Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On today’s episode, we sat down with Georgia based writer and researcher Katie Sartania. In April of this year, Katie wrote an excellent article entitled “Struggle and Sacrifice: Narratives of Georgia’s Modern History” which critically interrogates the role of Georgian nationalism and independence in the post-Soviet period, and how narratives of independence politically overshadow pressing social concerns in the country.  We discuss not only her article and the legacies of Georgian nationalism, but also what it means to do historical research in Georgia today and the ways that the pressures of nationalism can come into conflict with critical historical inquiry.

You can read the above mentioned article here: 

https://carnegieeurope.eu/2021/04/27/struggle-and-sacrifice-narratives-of-georgia-s-modern-history-pub-84391 

On today’s episode, Sopo Japaridze and Beka Natsvlishvili have an engaging discussion with philosopher Keti Chukhrov. Keti was born in Soviet Georgia in the 1970s and since then has gone on to write articles and books touching subjects such as art criticism, philosophy, political theory and more.

Sopo, Beka and Keti discuss the premise of her recent book Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism. Keti’s book is a much needed intervention into anti-capitalist discourse. Her thorough knowledge of both Soviet philosophy and Marxists from the West allow her to grapple directly with the philosophical and political tensions between how those anti-capitalists in the West imagined communism, how their own ideals reproduced capitalism and how those same ideals or ideas functioned (or didn’t) within Soviet society.  Keti’s work is not only refreshing but takes to task common understandings of the USSR from the Left. 

Her book description is as follows:

“This book, a philosophical consideration of Soviet socialism, is not meant simply to revisit the communist past; its aim, rather, is to witness certain zones where capitalism’s domination is resisted—the zones of counter-capitalist critique, civil society agencies, and theoretical provisions of emancipation or progress—and to inquire to what extent those zones are in fact permeated by unconscious capitalism and thus unwittingly affirm the capitalist condition.

By means of the philosophical and politico-economical consideration of Soviet socialism of the 1960 and 1970s, this book manages to reveal the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporaneous anti-capitalist discourse and theory. The research is marked by a broad cross-disciplinary approach based on political economy, philosophy, art theory, and cultural theory that redefines old Cold War and Slavic studies’ views of the post-Stalinist years, as well as challenges the interpretations of this period of historical socialism in Western Marxist thought.”

During the Russian Civil War, between May 1918 and February 1921, the Democratic Republic of Georgia – known as the First Republic  - was a nominally independent state controlled by social democrats. These Georgian social democrats were Mensheviks. Formally, Menshevism and Bolshevism were two distinct wings of the empire wide Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. In the decades leading up to 1918, Menshevism and Bolshevism in Georgia had more politically in common than not.

Over time strategic and political differences set them apart. Georgian Menshevism, led by Noe Zhordania and others, blended a particular vision of Georgian nationhood and national liberation with their Marxist politics. In 1921, as Bolsheviks began consolidating power around Georgia,  the Red Army invaded with the help of local Georgian Bolsheviks, and the First Republic was no more.

In Georgia today the First Republic exists as an important reference point of Georgian independence and sovereignty and the only example of modern Georgian nationhood. However, the Marxist politics of its founders and the intimate political upbringing they shared with Bolsheviks is often either ignored or disregarded. So what does the First republic really mean for Georgia today? How should it be remembered and understood?

In this episode, Bryan Gigantino and Sopo Japaridze discuss all this and more with  Stephen Jones.

Stephen Jones is a historian and political scientist, and a self- described socialist, who has been studying and writing on Georgia since the 1970s. He is an expert on Georgia’s First Republic authoring the now classic 2005 study on the topic Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy as well as an excellent study on post-Soviet Georgia entitled Georgia: A Political History Since Independence.

Ronald Grigor Suny’s decades long career as a historian transformed historiography of the Soviet Union by centering the nation and nationality. He did this with special attention to the nations of the South Caucasus - Armenia, Azerbaijan and of course, Georgia. Suny’s analysis focused on how nationhood is a constructed product of history, and imagined, not a primordial, essential, ethnic community.

Suny’s newest book Stalin: Passage To Revolution is a look at the early part of Josef Stalin’s life in the years leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution. The book interrogates the world that made Stalin -  early 20th century social democracy in the South Caucasus. This is the multinational movement and milieu  spanning Baku, Tiflis and Batumi, in which the young seminarian from Gori, Soso Jughashvill politically matured through writing articles, planning expropriations and organizing workers, becoming Josef Stalin a revolutionary Marxist and bolshevik.

On today’s episode myself and Sopo Japaridze interview historian Ronald Grigor Suny to discuss his new book Stalin: Passage To Revolution, social democracy in Georgia, Soviet history and more.

