What do all these Russians want here with us?

They should return to their homeland, influence their compatriots and finally bring about a change of power!" The literature manager Medea Metreveli, who, as head of Georgia's National Book Center, organized the brilliant guest country appearance at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2018 and who we met in a café in Tbilisi like many Georgian intellectuals, is not at all enthusiastic about the mass exodus of the Russian intelligentsia to their country.

Since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine began, an estimated 30,000 Russian nationals have come to Georgia, where they can enter without visas, are not persecuted or conscripted, and where low incomes can support comparatively good living.

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, particularly politically active emigrants, opposition activists, artists and journalists have been gathering here.

But there are also Putin supporters and chauvinists who see Georgia with its cultural coloring as an exotic government, enthuses Medea Metreveli, who holds all Russians collectively liable for the disgrace of the Putin regime, as she calls it, which, according to polls, supported by 70 percent of the population.

That's why she's currently advocating a blanket boycott of Russian culture.

Because artists have a special responsibility for the value system in their country, and the critical voices of Vladimir Sorokin, Mikhail Shishkin, Viktor Erofeev, Boris Akunin - who, moreover, live in the West themselves - are simply too few, their voices too weak and too ineffective.

The people are pro-Ukraine, the government is pro-Russian

Georgia, whose state territory has been 20 percent Russian-occupied since 2008, considers the war in Ukraine to be decisive for its own fate.

In Tbilisi, facades, balconies, metro stations and cafes are decorated with Ukrainian flags, and people wear blue and yellow ribbons.

Two Georgian volunteers who died serving in Ukraine are being blessed with great pomp these days in the Kashveti Church on Rustaveli Boulevard.

Ukraine must win this war, says Metreveli, speaking for eighty percent of her compatriots, according to polls.

Should Putin win, Georgia will also be lost.

She is all the more embittered that the government of the "Georgian Dream" party is pursuing a pseudo-European policy and, in accordance with the business interests of its founder,

of the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who dominates the Georgian economy, has oriented the country to be pro-Russian.

This had direct consequences for Metreveli.

After the Georgian triumph in Frankfurt, state cultural officials asked her why she didn't organize an appearance at the Moscow Book Fair, she says.

In 2019 the National Book Center was closed.