Russians go home: Exile, Empire, and Everyday Tensions: Russian Migration to Georgia after 2022

Since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Tbilisi has become a key destination for Russian emigrants, including political activists, journalists, and NGOs. Their presence has sparked both solidarity initiatives—particularly in support of Ukrainian refugees—and deep social tensions, with accusations of “neo-imperialism” shaping public debates. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and collaborative research with colleagues, this talk examines how Russian “civil society in exile” coexists with Georgian civil society, and why their practices often clash. By contrasting Russian traditions of “small deeds” activism with Georgia’s more visible protest-oriented political grammar, Dr. Gavrilova explores how histories of empire, Soviet legacies, and ongoing occupation inform mutual perceptions. The presentation introduces the concepts of conditional neo-imperialism and embodied imperialism to explain how everyday practices of Russian émigrés are interpreted in Georgia’s anti-colonial framework, highlighting the fragile balance between cooperation, invisibility, and confrontation in Tbilisi’s contested civic space.

Dr. Sofia Gavrilova is a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), Leipzig, specializing in critical geography, migration, memory politics, and post-Soviet spatial transformations. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford and has published widely on cartography, displacement, and the politics of space in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.