We here at Reimagining Soviet Georgia held a reading group on the book, so we invited our friend, comrade and fellow reading group member Julia Damphouse on for a short conversation and reflection on the Stalin: Passage to Revolution

Julia is a member of the editorial board for the english language translation of the complete works of Rosa Luxemburg, and the reading groups coordinator at Jacobin Magazine.

Immediately following the Suny interview, Sopo and Julia  discuss their reflections on the book and why it is worth the 700 page undertaking.

During the late USSR, thousands of people from Soviet Georgia relocated to both Leningrad and the all-Soviet capital, Moscow. Many left Soviet Georgia to study in universities, for job placements or other career opportunities. Some of these people stayed, while others returned. Some went to Leningrad and Moscow as traders of fruits or flowers, using trade networks and access to desirable goods in Georgia to forge out comfortable livings for themselves.

We spoke with Jeff Sahadeo about his book “Voices From the Soviet Edge” which uses oral histories to explore the experiences and memories of these Soviet migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. In particular he explains to us what the experiences of the Georgian migrants were, what their lives were like, what the Soviet experience meant to them, and how life in the Soviet Union was remembered as one of freedom, stability and better days.

In Episode 1, Part II we interview Beka Natsvlishvili, professor and former MP in Georgia to discuss the use of anti-Soviet memory politics in Georgia and the implications this has on political development and debate in the country. Beka shares his own experiences in both the university setting and as a politician in Georgia to shed light on the real uses and misuses of Georgia's Soviet experience and why a reconsideration of Georgia's Soviet past is important for developing a coherent left wing politics today.

Episode 1 - The State of Soviet History in Georgia

We discuss with Timothy the roles and relationship between university research and NGO research on the Soviet past in Georgia as well as Timothy’s own research on Soviet Georgia and Abkhazia as well as the socio-political and academic environments in which this research is received.

Welcome to the first, introductory podcast of Reimagining Soviet Georgia!

We are a new, multigenerational, multilingual, Tbilisi based collective. Our goal is to reexamine and rearticulate the history of Soviet Georgia by producing and supporting critical research, including oral and written histories, and a podcast for both Georgian and English speaking audiences.

By documenting the perspectives and stories of Georgia’s aging Soviet generation, exploring underused archives and working with a new generation of historians untainted by Cold War anti-communism, it will be possible to tell the story of Soviet Georgia on an array of platforms with the honesty and openness it has yet to be fully afforded.

Why is Reengaging with Georgia’s Soviet experience important? Why now?

As the nuance of the Soviet past has been under sustained public political assault since Georgian independence in 1991, the Soviet Union and Georgia’s experience within it has been reduced to a caricature of its complex self, seen wholly through the lens of crude anti-communism and ethnonationalism. Even worse, this caricature is used as the ideological and political basis of Georgian politics, creating fertile ground for orthodox libertarianism and a cult of neoliberalism to capture the political imagination of the populace.

The Soviet Union in Georgia is presented in public discourse as a time which was bleakly totalitarian, composed solely of gulags and defined solely by political repression. Even worse, propagandistic projects like Tbilisi’s “Museum of Soviet Occupation” - a permanent exhibition - work to conceive of Georgia’s Soviet story as a continuation of a two century long “Russian occupation”. Or the 2010 passing of the "Liberty Act" which effectively banned the public display of Soviet-era, Communist symbols, thereby making any balanced public appraisal of the historical experience of Soviet Georgia impossible.

Projects and laws such as these erase the realities of the Soviet system in Georgia, including the dynamics of Soviet multiethnic life, legacies of Georgian Bolshevism or the benefits and possibilities afforded to Georgians given their comparatively privileged position within the Soviet Union. Georgians who helped build the Soviet Union and the ways in which the Soviet Union built and developed Georgia are actively erased. Even worse, by framing all of Georgia’s contemporary problems being solely caused by the Soviet experience, or due to some persistence of a “soviet mentality”, creative and effective political solutions become further and further out of reach.

These politics stand in stark contrast to what those of us – both Georgian and non-Georgian alike - with deep interests in the Soviet Union and, in particular, Georgia and the South Caucasus, have experienced in Georgia. Many people we have spoken to wholly reject reductive anti-Soviet sentiments. Miners in Chiatura, refugees from Abkhazia in Tskaltubo, taxi drivers in Kutaisi, market workers in Tbilisi, or small café owners in Batumi - remember the Soviet era as a time of stability and possibility, and the post-Soviet era as marked by profound loss. This opposes how politicians, think tanks, and Western governments alike try and frame the USSR as a system wholly marked by repression and unfreedoms. This is a political tool to them of course, but it is profoundly cynical and dishonest to the history of modern Georgia.

Our hope is to give a platform to the voices of those across the country for whom the memory of the USSR is not seen as a regressive detour in the larger history of Georgia but as a better time. We hope to compliment these oral histories with research and writing that will piece together a clearer picture of Georgia’s Soviet story, and of Georgia within the global historical trajectory.