries and industries across the nation
crumbled, taking the jobs they provide and the incomes they distributed with
them. These skeletons of industry dot much of this country; travelling around I
see abandoned buildings everywhere, painful reminders of what once was and what
is now the slow decay and a belabored memory of human sacrifice and effort.
The economic and
personal woes of the people are not only bound up with the loss of these
industries, but are also exacerbated by the fact that in the remote areas of
the country nothing has sprung up to replace the industries that many of these
villages grew up around. What jobs are the people of a small, remote village in
Georgia supposed to take on? Aside from the government jobs (police officers,
teachers, etc.) and those providing necessary services (shopkeepers,
manufacturers of building and home supplies, etc.), there seems to be little
work in many of these places. The most common occupation seems to be for people
to sell whatever they have gleaned from the land; the streets of Ureki are
dotted with stalls of people—usually old women—selling fish, fruits, nuts, and
whatever else may be in season at that point. Talking to my host mother, a
teacher in the same school as me, I learned that, in fact, almost all of the
men living on our street are without work, especially the young ones. They are
all able-bodied men capable and willing of hard work and physical labor, but
there is nowhere for them to apply their skills. The young men I speak to hold
out the hope of soon leaving for Tbilisi, Batumi, or another urban center where
work is more readily available, but for the older people, the ones who have
lived here the longest and have invested the most in this place, there is no
hope of leaving; they are stuck in the home that they built themselves or that
their parents built before them, forced to scrape together the resources to
maintain a reasonable level of material well-being.
Though the situation I
describe is disconcerting, I do not want to paint a picture of people living in
abject poverty or squalor. Even those struggling the most are still able to
find a reasonable sense of material security and to live comfortably, though
there is always the threat of having the rug pulled out from under them. This
threat is, however, assuaged by the fact that those surrounding them, their
friends, neighbors, and the community as a whole understand the woes that
plague so many across Georgia and are eager to lend a helping hand in their
hour of greatest need. Their needs are met, but they lack any real sense of
hope for a brighter future. Upon being pressed they will concede that things
are slowly getting better, that more improvements both in terms of job creation
and infrastructure improvement are being made every day, but for most of my
older interlocutors this is not a real source of hope. Often they feel that
while around the country improvements are being made, those improvements are a
long time coming in the villages, and I can’t fault them for this bleak
outlook.
Having travelled
around Georgia to a fair extent I have begun to see where the government is
investing. All the major cities and tourist destinations are sites of
industrious activity; major construction projects are being undertaken in
Tbilisi, the whole downtown of Batumi has a newness about it, and the whole
downtown of Mestia, a small town but the only major town in the mountainous
Svaneti region—a major tourist destination—is being renovated: soon nearly
every building on the main downtown street will have been built in the last few
years. While it is important for Georgia’s economy to create centers of
business and tourism, the government’s primary duty is to its citizens, who,
out here, have the dejected feeling of being neglected. There are those who
have found success in this new climate of the cities being major business and
tourist destinations; they have been afforded opportunities that did not exist
prior to the current president or during the Soviet Union, but these stories of
success are, for me, balanced and outweighed by the stories of struggling
villagers.
What is most enigmatic
to me is that in the same regions that seem to have been hit hardest by
unemployment are the regions where the infrastructure is most lacking, where
roads have fallen into disrepair, where once impressive government buildings
stand abandoned or at least look like they should be abandoned, and where
sewage and water systems are antiquated at best. The event that typifies this
neglect of infrastructure in my mind came one day while walking around downtown
Supsa. I had admired the train station there for a long time, marveling at how
it seemed to be in worse shape than many of the wholly abandoned buildings I
had seen around town. The awning over the platform is collapsed, there is
nothing inside the main room other than the ticket booth and piles of trash in
the corners, and the entrance to the bathroom outside is choked with weeds and
gives off a smell that would seem to indicate it had not been cleaned in years
(I never mustered the courage to go in). But the experience that most made me
realize the absurdity of the fact that this building is still a functioning
train station is when I looked to the entrance of it one day and just watched a
goat casually walking through and out of the entrance to the station, not paying
any heed to it, as if it were no longer the domain of humans but that it had
succumbed to being a part of the natural landscape again.
Though I have no pretensions of being an expert or
anyway knowledgeable about matters pertaining to economic development or the
processes through which a struggling nation addresses social issues, there
seems an obvious solution to significantly and simultaneously addressing
problems of high unemployment and faltering infrastructure: put the jobless to
work making the improvements needed in their villages, have them rebuild the
institutions and infrastructure that would simultaneously improve their
standard of living and make those places more attractive for other industries
and permanent sources of jobs to move into. I’m sure that this outlook on this
situation is a reductionistic take on a complex issue and things are not nearly
so simple; if they were, I have no doubt that someone in the framework of
Georgian bureaucracy would have thought of and implemented it. But what I know
is that from the talks I have had with the people of the villages I have
visited and in which I have lived there is a feeling that the Georgian
government is not sufficiently providing for the people, and in its stead there
is no functioning private sector to provide the jobs and material well-being
that are lacking.
