Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On today's episode we examine how broader shifts in the global order, globalization and geopolitical trends since the end of the Cold War led to the current European security crisis and political context for the Russo-Ukraine War. We also explore how this context shapes Georgia's geopolitical and security environment, and is sowing the seeds for more open discussions about what geopolitical neutrality and explicit multi-vectorism could mean for Georgia.

With guest co-host Beka Natsvlishvili, we welcome Richard Sakwa on to Reimagining Soviet Georgia.

Richard Sakwa is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Kent, U.K.

His research interests include: political developments in Russia, international politics and the Second Cold War, multipolarity and global realignments, prospects for socialism, problems of European and global order, the English School and international systems.

A description of Sakwa's recent book The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War (2023, Yale University Press) below:

The end of the Cold War was an opportunity—our inability to seize it has led to today’s renewed era of great power competition
 
The year 1989 heralded a unique prospect for an enduring global peace as harsh ideological divisions and conflicts began to be resolved. Now, three decades on, that peace has been lost. With war in Ukraine and increasing tensions between China, Russia, and the West, great power politics once again dominates the world stage. But could it have been different?
 
Richard Sakwa shows how the years before the first mass invasion of Ukraine represented a hiatus in conflict rather than a lasting accord—and how, since then, we have been in a “Second Cold War.” Tracing the mistakes on both sides that led to the current crisis, Sakwa considers the resurgence of China and Russia and the disruptions and ambitions of the liberal order that opened up catastrophic new lines of conflict.
 
This is a vital, strongly argued account of how the world lost its chance at peace, and instead saw the return of war in Europe, global rivalries, and nuclear brinksmanship.

Since the 1970s, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the Soviet Union. As a key figure in the "revisionist school" of Soviet history, Fitzpatrick along with other historians opposed entrenched Cold War era narratives about the USSR including (but not limited to) the "totalitarian thesis". Fitzpatrick in particular added texture and complexity in her studies of the Soviet Union by focusing on social history, perspectives "from below" and daily life as well as social and economic advancement & upward mobility during Stalinism. On today's episode, we welcome Sheila Fitzpatrick on as a guest to reflect on the development of Soviet history since the 1970s, her work and what the Soviet past looks like today.

Sheila Fitzpatrick is a historian of the Soviet Union and modern Russia. Her books The Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-31 (1978), Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-34 (1979) and The Russian Revolution (1982) were foundational to the field of Soviet social history. She taught for many years at the University of Chicago, before returning to Australia, the country of her birth. Her book, White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration was published by Black, Inc., Melbourne, in 2021; followed by The Shortest History of the Soviet Union in 2022. She is currently working on a monograph, Displacement: Repatriation and Resettlement of Russian and Soviet Displaced Persons after the Second World War, and a biography of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, under contract to Princeton University Press. She is currently a professor at the Australian Catholic University.

On today's episode we discuss the book Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor's Global Anticommunist Crusade with author Jeff Schuhrke.

Blue-Collar Empire explores how the CIA used American unions to undermine workers at home and subvert democracy abroad through the shocking story of the AFL-CIO’s global anticommunist crusade—and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.

Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy. In this work, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO’s anticommunist officials, who, in a shocking betrayal, for decades expended their energies to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers’ movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, journalist, union activist, and assistant professor at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to In These Times and Jacobin, and his scholarship has been published at Diplomatic History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History.

Episode image: President Richard Nixon gestures toward labor leader George Meany during a speech at the 1971 AFL-CIO convention. (Wally McNamee / Corbis via Getty Images)

After World War 2, during the period of developed socialism, a rich ecosystem of Marxist intellectuals and academics emerged in the Georgian SSR. Universities and scientific institutes in Tbilisi, Kutaisi, Telavi, and Batumi were home to sociologists, philosophers, anthropologists, historians and other academics who took part in Soviet wide and international discussions and debates on different aspects of Marxist theory or Marxist inspired academic research.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, this "lost pantheon" of Georgian Marxism has been politically undermined, intellectually marginalized and socially forgotten. But who were these Soviet Georgian Marxists? What were their ideas? What were they writing about and researching in the period of developed socialism, the late USSR? And how did Soviet Georgian Marxists fit into Soviet-wide and broader international academic networks and debates? And why is reclaiming and reengaging with Soviet Georgian Marxists important today?

On today's episode we welcome Bakar Berekashvili to begin this discussion on Marxism in Soviet Georgia, what it tells us about Georgia's Soviet experience and how it relates to academia, politics and more in Georgia since 1991.

In the coming weeks we will be releasing a series of shorter episodes on individual Soviet Georgian Marxists....stay tuned!

Bakar Berekashvili is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Georgian American University in Tbilisi. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, at the Masaryk University in Brno and at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. His research and teaching interests include qualitative research, critical sociology, Marxist thought in Soviet Union, Soviet Union (life and social order), post-socialist politics and society, ruling class, problems of democracy, social & political theory, political sociology, power and ideology.

On October 20th 2024, Moldova held a presidential election and a referendum, supposedly on the question of integration into the EU. The referendum passed with a slight majority – 50.35% vs 49.65%. Two rounds of a presidential election were also held in the country, with the EU favored candidate Maia Sandu winning.

While many observers have interpreted the results as indicative of the country being divided between a pro-EU and pro-Russian faction and Russia’s meddling in the elections, the situation is far more complex.

