The Irony of Georgian Nationalism

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.