David Kakabadze: “Our main goal is to get rid of the Russian influence”

Excited to share a story of a publisher David Kakabadze who returned from Europe to Georgia to become a part of positive changes. Recently he came to Ukraine and we had a chance to talk about how the creative community fights against Russian influence:

"Our main goal is to get rid of the Russian influence and revive the country. Because we are heading in a very dangerous direction again, towards Russia, and we cannot allow this to happen. What did we do as book publishers? Of course, we wrote a letter of protest. We protest all the time as a group and as a whole community.

For example, in mid-May, we had a protest march from the writer’s house. We gathered publishers, booksellers, writers, translators, and all literary people. We gathered at the writer’s house symbolically and went from there to Rustaveli Avenue to join the bigger protest. Furthermore, we suppose that the publishers who are very strongly against this law and against the government will feel consequences, like withdrawal of government funding.

So, to speak, our publishing house and 30 other publishing houses refused to take any grants from the state as long as this government was in place. We signed a special letter for this. So we are targets for the government now".

Source: https://chytomo.com/en/publisher-from-georgia-david-kakabadze-the-most-important-thing-is-to-get-rid-of-russian-influence/