BOUNDARIES LEFT
UNSPOKEN
Competing Russian Language Ideologies in a Tbilisi
Theatre
MSc. Cultural and Social Anthropology University of Amsterdam
September 12, 2018 Peer van Tetterode Student# 10448470 peervantetterode@gmail.com
Word count: 31016 Supervisor: dr. Julie McBrien 2nd reader: dr. Vincent de Rooij 3rd reader: dr. Artemy Kalinovsky
A note on plagiarism
This thesis meets the rules and regulations for fraud and plagiarism as stated by the examination committee of the MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. I hereby assure all readers that all ideas, concepts and passages of other authors’ works in this work are acknowledged and referenced in a way that is deemed proper within contemporary social sciences.
Quote
‘So it is clear that redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it. And particularly at times when the State takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized.’
Salmon Rushdie1
1 Page 13 -14 in chapter ‘Imaginary Homelands’ in (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and criticism 1981-1991 Granta books London
Abstract
This thesis asks how a changing language ideology towards Russian in Tbilisi affects the usage and appreciation of the Russian language in the multilingual Griboyedov theatre environment. Two theoretical takes on language ideology are explored, one with a focus on power that engages with the debate about postcolonial theory’s place in descriptions of the post-Soviet condition. By using Gibson’s affordance it explores the possibilities of language ideologies’ ties to the material environment.
I argue that Tbilisi is home to two different language ideologies that are historically rooted in the material environment and form two ends of a spectrum along which Tbilisi residents place their views. On the one hand Tbilisi residents perceive the Russian language as a symbol that is foreign to the Georgian nation and therefore the ‘multi-ethnic’ ‘Soviet’ Russian language’s ties to the material and public sphere are described as a phenomenon that has to vanish. On the other hand there is a language ideology that appreciates the Russian language as a symbol of continuous historical ties –that envisions Russian to be essential to a Tbilisi tolerant multicultural community, it imagines a primordial harmony between Russian speaking peoples. The study on the Russian language Griboyedov theatre shows that the latter perception dominates here and that this is also manifest when looking at the material
environment and ritual appreciation of what is considered pure Russian speech. However when zooming in, Conversation analyses reveal that there are actually two speech
communities within the multi-ethnic theatre staff that maintain mutual exclusivity when it comes to Georgian-Russian code switching patterns. Since the boundaries between the speech communities are isomorphic to ethnic categories, the findings in this thesis problematize common held assumptions about the neutrality of a lingua franca in current multilingualism studies, since ethnicity seems to mark the use of this common language.
Acknowledgements
It is incredible how willing people are to help. Therefore my gratitude requires paragraphs. I first and foremost want to express my sincere gratitude to all those who have participated in this project and gave me a glimpse into their daily lives, views and aspirations. დიდი მადლობა! /Огромное спасибо вам!
Personally I would like to thank my wonderful girlfriend Judith, my father Jan Roland, Adèle and my family for sticking with me and making me the person who I am. Although life has not been kind on us two, I too wish to thank my mother Ria in this regard and wish her all the strength she needs. A big shock for my friends and me was the young death of our friend Noud. I personally thank him for being the weird, beautiful and inspiring person that he was.
Where the development of this master’s thesis research itself is concerned I would like to thank the wonderful people I met in Tbilisi for their help. My local supervisor, the
knowledgeable ever kind Keti Gurchiani at Ilia State University helped me out with regaining the focus that I would lose every once and a while. A special thanks also goes out to my smart and vigorous research assistants Megi Sajaia and Salome Gogilashvili who have helped me out immensely with interpreting and support. Timothy Blauvelt is thanked for showing me around and being such an active member in Tbilisi’s academic community. Moreover I am grateful for the help of my Georgian teacher Maka Tetradze and her husband Alex Popiel.
At the University of Amsterdam, I would like to thank my supervisor Julie McBrien; if readers stumble upon any cohesive arguments or clear descriptions in this thesis, then I can assure them that she had a part in tackling the sloppy filler that preceded these. At the anthropology department I want to thank my friends, particularly Senya and Nick for their company and general interest in this project and me. Lucie is greatly thanked for her spelling and phrasing check. Lastly, this thesis’s readers are thanked for their reading effort.
Contents
Introduction ... 7
Red Carnations 7
Setting 8
Post-colonial multilingual speech in a post-Soviet state 12
Language ideologies through a lens of power 17
Language ideologies’ ties to space and materiality 18
Purity and time 20
Position, methodology & ethics 22
Outline 26
1... 28
Trends, classroom stubbornness & hands-on jargon in a changing Tbilisi
2... 42
Chistaya Russkaya Rech’Purity and old ties in the Griboyedov theatre
3... 66
Awkward accommodations: Configuring identities in Griboyedov speech
Conclusion ... 80 Bibliography ... 86
Introduction
Red Carnations
Matvey informs me that the day before there was a big plane crash near Moscow. 71 deceased were the result of the Russian Saratov Airlines flight 703 crash.The commemoration takes place in front of the Russian embassy in Vake. We have a bouquet of red carnations with us. There are reporters from the Russian television-broadcasting channel ‘Russia 1’ who are filming. Daur, the Abkhazian stands in the spotlight. This is a strange moment, since he briefly before, together with Matvey and a friend was talking in Georgian all the time - yet when the reporter asks for his views he gets out on the stage and puts forth the most sincere Russian words of loss. Afterwards he immediately switches to Georgian and begins joking and laughing with his friends. They seem to be making fun of the situation. The actors and me all burn a tea light. There is a ritual walk to the fence where all the flowers and tea lights are stacked up. An official statement follows [in Russian]. Literally everyone that is involved in the memorial sermon speaks Russian at this moment. One of the actresses, Gulisa when she sees me, insists on speaking English. When we do, this feels highly inappropriate and rather alienating from the whole set up. An older lady asks her who I am and when she tells her who I am in Russian, the older woman nods and turns away before I can speak.
This vignette is a description of the first day I had contact with the young actors of the Tbilisi based Russian language Griboyedov theatre. After a focus group interview the young actors and I went to a commemoration of a Russian plane crash. What leaves me puzzled initially in this chain of events is that Daur switches so easily between a Russian language enactment of a serious affair in front of Russian national television and a nonchalant,
frivolous state of being with his friends in Georgian in a matter of seconds. It is very easy in this way to hop between linguistically bounded realms of social interaction that are so detached from each other that their whole atmosphere can be entirely different
simultaneously. Later on an actress begins to speak with me in English, but only after everybody speaks in Russian. For the older woman this seems to be a sign that I cannot
communicate with her, and so I am excluded from the group. These swift linguistically bounded configurations of identity initially leave me puzzled and therefore are at the core of this thesis’ inquiry. To get more insight in these configurations I prompted the following question: How does a changing language ideology towards Russian in Tbilisi affect the usage
and appreciation of the Russian language in the multilingual environment of the Griboyedov theatre? To accurately answer this question I have subdivided this question in three relating
chapter sub-questions, which are respectively:
1) How could the Russian language have been spoken and appreciated in Tbilisi and how did the language’s usage and the appreciation for it change?
