Tbilisi, Revisited

Becky here, signing back into Ullmans on the Road* after a nearly one and half year hiatus in which I graduated from law school, spent three dramatic months studying for the bar, the next four months flopping about in search of a job, and finally moved back to DC with a fantastic job working on international NGO law in the NIS region.

We recently started a new project in the Republic of Georgia and I’ve had the opportunity to go back twice so far, and there are more trips in the future. (Side note: I’ve been sent on five business trips in my career thus far- three to the Republic of Georgia, and one to the state of Georgia, and… one to Ohio.)

Thus far, the job has been…capricious. There have been some serious highs; times when I think I’ve landed the job that I always wanted, doing interesting things that matter in a field I care about. There are also times when I feel like I can’t do anything right. I’ll save my more detailed complaining for emails and phone calls (many thanks to the recipients) but will share one of the happy times.

In Georgia, we are working on the sustainability of the NGO sector. In an otherwise progressive country, NGOs remain dependent on foreign grants for over 90% of their funding, and foreign funding is not a long term solution, especially in Georgia. While it remains a darling of the West, funding for the region decreases substantially every year. Our goal is to identify the causes of this dependency and how they can be fixed. After meetings with NGOs, charities, and government officials, our first stop was the tax code.

The happy time came on the first night of the most recent trip. My boss and I were preparing for meetings the next day and revising the analysis we had prepared. We sat on the 18^th floor of a beautiful hotel in Tbilisi with a panoramic view of the city. Sipping on tea, we waded through the tax code…. It was really great. Seriously. There’s something puzzle-like and satisfying about wading through definitions and cross-references to figure out what’s there…or what’s not. But don’t ask me about VAT because that stuff is wild.

I last left Tbilisi in 2008, approximately 3 hours before the Russian tanks arrived. I followed the events of “The War,” as people there call it, with concern from Istanbul and Mykonos. I knew that the conflict left a lasting mark on the country’s diplomatic interaction with Russia, but upon returning I was struck by how very deep and cultural it is. Most notably, Russian, as a language, is gone from Tbilisi’s exterior. There are no more signs in Russian, not on store fronts, in shops, road signs, or newspapers. It’s still engraved on buildings like the Opera, but apparently that will soon come off as well. As we drove across a bridge that was decorated in Soviet symbols fashioned out of steel, my friend told me that there is a new law that requires the removal of all Soviet symbols, and so the ornamentation on the bridge will be removed as well.

Taking the place of Russian is, unsurprisingly, English. It’s everywhere. And it’s no longer a country in which I would hesitate to just start a conversation in English without first asking. Of course fluency of this kind isn’t something that happens in two years- Georgia’s western orientation started long before that- but this most recent push both toward English and away from Russian is truly remarkable.

A side effect of this push is a division between the young and old. Simply put, the old speak Russian, the young speak English, and everyone in between speaks varying degrees of both. With such a pronounced shift away from Russian/Russia, I worry what happens to older people who do not speak English. They are cut out of a large part of the economy and as evidenced by the many elderly people in the street, the state struggles to provide adequate social services.

Then there is the reference to “The War,” a reference without identifiers. Like Madonna or Bono. Technically, the conflict in 2008 lasted 8 days. In no way do I mean to slight the seriousness of what happened or the tragedy of lives lost, but it does pale in comparison to say, World War II. The War, combined with the global economic crisis, put a stop to the hundreds of large-scale construction projects throughout the city. The construction sites remain quiet.

It seems these efforts to erase Russian are like the final steps in ending the abusive marriage between Russia and Georgia. Georgia is taking back her maiden name, dating other superpowers. She’s lost weight, bought some new and fashionable clothes, but struggles to regain the financial stability she had when married.

*Thanks to Sarah for the suggestion to hop back on here, ie the “BLOG THIS” email.