After A Frosty Reception, Tbilisi’s Wartime Russians Are Beginning To Leave
(Article text Copyright © 2024 RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036. – rferl.org – Joshua Kucera – Jan. 21, 2024 – article text also appeared at rferl.org/a/georgia-russians-fleeing-war-leaving-/32784835.html)
TBILISI — Yekaterina and Aleksandr were never fully comfortable in Georgia.
Like tens of thousands of other Russians, they moved to Tbilisi after the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly 23 months ago. They managed to work remotely for Russian tech companies and made Georgian friends through their fondness for Dungeons & Dragons and board games.
They grew weary, though, of the frequent electricity and water outages in their neighborhood, and Internet that was slower and far more expensive than what they were used to in Moscow. But it was the low-grade hostility that they felt from Georgians — collective blame for the war — that was the most difficult to get used to.
“They are really supportive of Ukraine because they see themselves in that situation, and I completely understand it,” said Yekaterina, who asked to avoid publication of her last name for safety reasons. But at the same time, “no one wants to have to prove every day that they are a ‘good Russian.'”
The sudden arrival of tens of thousands of Russians in early 2022 shocked Georgians already stunned by the attack on Ukraine. Many Georgians see Russia as their enemy and oppressor, strongly identified with Ukrainians, and were outraged by their government’s passive response to the Russian invasion. The presence of so many Russian newcomers — even ones who appeared to overwhelmingly oppose their government and the war — further heightened tensions.
Now, the Russian newcomers are quietly, but in large numbers, leaving.
The last straw for Yekaterina came when her husband’s parents came for a visit last summer. They live in a small town in Russia’s south and it was their first trip outside the country. “They were so hyped up, they were like, ‘Wow, it’s so beautiful,'” she recalled. But one day the whole family got into a taxi in which the driver had posted a sign, in English, reading, “Russians go home.”
“I was so happy that they couldn’t read English at all,” she said. “When I read this message, my god, I almost cried. I sat there and thought, ‘Oh no, we have to leave.’ It was a really sad moment.”
Soon after, they did leave: to Serbia’s second city of Novi Sad, on the banks of the Danube River. There, they rent a large downtown apartment for the same price as their smaller former home in a scruffy, remote neighborhood of Tbilisi. In general, Serbs show far less hostility toward Russians than Georgians do, and there is a growing Russian tech population in Serbia that they quickly integrated with.
“It’s all about the community,” Yekaterina said.
Official statistics indicate that more than 30,000 Russians have left Georgia in the past six months, slashing the number of wartime Russian immigrants by almost one-third from its peak a year ago.
Once attracted to Georgia as an easy, relatively welcoming refuge from a homeland where they felt increasingly estranged, Russians here have complained of hostility from regular Georgians and bureaucratic roadblocks thrown up by the Georgian government.
Just in the past few months, according to Katya Chigaleichik, an anthropologist who has studied the migration, a critical mass of Russians has started to conclude it is not worth it. She said there is no specific trigger, but rather many have realized that the situation won’t get any easier for them in Georgia and they have had enough time to make onward plans.
“People have realized that nothing is changing,” she said. “That is exactly the point: Nothing has happened.”
The Influx
Russians began fleeing their homeland en masse within days of the Russian troops’ full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Some left out of disgust over the war, while others feared repression would make life unbearable or that international sanctions would make it impossible to continue to work. Another wave of Russians left in September of that year, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilization as the war ground on.
In both waves of emigration, Georgia was among Russians’ top destinations. It doesn’t require them to get visas and shares a land border with Russia, so is relatively cheap to reach. Georgia also has been a favored vacation spot for Russians for generations, and more recently has gained a reputation among young, liberal-minded Russians as a country far freer than their own.
Long lines of cars have been lining up to cross into Georgia from Russia in recent days.
By the end of 2022, about 110,000 Russians had moved to Georgia, according to an extrapolation of statistics from Georgia’s Interior Ministry, which counts entries and exits by nationality. The new Russian arrivals were concentrated in the two largest cities, Tbilisi and the Black Sea resort city of Batumi, and in parts of those cities it became common to hear more Russian spoken on the street than Georgian.
Rental prices shot up, and the arrival of so many middle-class consumers revved up the economy: Georgia’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew more than 10 percent in 2022, at least two percentage points of which could be directly attributed to the Russian influx, according to economist Davit Keshelava, who has studied its economic impact.
It also led to an increase in social tension. Public sympathy for Ukraine runs strong in Georgia. And while the overwhelming majority of Russian immigrants say they oppose the war and Putin, many Georgians nevertheless hold them responsible for the conflict and for what they see as Russian bullying of their country over the past two centuries and in particular since Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union.