2) What makes the theatrical experience Chistaya for the workers of the Griboyedov theatre?
3) How is a Tbilisi urban identity configured within the multilingual environment of the Griboeyedov and in what way does this urban identity become apparent in everyday conversations?
Setting
Georgia is a country situated to the north of Turkey and south of Russia, next to the Black Sea. The country makes up a part of the South-Western Caucasus mountain range. Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia is inhabited by almost half of all 3.8 million Georgians. Georgia has an interesting political situation within the region, mostly because it is less dependent on Russia and the CIS countries, and in this sense it is unique in the Caucasus. To understand this regional political oddity one requires some recent historical context.
Georgia became part of the Soviet Union in 1921. In the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic Georgian has remained the official state language (Kaiser 2015) thus in Georgia
unlike other states to be Soviet did not mean to be fully Russified-as was the case in Ukraine (Bilianuk 2010)- yet Russian was commonly used as a second language that facilitated interethnic communication and official spaces, of political life. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgian became the official and primary language, however Russian was still used in public spheres. This changed after the 2004 Rose revolution. Russian obligatory education hours decreased critically and Russian street names were removed after president
Mikhail Saakashvili2 took office. Four years later in 2008, a war broke out in the Georgian province South Ossetia. The South Ossetian rebels claimed their national independence and were aided by Russian military troops to fight the Georgian power. In the aftermath of this short war, the combination of a politicized climate, less stress on Russian in education and the fact that English became an obligatory course in schools instead of Russian from 2006
onwards meant that younger Georgians were raised in a different Georgia than their parents. Although the government is encouraging the learning of English as a second language for the youngest generation (that grew up after the rose revolution) in urban areas, Russian is still widely spoken as a second language nowadays.
Although non-Indo European Georgian has a far older literary tradition than Indo-European Russian; the nation has long been confronted with Russian as a regional lingua franca. In the beginning of the period between 1789 and 1811 the area that is now Georgia became part of the Russian tsarist empire; a form of ‘soft-Russification’ was applied (Sherouse 2014: 8). Local aristocrats started to learn Russian in order to climb up tsarist military and administrative ranks. This was also the time in which Georgian nationalism developed among a group of intellectuals that defined the Georgian nation as a territory that was not Russian. In their article about language myths Smith et al. give a telling example of the importance of the Georgian language in the forming of the first independent Georgia. A year after the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1918, they state that Nikolay Chkeidze, the chairman of the National council ordered that all Cyrillic typewriters should be replaced by Georgian ones (1998).
After its short-lived independence in 1921 Georgia was annexed by Soviet troops and became a socialist republic in the USSR. In the USSR, Russian became the language of socialism, effectively a default language. However, official languages of the independent states in the Soviet Union were not banned but instead encouraged (Slezkine 1994 & Hirsch 2005); they were carefully recorded, standardized and taught in schools (Slezkine 1994: 420).
2 Mikhail Saakashvili was the Georgian president that came to the front after involved in Georgian
politics being since 1995 and became president after 2003. He is known for his all compassing and sometimes aggressive reforms in the fields of geopolitical orientation, economy, education, democratization and justice, retrieved from Petersen, A. & Cashman, R. (2014).
In early Soviet years they were often reduced to a Latin alphabet, a tragedy for Georgians, as they have a very old entirely original alphabet. Then in the 1930’s the alphabet was
standardized into Cyrillic, and Russian was mostly set up for intercultural or ‘inter-socialistic’ communication between the inhabitants of Soviet socialist states. The native language was so promoted that the main politicalparty in Moscow–among them the Georgian Joseph Stalin- mocked the Georgian leaders in the 1930’s –among them Georgian Lavrenti Beria-,
proclaiming that Tbilisi was being transformed from a multi-ethnic city (where only 25 percent spoke Georgian) into an all Georgian capital (Slezkine 1994: 426).
There was a conflict in the Soviet ideology between egalitarianism and the privileged position of Russian (Sherouse 2014: 9-11). Russian had symbolic connotations from the thirties onwards because it symbolized Soviet power while through that it was also a window to western media (Lemon 1991).To learn how to speak Russian was also a part of learning how to speak internationalist Bolshevik (Slezkine 2000: 232). Speaking Russian in the Soviet era can be seen as a performance of what Yurchak describes with Mikhail Bakhtin’s
authoritative discourse, this is a discourse that is omnipresent and asks to be performed (Yurchak 2003: 283). The structural promotion of Russian and native language bilingualism from the late Stalinist era onwards is an example of how this lingua franca was envisioned next to the vernacular (Crisp 1989 in Sherouse 2014: 12).
For many Georgians the Soviet Union offered possibilities outside of their national borders. The Georgian diaspora was successful in the sense that Georgians could maintain a distinct community identity while they were accepted into foreign Soviet cities. Comparably to Italian communities in the USA (Scott 2017: 37), Georgian restaurants, music and
entertainment were well known in every major city in the USSR (Scott 2017: 109)
Furthermore, Georgian intelligentsia, as with Italians in the USA, ‘could claim status as the heirs of a long-standing European high-culture tradition (ibid: 37)’. Although not numerous, Georgians were relatively overrepresented in Soviet governing bodies in the Kremlin until 19533 (ibid: 21). Georgian writers published their works often in both Georgian and Russian,
3
In 1953 the Georgian Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died. After a brief political instable situation, the Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev takes over power, while he agrees on a position that comes with more checks and balances. This marks a shift in the ethnic composition and two generations of Georgians in the highest levels of Soviet power in both the central party and the NKVD (a precursor of the KGB) of which Georgian Lavrenti Beria was the head at this time. Beria, who did had a rather bloody resume was competing for Stalin’s previous position was ousted, trialed without judicial defense and executed.
while Georgian music, film and theatre producers were acclaimed all throughout the union (ibid.: 128). Extremist Georgian nationalists in the late 1980’s, among them Gamzakhurdia condemned Georgian intelligentsia’s Russian language Soviet cosmopolitanism and gained popularity by promoting an idea of Georgian exclusivity. Georgians now faced the choice between ‘Soviet cosmopolitanism and a promise of national greatness; unsurprisingly, many
chose the latter (ibid: 234).’
