Caucasus: Still a Touchy Question
I come from the Caucasus. For me Russians divide into two categories. One is the older Soviet generation, which sees everybody from the Caucasus as being like Georgians – a raucous lot who speak Russian with a strong accent, like to harmonize and drink a lot of wine. For the younger generation, the Caucasus means Chechens – bearded Islamists, who are quick with a knife and keen on blowing up the metro.
In Moscow I got used to being called a Chechen, because that’s what they call everybody from the Caucasus. When I came to Germany, though, and met people from the younger post-Soviet generation, I realized that time here had stood still and that this would take some getting used to. Migrants from the old USSR still associate people from the Caucasus with Georgians. It’s no use saying that we are all different, that our accents are different, that we don’t all drink wine – in fact the Muslims of the North Caucasus don’t drink at all – and that harmonizing is a national thing.
“You’re called Nino, right?” asked Andrey. Nino is a really popular girls’ name in Georgia, and this was despite the fact I’d spent the previous evening with him drinking tea, smoking most of his cigarettes and discussing at length the Ossetian language (that topic of discussion was his idea).
You can tell a Russian as soon as he starts speaking German. The strong Russian accent gives them away. People from the Caucasus don’t have it when we speak European languages. We also tend to have a much wider range of interests.
“I really should record my own disc”, confided Semyon, a professional photographer.
“In Russia the fight isn’t between left and right wing media any more, but between journalists and writers. People want to read essays rather than news stories, and there’s real competition for attention”, mused one migrant.
“In my opinion, anybody who understands what’s happening in Russia, or has any brains at all, has left”, said another.
This observation came from a person who probably found it hard to understand that not everybody in Russia has German or Jewish roots, and for them it’s not so simple to move to Germany.
In cities with large migrant populations, where there are plenty of language courses, migrants from the former USSR are not hard to find. As a rule, they look grumpy and dissatisfied. One of the reasons I don’t like Dostoevsky is that his characters are just like the people I spend so much of my time with. I asked one of them why migrants from Russia always look so depressed. “Probably the Soviet slave mentality left its mark. They still haven’t shaken it off”, he said.
“Maybe it’s more than just the Soviet Union?”, I ventured.
“What else, then?”
A quote from a Sergey Dovlatov story suddenly sprang to mind: “The tourists from the Caucasus paid no attention to the guide. They chatted among themselves and laughed loudly.”
“I think discussing your own culture, traditions and language stinks of nationalism”, an artist friend told me. An hour or so later he stood looking at one of his own paintings, a blurry Stalin, and reflected on his path to self-realization in Germany. He was, he said, a representative of Russian culture, and intended to stay that way as long as he was in Germany.
“We’ll never become Germans”, said a woman. “They’ll always see us as foreigners.”
Migrants hold diametrically opposed political views. One group thinks Putin is a hero, a uniquely strong leader of a unique nation, while the other thinks the Soviet Union never died, Putin is the root of all evil, and only NATO can guarantee freedom and human rights.
A fellow student on a language course shared this observation with me: “The fall in the ruble isn’t bad, you know. No, quite the opposite, it’ll have a positive effect on the Russian economy”.
“But if the economy’s so great, why did you come to Germany? What’s to stop you going back?”, I asked.
She put the blame on her husband. “It’s easier for him to find work here. That’s what husbands are for, really.”
Another group of migrants stopped speaking Russian and switched to Ukrainian and pasted little blue and yellow flags in their Facebook pages. Only a very few stayed neutral.
It’s become very fashionable in the migrant community to speak out, to write in support of the LGTB movement and go on gay parades and other such actions. Their enthusiasm is suspiciously overdone. It seems like they’re trying to prove the distance they’ve traveled from the old USSR, where homosexuality was a criminal offense.
They avoid the subject of human rights in the Caucasus like the plague. “The situation in the Caucasus with human rights is much more complicated and much worse than people think. It’s practically impossible to achieve anything there”, one human rights activist who has spent the last two years in Germany told me.
When I asked when was the last time he’d been down there to try and do something about it, he said he really would have liked to go, but he’d never been himself. Though he got his information from the Voronezh Youth Human Rights Movement. They were working down there and knew the situation first-hand. “Ah well, that’s ok, then”, I said. “At least you know people who actually know.”
“They used to call me a Jew in school, because I have this very Jewish face”, one migrant said. “My father tried to hide the fact he was a Jew. He used to tell me that for a long time he didn’t know he was one. I’m sure he was lying, though, and must have known all along. He was just scared to admit it. Society was like that.” His voice betrayed a hint of nostalgia.
“In the Caucasus nobody cares if you’re Jewish. They didn’t even in Soviet times”, I said. I was happy to share what I thought was good news, which I’d heard first-hand from the older generation and not picked up from some Soviet propaganda leaflet. But it failed to have the effect I intended.
Sometime later, at one of our regular late night political discussions around the kitchen table, like in Soviet times, he asked me: “Can you tell me where I can get a freelance press card, like yours. I’m really a journalist just like you, aren’t I?” There was an awkward pause. “What makes you think you’re a journalist? Because you can speak Russian without an accent?”
Not long afterward, I was complaining to my friend Asya, who had come to Germany on a student visa that the Russian classics didn’t like people from the Caucasus, either. I quoted Lermontov: “…And the savage tribes of those gorges! Their God is Liberty, their law is war.”
“What’s wrong with that?”, Asya asked. “It sounds really poetic.”
“Well, I don’t like the reference to ‘savage tribes’, labeling the whole Caucasus like that”, I tried to explain my position.
“I think ‘savage’ in this context sounds truly poetic. It should make you happy!”
“And if I start calling you ‘savage Asya’, would that make you happy?” I snapped back.
“You don’t have to be so aggressive about it”, she said, taking offense. She didn’t talk to me for three weeks, and very nearly unfriended me on Facebook.
Whenever I do some Caucasus-style home cooking, I always invite my Russian friends. “What are you making?”, they ask, slightly off-hand. “Caucasian? Great! We’ll be right over.” They grab their husbands, lovers, friends, children and maybe a bottle and hurry to the metro. Sometimes they remember to ask if they can bring something. “Buy some wine if you’re passing a shop”, I say in hope and get back to my cooking. I use a big pan, because I know there’s going to be a lot of people.