Russian troops invaded Georgia during their five-day war in 2008, and since then Moscow has militarily and diplomatically propped up breakaway authorities in the Georgian territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in what Georgians say is an occupation of their territory.
The sentiment that all Russians were implicated in the invasion of Ukraine has been particularly strong among young, liberal Georgians — for the most part, the Russian immigrants’ peers. Anti-Russian graffiti has blanketed Tbilisi’s central neighborhoods, and opposition politicians have campaigned on promises to make it more difficult for Russians to come and to stay.
The Exodus
While it has received little notice in Georgia, the data point to a strong trend of departing Russian expatriates.
About 6,000 more Russians left than entered Georgia in the first six months of last year. The outflow quickened in the third quarter to a net drop of about 14,000 people. In the fourth quarter, the decline was 11,000.
Financial data point to the same trend: In December 2022, remittances from Russia to Georgia amounted to $317 million, much of it thought to be payments from Russian companies to their workers who were living in Georgia. By December 2023, the figure had dropped 78 percent to $71 million.
Russians in Tbilisi say they began to notice the exodus late last summer. “It seems like every two weeks, someone in my community — a friend or an acquaintance — is leaving,” said Chigaleichik, who herself fled to Tbilisi from her home in St. Petersburg shortly after the start of the all-out war.
With some fellow Russian academics who had come to the Caucasus at the same time, she formed an informal group researching the Russian migration. By now, she said, she is the only one of its members who is still in Georgia: Everyone else has left, mostly to graduate programs in Europe or the United States.
There are several factors driving Russians to leave, she said, but the two most significant reasons are bureaucratic uncertainty and the discomfort of living in a society with so much anti-Russian sentiment. “You can’t get a residence permit, and people are tired of feeling like they are unwelcome,” she said.
The hostility toward Russians was at its hottest in the early days of the influx, with outpourings of anti-Russian sentiment on Georgian social media and occasional spillovers into real life. There were reports of bar fights between Georgians and Russians and of Georgian restaurants refusing to serve Russians.
Tbilisi recently announced it was investigating several businesses in Batumi, Georgia’s seaside capital, for violating a law requiring service to be offered in the Georgian language.
Over time, that anger has dulled somewhat. But there is still little appetite among most Georgians for welcoming Russians into their country. Russians commonly describe a coldness from Georgians in everyday interactions.
“People feel a kind of disgust, and that is much more traumatic than, I don’t know, some drunk guy punching you in the face,” Chigaleichik said.
Border Problems
Bureaucratic complications, meanwhile, have made Russians’ lives here increasingly precarious.
Many Russians were initially attracted to Georgia because of its laissez-faire policies about entry to and residency in the country. Citizens of 95 countries, including Russia, need no visa at all to stay for up to a year — meaning that as long as they leave the country at least once a year, they can stay indefinitely. For many foreigners in Tbilisi, this means an annual “visa run,” often to the nearby Armenian border, to reset the clock.
In practice, however, many Russians have reported being arbitrarily denied entry when they try to reenter Georgia. Many of those cases, when they affect well-known figures connected to Russia’s political opposition, have drawn wide attention in Georgia and speculation that the government, moving in a more authoritarian and Russian-friendly direction, is blocking opposition figures in order to placate the Kremlin.
But unofficial bans on prominent Russians are just the tip of the iceberg. “It’s not only the political community that is banned — a lot of tourists, a lot of businesspeople. It’s random,” said Anton Mikhalchuk, coordinator of the Tbilisi office of the Free Russia Foundation, a liberal opposition exile group.
Mikhalchuk described the Georgian government’s border policy as a tool in its internal and foreign political arsenals: For example, if too many Russians support a protest by Georgia’s political opposition, the government might decide to impose a quota of sorts to put pressure on the Russian community.
“It’s like they say, ‘We need to make a ban for 300 people,'” he said. Or, if Russians in Tbilisi organize a protest against the war in Ukraine or conduct other sorts of independent political activity, the Russian government might pressure the Georgian government to do the same, he said.
“These days, Georgia has to maneuver between the enemy, which is very close to them, and its relations with the West,” Mikhalchuk said. “And this leads to a sometimes incoherent policy toward the Russian community.”
At the same time, more formal methods of staying in the country have also become increasingly closed to Russians. In theory, a residence permit is available to any foreigner who buys real estate worth more than $100,000, invests more than $300,000, or has a business with annual turnover of more than 50,000 Georgian lari (just under $19,000).
In practice, though, Russians have reported being denied residence permits even when they meet all the requirements. Nina Aleksa, a project manager at the Free Russia Foundation, said that only about 60 percent of the Russians they work with have gotten residence permits when they applied for them, compared to about 90 percent before the war. (Representatives of Georgia’s Interior Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.)