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed officially. For Georgia this would mean that it entered an era of failed state that was typified by corruption of government, outright poverty and long-term precariousness for big parts of the population that was used to a certain standard of living under the Soviet Union (Rayfield 2012). Thieves-in-law [Russian: Vory v
Zakonye] were controlling much of economic and juridical practices in urban areas in the
1990’s. These various criminal networks that originated in the Soviet prison system were popular and normalized, illustrated by a 1993 survey that found that one in four Georgian school children wanted to become a thief (Slade 2007: 179). Georgian thieves could have an international career in the Soviet Union, since their network was vast and organized. The thieves spoke Russian and were historically tied to the Russian language Soviet prison system (ibid). Their influence on Georgian street slang was significant (Sherouse 2014: 35). The last major leaders of the criminal networks were detained violently in the early 2000’s, placing the thieves back in prison, a place where they originated from and thrived. In this sense the
symbolical image of the criminal network never really went away (Slade 2007: 127). Zviad Gamsakhurdia was independent Georgia’s first president from 1991 onto 1992. In his first months in office, he launched the campaign ‘Georgia for Georgians’ that was a teaching program that taught the Georgian language to ethnic minorities. In Georgian
periphery territories with a lot of ethnic minorities this campaign was not popular, since these ethnic minorities were used to communicating in Russian with Georgians. Also, in this period the Abkhaz independence war (aided by Russian troops) ensued, making the Georgian province Abkhazia semi-independent and non-cooperative with Georgia politically.
After the ousting of Gamsakhurdia in a raging civil war, the president that had occupied high posts in Georgia’s government in Soviet times already; Shevardnadze would remain the leader of Georgia until 2003. Although his reign is considered in line with Soviet rule he was the first to start initiating trade agreement and educational exchange deals with western countries. In 2003, the political tide changed with what came to be called the Rose
Revolution. One of the prominent initiators of this democratic peaceful revolution was Mikhail Saakashvili who thereafter became president and introduced a pro-European style of politics. Saakashvili became known for big building projects in Tbilisi and Batumi, which were supposed to symbolically signal Georgia’s climbing out of the transition period.
In august 2008 Georgia waged war with its province South-Ossetia that
self-proclaimed its independence with help of Russian military force. The war lasted days but the expansion of claimed South Ossetian unofficial borders continues up until now (Kakachia et al. 2018). The political threat though more stabilized is thus still present. Indicating the politicized nature of Russian immediately after 2008, Tbilisi residents claimed that bans on Russian film dubbing and popular Russian songs on the radio (Sherouse 2014: 83) would follow; yet this proved to be an imagined anxiety. Russian schools did close before and after the war. From the 200 Russian schools that were in Georgia in 2001, only 28 are still opened.4 The popular stance held by many young Georgians in Tbilisi is that Russian is being replaced by a new lingua franca, namely English. However, proficiency rates between both languages are still not comparable, with English lacking capacity (Alan, D., & Astghik, M. 2015).
Post-colonial multilingual speech in a post-Soviet state
To look into considerations or habits that play a role in the ‘ways of speaking’ (Dell Hymes 1989) of the Griboyedov theatre speech community I look at the bigger picture.
In Soviet times and throughout the 19th century under imperialist Russian rule, Russian was the second language in Georgia, spoken by a large percentage of the population
(Pavlenko 2008). In 20065 all Russian language education that was mandatory in schools was scaled down in total education hours whilst simultaneously the language was discarded in the streets from 2004 onwards. These sanctions put forward by the Saakashvili administration were abrupt though in line with a larger Europeanizing discourse. This discourse that isolated Russian as a non-native language, was projected top-down upon the Georgian population and
4 Retrieved from https://www.russkiymir.ru/en/publications/182780/ (visited on July 27th, 2018) 5
In 2005 new Law on General Education has been approved and National Curriculum introduced. It stated that every school can choose two foreign languages. The teaching of two foreign languages has been mandatory since the introduction of the new National Curriculum, implemented in 2006. Russian is still taught as second foreign language in 1995 public schools out of 2077 public schools, yet not as a second language of near-native command as it was the case before the reform. (Retrieved from
http://liberali.ge/news/view/34407/inglisuri-franguli-rusuli-germanuli--ramdeni-utskho-enis-pedagogi-astsavlis-sajaro-skolebshi on August 6th 2018)
it was aiming to constitute a European Georgia. This European Georgia had to become less reliant on agreements or alliances with the former Soviet bloc and Russia as it had been until then. Furthermore the discourse highlighted new affiliations with the west, indexing the geopolitical sphere of material and ideological influence of the US and the EU.
Georgia is often described as a post-socialist transition country that has followed a political trajectory that is atypical for Central Asian post-Soviet states and more comparable to western post-Soviet states such as Ukraine and the Baltic states (Kakachia, K., & Minesashvili, S. 2015). From the 90’s onwards it started to approach European trade markets, the European Union and abruptly distanced itself from Russia and the commonwealth of independent states (ibid). Therefore on the backdrop of this study Europeanization also plays a role. With Europeanization in Georgia, I refer to the process of European integration in which Georgia’s state actors engage aided by EU institutions and the intensified trade regulations between European member states and Georgia. Yet more importantly with Europeanization I highlight the impact of this usage on identity and everyday practices of both the state actors and the population of Georgia that is engaged in the process (Amashukeli et al. 2016: 126). A recent event that might have caused this last form of Europeanization to grow is the no-visa barrier policy that was adopted by Georgia in regard to traveling in the Schengen countries.6 Europeanization in the sense of identity also implies that the Russian language is seen as something that does not belong to a modern European Georgian identity.
A thick contour in the background of my inquiry is the presence of the state. It is useful to locate these effects of state in the banal encounters of everyday life, since it is here where they surface occasionally (Trouillot 2001: 126). This is especially true when
considering the role of language in the USSR. Yurchak shows that the large amount of people that supported the socialist state cannot be understood by seeing these citizens as a producers and transmitters of hidden rebellious meanings (Scott 1990) or a general public that was acting ‘as if’ it was supportive of the system (Yurchak 2003: 483, 484). As Yurchak
describes, in the case of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic state power was maintained in part through the performance-based repetition of certain forms of party language in rituals. Yurchak argues that it is not that important that Soviet Russians actually believed in Soviet
6Retrieved from
ideology, but that it is more important how they gave meaning to what it was that was Soviet (Yurchak 2006: 285). This meaning often was not excluding other identifications to develop such as more extreme nationalist ones in Georgia (Rayfield 2012: 351). A process that is more widespread and for instance comparable to McBrien’s (2017: 25) description of re-emerging Muslim identifications in late socialist Kyrgyzstan that were already preserved in the common view of Kyrgyz national identity. Both the internationalist Soviet identity and the nationalist identity could exist within one person (Coombs 2012: 57). With an eye on this project it is relevant to understand what being Soviet meant for my interlocutors and how the performance of certain attributes of this identity claim is still relevant in the present day. The aim of this exercise is not to speculate on whether being Soviet actually implies believing the ideology but to grasp at what it means for my interlocutors and why it is important to keep those past attributes alive.
