While most Georgians support closer integration with Western Europe, many people in industrial areas that collapsed along with Communism in the 1990s express nostalgia for the old Soviet prosperity.
The town of Kazreti, nestled in the picturesque mountains of Georgia near the border with Armenia, once boasted a cinema, a bank, musical fountains, two schools and a kindergarten. Dance ensembles and volleyball teams from across the Soviet Union would come to perform and compete, and central heating and electricity were free.
“It was a true Communist oasis,” said Davit Jakeli, 52, who worked as a carpenter in a state-run vocational school in the town of about 5,500 people, about 50 miles southwest of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi.
But after the Soviet Union’s collapse in the 1990s, he said, everything also came crashing down in Kazreti. No longer supported by the Soviet command economy, the unprofitable local gold and copper mines and an enrichment plant were shut, putting hundreds of people out of work. They reopened years later on a much smaller scale under private ownership.
Now there is just one school in the town and the cinema and bank have closed. The fountains, which once adorned a central square, are long gone. Stray dogs roam potholed roads flanked by decrepit apartments.
“It is a huge injustice what happened here,” said Mr. Jakeli, who now resells scrap metal from the courtyard of his home.
…
In Georgia’s Depressed Heartland, Pining for the Soviet Past
byu/sxva-da-sxva inSakartvelo
Posted by sxva-da-sxva
3 Comments
Sopo Japaridze can fuck off, Tankie idiot. Anyone who quotes Tucker Carlson on their twitter is a fucking joke and a government stooge.
Pretty stupid (and dangerously stupid) article. I counted four blatant factual errors. Then: not interviewing the Sopeli Zodi protest movement while they are right there in Zodi, instead interviewing random Soviet nostalgians; interviewing an edgy tankie “labor activist” who’s been repudiated by every labor union in Georgia; not doing a single bit of investigative reporting into the corrupt owners and enablers of the catastrophic Kazreti and Chiatura operations, instead a bunch of handwaving about “after communism came capitalism and some people didn’t like it.” Absolute bullshit. I know it’s pointless to expect better of the NYT, but someone there has a serious agenda in representing Georgia as hopelessly backwards and non-Western, this is not the first piece I’ve seen from them that pushes this view of Georgia
It’s interesting to see different sides to stories, even if it’s widely believed to be untrue and very unpopular.