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| There once were jobs here |
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| and here |
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| and probably here too |
While
this may all seem very critical of the Georgian government, I would like to say
that some of the projects the government has undertaken are very positive and
are, in fact, looking out for the interests of its citizens, although many
people may not have thought of the full implications of these programs. One
such program is the one I am a part of: Teach and Learn with Georgia. The
importation of hundreds of English speakers from around the world into Georgia
to teach English to school children is a forward looking initiative that serves
to foster the level of proficiency in English among the Georgian, further
enabling Georgians to find a place in world markets and the world economy,
where English is an important means of communication, and helping tourism, as
many of the visitors who come to Georgia are more likely to speak English than
Georgian or Russian. The program also has the added benefit of bringing fresh
ideas into the country. In many places, especially in the villages, the
Georgian education system maintains a distinct post-Soviet feel, especially as
most of the teachers were schooled and trained during the Soviet Union. But by
bringing in teachers from around the world and pairing them with Georgian
teachers there is an opportunity for those Georgian teachers to improve their
language skills as well as to be exposed to new and alternative teaching
methodologies. This program also coincides with a number of other reforms to
the education system that will help foster a better future for many Georgians.
For example, schools are being equipped with more and newer technology and
students are being taught how to use these technologies, something of utmost
importance as many students will eventually find themselves working in areas
where knowledge of current technology is of an increasing importance.
However, these sorts of programs are not the full
answer to the woes that Georgians have conveyed to me. These programs are great
at looking at the long-term, and are especially well-suited for the large urban
areas that are poised to become important centers of commerce and tourist
destinations, but they do little to alleviate the hardships of the people in
rural areas, where more immediate solutions are needed. I am glad for the
programs, but concerned that they are leaving behind an important sector of the
population, the population outside of Tbilisi, Batumi, and Kutaisi. The
juxtaposition of these new programs (the Georgian Ministry of Education has
also provided small notebook computers to first graders) against the state of
the schools is at times striking. I have made the comparison before that in
many ways like spending a lot of money to furnish and decorate a house with a
crumbling foundation. I have seen a number of schools with physical structures
falling apart, bathrooms I would consider unusable, and even in one case was
shown by a student where I could grab onto a staircase’s handrail and feel a
minor jolt of electricity. New computers and good English teachers are
important parts of Georgia looking forward to the future, but so are addressing
the basic infrastructure concerns of the school system and elsewhere.
This digression about the school takes me away from my
impression of how people around Georgia think of the Soviet Union, but it is a
related topic. Many of the older people remember the Soviet Union as a time
when many of the countries institutions were better. Just last night I was
discussing the prospect of receiving mail in Ureki with an older woman in the
village, who described how well the postal system used to work but how
unreliable it now is. During the time of the Soviet Union apparently one could
reliably expect to receive packages or letters from anywhere in the world, but
now it is often questionable. I suppose for all its faults, the Soviets did do
a good job of creating and maintaining public institutions like the Postal
Service and public transportation. This is not the first time that I have heard
people around the village muse on what was better in the Soviet Union. Many remember
the Soviet Union providing many services that now are beyond their ability to
afford. Before, any operation or medical procedure one needed was paid for by
the government and could be obtained relatively quickly, but now the price tag
is too steep on many of the same non-essential medical procedures that were
once covered. This fond remembrance of the Soviet Union is not limited to the
institutions people sees as having been better suited for serving the country’s
citizens. One person I spoke with also, perhaps paradoxically, remembers the
time of the Soviet Union as being a time of greater freedom, especially freedom
to travel. The Soviet Union was never viewed by many in the west as giving its
citizens the utmost freedom, and it was undoubtedly difficult for citizens of
any of the Soviet Republics to travel outside of the Soviet Union, but the
whole Soviet Union was open to every citizen—an area that is more than twice
the size of the United States—and travel across the Union was cheap.
These paradoxical statements lamenting the loss of
freedom that existed under the Soviet Union are not isolated to one or two
conversations. I remember a long and revealing conversation I had with a
Georgian man at dinner one day in which he held forth for an hour about how
things are now and how they used to be. A major part of his lament of what was
lost in the collapse of the Soviet Union stemmed from the loss of freedom of
travel. He conceded that it is true that under the Georgian government a
Georgian citizen can travel almost anywhere in the world without a problem, but
he countered this by pointing to the reality that most Georgians are restrained
now not by the government but by economic realities. Relatively few Georgians
can afford to make trips to the United States, Western Europe, or many other
destinations around the world, making the areas no more open than when the
citizens were wholly forbidden from visiting those countries. While those areas
of the world may in reality be just as unattainable as they once were, the
current economic and political situations have also closed off much of the
former Soviet Union. Whereas it was once extremely cheap to travel from Georgia
through Russia to Ukraine, Estonia, or any of the other Soviet Republics, it is
now either extremely difficult (in the case of Russia) or very expensive
(everywhere else, with, perhaps, the exception of Armenia). Many older
Georgians I have spoken with spent time in Russia, Ukraine or one of the other
Republics, and even more have family members of other nationalities, a product
of a time when one could easily move around the almost unfathomably large, and
surprisingly diverse, Soviet Union.