Next to this, a big question in Post-Soviet area studies is whether empire or post-colonial theory is relevant to take into account when looking at post-Soviet nation-states. By pointing out the two most commonly debated points I argue that the objects of study of both schools show significant resemblance.
Firstly there is the question of colonial empire, what is the colonial empire that is relevant here? I am referring to both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union as making up the colonial heritage of Georgia. There is a substantive consensus that tsarist Russia was a colonial empire (Jersild 2002 &Thompson 2008) and that Georgia was its colony (Rayfield 2012). The state that followed the last tsar’s reign: the USSR is not considered the most typical colonial empire because from its outset its most prominent designer Vladimir Lenin ideologically defined the USSR to be a state that firmly opposed imperialism and colonialism (Yekelchyk 2004: 487). However the shape that the USSR took in its initial decades of existence was a state that promoted aggressive modernization (Péteri 2008: 930). On top of that, an important way in which this modernization was established was through systematic accumulation by dispossession; the capital and goods that were dispossessed where
redistributed in a way that created new tiers of dependency: the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, the other Soviet states, the Central and European socialist republics and dependent communist regimes that were supported overseas (Chari & Verdery 2009: 14). The colonial imperialistic practice within the USSR in other words overshadows its guiding
to decolonize states).
Secondly, an important difference between Europe-centered colonial empires lies in the fact that the Soviet Union from the outset promoted ethnic particularism, decentralization and self-governance among all its nation-states (Hirsch 2005, Slezkine 1994, Slezkine 2000). This is in contrast to imperialism, which could be described in Said’s terms as in need of a ‘dominating metropolitan center (1993: 8)’, and colonialism as the implantation of settlements in distant territory (ibid). National mistrust in the USSR had to be overcome by promotions of localized identities. That is why the native national language of the unions’ fixed member states was promoted during the initial years of the USSR (Martin 2001: 394) although its promotion was contested during its entire existence (Slezkine 1994: 432). Cultural heritages of the peoples of the USSR were furthermore studied and material artifacts were preserved with care and exhibited in museums (Hirsch 2005). However there continued to be an assumption of seeing non-Russian center regions as backward and in need of rapid
modernization. In the new regions the speaking of Russian was considered neutral and was most of all associated with bolshevist modernity (Slezkine 1994: 437).
Regarding the neutrality of modernization I see an important link that has to be stressed between former colonial empires and the Soviet Union that was enacted in empire’s regions. After all, the promoting of ethnic particularism existed in colonial history as well. In India for instance, the autonomy that local elites were granted under British colonial
administration enabled them to dominate cultural practices, a process that in turn inspired the rise of opposing subaltern movements. On top of this the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, during Soviet times was structurally prioritized as a leading nation, both considering the relative redistribution of goods within the union (Chari and Verdery 2009: 14 & Moore 2001: 14) as culturally, reflected in the ‘elder brother’ image (Peteri 2008).
Once the USSR (at least to some extent) can be seen as a colonial empire then this opens up new horizons that can be explored by ‘thinking between the posts (Chari & Verdery 2009: 12)’. In line with Chari and Verdery, I argue not that the post-Soviet should be studied as post-colonial but that the insights of both academic schools should be combined in a collective field of inquiry that they name post-Cold War (ibid: 18). Such a framework is useful for both scholars of the post-Soviet area as post-colonial scholars. It shifts our attention to parallels between desovietization and decolonization as ongoing processes (ibid: 17) that leave a hallmark on lived realities in many post-Cold War societies up to this date, Georgia being no exception. Therefore I think that the commonalities between the inquiries of
academics of the post-colonial and post-socialist field are larger than their differences (Chari & Verdery 2009: 29).
A focus on these processes also shifts the attention to historically grown, subtle continuities between the Soviet and the post-Soviet. To get a better grasp at these I apply Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial conceptualization of hybridity and more prominently ‘the third space of enunciation (1994: 37)’. Hybridity in broad terms circumscribes the
crossbreeding of two cultural forms. The term was used in colonial times but gained
prominence in cultural theory via Mikhail Bakthin who used it to describe how multifocal text and narrative can have a capacity for cultural change (Clark & Holquist 1984:4). Bhabha reframed the concept to describe the (post-) colonial setting where the dominant colonial and colonized cultures meet. The colonizer and the colonized historically negotiate identities in the third space of enunciation or third space. The third space is a place where identities are negotiated between the colonizer and the colonized. This space is both ambivalent and inspiring mimicry. It is an ambivalent place in the sense that colonial dominance is never clear-cut, dominance is fractured and conveyed by the colonized that resists and complies with the colonizer at the same time. Whereas the initial ideal of colonial governing is to let the colonized become like the colonizer, the mimicry is never perfect and instead leaves space for mockery. Parodies can always be inscribed in copying the colonizer (Huddart 2006: 57)- such actions have the potential of reversing power relations because they turn the colonized into a creative agent (Young 1995: 161), giving voice to the subaltern.
Third space has grown to be a concept that has proven itself relevant for socio-linguistic research (López-Robertson & Schramm-Pate 2013) but has not been used in post-Soviet literature much and therefore I feel inspired to engage with it, although I have to specify. In studies of bilingual teaching settings the concept is often reduced to an instance of multicultural exchange and the imagining of the learned target language’s culture. Such a usage however has been criticized for leaving the configurations of dominance out of the equation, a point that was important to Bhabha (1994: 37). I use third space to look into how identities are configured in everyday conversations between Russians and Georgians.
Georgians here are the formerly colonized and Russians the former colonizers and although this is not the case anymore and nuances regarding the nature of the dominance should apply, third spaces that are created are interesting to discover.
Language ideologies through a lens of power
A language ideology is a combination of two notions that are tough to pin down: language and ideology. The common view of language ideologies as overarching systems of meaning can be traced back to the philosophical development of the concept of ideology, which has become a very broad, widely known and yet multifocal term.
Ideology in its modern academic conception has basically four strands (Woolard 1998: 5-7). Firstly it is seen as matter that is situated within the head such as ideas, beliefs and representations. A second strand is that ideology is not exclusively ideational but also reflective of a social position, although it can be presented as universally true. A third strand is closely related to this; mainly that it is not only reflective of a social position but is actually a tool for the subject in the social position to overcome a power struggle. Lastly, there has been an influential philosophical argument stressing the distortion present in ideology. A well-known idea that illustrates this take on ideology is the Marxist notion of false
consciousness that implies that a dominating power or structure profits when its subject or the proletariat is misled. The greatest academic friction as Woolard notes (ibid: 7), is located between proponents of the second and the third strand. While the second strand perceives ideology as an uncritical reflection of the social structure based on meaning, the third stresses unequal power relations between social positions, which are reflected through the ideological. This dialectic between academic positions echoes into recent debates.
