Russian media have recently reported that a member of the Russian law-enforcement agencies, who had Georgian origins, found a strange product in a supermarket named ‘Fried Little Georgians.’
The vigilant citizen applied to a state body that’s representatives agreed that the product was a suspicious one. They meant not that the product was a low-quality one, but that it was named in an ambiguous way, in a way that may be offensive for other people.
At the same time, members of the Investigative Committee didn’t agreed to qualify the company that produced ‘Little Georgians’ an extremist group saying that the dish is traditional Georgian meal. In fact, if one search Google, he will find a lot of websites providing the recipe of “little Georgians’ as a traditional Georgian meal.
However, no Georgian cook knows such meal. The Georgian cuisine doesn’t include such dish and it is a purely Russian invention. The campaign that started after the public found out this fact was a remarkable one. A lot of people were deeply offended saying the Russian society is extremely intolerant one. They blamed the 2008 war between Georgian and Russia for such xenophobia.
Still it’s much more probable that the dish wasn’t invented after 2008 and it was served when both Russians and Georgians admired Buba Kikabidze. That fact that such meals are still popular shows that Russia is still an empire. Being an empire means being tolerant to other people, other cultures, an empire cannot be a nationalistic state. It’s not clear whether it’s good or not that Russian state remains an empire, but it’s no less evident.
Georgy Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively to VK
