Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On this episode, we have a discussion with political geographer Dr. Gerard Toal about the 2008 August War that embroiled Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia in conflict, along with the contingencies and background that led to the fighting and what this event can tell us or not tell us about Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

In this interview with French political scientist Laure Neumayer, we discuss how a particular form of anti-communist memory politics were mobilized and utilized by "memory entrepreneurs" in Europe following the Cold War. A particular interpretation of the socialist past was put up against  official European memory of the 20th century as the EU enlarged into Eastern Europe. A mixture of anti-communist nationalists, former dissidents and liberals wanted a pan-European identity to be rewritten in a way that criminalized communism as it had after World War II criminalized Nazism.  

This book retraces the anti-communist mobilisations carried out by Central European representatives in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and in the European Parliament since the early 1990s. Based on archive consultation, interviews and ethnographic observation, it analyses the memory entrepreneurs’ requests for collective remembrance and legal accountability of Communist crimes in European institutions, Pan-European political parties and transnational advocacy networks. The book argues that these newcomers managed to strengthen their positions and impose a totalitarian interpretation of Communism in the European assemblies, which directly shaped the EU’s remembrance policy. However, the rules of the European political game and recurring ideological conflicts with left-wing opponents reduced the legal and judicial implications of this anti-communist grammar at the European level.

In this episode we sit down with anthropologist Erin Koch to have a conversation about the shifts in medical practices, treatments as well as epidemic management from the Soviet period to Post-Soviet period in Georgia through a discussion of her 2013 book Free Market Tuberculosis: Managing Epidemics in Post-Soviet Georgia. The shift to a market economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union radically transformed health care and epidemic management in Georgia resulting in drastic consequences for patient care and public health.

One of the Soviet Union's most well known directors Mikhail Kalatozov was born as Mikhail Kalatoziashvili in Tiflis in 1903. Before releasing his more famous works such as Soy Cuba (1964) and The Cranes Are Flying (1957), or winning an award at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, he along with Nutsa Gogoberidze (Soviet Georgia's first female director) co-directed their first film together - a documentary called Their Kingdom (1928). For decades Their Kingdom was lost in Moscow archives and was only recently rediscovered. The film is an early Soviet critique of the Menshevik controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia (1918-21) (also known as the First Republic). The portion of the film that was recently restored was recently shown at a film festival in Tbilisi showcasing early Soviet Georgian films and we were lucky enough to watch it.

On today's episode we sit down with prolific historian Dr. Gerald Horne to discuss the intimate political relationship in the 20th century between the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of the USA and Black political struggle in the United States. We discuss a number of topics including African American Marxists such as Paul Robeson - who Dr. Horne has written a biography on - as well as the role the Soviet Union's political support of Civil Rights in the United States had in strengthening the movement for black civil rights.

Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein have recently released a new book entitled "Taking Stock of Shock: The Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions" - this week we have both authors on as guests to discuss their new book, their methodological process, how to make sense of the social consequences of socialist collapse and how it relates to Georgia.

In this episode we sit down with Tbilisi-based researcher and lecturer Archil Sikharulidze, who specializes in securitization, Georgia-Russia relations and more, to discuss the hurdles that dominant forms of nationalism pose to doing research on critical yet politically sensitive topics in Georgia.

His most recent article here on Georgian identity and the West is available here:

On today’s show we welcome Anastasia Shesterinina to discuss her excellent new book Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia which, using hundreds interviews and extensive field research, explains how and why Abkhaz did or did not mobilize to fight in the war with Georgia in the early 1990s, and how to many Abkhaz as the war was beginning  it came as an unexpected surprise leading to the uncertain and uneven mobilization of a collective identity both immediately preceding and  during the 1992-1993 war with Georgia.  

Our guests for today's episode are author, educator and journalist Vijay Prashad as well as world literature professor and author Ian Almond. 

With Vijay Prashad, we discuss the basic idea of one of his recent books Red Star Over the Third World (2019, Pluto Press) - how the 1917 Russian Revolution and then the seventy year existence of the Soviet Union directly inspired Third World Marxism and anti-colonial struggles during the 20th century, as well as what this century of Soviet internationalism and the collapse of the socialist world mean today.

With Ian Almond we explore how 20th century Soviet internationalism and it's anti-communist opposite both influenced and manifested themselves in the global literary imagination and more.

We discuss the book Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire with the author Erik Scott and much more.