Expanding on these ideology strands its relation to culture has been discussed by anthropologists Geertz and Bloch. They debated the implication of both strands on culture. Geertz stressed that whether ideologies are held to be true by people does not matter as much as an ideology’s capability of signifying meaning between their social groups. Bloch
contested this less politicized view and held that ideologies are always mystifying the normative [oppressive] social and cultural order. I hold the middle ground in these views, seeing ideology as a locus of power in the process of meaning making that subtly disables other possible meanings. In this study I will make clear that my interlocutors are referring to the Russian language in similar terms, and all relate to a spectrum of views that is popular in the urban setting of Tbilisi, they do not express views outside of this spectrum, all other options are left unspoken.
The reason why I decided to sketch a rough background considering the development of ideology is that within language ideology a similar divide persists in the concepts’ usage
among scholars. To show how power relations have historically shaped the speaking
situations I subscribe to the critical strand that sees ideology as obfuscating cultural embedded dominance.
In general, language ideologies are common understandings on how to use language and these conceptions and implications of practices can be both consciously and
unconsciously reproduced. Such common understandings are situated in all places where ‘human beings and language intersect’(Woolard & Schiefellin 1994 elaborating on a quote by Raymond Williams). ‘These representations can be seen as ‘beliefs about language [that are] articulated by users as a rationalization of perceived language structure and use’ (Silverstein 1979: 193). Initially these beliefs were studied through written sources. In the last two decades scholars have stressed that a shift towards a more contemporary social field implies to step away from the more mental beliefs and texts to practices to observe the working of language ideology. In this view, there is room for speakers to contest existing representations by altering their speaking practices (Cameron in Holmes & Meyerhoff 2006: 448). I see this as a fruitful approach and that is why I took up the task of studying both language
appreciations and speaking practice in order to get information about the workings of Tbilisi language ideologies.
Commenting on Geertz’s and Bloch’s debate on ideology I see language ideology as having the potential for people to have a certain set of dominant or dominating ideas about other social groups that keep in place a historical power structure that enables and disables the behavior between people in everyday settings. In this thesis this conviction has implications for the way that I view conversations between Russians and Georgians.
Language ideologies’ ties to space and materiality
Anticipating on a shift from beliefs and texts to practices there is a more recent
academic development in anthropology that takes spaces and things into account. I agree with the scholars (Cavanaugh & Shankar 2017, Sherouse 2014, Kress 2010)subscribing to this development that it is odd that the agency of the object is still quite irrelevant in
sociolinguistic inquiries since technologies and its products engage in the social world now far more than ever before, while the combination of objects and language has been around for a long time. Anthropologists and social scholars have granted more agency to objects in non-linguistic anthropology for some time now. Noteworthy examples are the following authors.
and immaterial) are stressed instead of relations between them in the western context. Latour stresses the networks of material objects and people (1996). Miller who makes aware of objects as mnemonic devices (1987). Ingold envisions a different ontology that is focused on cultural interactions that merge the human and the material environment (2000). Recently language’s ontological move to the material is becoming a more active discussion among linguistic anthropologists (Cavanaugh & Shankar 2017).
There are two relevant ideas in recent linguistic anthropology that define links
between language ideology and the material: linguistic landscape and affordance. The notion of linguistic landscape has overlap with later elaborations on language ideology by Irvine and Gal (2000) in which some languages or ideas about language are prominently displayed while others are erased; this in turn is a way to reestablish power relations and language hierarchies. However while the notion is good to make systematic scans of the linguistic compositions of a public site (Shibliyev 2014: 207), it does not pay attention to how the signs affect the behavior of people. Affordance has this potential.
Affordances are transmitting stations that enable people to perform a certain practice. Through time these stations become naturalized and people start perceiving them as natural to the environment (Chemero 2003, Stoffregen 2003 on the application of Gibson 1977 in psychology). To understand how affordances work, one is required to accept that they are not a part of the subject nor are they a part of an object, both the subject and the object get
blended in with the environment.7 The affordance transmits and enables practices between object and subject, and between subject and subject. Affordances can be understood in the linguistic anthropological sense as the –material- presence in a space that makes it desirable for a language or language code (a lexical form or word descending from one language that is used in another language in particular instances) to be used.
Linguistic anthropologist Sherouse shows that in Tbilisi, there are spaces where affordances surface and Georgians are used to come into contact with the Russian language. According to him Georgians are more likely to use Russians within spheres having to do with technology (sizes, decimal number systems, phone dialing, gears), spheres that had to do with high Soviet culture (education, theaters, and cinema’s). In both these spheres, Sherouse argues, Russian was seen as neutral because it stood for the modern, as he explains: ‘Serving
"art" of a spiritual yearning neutralizes the politics of linguistic code choice by framing the human organism as a medium rather than a locus of choice. Similarly, science and
technology, by standing in opposition to human-ness also neutralize linguistic code choice. Both profound feeling and the cold emptiness of machines configure the communicative channel (…) as neutral and autonomous (2014: 63).’
This assumption of neutrality is a misconception I find. Russian in the USSR was the language through which modern technologies became available and because of this it was perceived as neutral since it was not tied to national identity – the realm of ethnicized
Georgian culture. The assumption of neutrality however mystifies the continuous inequality in past and persisting social realities. A useful insight comes from a colonial study on the Dutch Indies by Mra’zek (2002). The construction of new roads on which the first motorcycles in the colony drove in the 1910’s, as one would expect heralded not only a change of scenery but also a change of speaking about these new features. Talking about these roads was done preferably in Dutch, instead of Malay, Bahasa or Javanese, and discourse about infrastructure and the technical was filled with words denoting purity such as ‘smooth asphalt’ or ‘clean tracks’ (Mra’zek 2002: 25). Infrastructure became the new language of building modernity on Java, the Indonesian island that housed most Dutch colonial institutions. In line with colonial scholar Mra’zek, I would like to pay attention to the ways that affordances are consciously mystifying historical dominance in the case of ‘neutral’ technology and the arts in Tbilisi and the Russian language Griboyedov theatre.
Purity and time
For my analysis I propose a new take on the well-known conceptual framework that acclaimed author Mary Douglas uses in her book ‘Purity and Danger’. This book examines purity and impurity rituals through examples from various communities in the world at various times. In her book, Douglas envisions pollutions ‘as analogies for expressing a general view of the social order (Douglas 1980: 3-4).’ By means of purity and impurity rituals, dirt is categorized as ‘matter out of place’ (ibid: 35), with this act of drawing symbolic boundaries, what is considered to be pure and at the same time what is considered to be the social structure, is symbolized. For instance she gives the example of beliefs (that inspire purity rituals) that portray each sex as a danger to the other because of contact with sexual fluids, while in other communities or societies only the male is claimed to be endangered by the female when it comes to sexual endeavors. Douglas in this case argues that ‘it is
implausible to interpret them as expressing something about the actual relation of the sexes. I suggest that many ideas about sexual dangers are better interpreted as symbols of the relation between parts of society (ibid.4).’ This relation can be symmetrical or hierarchical and they
can already be seen symbolized within the symbols apparent in the ritual or conviction. These symbols are thus mirroring a social system of a society or community, because the act of pointing out certain sexual dangers can stigmatize certain sexes in this case and prioritize the other -often male- sex (ibid: 3-4).
