Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On October 20th 2024, Moldova held a presidential election and a referendum, supposedly on the question of integration into the EU. The referendum passed with a slight majority – 50.35% vs 49.65%. Two rounds of a presidential election were also held in the country, with the EU favored candidate Maia Sandu winning.

While many observers have interpreted the results as indicative of the country being divided between a pro-EU and pro-Russian faction and Russia’s meddling in the elections, the situation is far more complex.

Vitalie Sprînceană is a sociologist, journalist and urban activist based in Chisinau. Moldova. He is also a co-editor at PLATZFORMA.MD, a web platform for social, economic and political criticism. He is interested in and argues for inclusive democratic public spaces, social justice, free knowledge, plurality of worldviews and practices. His research interests are: sociology, globalization, history of ideas, literary and cultural criticism, history of Soviet Moldova.

Read his recent article on the EU Referendum in Moldova here:

https://transform-network.net/blog/commentary/moldovas-referendum-on-what/

Check out the Moldova based web platform Platzforma here:

https://platzforma.md/

Since the collapse of the USSR and Georgia's independence in 1991, anti-soviet memory politics have played an intractable role in Georgian politics. On the one hand, they are a rhetorical allegory without limits - nearly anything and everything negative can be associated with the soviet past. Yet on the other hand, they also played a crucial role in nation building, becoming especially institutionalized after the 2003 Rose Revolution. In the lead up to the parliamentary elections on October 26th 2024, politicians still make regular reference to the USSR. But where do anti-soviet memory politics in Georgia come from? Why do they persist? How exactly are they reproduced? And for what? Is the USSR simply a metaphor for Russia? Or a means to demonize socialism and reinforce market orthodoxy? Or both?

To discuss all this and more, we sat down with frequent co-host and guest, Beka Natsvlishvili.

Beka Natsvlishvili is a director of the Institute for a Fair Economy. He is also the Georgian team lead for a platform economy research project in collaboration with the University of Oxford. His teaching experience includes lectures on political economy, globalization, and political sociology at the Georgian-American University, and previous engagements at Caucasus University and the University of Georgia. Beka previously served as a Member of Parliament and Deputy Chair of the Committee for European Integration, and as a Member of the Tbilisi Municipal Council, where he chaired the land legalization commission. With over two decades of academic and professional experience, he holds a Master of Arts (Magister Artium) from Wilhelm University of Münster and has extensive expertise in political economy, trade unions, and social research.

Georgia’s trade dynamics with the EU have not improved, even though it signed a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) in 2014. The Georgian export basket deteriorated qualitatively since that time. Specifically, Georgia’s export basket sophistication has decreased, and the share of low-tech and resource-based products has

Georgia's economy is marked by jobless growth, deindustrialization and other unyielding structural weaknesses. How and why did Georgia find itself in this "neoliberal lock in"? And what does the DCFTA have to do with it?

On today's episode, we discuss EU-Georgia trade ties, how a peculiar form of neoliberalism developed in the country since 1992 and the political implications of it all with political economist Tato Khundadze.

Check out the study "Neoliberal lock-in: Why Georgia-EU free trade does not work" co-authored by Tato Khundadze and Salome Topuria:

https://southcaucasus.fes.de/news-list/e/neoliberal-lock-in-why-georgia-eu-free-trade-does-not-work.html

Tato Khundadze is a PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he also teaches multiple courses and works as a research assistant. He received his MA in Economics from the New School for Social Research. He has extensive research experience in public policy and economic development. He was the head of the Analytical Division at the Georgian Public Broadcaster and a research fellow at the Centre for Social Studies of Georgia. His research interests include economic development, statistical learning, and economic growth models. His latest publications refer to the potential of introducing progressive taxation, Georgia’s history of industrial development, and public debt sustainability.

