3. What Would Stalin Do?
Do You Speak Georgian? is a narrative podcast and serial memoir set in the Republic of Georgia. Join your host, Alicia Michelle, on a whirlwind adventure in the South Caucasus, where you’ll hear about the dark side of international travel – the side mainstream travel bloggers don’t share on Instagram.
Do You Speak Georgian? reflects the author’s recollection of events. Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted. Dialogue has been recreated from memory.
Time for a confession.
I had been to Georgia before.
In June 2013, as part of a graduate course on international development.
Once the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, a crop of new national borders sprouted up overnight like mushrooms. What this meant, for the first time in nearly a century for some, was being faced with the task of foraging a new national identity. Like children finally free from the control of an overbearing parent, states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia were posed with a question:
Who am I?
The answers were mixed.
Some, like the Baltic republics, rode into the sunset with the European Union. Others, like Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, fell right back into autocracy’s iron embrace.
The question was no different for Georgia.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union gave way to a dysfunctional Georgian government, complete with rigged elections and a parliament with ties to organized crime. Regions within Georgia, Adjara and South Ossetia, threatened to rip the country apart with civil war as they attempted to form their own, equally dysfunctional, governments. Some places got boy bands in the 90s, other places got ethnic cleansing; simmering interethnic tensions bubbled over into bloody massacres in Georgia’s northwestern Abkhazia region.
When faced with “Who am I?”, Georgia had no choice but to take a long, hard look at herself. The reflection in the mirror was ugly.
Post-Soviet vibes. Photo by Sergei Wing on Unsplash
A combination of widespread poverty and mounting public discontent provided the kindling for a wave of nonviolent post-Soviet revolutions, dubbed the “Color Revolutions”, in 2003. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution. The Rose Revolution in Georgia.
The Color Revolutions underscored the idea that the world could make a fresh start just in time for the turn of the century.
The end of the Cold War meant the end of history. It meant states with a history of autocratic rule could evolve into full-fledged democracies. All they had to do was believe, with a little help from foreign researchers and international aid, of course. Lauded for the use of civil disobedience and the peaceful transition of power, Georgia became the perfect case study – the New East’s golden child, with President Saakashvili as the world’s father of the year – for how to do state building right.
My graduate school trip, a wine-soaked romp through Georgia’s eastern and northern municipalities, lasted two weeks. The host family assignments were botched by the organizing agency, with students sleeping two to a bed in homes choked with cigarette smoke. The trip itself was soured by my classmates’ – international development majors – constant bitching about how conditions in a developing country were...surprise...conditions in a developing country.
The course’s host professor, radiant with the kind of self-assurance only a tenured position could give, embodied the kind of woman I dreamed of becoming. The kind of woman who could afford a closet of white linen and whose femininity was not stolen by menopause’s unforgiving hands. The kind of woman I dreamed of becoming had also found love across borders; she had married a Georgian man, of whom she met during her own research trip to Soviet era Moscow.
In addition to a final research paper, the host professor required her students to keep a travel diary during the course. Georgia, like history, was alive. Georgia had a story to tell. It was still in the making and it was up to us to interpret it.
I admittedly did poorly in the research portion of the course. My final paper was disorganized, full of observations that never reached a conclusion. The professor returned my paper back to me with a “C” written in the upper left corner of the first page. Red ink filled the margins. My leather notebook, however, was returned with an “A” circled and underlined on the first page.
One notable portion of the trip involved boarding a rusty Ford Transit and traversing the Georgian Military Highway, a road that snakes through northern Georgia and continues through Russia, up to a village called Stepantsminda (commonly named Kazbegi). The village rested near the Russian border and the borders of legend, at the base of Georgia’s third highest peak, Mount Kazbek, a sleeping volcano where mythical giants were chained in punishment for defying ancient gods.
During our excursion to Stepantsminda, we were to visit Gergeti Trinity Church, a 14th century monastery built on top of a hill. We had two options to get there; take a taxi, or go on foot through a path overgrown with meadow grasses.
Along with the host professor and a few others, I opted to walk.
The groups’ puny American legs could not keep up with the locals who overtook us; octogenarian women silently shuffling along the path, their weathered hands clasped tight around wooden prayer beads.
Marxism famously damned religion, calling it the opiate that subdued the proletariat masses. Fashioning themselves in Lenin’s image, the Bolsheviks cast away the bourgeoisie god and suppressed all forms of religious expression during the Soviet Union’s teething years. To believe meant being sentenced to prison. If you were lucky.
Gergeti Trinity Church was shuttered during the Soviet period, but belief persevered in the shadows. The end of Soviet rule breathed new life into Gergeti, its image now synonymous not only with Georgia’s tourism industry, but with the resilience of the Georgian spirit as well.
Gergeti Trinity Church. Photo by Patrick Schneider on Unsplash
The drive along the Georgian Military Highway was a story all to itself as well.
