When we arrived at immigration in Lisbon airport, towards midnight, there were two queues. The shorter of the two was for Portuguese citizens, members of the EU and other permitted states. There were only a handful of people in this one, nonchalantly breezing through passport control. The other, a snaking mass of tired-faced travellers, was for “everybody else”.
It was 2015, pre-Brexit, so I felt a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment at being allowed to slip into the shorter one. My Georgian friend, Chortika, however, wasn’t granted such privileges. But not one to let a mere diplomatic detail get in the way, he announced, without a moment’s hesitation, that he would be coming with me.
After a few minutes, it was Chortika’s turn. He approached the immigration officer with total confidence and, handing over his Georgian and conspicuously non-EU passport, looked him straight in the eye. To no one’s surprise, the officer immediately told Chortika that he could not go through this way; he would have to join the other queue.
“But why?” Chortika asked, almost insulted.
“Because this line is for members of the European Union,” the officer explained, nodding towards the yellow letters that read “EU PASSPORTS” on the sign above his head.
“But I’m Georgian,” Chortika said. “I am European,” he stressed. The officer laughed, perhaps charmed by Chortika’s forthrightness, by his conviction that this was something a person could decide for themselves, rather than something bestowed by Brussels. Smiling, he told Chortika that, despite his protests, he could not pass through this particular gate, but he could go right to the front of the other queue, which had been lengthening by the minute. Chortika looked back at me and winked. Good old Chortika, I thought, whose name fittingly translates as “little devil”. He’d won the battle, if not the war.
My friend is not alone in his European convictions. Polling data consistently shows that the vast majority of Georgians want to join the EU; a survey in March 2023 suggested that as many as 85 per cent of Georgians were in favour of membership. Drive through Tbilisi and you’ll see EU flags blowing in the wind or spray-painted onto walls. A friend of mine has “Georgia is Europe” written underneath her Instagram profile.
Public proclamations such as these are a form of protest against a government that continues to promise Georgia will join the EU by 2030, but whose recent actions have stunted the country’s path to accession. They’re also a message to the west, which has all too often failed to include Georgia in its vague psychogeography of what constitutes Europe. “Do not forget about us,” Georgians are saying. There are other blue and yellow flags all over Tbilisi, too—Ukrainian ones, raised in solidarity with their neighbours across the Black Sea.
In December 2023, many Georgians like Chortika would have been feeling rosy about their country’s prospects of joining the EU. The bloc had just granted Georgia candidate status, and thousands of people took to the streets of Tbilisi to celebrate. Finally, the country was on the path to becoming officially “European”, a hugely important milestone in the shedding of its post-Soviet skin.
However, since December, the story has changed. Stephen Jones, a leading scholar on Georgian political history, has written that the Georgian Dream party, which has been in power since 2012, has gradually replaced its democratic, reformist aspirations “with a populist right-wing ideology stressing order, unity, the exclusion of undesirable minorities, support for Orthodox Christian values, and control over education, culture and, more broadly, civil society”.
A tipping point was reached in May when the government passed a law requiring NGOs and media outlets who receive more than 20 per cent of their funding from abroad to register as “serving the interests of a foreign power”. The passing of what is often dubbed the “foreign agents law” led to Georgia’s EU accession plans being put “on ice”, just six months after they began.
The bill is also often referred to as “the Russian law” because it resembles legislation brought in by the Kremlin in 2012. This has fuelled speculation that the Georgian government may be eschewing its approach of what analysts call “strategic ambiguity”—treading the fine line between Russia and the west—in favour of a pivot towards Moscow. The government denies this, and says the law is part of a drive for transparency and sovereignty. Others have speculated the move is part of a strategy, perhaps inspired by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, to win over socially conservative voters by polarising the debate and feeding culture wars.
While many have protested in the streets against the “Russian law”—on just one day, as many as 300,000 people, nearly 8 per cent of the country’s population, marched through Tbilisi—others are protesting with their passports. According to the Georgian National Statistics Office, the number of residents leaving Georgia in 2023 nearly doubled in comparison to the previous year.
Sixty-one per cent of Georgians have said that none of the political parties represents their interests
So where is this all leading? On 26th October, Georgians will vote in a general election. Some have billed this as a choice between the west and Russia. Many fear that a win for the incumbent Georgian Dream would mean deeper assimilation with Russia and further isolation from Europe. A win for any one of a patchwork of liberal coalitions in opposition could enable a gradual rapprochement with Europe.
