Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On today's episode we sit down with historian Diane P. Koenker to discuss the history, development and role of vacations, sanatoria and leisure in the Soviet Union. Koenker is the author of the 2013 study on the topic, Club Red: Vacation, Travel and the Soviet Dream

On today's episode we sit down with historian Yiannis Kokosalakis to discuss his new book Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System 1921-1941 Book description: "By placing the party grassroots at the centre of its focus, Building Socialism presents an original account of the formative first two decades of the Soviet system. Assembled in a large network of primary party organisations (PPO), the Bolshevik rank-and-file was an army of activists made up of ordinary people. While far removed from the levers of power, they were nevertheless charged with promoting the Party's programme of revolutionary social transformation in their workplaces, neighbourhoods, and households. Their regular meetings, conferences and campaigns have generated a voluminous source base. This rich material provides a unique view of the practical manifestation of the Party's revolutionary mission and forms the basis of this insightful new narrative of how the Soviet republic functioned in the period from the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921 to its invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941." Yiannis Kokosalakis is currently a research fellow at Bielefeld University. Check out his website here: https://ykokosalakis.com/

On today's episode we put the specific yet shared experiences of healthcare systems in Socialist Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic and the Georgian SSR into conversation. Through the discussion we bring to light both the similarities and differences in three distinct forms of socialism, as well as how the transition to capitalism dramatically changed health and healthcare in each society. Our guests are: Ana Vračar is a Zagreb based researcher and activist with the People's Health Movement and the Organization for Worker's Initiative and Democratization. She researches healthcare in the transition from socialism to capitalism in former Yugoslavia and writes on healthcare related issues today. Matthew Read is a researcher with IF DDR, a research institute focused on investigating the history of socialism in the German Democratic Republic to help draw political lessons for the present. Read more here: https://ifddr.org/en/studies/studies-on-the-ddr/socialism-is-the-best-prophylaxis/ https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/04/21/a-brutal-system-replaced-socialist-health-care-in-europe/

In the 1920s and 1930s, Bolshevik historians actively took part in building Soviet socialism. As militant scholars, one of their main tasks was (broadly speaking) to reconceptualize and rearticulate the history of the political entity they had just overthrown - the Russian Empire. The multinational Bolsheviks were not only committed to building a socialist state, but believed this must be done through the dismantling of what Lenin called the Russian "prison house of nations". Writing History was a critical tool in this process. Through the analytical lens of Marxism and a political commitment to anti-imperialism, Bolshevik historians from across Eurasia spent the 1920s and 1930s writing new materialist histories of imperial Russia. Historians like Mikhail Pokrovskii sought to wholly overturn the narratives of Imperial historians by explaining Russian colonization and imperial expansion as material processes, subject to forces like capital, class conflict and the quest for raw materials rather than the abstract notions of imperial rights, religion or civilizational benevolence. Militant historians from Central Asia, the Caucasus and elsewhere also began rewriting national histories, using materialist explanations of national development and colonialism in areas of Eurasia often for the first time. Because the writings of early Soviet historians critically engaged with nationhood, imperialism, capital and colonialism, they offer many lessons about writing History today. Currently, many studies and discussions about Eurasia are focused on the concept of "decolonization". However, unlike early anti-colonial Bolshevik historiography, the current decolonial discourse about post-Soviet countries tends to reinforce narrow national-historical narratives and nationalisms, and are entirely divorced from the revolutionary modernization, internationalism, universalism and socialist construction that were key features of anti-colonial Bolshevik historiography in the early 20th century. On today's episode we discuss all this and more with historian Alexey Golubev. Alexey recently wrote an article entitled "No natural colonization: the early Soviet school of historical anti-colonialism" which discusses Soviet Marxist historical narratives of the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to reframe Russian history as a process driven by commercial capital and analyzed Russian territorial expansion and its historical scholarship in terms such as settler colonialism and indigenous erasure. Alexey is a professor of History at the University of Houston.

Gabriel Rockhill, a scholar specializing in the history and theory of Marxism, dives deep into the evolution of leftist thought and its diverse interpretations. He explores how historical contexts gave rise to various forms of Marxism in the global South during decolonization. The conversation also highlights the intertwining of Hollywood and anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War, illustrating how cultural narratives shaped ideological perceptions. Additionally, Rockhill critiques the totalitarian discourse that has historically conflated communism with fascism, challenging contemporary understandings of these ideologies.

Guests Geo Maher and Volodymyr Ishchenko discuss decolonization in the context of Ukraine and Russia. They explore the radical transformation of society, the complexities of Ukrainian national identity, the challenges of activating a national identity, and the importance of social progress and development. They also touch on demographic changes, the rise of women in care work, and the concept of decolonization. The speakers emphasize the ongoing need for decolonization and the role of memory in the struggle.