The journey began with my male peers’ cringeworthy quips about Chechen suicide bombers, an exchange that was finally silenced when the driver turned up the radio. The Caucasus, a byproduct of eternal contention between Arabian and Eurasian plate boundaries, peeled my eyelids back. As far as I knew, I’d only get to see the peaks once, so I had to make it count. An altitude headache spread in my skull the higher we climbed, the Ford Transit’s engine straining under the stress of carting twelve American bodies through unpaved roads clogged with mud.
Earlier in the week, we were treated to observing a dress rehearsal by members of Georgia’s national dance company, Sukhishvili National Ballet at Tbilisi’s Suxishvilebis Studia theater. Upon entering the room, men sprung up from their squatting positions and proceeded to spread their feathers; they executed backflips and leaps across the wooden dance floor, the soles of their feet cloudy with chalk. Kartuli, a courtship dance meaning “Georgian”, was the name of Georgia’s most famous national dance, where men displayed feats of strength and acrobatics as women clad in floor length gowns glided between them. They never touched, but their bodies carried a message everyone could understand.
One guardrail-free switchback gave way to another, more perilous guardrail-free switchback. Jetlagged eyes glued themselves to the Caucasus, scenery that called for silence like the dancers in Tbilisi. The mountain peaks, stained orange by the setting sun. The full moon, translucent behind a silver wedding veil, rose in search of her companion, the mists that flicked and undulated before an eternal audience carved from stone.
My body wracked with shivers by the time we arrived in Stepantsminda. Not from the breeze that cut through the village, not from the rainstorm that greeted us there, but from something I could only find one word to describe.
Grace.
The email containing the flight itinerary arrived in my inbox at 3:11 AM, Eastern Standard Time.
I was going to Georgia.
The process of booking a flight carried a sense of finality. Anyone could search for airport codes or scan itineraries from the comfort of their cubicle. The best part was you didn’t have to go anywhere. “Thinking about it” was good enough.
Entering credit card details and pressing the “purchase” button was another matter. It meant signaling you were ready. Ready to commit to getting on that plane and opening yourself to the possibility of returning home as a different person.
Someone in an unseen office halfway around the world took the power to make that decision from me. TLG said I had to commit and I had to do it now. But what if I wasn’t ready? It was easier to just sit on my ass, nurse the same mojito I always nursed, and complain about how much my life sucked.
Modern Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. Photo by giorgi gvilava on Unsplash
I opened my laptop, turned the volume up on a Georgian music playlist I found on YouTube, and proceeded to stare at the two empty suitcases before me. Dappled sunlight shimmered in their eager black mouths. A golden pool, or the abyss, for me to throw my incohesive wardrobe, my good intentions, into.
A little voice inside of me screamed, you’re a charlatan. A fake. I didn’t deserve to experience what lithe, blonde travel bloggers described as a lifechanging year abroad. My acceptance to TLG was a fluke. A massive typo by some underpaid Georgian administrator who couldn’t speak English.
Sure, I was physically prepared; my medical tests for tuberculosis and the ABC’s of hepatitis came back clear. Sure, I was professionally prepared; I had cut my teeth in the classrooms of a DC nonprofit, where I taught English to groups of adult immigrants and refugees. Sure, I was knowledgeable. I majored in Political Science, with a concentration in comparative politics and a heaping helping of political psychology. My final research paper explored the legacy of authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union and the collective trauma it inflicted on its citizens.
I just didn’t feel prepared.
Filling the suitcases with a year’s worth of clothing meant saying goodbye. Bidding bon voyage to the small town girl who dreamed of the big city, who, despite believing, didn’t become the next Condoleezza Rice or an ambassador’s wife, draped in pearls and guest lecturing at Georgetown. Like the New East posed with “Who am I?”, I too was faced with the same predicament.
Who am I?
My reflection in the mirror was burnt out. I was tired. Of everything. Already, at the old age of 25. I was tired, but it was too late for any of that. Too late because if I changed my mind, I’d owe the Georgians the cost of the flight, money I didn’t have. Too late because if I changed my mind, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.
I’d get on that plane whether I liked it or not. If I got on the plane, I’d return home as a different person.
Who was that person?
Who would that person become?
There was only one way to find out.
By going to Georgia.
The music playlist told me to keep believing. To remember the things Georgia showed me on my first visit; of the weathered human faces that reflected the grace of the Caucasus, of the eyes of an elderly villager that welled with happy tears when he spotted tourists in the Ford Transit’s backseats. Of the whispers of the Georgian women who, according to the host professor’s husband, waxed poetic about my appearance, a black girl invisible in her home country, now visible in a place that had never seen black girls before.
I was going to Georgia.
In times of crisis, a part of me, my shadow self who housed the antithesis to my existential impotence, sometimes turned to young Stalin as a corrupt role model.
What would Jesus – no – what would Stalin do?
He believed.
That he was destined to become someone great, whoever that someone was. That he was destined to make a mark on history, whatever that mark may be…
I was going to Georgia.
I wiped my sweaty hands on my shorts before grabbing a pair of jeans from my closet.
I folded them into a square before placing them into one of my suitcases.