Looking at the face value of a purity ritual and its creation of social boundaries, the focus of Douglas, is valuable for my research because I think that it is applicable to theatre shows with a focus on ‘pure Russian’ as well. This was the core of every play I watched in the theatre where I did research. ‘Pure speech’ was always highly regarded and seemed to be a fundament for the social structure of the theatre and its regular attendants. In this sense I regard the theatre play as a purity ritual focused on speech, and just like every ritual it is involved with the material (artifacts play an active role) as well as the immaterial (people speak and act in a certain way during the ritual).
Although the focus of my study is the interplay of language ideologies and the valuing of pure speech in it, I must acknowledge that the very notion of pure speech also implies impure speech, and also in the theatre that I will introduce there is impure speech that enables and at the same time threatens speech considered pure. I see parallels in this dynamic of linguistic purification with surzhyk, a mix between Ukrainian and Russian that after the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Ukraine suddenly was considered impure by media and Ukrainian officials of both Russian and Ukrainian speech communities. (Bilianuk 2004: 423). The Georgian case is different in the sense that Georgian does not have a dominant mix language of Russian together with Georgian such as this, but there are
negative associations with the impure Russian-Georgian mix that was spoken among Georgia’s organized criminal networks. The danger to be associated with this impure ‘Zhargoni’ affiliated with the mafia indirectly, threatens the social order in the theatre and attempts to speak or value a certain kind of cultured Russian associated with Soviet era intelligentsia, to be in effect the only pure Russian.
This research also has to be seen against the backdrop of Post-Soviet anthropological debates on nostalgia (Boyer 2010, Boym 2002, Berdahl 1999). The theatre company I studied
could be nostalgic by choice of its repertoire yet it risks or fears becoming irrelevant when it would not show classical plays with the enactment of beautiful accent-less Russian in it. I interpret the act of distancing oneself from impure Russian as reflecting a fear to be excluded from the project of building a modern Georgia. Such a fear meets the description of Martin Demant Frederiksen in his ethnography on adolescent male youth in the Georgian coastal town Batumi. Like Frederiksen’s interlocutors who grew up in Russian-Georgian speaking petty criminal networks in the country’s chaotic and violent transition period and had to reinvent themselves under Saakashvili (2013: 66), theatre workers fear that they are not confined to the present but tossed into the past. This is a past that is in fact not situated in a time frame gone by but functions as an imagined stigma in the present. The theatre as a whole is sometimes named ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘nostalgic’, because it just does not fit anymore in the direction in which they find that society is heading. I think that this temporal exclusion gives an extra dimension to both the ideas of nostalgia and purity, since it perceives the nostalgic as a way to safeguard the future in a climate wherein a confinement to the past is a threat.
Position, methodology & ethics
Since this study is about language, my sociolinguistic position, which colored every method I used is prioritized in this section. I am a 26-year-old Dutch male and I have been raised monolingual as a child. From my 9th life year onwards I attended English classes although before that I already watched subtitled English television shows. From that time onwards I have been speaking and using the English language more regularly every year. I started out learning Russian two years before I arrived in Georgia for this project. I had been to Georgia four times before I began my fieldwork. I would describe my Russian proficiency as a shy B28 with amnesia-like tendencies yet still improving. My command of the Georgian language is not worthy to be referred to as A1 on the same scale.9
From the outset this meant that I could do participant observation among Russian speakers, but that I had to prepare everything that I was to say in broad terms and that
8Retrieved from https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/resources/european-language-levels-cefr (visited on
the 18th of June 2018)
9
I can understand the Georgian alphabet, greet people, pronounce geographical names in an artificially sounding Georgian manner; I can let taxi drivers describe their neighborhood (while not understanding what they say) and order dishes in a restaurant.
I never knew what my interlocutors were saying if they spoke in Georgian (the same goes for fast paced colloquial Russian). That is why I decided to approach research assistants that could interpret Georgian-English, English-Georgian and later on in the research also Russian-English and Russian-English-Russian if needed. The latter Russian interpretations were not always necessary but were very useful when going to theatre plays, which require a great
comprehension of Russian. Megi and Salome could also get access more easily into the schools I visited and the theatre, since they had a better understanding of cultural norms and had good communication skills. Seeing interpreters as merely neutral transmitters of
information has been criticized in the reflexive turn (Edwards 1998: 202). In line with these criticisms I find that a researcher should reflect on the position of interpreters as well as their role in interactions. The fact that both my interpreters were Georgian, middle class young females had an effect on the materials I gathered. The mechanics, which I interviewed, were very talkative, because supposedly they were not accustomed to a female (my interpreter) asking them a lot of Georgian technical questions. This rich information would have been much more scarce if I would have tried to ask the same questions. As a Georgian speaking both Russian and Georgian, Salome did not only interpret but also functioned as a key informant in the sense that she knew a lot about Tbilisi theatres and was raised bilingual. When interviewing she could create a common everyday conversation instead of a stagnant inquiry.
The driving force behind this research has been my curiosity for the apparent
discrepancy between urban linguistic identities manifest in views on language and apparent in language practice. That is why some methods focus on ideas about language and/or monitored language practice.
I conducted 28 informal semi-structured interviews that were recorded by a voice recorder or a phone in various urban spaces in Tbilisi. These interviews were about the appreciation and use of the Russian language and took half an hour to one and a half hours. They were conducted among five taxi drivers, two vocational school car mechanics teachers, six school teachers and a school principal (of whom two teachers of a private school
specialized track for Russian language and literature and four from Georgian public schools with a Russian sector), six university teachers (of which two were specialized in teaching the Russian language and Russian philology), six theatre community workers, one editor-in-chief of the Russian Club Journal and ten young actors (in a group interview).
I therefore labeled small-talk interviews in my field notes. These small talk interviews were set up to get insight into my interlocutor’s views on language and their life trajectories (inspired by the small talk method explained in Driesen 2013: 259) while at the same time attempting to work with my Russian language barrier in a fruitful way. Of the 24 Small talk interviews I have conducted (with and without a research assistant) there were 10 held among mechanics, and 14 held within the Griboyedov community in multiple settings. In terms of nationality all my interlocutors identified themselves as Georgian except for four people that saw themselves and were seen as Russians.
