“Aren’t you afraid of going to Georgia?” my Russian friends asked repeatedly when I informed them of my decision to relocate to Tbilisi. I was puzzled at first: “Is there a reason to be fearful?” I asked. “They do not really like Russians there,” was a common response.

As a citizen of Belarus, I look blatantly Russian. And while I bear allegiance to my country, my Russian ethnicity is more visible than the citizenship in my passport. I never foresaw any dangers awaiting me in Georgia, or at least not ones resulting from my ethnic origins, but paranoia is treacherously contagious. My friends cautioned me to be careful. I started feeling the jitters.

My nervousness escalated further during the transatlantic flight. I was travelling from Texas, the United States, and eleven hours on the plane provide nothing but deficient conditions that generate similarly incoherent thoughts. Tired and deprived of sleep, I arrived in Tbilisi at night, which only heightened my worries.

I requested an airport pick-up from the B&B I had reserved for my first days in Tbilisi. As the cab pulled away from the airport my driver turned on a radio station with Russian pop music. “You listen to Russian music!?” I half asked and half exclaimed in English. “Yes. We like the Russian language, Russian culture and Russian people,” replied my good-natured and very accommodating driver. “It is the politics of the Russian Government that we do not like.”

I heard these words again and again from the Georgian people in the stores, the coffee shops and in the building where I now rent an apartment. And reaching far beyond words, these same people lavished me with hospitality that I could not imagine existed. My landlady, seeing my empty fridge, bought me a week’s worth of groceries, my neighbours took me to the local market to buy random necessities for my apartment and a woman walked me to my destination when I found myself lost among the weaving streets of Tbilisi.

“It is very characteristic of Georgia to have kind, warm relationships between people, maybe because it is a southern nation,” said Neli Rodionova, President of Georgia’s Slavic House. “And our country has always been very kind, open and hospitable.” Rodionova said she had heard of only “positive experiences” from Russians who had travelled to Georgia for a short while or stayed for an extended period of time.

In addition to visitors more than 67,000 Russians reside permanently in Georgia, constituting about 1.5% of the population. “Ethnic Russians in Georgia are the same Georgian citizens as all the rest,” said Valeriy Svarchuk, President of the Otchizna Union of Russians in Georgia. This statement was largely corroborated by the Council of Europe’s Advisory Committee on the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) in its first report on Georgia released on October 12. The committee noted “with satisfaction that the Government [of Georgia] has stressed the need to promote tolerance and integration.” And while some areas of concern still exist, notably the linguistic rights of minorities and increasing religious tensions, the report’s assessment of the treatment of ethnic Russians in Georgia further corroborated my personal experience.

“The August 2008 armed conflict currently seems not to have seriously affected inter-ethnic relations in Georgia in the areas under Government control,” reads the report. The committee stressed that even “villages close to the ‘buffer zone’” maintained “solidarity … between the residents belonging to different national minorities.” And, as stated in the comments of the Government of Georgia to the Council of Europe report, “not a single case of hate crime has taken place since the war against persons belonging to the Russian minority.”

And while my friends cautioned me against speaking Russian in Georgia, about 9% of the Georgian population itself communicates in Russian as a first language, and the country has 142 Russian language schools. “The Russian language still remains a language of communication between different nationalities,” Svarchuk said. “This is a fact, maybe at some point it won’t be, but currently it is a fact.”

The Georgian people are still fond of Russian culture. Since 2004 the Ministry of Culture, Monument Protection and Sports of Georgia has run a special programme aimed at supporting cultural centres of national minorities, as the Georgian Government’s comments on the Council of Europe report. The Centre of Russian Culture, among other minority cultural institutions, also benefits from this programme. “Neither the status nor the number of cultural activities of these organisations has declined,” state the comments.

The only area of concern, expressed in the report about the status of ethnic Russians in Georgia is that “following the August 2008 conflict certain media outlets are voicing anti-Russian sentiments with increasing frequency, which might negatively affect persons belonging to the Russian minority.” And while the report does not provide specific examples, even this generalised statement sharply contrasts with occasional outbursts of racially-charged propaganda in the Russian media. As Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Pro et Contra journal, wrote in her monthly column for The Washington Post in October 2006, the Government-controlled TV in Russia has “vilified” Georgians as “fat cats running casinos and driving Mercedes-Benzes.” Describing this 2006 information campaign in the Russian media Lipman continued: “Raids on casinos (with their owners' unmistakably Georgian-sounding last names repeatedly cited) were shown on national news programmes. One of the federal channels showed a documentary about ‘guests’ from the south - all with Georgian last names - coming to Russia to commit crimes.” I saw similar programmes in the summer of 2008 when travelling in Russia.

“The mass media does not always show objective things and the people sometimes have a wrong impression about what they should expect, and of course some could be afraid,” said Rodionova about the effect of such TV programmes on Russians travelling to Georgia. “But I can say that those who have come here, in any case, are very pleased with the warm welcome and with the general situation.”

And, as one of my Georgian friends said, “there are no skinheads in Georgia,” the barefaced truth that perfectly drives the point home.