The Free Russia Foundation is usually able to negotiate with Georgia’s security services to get opposition figures unblocked and into Georgia. But for the many others who have no such connections and hear stories of other Russians being denied entry, it’s a level of uncertainty that makes it very hard to establish a life in Georgia. “People have apartments, boyfriends, cats,” Aleksa said, “so it’s stressful when they need to make a visa run.”
Moving On
Since the start of the war, Artem Grinevich has opened two bars in Tbilisi that are aimed at other Russian expatriates. Of the fellow Russian bar owners he knows, he said, only those who applied for residence permits before the war have been able to renew them since then. All the people he knows who applied after the war, himself included, have been denied, he said.
He also knows two friends who weren’t let back into Georgia after making visa runs, so he isn’t risking it: He has stayed in Georgia nonstop for more than a year and is counting on being able to just pay a fine once he leaves, as is the standard penalty. “I have two projects here; I need to be here,” he said.
Not for long, though. He also is planning to move away and is already in the process of closing one of his bars. He is in a Telegram group chat of Russian bar owners in Tbilisi; he estimates about 200 Russian-run bars have opened during the war. Now, though, “every couple of days you see a message, ‘We’re selling all our stuff because we are closing.'”
He doesn’t yet know where he is moving. “Maybe Asia somewhere,” he said. “Somewhere where, if I follow the rules, I will be stable.”
The dispersion out of Georgia is wide and hard to generalize, but anthropologist Chigaleichik said there are some rough patterns. Many opposition political figures and journalists are going to Germany, she said, where the government has made it easier for persecuted Russians to get what are known as “humanitarian visas.” Many who came to Georgia without jobs have been forced to return to Russia after their savings ran out and they couldn’t get jobs here. Remote tech workers, probably the largest segment of the Russian community in Tbilisi, have moved on to Serbia or Southeast Asia, where costs are lower and infrastructure often more reliable.
While Serbia has become particularly popular among Tbilisi’s Russians, it can be awkward. The emigrants tend to be overwhelmingly anti-Putin, while Serbs are not only friendly toward Russians in general but often supportive of Putin in particular.
“People say, ‘It’s OK [that] you are Russian, because Putin is cool.’ If you don’t feel weird with that, it’s OK for you to live in Serbia,” Chigaleichik said with a laugh.
A Political Football
While the Russian community may be shrinking, it remains a political football in Georgia. When the Russians first started arriving in large numbers in 2022, Georgia’s opposition parties seized on the issue as part of their criticism that the ruling Georgian Dream party was too accommodating toward Russia.
Opposition figures argued that there should be greater restrictions on Russians in Georgia, like removing Russians from the visa-free regime and instituting limits on Russians’ purchases of real estate. The government was put on the defensive, and argued variously that many of the new arrivals were in fact ethnic Georgians with Russian passports, that they were boosting the economy, or that anyway they wouldn’t be here for long.
Limiting Russians’ activity in Georgia has popular support: Seventy-three percent of Georgians in a recent poll said Russians should not be allowed to enter without a visa, register a business, or buy real estate. Only 18 percent of those surveyed supported Russians being allowed to enter visa-free, and just 7 percent said they should be allowed to register a business or buy real estate.
“The public is demanding more action on this,” said Salome Samadashvili, a member of parliament from the opposition Lelo party. “This will remain a big issue for our party before the elections [scheduled for later this year], because we see that this is quite a concern for Georgians.”
The party has put forward legislation, called the Georgia Defense Act, which would impose a variety of restrictions on Russians: requiring visas, limiting Russians’ right to work or buy land, and imposing an “occupation tax” on Russian businesses, the proceeds of which would go to support Georgians displaced by the separatist wars of the 1990s.
Samadashvili acknowledged that the legislation won’t go anywhere as long as Georgian Dream remains in power, but she argued there is a need for it even if the Russians are moving away.
“Something else could happen and then it [the influx] could happen again,” she said. “People need to feel that there will be a consistent policy to build up Georgia’s independence from Russia.”
Staying Put
Although it is dramatically shrinking now, the new Russian community in Tbilisi is unlikely to disappear completely, Chigaleichik said. Even as Russians disperse to other parts of the globe, there are also four emerging centers of the new exile community: Yerevan, Belgrade, Berlin, and Tbilisi. Some Russians are still coming to Tbilisi, in particular from earlier emigration landing spots like Kazakhstan and Turkey, she said.
The Russians most likely to stay might be the ones who have jobs in Georgia connected to the Russian community itself. “There is still a market here, but you don’t need so many bars” as now, said Grinevich.
Those remaining also are likely to include those who can best adapt to the various difficulties that living in Georgia presents, Chigaleichik said: “Either you accept the rules of this game, or you go somewhere else.”