Reimagining Soviet Georgia

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.

On this episode, we have a discussion with political geographer Dr. Gerard Toal about the 2008 August War that embroiled Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia in conflict, along with the contingencies and background that led to the fighting and what this event can tell us or not tell us about Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Dr. Toal wrote a book in 2016 entitled "Near Abroad: Putin, The West and the Contest Over Ukraine and The Caucasus" - here's a description of the book below: "Before Russia invaded Ukraine, it invaded Georgia. Both states are part of Russia's "near abroad"--newly independent states that were once part of the Soviet Union and are now Russia's neighbors. While the Russia-Georgia war of 2008 faded from the headlines in the wake of the global recession, the geopolitical contest that created it did not. In Near Abroad, Gerard Toal moves beyond the polemical rhetoric that surrounds Russia's interventions in Georgia and Ukraine to study the underlying territorial conflicts and geopolitical struggles. Central to understanding are legacies of the Soviet Union collapse: unresolved territorial issues, weak states and a conflicted geopolitical culture in Russia over the new territorial order. Toal explains the road to invasion and war in Georgia and Ukraine, thereafter, and provides an account of real life geopolitics, one that emphasizes changing spatial relationships, geopolitical cultures and the power of media images. Not only a penetrating analysis of Russia's relationships with its regional neighbors, Near Abroad also offers an analysis of how US geopolitical culture frequently fails to fully understand Russia and the geopolitical archipelago of dependencies in its near abroad.

In this interview with French political scientist Laure Neumayer, we discuss how a particular form of anti-communist memory politics were mobilized and utilized by "memory entrepreneurs" in Europe following the Cold War. A particular interpretation of the socialist past was put up against  official European memory of the 20th century as the EU enlarged into Eastern Europe. A mixture of anti-communist nationalists, former dissidents and liberals wanted a pan-European identity to be rewritten in a way that criminalized communism as it had after World War II criminalized Nazism.   Here's a description of Laure Neumayer's 2019 book The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space After The Cold War: Memory has taken centre stage in European-level policies after the Cold War, as the Western historical narrative based on the uniqueness of the Holocaust was being challenged by calls for an equal condemnation of Communism and Nazism. This book retraces the anti-communist mobilisations carried out by Central European representatives in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and in the European Parliament since the early 1990s. Based on archive consultation, interviews and ethnographic observation, it analyses the memory entrepreneurs’ requests for collective remembrance and legal accountability of Communist crimes in European institutions, Pan-European political parties and transnational advocacy networks. The book argues that these newcomers managed to strengthen their positions and impose a totalitarian interpretation of Communism in the European assemblies, which directly shaped the EU’s remembrance policy. However, the rules of the European political game and recurring ideological conflicts with left-wing opponents reduced the legal and judicial implications of this anti-communist grammar at the European level.

In this episode we sit down with anthropologist Erin Koch to have a conversation about the shifts in medical practices, treatments as well as epidemic management from the Soviet period to Post-Soviet period in Georgia through a discussion of her 2013 book Free Market Tuberculosis: Managing Epidemics in Post-Soviet Georgia. The shift to a market economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union radically transformed health care and epidemic management in Georgia resulting in drastic consequences for patient care and public health. Here's a description of Erin Koch's book Free Market Tuberculosis: Managing Epidemics in Post-Soviet Georgia: "The Soviet health care infrastructure and its tuberculosis-control system were anchored in biomedicine, but the dire resurgence of tuberculosis at the end of the twentieth century changed how experts in post-Soviet nations--and globally--would treat the disease. As Free Market Tuberculosis dramatically demonstrates, market reforms and standardized treatment programs have both influenced and undermined the management of tuberculosis care in the now-independent country of Georgia. The alarming rate of tuberculosis infection in this nation at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Asia cannot be disputed, and yet solutions to attacking the disease are very much debated. Anthropologist Erin Koch explores the intersection of the nation's extensive medical history, the effects of Soviet control, and the highly standardized yet poorly regulated treatments promoted by the World Health Organization. Although statistics and reports tell one story--a tale of success in Georgia--Koch's ethnographic approach reveals all facets of this cautionary tale of a monolithic approach to medicine."