Anti-Russian sentiment as a test for a Georgian “patriot”

The internet forum "Re-aktsiya" (Re-action) made a proposal to declare a day-long boycott of the Russian language on the "Day of the Sovietization" of Georgia on 25th February. Radio stations and television companies in the republic have supported this initiative.

"We are still in a state of occupation by Russia," the Regnum news agency quotes the founder of "Re-aktsiya" Giga Nasaridze. "Last year it demonstrated the aggression at its core. But we need to gradually throw off this occupation." "We think that one day a year - on 25th February, the day of the forceful Sovietization of our country," an activist from the forum, Nika Siradze, seconds him in an interview with RIA Novosti, "we should refrain from showing what we have produced in Russian." Admittedly, the Russophobes from "Re-aktisya" note that the planned action is in no way "directed against Russian culture". Which seems paradoxical.

Georgian radio stations and television companies immediately joined in the appeal to "refrain from" using Russian. In particular, the radio station "The Voice of Georgia", whose director, Mamuka Kuchava, explained his decision by pointing to "the interests and mood of society". And the editor-in-chief of the Imedi radio station, Nino Gabriadze, boasted: "We have refused to play Russian songs for a long time. Last August, in protest against Russia's actions on our land, we pulled songs in Russian off the air."

One gets the impression that the current action and the "lessons of hatred" towards Russia, which are now being propagated in Georgian schools at the initiative of the Minister for Education, Nika Gvaramiya, are both elements in the same mosaic which political technologists are creating with the aim of establishing new national myths. Admittedly, the "historical basis" for this is shaky. After all, Russia (and not only them) can just as successfully accuse Georgia of "Sovietization": for several decades, Georgians occupied the highest posts in the multi-national Soviet state. If you live by this principle, you can go a long way. In that case, two Georgian schools in Moscow, where the children of immigrants from the home of the Rose Revolution study, should be closed, and there should be a ban on reading Rustaveli and watching films by Daneliya...

One shouldn't denounce one's past without any grounds to do so, especially if it is shared by other nations. It's the same as calling the million Georgians living today in Russia "traitors" and accusing them of dislike for Georgia. After all, many people livings on the banks of the Kura now think that Georgians never lived so well as in Soviet Georgia. And in Russia as well, judging by surveys, the name of the Georgian tyrant Stalin is still sacred for a large number of people.

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