There’s an interesting and worrying trend in Georgia right now.

A lot of Russian IT specialists have relocated here. Roughly half left for political reasons, and the other half because of restrictions on services. This post is not about that split, though. It is about what happens when they arrive.

These IT specialists are bringing their old, imperial habits with them and quietly rebuilding the same broken systems they left behind.

Here is what I mean.

In Saint Petersburg and Moscow, even before the war, it was almost impossible to find a comfortable apartment at a reasonable price. The rental market was already distorted.

In response, Russia developed a whole ecosystem of services that scrape rental and sales listings from multiple sites and automatically repost them in convenient feeds and aggregators.

Now we are seeing the same thing appear in Georgia.

At first glance, this sounds like progress: more technology, more convenience, more structure. But in practice, this is very bad for the rental market.

When listings are automatically aggregated and spread, they become much easier for aggressive real estate agents and intermediaries to find. The result is a rental market that becomes smaller, more closed, and more controlled by middlemen. Direct listings are quickly swallowed up, prices go up, transparency goes down, and finding a normal apartment becomes harder for everyone. It is a vicious circle, and Georgia is being nudged into it.

This is where the imperial mindset shows itself.

Instead of adapting to the local context and respecting existing practices, many Russians are recreating the same harmful systems they know from home. They treat the new country as a blank canvas for Russian-style solutions, without asking whether these solutions are good for anyone but themselves and local agents who profit.

The pattern is bigger than the rental market. Wherever Russians settle in large numbers, they often bring not just culture and language, but also the very structures and habits that damaged their own cities and institutions. If nothing changes, you will see it spread into other areas of life too.

In short, Russians are not only fleeing a broken system. Too often, they are quietly rebuilding it around them. And in the process, they risk ruining what was working better before they arrived.