And it is not just freedom of travel that many of the
villagers miss about the Soviet Union. While in many ways the isolationism and
xenophobia exhibited by the USSR was a negative for its citizens and for Soviet
relations with the rest of the world, there was an upside to it, as has been
described to me by a number of Georgians. As part of its isolation from much of
the world the Soviet Union strove to produce much of what its population needed
in the Republics. Thus, the tea factory and the textile plant that are now
standing skeletons and bleak monuments in Supsa were a necessary part of the
economy. The people of the village were needed to work, not just for their own
well-being, but to help provide for an empire stretching halfway around the
world, and so jobs were plentiful. My interlocutor continued to describe the
atmosphere of that time, claiming that unemployment was as low as 2% (he may be
exaggerating and the number as it was given by the Soviet bureaucracy was
undoubtedly altered), but at present—again, his claim—unemployment is as high
as 18%. He did not say how the quality of life compared then and now, but I get
the impression that in his mind it is better to have a population at work than
to have a slightly higher standard of living, as a population at work is a
population that is actively engaged in producing for itself what it needs and
is unable to fall into the sort of idleness that he perceives as plaguing the
unemployed village populations. As he explained to me, what has filled the void
of lost jobs in Georgia is either, on the one hand, people idling away there
time, filling their days with drinking and carousing because there is little
else to do, and on the other hand, being driven to find work abroad. For many
living in Guria, a short distance from the border with Turkey, the lack of jobs
in Georgia has driven them south across the border into that country to work.
He described to me the plight of so many, going to work for weeks or months at
a time in Turkey to support a family at home, when once upon a time the same
work could have been had in Georgia. And though this is one of the points I
believe the man to have been most biased, he gave an account of the lives of
those working in Turkey as being ones of perpetual hardship. I believe his
exact words, given in Russian, were “we go down there and work and work like
horses, and get nothing for it” and later “You go down there to work and they
tell you: ‘Oh, you are a Christian. That will be a problem.’” This last
statement was accompanied by an exasperated exclamation that in Georgia they
realize that if someone is a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, etc. it does not matter,
we are all people, and that those Georgians working down in Turkey to provide
for their families just wish they could find the same attitude.
Again, I want to mention that this information is from
a somewhat biased source. I do not want to slander the people of Turkey, and
have little verification of what the man said. But at the same time, I cannot
fault the man for his biases. He is in a situation of economic hardship, and
such situations easily skew the way we view and interpret reality. I do not
intend or want to make a statement judging either the Georgian government for
any failure to produce jobs, as I have not the scope or knowledge to evaluate
their work, or the people of Turkey for their treatment of Georgian workers,
which I have no real evidence for. Rather, I find it fascinating that the
climate I am surrounded by in this country is one where many of the older
people of the villages I have lived and visited look back on the Soviet Union
fondly and miss many of the features of that life that have now changed. It’s
difficult to say how earnest they are in this and how many of them would gladly
trade what they have now for what they had then, as it seems in many cases that
the people I have spoken with have succumbed to the sort of idolization of the
past and glorification of the way things were that is easy for us all to fall
into. It is easy to look back on the past and focus in on the great things that
may no longer be and forget the difficulties and minutiae that either make that
time indistinguishable from the present or make the present preferable to the
past.
I suppose my intention in writing this is to present a
common attitude that many of our Western eyes would see as ironic, insofar as
I’m sure most who know anything about the Soviet Union think of it as a
particularly positive thing to look back on. I also want to emphasize that
viewpoints on the Soviet Union are also varied, vacillating between the
idealization I described and vehement disdain for that time and for the
Russians who are viewed as heartless conquerors. It is unfortunate that most of
the people with whom I have spoken are part of one older generation who grew up
and lived in the Soviet Union; I would love to speak with a younger generation
of Georgians about how they look on the Soviet period of Georgian history, but
I am faced with the reality of being unable to communicate with most young
Georgians, especially out here in the villages, where English proficiency is
lacking and where most young people don’t bother to learn Russian. Lacking a
full dataset, I would encourage nobody to draw any conclusions about
actualities of life in the Soviet Union and the attitude of the Georgian people
as a whole from what I have written, but I think my experiences attest to a
reality that in the growth and development of a nation there are times and
events that can be viewed and interpreted in radically different ways.