(episode photo courtesy of: https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/photographs-of-abandoned-factories-and-industry-in-the-former-soviet-state-of-georgia/)

On today's episode we discuss how Ukraine's market oriented war economy is affecting the population, war time class divisions, post-Soviet Ukraine's economic development and how History and memory politics fit into the picture. Our guest to discuss all this and more is Peter Korotaev.

Peter Korotaev is a researcher who has worked on class dynamics and war for Jacobin, Arena and The Canada Files. He writes regularly at Events in Ukraine.

https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/

Helena Sheehan has spent decades involved in working class and Left struggles across the globe. She is an accomplished writer and academic who never lost or loses sight of her Marxist convictions. Her life brought her from America, as a devout Catholic entering the convent, to embracing revolutionary Marxism and participating in the Irish Republican struggle and the global communist movement. She also explains what it was like to visit the Soviet Union as a communist living in Ireland.

In this episode we discuss her life in the global left, the development of her political views, first hand accounts of political struggles and debates, as well as lessons she has for Left wing politics today.

She has recently written the book Until "We Fall: Long Distance Life on the Left". Here's a description:

"Offers vivid first hand accounts of encounters with fellow socialists following the fall of the Soviet Union

Most westerners glimpsed the breakup of the Soviet Union at a great distance, through a highly distorted lens which equated the expansion of capitalism with the rise of global democracy. But there were those, like Helena Sheehan, who watched more keenly and saw a world turning upside down. In her new autobiographical history from below, Until We Fall, Sheehan shares what she witnessed first-hand and close-up, as hopes were raised by glasnost and perestroika, only to be swept away in the bitter and brutal counterrevolutions that followed.

In Until We Fall, we come along on Sheehan’s travels as she tracks the fallout from the transition from flawed forms of socialism to a particularly predatory form of capitalism. As a sequel to Navigating the Zeitgeist — which captured 1950s cold-war America, the 1960s new left, the 1970s social movements and communist parties of Europe — Until We Fall takes us through Eastern Europe from the 1980s onward and moves on to offer vivid accounts of encounters with fellow socialists in many other places, such as Britain, Greece, and Mexico. It includes an entire chapter on South Africa, where Sheehan participated in its political and intellectual life for extended intervals of the post-apartheid period. And it offers her unique take on her birthplace, the United States, along with the unfolding realities confronting her chosen home, Ireland. She also reveals major changes in the culture of academe in the decades she has taught in universities.

As a philosopher, she scrutinizes the various intellectual currents prevailing, particularly positivism and postmodernism, and makes a persuasive case for the explanatory and ethical superiority of Marxism. As she moves through time and space, Sheehan pursues the perspectives of the vanquished in a world where the triumphalist narratives of the victors hold sway. The central storyline of the book is her political activism as waves of history swept through the left and challenged it in ever more formidable ways, bringing some victories but many defeats. She raises questions of how to keep going in this time of monsters, when the old is dying and the new cannot be born, when capitalism is decadent yet still dominant."

Helena Sheehan is Professor Emerita at Dublin City University, where she taught philosophy of science, history of ideas and media studies. She is author of many publications on philosophy, politics and culture, including such books as Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, The Syriza Wave and Navigating the Zeitgeist. She has been active on the left for many decades.

On today's episode, we discuss The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire with the book's author, historian Masha Kirasirova

Book description:

"In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"--primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus--with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"--the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter. The Eastern International explores how the concept of "the East" was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Masha Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualized and carried out by students, comrades, and activists--Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and agency to shape Soviet ideology, inform concrete decisions, and allocate resources. Contextualizing these Eastern mediators within a global frame, this book historicizes the circulation of peoples and ideas between the socialist and decolonizing world and reinscribes"

Masha Kirasirova is Assistant Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is an editor of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (OUP, 2023) and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties Between Protest and Nation-Building.

This is a special TWO PART episode with Historian and Jacobin Europe editor David Broder.