Inspired by anthropologists working with photo elucidation (Harper 2002), I found a way in which I could add a more tangible component to the small talk interviews my research assistant Megi and I held with car mechanics: I printed out ten technical drawings. These technical drawings were found online. I used a Russian language car manual of a Jaguar XJ10 and drawings from a car’s internal and external parts such as steers, engines etcetera.11 When a mechanic knew the Georgian word, which turned out to be rare, then notes of this were taken accompanied by information on whether they used the Georgian term or the Russian term and how often.
The form of participant observation in the Russian language Griboyedov theatre I undertook was relying more on systematic observations and less on participation. I observed 20 theatre plays and 6 rehearsals. During these theatre plays I often went with Salome, who interpreted the play for me while we were watching and often I made audio or film recordings (which I have erased now for copyright reasons). I used these recordings and translated notes to make transcripts, which I used in turn for discourse analysis purposes. The situations in which I could do participant-like observation were numbered. I had the opportunity of doing a volunteering job in the theatre, but after a couple of times I was not needed anymore, so I could not keep the job. The workers I met here were mostly older than 40 and both female and male. Another instance in which I could do more participant-like observation was when I was allowed to go along on a one day ‘gastroli’ [theatre tour], on this day I spoke with a lot of
10Retrieved from
http://84.22.143.158/files/%D0%A0%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%81%D1 %82%D0%B2%D0%B0/%D0%98%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BA%D0%B8/Jagu ar/Jaguar_XJ_X351_Owners_Handbook.pdf on the 1st of February 2018
actors that mostly were between 22 and 65 years old of somewhat evenly spread genders and could see them interact with one another in a way that seemed everyday-like. Although I do not think that my presence effected the way in which the actors (or the workers when I was working in the theatre) normally interacted with one another much, my situational position as a relatively well-off Dutch or West-European person that could not speak their language well could have alienated me from them.
Although participant observation, with a stress on participant is a very valuable method I want to point out the value of methodological flexibility. In his inspiring recent book, Ingold points out the following: ‘All study calls for observation, but in anthropology we
observe not by objectifying others but by paying attention to them, watching what they do and listening to what they say. We study with people, rather than making studies of them. We call this way of working “participant observation”. It is a cornerstone of the discipline (Ingold 2018: 11).’ I did not succeed fully in studying with people in the way that Ingold is stressing.
-Am I not an anthropologist, or at least an anthropologist-to-be for this? This is a question that bothered me throughout the course of my research project. I have been studying anthropology for a quarter of my life and I was brought up in an academic tradition in which the virtues of wisdom acquired by means of participant observation were always accentuated as most central to anthropology’s insights and aspirations.Although I failed to ‘study with people’, I still returned from the field with a corpus of useful material and reflections.
That is why I want to make the methodological argument that while knowledge and wisdom acquired through ‘studying with people’ is very useful information, it is not by definition the weightiest of insights because it can leave out what people do without each other. Just because this method is the bread and butter of the anthropological discipline, it is not superior to different kinds of methods. Because I encountered a theatre in which I could not play a role, I searched for small events in which I could take part. I went on a theatre tour and I watered plants yet I could not do the things that the workers did. If researchers cannot participate and live with a community or are excluded then at least they must be flexible and turn to other methods. I have turned to being a fly on the wall, an interviewer and an
anthropologist taking reflexive notes. I have experienced the way in which the feeling of failing to be a good participant-observer can become detrimental to the project (and the
person behind the research) and I am convinced that this should not be the aim of the exercise. Yet the lack of participation shifted my attention to exclusions and boundaries and the kinds
of observations this focus allowed formed the core of this thesis. Therefore I feel that training to cope with not being accepted in groups is an ethical task that anthropology as an academic discipline should embrace as I felt not sufficiently prepared for that, while on the other hand it can be a rewarding research attitude. Community acceptation and participation is our
discipline’s doxa (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]: 164) that deserves to be granted situational leeway. Furthermore I want to state that I have tried to safeguard my interlocutors. Only public figures are named with their real names in this thesis. Theatre workers, actors, mechanics, taxi drivers, teachers and university teachers that play a part in this work were all given
pseudonyms. Next to this I have left personal information that could be used against them out of their profiles. With an eye on my interlocutors’ privacy I must state that in the rare cases in which I was allowed to record everyday conversations, I have erased all the files that were used before finalizing this work.
Outline
Apart from the introduction, this thesis is structured into three chapters. Although I have tried to contextualize my field already, I have not touched upon living Russian language ideologies in Tbilisi. That is why in the first chapter I will look into prevalent appreciations and usages of the Russian language in various city sites. My data is reflecting views held by university professors, teachers, a taxi driver, the CEO of a job-site, a vocational school teacher and the artistic director of the Griboyedov theatre. This data is viewed in relation to language ideology’s power dimension and its ties to the material environment.
In chapter 2 the Griboyedov theatre is explored as a space in which the term Chistaya
Russkaya Rech’, a claim about the purity of speech content and form takes central stage in the
experience of the theatre. Following my interlocutors in the Griboyedov environment I take the term to be a worldview. Therefore, the reconstruction of a theatre visit is put forth wherein spaces and artifacts as well as the play itself are taken into account in order to determine what the term means and what its significance is. This data is also viewed in relation to language ideology’s ties to the material environment and explores the temporal dimension of symbolic boundaries.
The last and third chapter sheds light onto the Griboyedov theatre community and its particular configurations of essentialized identities. Following this, I problematize Russian as a neutral interethnic lingua franca by looking at cases of Georgian and Russian conversations
at the Griboyedov theatre and on a theatre tour. In light of these conversations I explore hints of the postcolonial in post-Soviet Georgia.
1.
Trends, classroom stubbornness & hands-on
jargon in a changing Tbilisi
‘Saint Petersburg, that is the most romantic city, me and my sister grew up there, yes… ah well… but times have changed in Tbilisi…in Georgia… what can I say…(vocational
school car mechanics teacher Khatuna [Georgian]) ’ Preface: Zooming out
When I am looking for an urban language ideology, I wander around Tbilisi looking for people that I can bother with my project for a month. The first place I visit regularly is a market place that is called Didube. Didube is a big transit station for the metro, minibuses that drive towards the north and for a lot of taxi drivers. When I come here I have already visited Tbilisi four times in the past and I’ve always had a lot of Russian conversations with taxi drivers at this place. Therefore I think that this will be a good place to start my fieldwork. I want to know what the language means for them and in what situations they speak it.
However, when I arrive in Didube and start to live in the area I find out that the Russian language is spoken with tourists only and that the language does not seem to have any meaning besides this user value. So the only considerations that the taxi drivers seem to have regarding the speaking of Russian is that if they speak it they will have potentially more clients. This is contrary to my expectations, since I was under the impression that Russian would still be spoken actively among the Soviet generation. Most of the taxi drivers are all male and above 45. As I want to have a more diverse research population in terms of gender and age, I leave Didube.
