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 of thirty-five years, Andrei Zhelnov. 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, Kindzmarauli did not complement our meal. 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 online 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
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
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