In Part I (recorded July 10th 2024), we discuss recent European Parliamentary and French election results, how both the right and left fared in the outcome, and the implications of these results for Europe, EU expansion and more.

In Part II (starts at 50:45), through a discussion of David's 2023 book Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy we explore how the current right wing political imagination in Italy and Europe at large are mobilized through historical memory. We also examine how anti-communist memory politics in Western Europe relate to anti-communist memory politics in post-communist countries.

David Broder is a historian, writer, translator and editor of Jacobin Europe.

Check out David's book Mussolini's Grandchildren here:

https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745348025/mussolinis-grandchildren/

On this episode we discuss how Baku oil shaped Bolshevism, Sovietization, and the structuring of the Soviet state between 1920-1929 in the South Caucasus. Our guest is Sara Brinegar, historian and author of the book Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus: Periphery Unbound 1920-1929.

Book description and author bio below:

The book shows how the politics of oil intersected with the establishment of Soviet power in the Caucasus; it reveals how the Soviets cooperated and negotiated with the local elite, rather than merely subsuming them. More broadly, Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus demonstrates not only how the Bolsheviks understood and exploited oil, but how the needs of the industry shaped Bolshevik policy.
Brinegar reflects on the huge geopolitical importance of oil at the end of World War I and the Russian Civil War. She discusses how the reserves sitting idle in the oil fields of Baku, the capital of the newly independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, and the center of the fallen empire's oil reserves were no exception to this. With the Soviet leadership in Moscow intent on capturing the fields in the first few months of 1920, this book examines the Soviet project to rebuild Baku's oil industry in the aftermath of these wars and the political significance of oil in the formation of the Soviet Union.

Sara Brinegar is historian of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She held a two¬-year faculty fellowship at Yale University’s European Studies Council and was previously a Digital Pedagogy Fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is an independent scholar with a full-time non-academic job and is based in the Washington, D.C. area. 

This episode was recorded on May 8th/9th 2024 - the situation is still unfolding.

A political crisis is currently underway in Georgia. Sparked by the ruling Georgian Dream party's proposed law on the "transparency of foreign influence", the stand off between the government, NGOs, protestors - both those of the formal opposition and not - and even some within the European Union, has deeper roots and a far from clear trajectory.

Today's episode begins with an outline of the tensions surrounding the proposed law, some informative aspects of Georgia's recent history, and both how domestic dynamics and a dramatically changing geopolitical situation are animating the crisis.

Then we have a discussion with Anatol Lieven and Almut Rochonawski on a range of topics related to the current crisis including the peculiar role of NGOs in Georgia, the European Union, Georgian political economy, a proposed "offshore bill", and how a shifting geopolitical picture is shaping the political calculus of elites in Georgia, the EU and beyond.

Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London.

Almut Rochowanski is an activist who specializes in resource mobilization for civil society in the former Soviet Union, including in Georgia and Russia. Her writing about this issue can be found at https://discomfortzone.substack.com/.

The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union unleashed an unprecedented mortality crisis. In the years following, the region endured upwards of 7.5 million excess (and thus preventable) deaths. This post-socialist mortality crisis was not only the result of the economic devastation and social fracturing caused by socialism's end, but was exacerbated by the political-economic commitment to market orthodoxy and austerity of post-socialist elites, leading to wide spread socio-economic, physical and mental immiseration.

On today's episode we welcome Gábor Scheiring to discuss how this post-socialist mortality crisis emerged, its political implications for today, and what types of methodologies are most effective for researching these topics and more in post-socialist countries.

Gabor is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Georgetown University Qatar, currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, Center for European Studies. His research addresses the lived experience and political economy of contemporary capitalist transformations using quantitative, qualitative, and comparative methods. His work analyzes how economic shocks fuel precarity, leading to mental and physical suffering, and how these processes affect the stability of democracy. As a member of the Hungarian Parliament (2010-2014), he advocated for a socially just transition to sustainability.

Gabor's website:

https://www.gaborscheiring.com/