“Russians Go Home”: Anti-Imperial Refusal and the Reception of Russian Migrants in Georgia (2022–2024)

Abstract

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Tbilisi has become one of the key destinations of post-2022 Russian emigration. Unlike in many other host societies, this arrival has been met in Georgia with pronounced public resistance, articulated through the language of occupation and anti-imperial refusal. Slogans such as “Russians go home” and references to a “third occupation” translate everyday Russian visibility – language use, spatial clustering, and lifestyle practices – into a historically saturated interpretive framework. This article examines how and why such interpretations have emerged in Tbilisi, and why hostility is frequently directed even at self-identified “good Russians” who oppose the war and the Russian regime. Empirically, the article draws on a mixed-method research design combining long-term ethnographic and digital observation with 30 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024 with young, urban, pro-European Georgians in Tbilisi. Rather than analysing migrants’ intentions or political self-identifications, the study centres the perspectives of the host society and the conditions through which Russian presence is interpreted. Analytically, it adopts a decolonial/postcolonial perspective and mobilises the concept of coloniality to distinguish between historical empire and the persistence of linguistic, cultural, and epistemic hierarchies after its formal end. The findings demonstrate this dynamic.