I don’t know how many languages he spoke, whether he listened to Bach or Blues and whether he slept well at night or stayed up smoking, like those lonely men do in movies fromthe 50s. Russia’s national rugby team were touring Europe and the promise of an international opponent generated a crowd, unlike anything I’d experienced in our modest Iffley Road stadium. As the game kicked off, I rememberRussia’s bright red strip and the way the November sun made it look fluorescent. Russia won by a narrow margin, and the teams enjoyed toaststowardsmutual friendship and brotherhood after the game. It is strange now to think how sanctions, Skripal and souring relations between the UK and Russia lay just around the corner.For onthatNovember day, the mood was characterised by optimism, potential and mutual respect. He died when my father was five, and whenever I asked about him as a child, I only ever received woolly replies: “he was from Russia, or Georgia, or something”, my family would respond. Seizing on this opportunity, Iwentdigging in the archives, assisted by Rugby Union Russia, ostensibly to prove I was Russian. I remember sitting in my bedroom in my university flat, hunched over my desk taking notes. Whereas previously he lived in the liminal spaces of uncertainty, he now belonged to a series of events that had happened andwereburied. This relative confirmed to me that my grandfather was born in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, somewhere between 1911 and 1913 (there are discrepancies in our various accounts). This in-between period had all the hallmarks of a classic 20th- centurystory of migration and exile: false passports, name changes, death, financial strain, separation, reunion. Gulags featured too, which – considering I was taking a moduleonAleksandrSolzhenitsyn that term – felt eerie. Though Georgia had been a republic of the Soviet Union and occupied by Russia during the days of the Tsar, it is a separate country with its own unique alphabet, language, literature, religion, customs, cuisine, history, attitudes, norms, and is now no longer under Russia’s dominion.Or at least, this is what I had presumed. Assured in my newly discovered Georgian identity, I arranged a call with the vice-chairman of Rugby Union Russia to deliver the news. What the vice- chairman had asked me, was whether I could get an Oxford historian to write a document asserting that a Georgian born in 1912 would have felt Russian. Western media outlets decried the annexation as an unlawful landgrab, an impulsive response to the Maidan protests in Kiev that saw the ousting of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Other sources cast the move as a defensive manoeuvre by Russia, inresponse to the threat of further NATO expansion. By casting their move as simply reclaiming whatwasrightfully theirs, bydrawing on historical and spiritual ties between itself and Crimea and notably, by claiming that Crimeans would have felt Russian. In his book Edge of Empires, leading Georgian scholar Donald Rayfield writes that in 1913, “Tbilisi was an Armenian city, administered by Russians. By all accounts, Georgian sentiment towards Russia was largely defined byresentmentthat the Russians weren’t honouring the Treaty of Georgievsk (or “trakat”) of 1783 that had guaranteed Georgia its internal sovereignty. It stands to reason that Georgianswouldhave felteven more pressure to preserve their heritage and identity during this period, in opposition to the cultural hegemony of the Russians. I spent eight months living there, and remain in awe of Moscow’s architectural splendour and the melancholy beauty of the frozen Volga in winter. (This is not to mention the numerous ethnic subdivisions within Georgiaitself thatmany Soviet citizens might have identified as – Megrelians or Svans for example – which have their own separate languages.) The Soviet project’s identity problem – at its core –lay intheparty’s attempts to create a supranational, unified group of “Soviet People” against a kaleidoscope of republics with distinct values and cultures. On the one hand, the dissolution of the Soviet Union allowed certain national groups – who had felt left behind by the Russo-centric regime – reclaim and reassert their autonomy and independence. On the other hand, many people who considered themselves Soviet Citizens first and foremost were left in an existentialfunk, whoserose-tinted nostalgia for the years under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev only developed into a deeper hue. In his book The Long Hangover, Shaun Walker reveals howthese people“had lost notan empire or an ideology, but the very essence of their identity. If they were no longer Soviet citizens, then who were they?” Later, Walker writes: “Russia was like a party host who awoke the morning after, started making a cursory effort to clean up the mess all around, but after a while simply gave up and slunk back to bed to nurse its hangover.” In uncertain times, we look for simple answers. When I was living in Russia, my landlord once told me her memories of the Soviet Union could be distilled into asinglevignette; an idyllic scene of children and their families at her local ice rink in Yaroslavl, smiling and skating in the early spring snow. It is a perfected, saccharine imageofSoviet life– like a snow globe, its frozen contents protected by a glass dome of unbreakable belief. And this goes some way in explaining why Russians might continue to see Georgiansastheirfellowcitizens – the reality of today being too complex, too messy, too dynamic to digest. This is a powerful image in the Russian soul, the idea ofbreadthas wealth, the more the better.” In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising, indeed inevitable, that Georgia continues to be considered as part of Russia’s sweepingidentity.“Empires arenot lost happily,” Remnick adds. Worn houses sat precariously atop jagged cliffs that rose out of the water. Without hesitation shop owners, waiters and taxi drivers would speak to me in Georgian. Whereas before I had used Russian and Georgian interchangeably when asked about my heritage, this external confirmation internally moved the needle. When I later discovered that my grandfather was Georgian, notRussian, small details such as these began to take on a new significance. He followed up our phone call with an email later that day, writing: “In respect of your potential eligibility to play for Georgia, having thought about it this may not work, as you[r] grandfather’s birthdate was during Russian times [...] and youwould need to demonstrate your own Georgian affinity”. In the world of elite sport, countries are always looking for creative ways to deepen their talent pool by recruiting foreign players. The art of ‘eligibility’ has become an accepted, commonplace practice in sports and a way for teams togain that competitive edge. Two of its recent standout players Dylan Hartley and Billy Vunipola were both born overseas butqualifiedthrough ancestry and residency respectively. This was both a conscious acknowledgement of France’s complicated relationship with minority groups and a gesture towards a more equal society, making space for migrantstobecome part of the national story. This was a hopeful sign that progressive politics might shine brighter than the increasingly anti-immigrant, nationalist rhetoric on the rise in muchofWesternEurope. I didn’t feel Russia was welcoming Georgia as part of its story, offering up a more cosmopolitan understanding of its national identity. There is only an all too familiar anger: thatfeelingthat something has been taken away from you, destroyed, reassembled, and given back to you in a way that feels completely wrong. On July 11th 2015, I played my first game for the Georgian National 7s team at a Grand Prix Sevens tournament in Exeter, UK. I was officially a Georgian citizen, an external marker of identity that now mirrored what I had long felt within. The ancient Georgian game of lelo –where the populations of two opposing villages would have to force a heavy ball over to their opponent’s field – is considered by Georgians to be a precursor to modern rugby today, andanexplanation for their world-renowned strength in scrummaging. As we lined up against our opponent, studs anxiously clinked and clunked on the tunnel floor and motivational criesinGeorgianechoed off the walls.
Komentar
Posting Komentar