Reimagining Soviet Georgia

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!

How the Soviet Union came to an end in 1991, after its nearly seventy year existence, is a process and event still mired in controversy and debate. Historians, politicians, citizens of the post-Soviet world and beyond understand this epochal event in drastically different ways -  was it the result of internal contradictions of the Soviet system? Did pressure from the capitalist world force the USSR into an arms race that led to economic ruin? Was the Soviet Union consciously dismembered by elites from the national republics? Did Gorbachev undermine his own political goals or was the rise of Boris Yeltsin to blame for the failures of perestroika and glasnost? Did the West, and principally the United States, actively push the USSR towards collapse or earnestly try to save it at the last moment? Or both? And what does all of this mean for post-Soviet Georgia? Former First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party Eduard Shevardnadze was at the center of it all as the final Foreign Minister of the USSR, only to return to Georgia and become president of the country in 1995. His unique role in the process of the USSR’s collapse, along with the close connections in the West he made along the way directly influenced the trajectory of nation building in post-Soviet Georgia.     On today’s episode, Sopo Japaridze, Beka Natsvlishvili and Bryan Gigantino discuss all of this and more with historian Vladislav Zubok author of the book Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union .

In this engaging and insightful conversation with Claire Kaiser, we discuss her new book Georgian and Soviet: Entitled Nationhood & the Specter of Stalin in the Caucasus. Here's a description of the book: Georgian and Soviet investigates the constitutive capacity of Soviet nationhood and empire. The Soviet republic of Georgia, located in the mountainous Caucasus region, received the same nation-building template as other national republics of the USSR. Yet Stalin's Georgian heritage, intimate knowledge of Caucasian affairs, and personal involvement in local matters as he ascended to prominence left his homeland to confront a distinct set of challenges after his death in 1953. Utilizing Georgian archives and Georgian-language sources, Claire P. Kaiser argues that the postwar and post-Stalin era was decisive in the creation of a "Georgian" Georgia. This was due not only to the peculiar role played by the Stalin cult in the construction of modern Georgian nationhood but also to the subsequent changes that de-Stalinization wrought among Georgia's populace and in the unusual imperial relationship between Moscow and Tbilisi. Kaiser describes how the Soviet empire could be repressive yet also encourage opportunities for advancement—for individual careers as well as for certain nationalities. The creation of national hierarchies of entitlement could be as much about local and republic-level imperial imaginations as those of a Moscow center. Georgian and Soviet reveals that the entitled, republic-level national hierarchies that the Soviet Union created laid a foundation for the claims of nationalizing states that would emerge from the empire's wake in 1991. Today, Georgia still grapples with the legacies of its Soviet century, and the Stalin factor likewise lingers as new generations of Georgians reevaluate the symbiotic relationship between Soso Jughashvili and his native land.

This episode explores how, through the process of developing a model of socialism applicable in the Third World, local actors interacted with the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact countries, China and the West. These political and economic interactions shaped not only the trajectory of these specific countries but of socialism globally. Our guest is Jeremy Friedman to discuss all of this and more with his new and excellent book Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World (2022). 

Highly lauded and acclaimed architect Vladimir (Lado) Alexi-Meskhishvili  (1915-1978) worked on the designs of some of Soviet Georgia's most iconic buildings. A partial list includes: Sanatorium “Imereti”, Tskaltubo (1957),   Tbilisi Sports Palace, Tbilisi (1961),  Restaurant “Iori”, Tbilisi (1962),  Lower floor of Freedom Square metro station, (then “Lenin Square”), Tbilisi, (1967) Agricultural Institute of Georgia, Tbilisi (1970) The Victory Memorial of Vake-Park, Tbilisi (1970)  Chess Palace and Alpine Club, Tbilisi (1973) The Central Postal Service and Telegraph, Tbilisi (1980) On this episode, we discuss life and legacy of Meskhishvili as well as architecture as an art and practice in Soviet Georgia with our guest, freelance researcher, curator and writer Nini Palavandishvili. Palavandishvili co-curated a current exhibition entitled Lado Alexi-Meskhishvili, Architect on the Edge of Epochs Her research focuses on Mid-century modernist architecture, monumental and decorative art, their role in a time of creation, and current interpretations. In 2018-2020 in collaboration with the Georgian National Committee of the Blue Shield, Nini worked on the Conservation and adaptation plan for the Tbilisi Chess Palace and Alpine Club building. Among other publications, her most recent is: Art for Architecture - Georgia. Soviet Modernist Mosaics from 1960 to 1990   . 

On this episode we have a wide ranging conversation with the illustrious historian Candan Badem who his an expert on the South Caucasus and in particular the borderlands between the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries prior to the Russian Revolution. He has written on The Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War of the 1850s, Russian imperial administration in the city of Kars (present day Turkey) and much more. We discuss Candan's scholarship, the complex history of the Turkish-South Caucasus borderlands through the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet eras, historiography and archives, as well as his experience growing up in Ardahan near the Soviet Georgian border in the 1980s and how this experience shaped his own understandings of the USSR and socialism. Since 2016 Candan has been in exile from Turkish academia due to his political stances and is currently teaching in Sweden. 

Anastas Mikoyan was an incredible figure. An Armenian old Bolshevik whose career spanned decades all the way from active involvement in the Baku Commune of 1918 to playing a central role in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Mikoyan's role as First Deputy Premier under Khrushchev and architect of de-Stalinization and thaw-era nationality policies meant his career of policy making influenced the trajectory of the entire Soviet Union. He also maintained close political and personal ties to the goings on in his native Armenia. Our guest to discuss Mikoyan, Soviet Armenia and much more is Dr. Pietro A. Shakarian -  a Lecturer in History at the American University of Armenia in Yerevan, and a historian of Armenia, Russia, and the Caucasus, with a particular focus on Soviet Armenia during the era of Khrushchev's Thaw. An article by Dr. Shakarian - "Yerevan 1954: Anastas Mikoyan and Nationality Reform in the Thaw, 1954–1964" https://www.peripheralhistories.co.uk/post/yerevan-1954-anastas-mikoyan-and-nationality-reform-in-the-thaw-1954-1964

On today's episode we welcome Samuel Moyn, professor of Law and History at Yale, to discuss the political history of human rights and in particular how this relates to the Cold War, Soviet collapse, and neoliberalism as a politics in the post-Cold War era. Here's an article by Samuel Moyn based on his book Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/human-rights-are-not-enough/ And here is a description of his book Not Enough : The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice. In a pioneering history of rights stretching back to the Bible, Not Enough charts how twentieth-century welfare states, concerned about both abject poverty and soaring wealth, resolved to fulfill their citizens’ most basic needs without forgetting to contain how much the rich could tower over the rest. In the wake of two world wars and the collapse of empires, new states tried to take welfare beyond its original European and American homelands and went so far as to challenge inequality on a global scale. But their plans were foiled as a neoliberal faith in markets triumphed instead. Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world.