Once I leave I begin to zoom out to the city as a whole. I get back to my initial focus: finding an urban Russian language ideology. My initial setup is involving school- and
university teachers as well, and so I am still busy when I leave Didube. To interview teachers about their changing views and usage of the Russian language I navigate through different parts of the city. From Didube I make my way into different parts of town. I go to the more chic Vake neighborhood were the Javakhishvili State- and Ilia State University buildings are
situated. I also go to neighborhoods in the outskirts of Tbilisi such as Isani and Gldani. The people I interview give me a more solid grasp of what more common ideas the Russian language and its ties to urban and national identities are. These ideas prove to be crucial to understand the dynamics that I encounter in the theatre later on as they point to two
competing stances when it comes to appreciating the Russian language. Next to this I also interview mechanics in an unofficial learning setting: the Eliava market and an official learning setting Mate Motors and the Mermisi vocational school.
To situate my reflections on the Russian language Griboyedov theatre where I have done the majority of my fieldwork, it is necessary to have a notion about what the Russian language ideology and societal changes in Tbilisi and Georgia are in general. This chapter therefore is not about the theatre but about the city. It examines language ideologies that are dominant in various sites I have visited. The question this chapter answers is: How could the
Russian language have been spoken and appreciated in Tbilisi and how did the language’s usage and appreciation change?
Changing language trends: prestige, corrosion, pragmatism and refusal
When people describe their subjective habit of speaking or not speaking Russian and their views on how they think their city has changed when it comes to language it becomes apparent that there are particular fashions or trends that died out or emerged within urban spaces at various points in time. Some of these trends could have parallels in other post-Soviet cities while others are quite distinct to Georgia and Tbilisi in particular. These trends are linked to opinions about what the Russian language stands for. Often there is a tendency among my interlocutors to see the Russian language as a symbol. The content of what this symbol should entail exactly seems to be a topic of debate.
There are two strands when explaining the content of the symbol and a vast grey area in between those poles. On the one hand there are Georgians that see the Russian language as a language of opportunity and widened worldview. A clear proponent of such a stance is Russian philologist Davit Gotsiridze who states: ‘After joining the Russian culture through
the Russian language, Georgian culture expanded the boundaries of its world, was able to rethink its own, having a unique opportunity to look at oneself from the outside. Together with the Russian language, a new vision of the world has come.’ Explaining the symbol as an
unnecessary continuing historical dependence, undermining national self-worth or
teacher Gvantsa’s view can be placed more on this side as she notes:‘so because people speak
the language… Georgia is sometimes reconfigured as part of Russian territory… [By Russians] They are forgetting that already in the 6th century there was an independent state here. That is not how it ought to work.’ Most of my informants could be described as
choosing a middle ground in between these poles.
What people think that the Russian language stands for in the present often relates to the manner in which they use the language in the present. Having said that, the symbolic quality of Russian speaking changed a lot. The waning trend here is the Russian speaker’s prestige. The following interview fragment between Georgian university professor Miriami and a befriended NGO worker Nana shows how this prestige could manifest itself in Tbilisi in the early 1980’s.
Nana: ‘In the past it was … in the eighties… Russian could be heard
everywhere… on the street and in the metro. But the intelligentsia spoke Russian far better than common folk let’s say; because it was stylish… it was necessary and fashionable.’
Miriami: ‘I agree, I remember now that when I was a student I was on my way to what was then called the Lenin square, yes and there were like nine Georgian women dressed well in clothes that were sought after so to say… They were chatting with each other in both Georgian and Russian with a very coquettish pronunciation and I remember that I was struck by what one of those women in the bus said. Youngsters need eccentric people to gossip about you know… And one of the women, we – my friends and I will always remember this, the woman says to the other: ‘(Russian) Akh, kak mne nravit’sya etot Shadrevani! [O, how I love that ‘Shadrevan’! {Georgian word for fountain}].’
Besides that this vignette shows that the Russian language was more common in Tbilisi’s public spaces it shows that Russian was considered chic, indicating certain kinds of people. That the women were all dressed in clothes that were not easy to come by in that time indicates that these women were more well off than average people in Soviet times. The fact that the woman in the anecdote uses the Georgian noun for fountain while the rest of the sentence is structured in Russian, makes the word fountain somewhat of an anticlimax. While the sentence has a more chic phrasing because of the Russian words, the Georgian makes the attempt somewhat clumsy and therefore funny. This joke is not only pointing at the woman
that fails to totally master coquettish Russian but it is also meant as mocking the status of Russian as a chic linguistic style in Georgia. This is a parody of an attribute of the colonizer (Bhabha 1994: 34), which would not make sense if Russian were considered a merely neutral lingua franca.
In my interviews Soviet Tbilisi seems to have been an urban environment in which the Russian language was to some extent omnipresent but not always practiced within ethnic Georgian circles. Soviet intelligentsia was expected to speak Russian in everyday life. During my time in Tbilisi, interviewers’ assumptions are widespread that people from more elite families during Soviet times spoke Russian amongst each other. For instance when the already mentioned Georgian Russian language philologist Davit Gotsiridze is interviewed about his work for a Russian educational platform, one of the first questions he gets asked is: ‘With what or with whom specifically did the Russian language began to play a role in your life? After all, you grew up, as I understand in a Georgian intelligentsia family...’ 12 Indeed all Georgians that I meet that do something within the Russian cultural or academic sector in Tbilisi grew up in families that were considered intelligentsia back in Soviet times. Mr.
Varsimashvili’s upbringing is telling. He states the following: ‘My father was an engineer and
my mom was a French teacher… They settled in Tbilisi. I had good parents. I was taught Georgian and Russian at exactly the same time. Back then I also thought in two languages, while now I only think in Georgian. On birthdays people talked in two languages […]’. What
I want to make clear here is that the Russian language, especially speaking it well, was a prestige item for people in relatively well-off more cultured urban milieus.
When I hear this for the first time it is hard to imagine since more than once I speak with professionals that, although having learned Russian in their youth, never speak the language anymore in the universities where they work or even within their social circles. One university professor when interviewing him did not speak sufficiently in Russian or in English and thus we conducted the interview in Russian with English filler words. An example of such a sentence would be: ‘(Russian) Da, ya pomniu, v tom vremya uchiteley (English)
everywhere (Russian) Russkiy’ [Yes I remember that in that time teachers would speak
Russian everywhere]’. The corrosion of Russian as an institutional language is nowadays
12 From http://www.ug.ru/archive/71891 Uchitel’skaya Gazeta, the Teacher’s Newspaper (visited on the
