Don't pull away

It seems that the talented provocateur Mikheil Saakashvili managed to outsmart us. His task was - to use a boxing term - to “pull” us out with his insults for clumsy, thoughtless actions and then point a finger at us to the world community: “Guys, I told you that this big guy wants to kill me. But you didn’t believe it, they said "that I have a persecution mania. Well, now you see for yourself!" That's all.

But this is Saakashvili’s task. And our task is not to “pull out”, i.e. don’t “get carried away”, keep your line, not his. But for this you need to have it. For Saakashvili it is obvious, for us it is not. We dance to his tune, do what he wants. He shows us an indecent gesture, we begin to get angry, growl and chatter our teeth. Besides, he is one step ahead of us. He has already released our military (intelligence officers, no, what difference does it make if for the whole world they are intelligence officers), and we are just getting excited. And how they got fired up! They stopped transport and postal communications with Georgia, and under some childish pretexts - it would have been better if they had directly said that this is supposedly for your edification, you asshole, after all, it’s clear - and they went to wool Georgian business in Russia and Russians in general Georgian. Why are these poor fellows suffering? The rich don’t care about water off a duck’s back, but the poor, who don’t have enough money to buy themselves a Russian passport – what are they for? Are they the ones who treacherously exchanged Russia for America? So that means Georgians can’t do it illegally, but everyone else can? This means that Georgian businessmen are now not allowed to circumvent the law, although it was possible just now, but everyone else can still do so? This means that the Georgian thieves in law are no longer in law, and the rest of the thieves can relax and continue to have fun in connection with their currently more successful nationality?

All this seems, to put it mildly, politically erroneous and obviously grist to M. Saakashvili’s mill. And morally this seems quite disgusting, since it resembles ethnic cleansing. I understand that an insult is an insult, a slap in the face is a slap in the face, and at the state level too. But at the state level, different reactions are required, not so unbridled and dangerously emotional. Who, after all, has the hot Caucasian temperament? Saakashvili or not Saakashvili?

I think that in the very next few days this murky wave will subside and a slow, careful, so as not to lose face, rollback will begin. The topic will gradually disappear from the front pages, the hysteria will be mixed. A great country will pull itself together. But a lot of wood has already been broken. In fact, what is now happening is what is called inciting xenophobia, and this always has extremely negative and long-term consequences.

When I received my first passport at the age of 16, the young lady at the passport office suggested that I sign up as a Russian. In principle, I didn’t care, I didn’t think about it. Naturally, I got used to considering myself a Russian boy. Who else? If I speak Russian, I read Russian books and was born in Moscow. So what if my father’s name is Georgian? My father doesn’t speak Georgian either. And in general, real Georgians are a romantic people, they live in the mountains, wear mustaches and daggers. They are cute and brave, but I have no real connection with them. As well as to other numerous peoples, in particular to the Jews, whose blood also flows in me. For all this, I considered the entry in the “nationality” column to be an empty formality. And I was ready to immediately agree to the young lady’s proposal, especially since the young lady was pretty and was tempted to agree to any of her proposals, but suddenly it occurred to me that this would be funny: the surname was Georgian, but it was written as Russian. It might occur to someone that I am ashamed of my father’s nationality. But I’m not embarrassed by her, what else, I just don’t care. So it’s better, in order not to make anyone laugh and not to expose yourself to absurd suspicions, to register as a Georgian - under your last name, and under your physiognomy, and even a hedgehog understands that I’m Russian.

I explained all this confusingly but cheerfully to the young lady. However, the young lady did not back down and again, as if on top of what I had said, she asked why, having a Russian mother, living in Moscow, not knowing the Georgian language, I still could not register as a Russian. I repeated my simple, but, as it seemed to me (and still seems to me), convincing argumentation. Then the young lady’s boss, an adult woman sitting at the next table, stepped in. She looked at me dryly and said that it would still be better if I signed up as a Russian, and personally she didn’t understand why I was so stubbornly unwilling to do this. I repeated the same thing to her, patiently and childishly obediently, but already somewhat confused (an adult, but he doesn’t understand). She raised her voice irritably. And then the irreversible happened: I realized that they were putting pressure on me. And I got stuck. Now I was ready to cry, but even under torture it was no longer possible to force me to register as anyone other than a Georgian. “Well, write down Georgian for him,” the aunt ordered vindictively, and the young lady wrote down “Georgian” for me in the entire column, so that it was not my name, surname or date of birth, but the word “Georgian” was the first and only thing that jumped out at me. eyes on the first page of my first passport. And at that moment I proudly felt like a Georgian. Those. Thanks to these aunts, who carried out an idiotic order, my self-identification at that moment was exactly that - not a person, not a man, not a citizen of my country, but a Georgian.

This was a natural reaction of a normal person to pressure. Now, no longer at 16, but at the daring 51, I know and can say the following about myself: I absolutely do not care about all my ethnic roots - both present and absent. If Georgians are persecuted in my country, I will again feel like a Georgian, if Jews - a Jew, if a Gypsy - a Gypsy. And if they begin to spread rot on the Australian Aborigines or the Maori people, I will immediately declare myself a representative of this proud tribe of cannibals and even, perhaps, somewhat push the boundaries of my gastronomic orientation. Moreover, this will happen on an unconscious level - of course.