Spelade
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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.
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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.
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Episode 1 - The State of Soviet History in Georgia
In this episode we explore how Soviet History and its legacies in Georgia are generally understood and approached today in academia, politics, the NGO sector and society at large.
In Part I we interview Timothy Blauvelt - professor of History at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. Teaching in Georgia for almost 19 years he has produced a range of varied scholarship relating to both Soviet history and in particular Georgia and the South Caucasus on patronage networks in Abkhazia, the 1956 protests in Tbilisi against de-Stalinization, attitudes in Georgia towards the Russian language, and has an upcoming book entitled Clientalism and Nationality in an Early Soviet Fiefdom: The Trials of Nestor Lakoba to be released this year.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.
In 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. -
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.