In terms of post-Soviet memory politics, arguably no figure is more controversial than interwar Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Since the Maidan uprising in 2014, his memory along with that of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists have been mobilized by both far right nationalists and the Ukrainian state - to varying degrees of success - to create a counter-memory to that of both the Soviet past and the current memory regime of the Russian Federation. This process has had a dual effect - simultaneously emboldening a nationalist memory politics through the sanitization and deification of World War II era nazi collaborators like Bandera, but also encouraged the nationalist-revanchist memory regime of the Russian Federation and it's pointed demonization of Ukrainian nationalism and Bandera specifically. This dynamic has shrouded the actual historical record of Bandera and Ukrainian nationalism in not only misconceptions , but given the political context has dis-encouraged critical engagement with the History itself. For this reason we welcome historian Grzegorz Rossolinksi Liebe on to Reimagining Soviet Georgia, author of the excellent Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, Fascism, Genocide, and Cult to discuss Bandera, Ukrainian interrwar nationalism and memory politics in service of clarifying the history on its own terms. Book description below: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed—despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustaša and the Slovak Hlinka Party—to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The Democratic Republic of Georgia - also known as the First Republic - existed between 1918-1921. Under the control of veterans of the decades long social democratic movement both in the South Caucasus and the Russian Empire at large, these Georgian social democrats led by Noe Jordania were allied with the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. While the Georgian social democrats had for years shared a lot in common with Bolsheviks ideologically and in terms of tactics of struggle (known as the "most Bolshevik of the Mensheviks") they found themselves in a peculiar situation, after splitting with Lenin and the Bolsheviks (who had achieved revolution after October 1917, but now were embattled in Civil War) by 1918. As committed internationalists and Marxists, the Georgian social democrats initially viewed the political future of Georgia within a reformed Russia. Yet, a number of contingent circumstances pushed them to declare national independence and develop an independent national state separate from Soviet Russia and other fledgling South Caucasus states. They found friends in the European-wide Second International. Karl Kautsky and other anti-Soviet social democrats visited Georgia in 1920 and offered not only support to the "peasant republic" but promoted ideals of its virtues, regardless of the on the ground reality, in Europe as a utopian alternative to Bolshevism. The external pressures of WWI and the Russian Civil War, along with long standing political differences with the Bolsheviks, shaped the nationalizing process in Georgia and moved the "First Republic" away from comprehensive social democracy into a nationalizing state reliant on the military and political patronage of European powers. Violent conflict with the non-Georgian population, a lack of clarity of the borders, and other issues made this nationalizing process conflictual, unstable, and in contradiction to the political ideals of many of the Georgian social democrats themselves - Bolshevik and Menshevik alike. Today, the memory of the First Republic tends to either romanticize and exaggerate the extent of social democratic reform or alternatively overlook the honest Marxist convictions and socialist measures undertaken by the ruling Georgian social democrats between 1918-1921. Because the period of the First Republic is overwhelmingly remembered as a time of independence, the contingent aspect of said independence and the political reluctance by the Georgian social democrats to initially pursue it gets entirely lost. To discuss all this and more we welcome Francis King to discuss his article (link below) "Improbable Nationalists? Social Democracy and National Independence in Georgia 1918-21" I recommend all listeners to read this article before listening to the episode: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/69894/1/Socialist_History_54_proof_2_pages_35_60.pdf

For decades, historian Lewis Siegelbaum has taught and written on the Soviet Union. While many historians of labor and the working class in the USSR narrowly focused on moments of resistance, Siegelbaum investigated other aspects of working class existence such as the meaning of Soviet working class identity, the labor process, factory life and consumption practices. Siegelbaum spent years studying and writing on Donbas miners both during the late Soviet period and through the collapse of the USSR. His most well known work, Cars for Comrades was a study of the Soviet automobile. The automobile functioned as a useful prism through which to understand many complexities of late Soviet socialism. Cars were in high demand and their use was encouraged by the Soviet state. Their production and ever expanding ownership represented an achievement of Soviet industrialization and the economy at large. On this episode, we sit down with Lewis Siegelbaum and discuss labor and workers in the USSR, Soviet miners, the automobile, as well as what it was like teaching Soviet history during the height of the Cold War and what lessons Soviet history holds for the Left today, thirty years after its collapse.

In this episode we discuss the histories, complexities and legacies of socialist Yugoslavia and non-alignment with contributor Gal Kirn and editor Paul Stubbs of the recently released book Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political and Economic Imaginaries. This discussion is a fascinating deep-dive into socialist Yugoslavia's system of self-management, its unique relationship with the Third World, nationhood, post-communist memory politics and more!