However, the decision for Georgians is not so binary. Many voters who are pro-Europe have little faith in the opposition to bring about change, and see no clear path forwards. In fact, 61 per cent of Georgians have said that none of the political parties represents their interests, indicating widespread disillusionment.
Equally, a vote for Georgian Dream might be a vote for stability and continuity—polls show high unemployment rates and the cost of living as the electorate’s two principal concerns—or a way to prevent former president Mikheil Saakashvili, still very much a divisive figure in Georgia, from coming back to power. Voting this way is unlikely to be a simple endorsement of Russia, a country whose colonial might has brought devastation to families in the region for decades.
That colonial might touched my own family just over a hundred years ago. Between 1918 and 1921, during a brief window of independence when the Russian empire had died and the Soviet Union was not yet born, Georgia created a thriving democracy. In the elections for the Georgian Constituent Assembly in February 1919, not only did women have the vote but 17 stood for election. Five became sitting MPs. “Distinctions of sex do not exist in Georgian politics or in Georgian industry. Equal pay for equal work is the ruling economic dictum,” noted British politician Ethel Snowden, when she visited in 1920 as part of an international socialist delegation.
This was the vibrant and progressive society into which my grandfather was born. He was six when the Democratic Republic of Georgia declared independence in 1918; I often imagine him running through the streets of Tbilisi with childish abandon, as free as newly independent Georgia itself. The novelist Boris Pasternak wrote that being in Georgia made him feel as though he were “a tune to be whistled, a trivial tune in a major key”; perhaps my grandfather was whistling too. He was born into a big Georgian Jewish family, the Djanashvilis, who worked in textiles. Life was good.
But this budding democracy came to an abrupt halt when the Bolsheviks invaded in 1921, and Georgia found itself, once again, under Russian occupation—as it had been since 1783 when the Georgians had to seek Russian protection against the Persians. Since the 4th -century AD, the Arab, Persian, Seljuk, Ottoman and Mongol empires had all occupied Georgian territory at one stage; occupied, but never possessed. But this sense of threat lingered, generation after generation. Georgian satirist Lasha Bugadze captured something of this when he wrote, in his book The Literature Express, published in 2009 shortly after the Russian invasion of South Ossetia, “We expect danger from all sides, so we tend to frown in advance. That’s the way we defend ourselves.”
Anticipating the Bolshevik invasion, my family uprooted and fled to Istanbul. When I imagine this, my grandfather is still running—but this time out of fear, not joy. It is unclear exactly when they fled, but it must have been before the snowy day in February 1921 when Lenin’s 11th army invaded, committing Georgia to 70 years of Soviet rule. Some years later, an uncle of my grandfather’s returned; he ended up in the gulag.
My grandfather arrived in the UK in 1930, travelling on an Iranian passport. He became a British citizen, worked as a doctor in Tooting, changed his surname to Janney, had three children with my Swiss grandmother and died in 1957. To recap, he was a Jewish, Georgian-born, Turkish-assimilated, Iranian passport-wielding naturalised British subject. Growing up, however, I was told he described himself as Russian. Granted, the full biography is a bit of a mouthful—but Russian?
It was only more recently, when I heard the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko speaking at Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi, that I reflected on the significance of this choice. Yermolenko argues that whereas western colonialism was built on the idea of difference—in other words, you will never be the same as us—Russian colonialism was built on the idea of sameness—you will never be different from us. By describing himself as Russian, surrendering to sameness, even for what were likely innocuous, pragmatic reasons, my grandfather was perpetuating that Russian colonial trick, while simultaneously being a victim of it.
In light of this, I thought back to my experience with Chortika. I now finally understood what he meant when he said he was European, in that fiery exchange with an immigration officer in Lisbon all those years ago. What Chortika was really saying was that he was not Russian. He was protesting against sameness.
Just as Georgia’s democracy was thrown off course by Moscow a hundred years ago, the country’s European future once again appears tied up with Russia. It’s the same old story. Georgia’s youth lead the protests of today, like their parents who came out in 1989 against the Soviet Union, or in 1978 when Moscow wanted to make Soviet Georgia’s official language Russian. (That was just another attempt at enforcing sameness.) We could go back further.
While the repetitiveness of this struggle breeds despair, it is also the very thing that keeps Georgians in the fight. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” wrote the dissident novelist Milan Kundera. Georgians have not forgotten 1921, or 1978, or 1989, or 2008. When voters stand in line on 26th October to cast their ballot, more will be on their minds than the choice between Russia and the west. But for those who fear sleepwalking into sameness, there is only one queue.
