In the Summer of 2007, I had the honor of leading the first American delegation to a remarkable language camp called Moscovia, about an hour from Moscow.
Moscovia is the brainchild of Yury Luzhkov, the powerful and controversial mayor of Moscow. It is truly is a remarkable place, where some three hundred students from thirty-three countries come together for three weeks every summer to study Russian and get to know each other through an impressive array of cultural interactions. Students stay in youth hostel-like conditions and are divided into international groups of about fifteen. Delegation leaders stay in a hotel on the camp grounds.
The delegation from Georgia was one of the more popular delegations at Moscovia. I liked their leader, Ekaterina, very much. There was something regal about her, yet at the same time she was very down to earth. She was also smart, cultured, funny and still beautiful at 60. I often joined Ekaterina and the leader of the Armenian delegation, an equally charming woman, for a late afternoon coffee and cake.
Moscovia was not my first encounter with Georgians. While I was on sabbatical in Moscow in 1988, our group took a memorable trip to Tiblisi, the capital of what was then the Soviet Republic of Georgia. After the constant shortages in Moscow, we were surprised by how well stocked with fruits and vegetables the supermarkets were. We were charmed by the beauty of the city with its winding roads and buildings with pretty, colorful balconies, by the mild climate and by the Georgian people themselves. Their hospitality seemed even more generous than that of our Russian friends in Moscow. We drank Stalin's favorite wine, Kindzmarauli, from a horn, which we could not put down until the wine was gone. Of course, that was the whole point! Good food, drink, conversation, and lots of laughter accompanied every encounter we had with the locals. Stalin was an evil dictator, but he did have good taste in wine. Kindzmarauli is a red wine with a delicate sweetness, and we all fell in love with it. We brought enough of it back with us to Moscow to stock not only our friends' wine cabinets but also just about every Georgian restaurant in the city.
I also came to know two Georgians, Revaz, and Nugzar, through my Russian friend, Andrei. While I was at Moscovia, we took an excursion to Moscow, and I was able to meet Andrei, his wife, Oksana, and Nugzar Msvenieradze, a well known sports figure for dinner, at a Georgian restaurant. Unfortunately, there was no Kindzmarauli. Russia had banned its import due to tensions between the two countries. It was the beginning of the summer, and the dinner conversation was dominated by a fear that war would soon break out between Russia and Georgia. I could not believe it, because I had been reading the New York Times and other papers on line while I was at Moscovia. There was no mention anywhere of the conflict, not even buried on the back page of the American, British and German papers I tried to read just a little every day. The Western press did not begin to cover the percolating conflict until the eve of the war, which happened in August. I told my friends that any conflicts that existed could surely be settled by negotiations. Andrei and Nugzar were skeptical. They knew better than I. Sadly, I was wrong, and they were right. Less than two weeks after I left an almost Utopian situation at Moscovia, where teenagers and their leaders from 33 countries came to know and even love each other, I was confronted by the harsh reality of the real world when war did indeed break out between Russia and Georgia.
An addendum: The Story of the American Performance at the Festival of International Cultures
I have added many photos from the Festival of International Cultures. Several are courtesy of, Annie Redmond, one of the American students in our delegation.
You will notice the gorgeous folk costumes the students are wearing. Our folk costumes were much more modest- jeans, tee shirts, red arm bands for the boys and red headbands for the girls to evoke the flag. Here is the story behind that.
Toward the middle of the second week there was an all important Festival of International Cultures. This event was a very big deal and was attended by big shots from Moscow, although not Mayor Luzhkov. Students from thirty-three countries were given three to five minutes to perform in front of the entire community and invited guests. Many performed elaborate folk dances in gorgeous folk costumes. We found ourselves in a dilemma. What is an American folk costume? A cowboy outfit? A baseball uniform? Is square dancing really understood throughout the world as an American folk dance? Since I had the honor of leading the first American delegation to this camp, even ACTR, the American Council of Teachers of Russian, located in Washington was not sure quite what to expect and how to prepare us for the experience. We had to wing much of it.
Anyway, I suggested to the kids that rock and roll is a quintessential American art form and that perhaps we could do a series of rock dances beginning with the present and going back in time to 1960 and the Twist. The kids went with it. One girl, Annie Redmond, knew the Soulja Boy dance (At first, I thought it was a contemporary cover for the early Sixties hit, "Solder Boy," but I quickly found out differently! ) Somebody else knew the Electric Slide, and we could all fake The Twist. The folk costumes? White tee shirts, blue jeans and a red band to evoke the flag! We made up signs for the three decades, and I ran out onto the stage and held them up before the kids started dancing. I joined in for The Twist.
We were a big hit! The next day everybody who saw me greeted me with a twist movement. The kids were driven crazy by their friends from all over the world who wanted to download the songs, especially "Soulja Boy," onto their iPods. A loud speaker at the camp played an international array of rock and folk music all day long. The day after our show, we must have heard "Soulja Boy" twenty times! My kids assured me they had the clean version, and that's what we rehearsed to. However, the camp DJ had to download all the music played, and, unawares, he downloaded the dirty version. The kids told me this only after our performance! I figured that I must have listened to it fifty times, and if I, a native speaker of English, had absolutely no idea what he was saying, then neither would any of the Syrians, Egyptians, Turks, Kazakhs, Mongolians, and various and sundry other conservative Muslim citizens of former republics of the Soviet Union, who, as I write this, are no doubt listening to the song on their iPods. Most moving was the fact that after the show, kids from all over, including Syrians and other countries that rather hate us, came up to our kids and asked to pose with them and the U.S. flag. If there were thousands of Moscovias and tens of thousands of kids visited them every year, we might some day eventually even come close to achieving something like world peace. My students were told again and again by their new found friends that they were so happy that met real Americans, because now they knew that we are a good a decent people and that their stereotypes had been destroyed. Our reputation had taken a hit around the world. Five American students helped to restore it, if even a little.
PS. On the final full day of the camp, there was a big ceremony. The Director of the Festival of International Cultures presented me with a special award for the American performance. I was the only delegation leader to receive such an award!
Ekaterina leading the Georgian delegation into the Festival of Cultures
My good friend, Betsy, and I at the Narikala Fortress in Tiblisi
From left to right: My long time Russian friend, Andrei Zhelnov, his Georgian friend, Нугзар Мшвениерадзе, Andrei's wife, Oksana, and I.
Our group leader, Mrs. Baker, Johanna from Austria, and I in front of The Church of Dzhvari in Georgia. Christianity came to Georgia in 337, making it the second country to adopt the religion.
Ekaterina, the lovely leader of the Georgian delegation, is on the left.
Photo Courtesy of Annie Redmond
Photo Courtesy of Annie Redmond
The closing ceremonies at Moscovia. Here I am receiving an award on behalf of the American delegation for the most creative performance at the Festival of Cultures. One of my charges is on the right.
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