Vitalie Sprînceană is a sociologist, journalist and urban activist based in Chisinau. Moldova. He is also a co-editor at PLATZFORMA.MD, a web platform for social, economic and political criticism. He is interested in and argues for inclusive democratic public spaces, social justice, free knowledge, plurality of worldviews and practices. His research interests are: sociology, globalization, history of ideas, literary and cultural criticism, history of Soviet Moldova.

Read his recent article on the EU Referendum in Moldova here:

https://transform-network.net/blog/commentary/moldovas-referendum-on-what/

Check out the Moldova based web platform Platzforma here:

https://platzforma.md/

Since the collapse of the USSR and Georgia's independence in 1991, anti-soviet memory politics have played an intractable role in Georgian politics. On the one hand, they are a rhetorical allegory without limits - nearly anything and everything negative can be associated with the soviet past. Yet on the other hand, they also played a crucial role in nation building, becoming especially institutionalized after the 2003 Rose Revolution. In the lead up to the parliamentary elections on October 26th 2024, politicians still make regular reference to the USSR. But where do anti-soviet memory politics in Georgia come from? Why do they persist? How exactly are they reproduced? And for what? Is the USSR simply a metaphor for Russia? Or a means to demonize socialism and reinforce market orthodoxy? Or both?

To discuss all this and more, we sat down with frequent co-host and guest, Beka Natsvlishvili.

Beka Natsvlishvili is a director of the Institute for a Fair Economy. He is also the Georgian team lead for a platform economy research project in collaboration with the University of Oxford. His teaching experience includes lectures on political economy, globalization, and political sociology at the Georgian-American University, and previous engagements at Caucasus University and the University of Georgia. Beka previously served as a Member of Parliament and Deputy Chair of the Committee for European Integration, and as a Member of the Tbilisi Municipal Council, where he chaired the land legalization commission. With over two decades of academic and professional experience, he holds a Master of Arts (Magister Artium) from Wilhelm University of Münster and has extensive expertise in political economy, trade unions, and social research.

Georgia’s trade dynamics with the EU have not improved, even though it signed a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) in 2014. The Georgian export basket deteriorated qualitatively since that time. Specifically, Georgia’s export basket sophistication has decreased, and the share of low-tech and resource-based products has increased. Moreover, Georgia’s exports to the EU have become more concentrated.

Georgia's economy is marked by jobless growth, deindustrialization and other unyielding structural weaknesses. How and why did Georgia find itself in this "neoliberal lock in"? And what does the DCFTA have to do with it?

On today's episode, we discuss EU-Georgia trade ties, how a peculiar form of neoliberalism developed in the country since 1992 and the political implications of it all with political economist Tato Khundadze.

Check out the study "Neoliberal lock-in: Why Georgia-EU free trade does not work" co-authored by Tato Khundadze and Salome Topuria:

https://southcaucasus.fes.de/news-list/e/neoliberal-lock-in-why-georgia-eu-free-trade-does-not-work.html

Tato Khundadze is a PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he also teaches multiple courses and works as a research assistant. He received his MA in Economics from the New School for Social Research. He has extensive research experience in public policy and economic development. He was the head of the Analytical Division at the Georgian Public Broadcaster and a research fellow at the Centre for Social Studies of Georgia. His research interests include economic development, statistical learning, and economic growth models. His latest publications refer to the potential of introducing progressive taxation, Georgia’s history of industrial development, and public debt sustainability.

(episode photo courtesy of: https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/photographs-of-abandoned-factories-and-industry-in-the-former-soviet-state-of-georgia/)

On today's episode we discuss how Ukraine's market oriented war economy is affecting the population, war time class divisions, post-Soviet Ukraine's economic development and how History and memory politics fit into the picture. Our guest to discuss all this and more is Peter Korotaev.

Peter Korotaev is a researcher who has worked on class dynamics and war for Jacobin, Arena and The Canada Files. He writes regularly at Events in Ukraine.

https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/

Helena Sheehan has spent decades involved in working class and Left struggles across the globe. She is an accomplished writer and academic who never lost or loses sight of her Marxist convictions. Her life brought her from America, as a devout Catholic entering the convent, to embracing revolutionary Marxism and participating in the Irish Republican struggle and the global communist movement. She also explains what it was like to visit the Soviet Union as a communist living in Ireland.

In this episode we discuss her life in the global left, the development of her political views, first hand accounts of political struggles and debates, as well as lessons she has for Left wing politics today.

She has recently written the book Until "We Fall: Long Distance Life on the Left". Here's a description:

"Offers vivid first hand accounts of encounters with fellow socialists following the fall of the Soviet Union

Most westerners glimpsed the breakup of the Soviet Union at a great distance, through a highly distorted lens which equated the expansion of capitalism with the rise of global democracy. But there were those, like Helena Sheehan, who watched more keenly and saw a world turning upside down. In her new autobiographical history from below, Until We Fall, Sheehan shares what she witnessed first-hand and close-up, as hopes were raised by glasnost and perestroika, only to be swept away in the bitter and brutal counterrevolutions that followed.

In Until We Fall, we come along on Sheehan’s travels as she tracks the fallout from the transition from flawed forms of socialism to a particularly predatory form of capitalism. As a sequel to Navigating the Zeitgeist — which captured 1950s cold-war America, the 1960s new left, the 1970s social movements and communist parties of Europe — Until We Fall takes us through Eastern Europe from the 1980s onward and moves on to offer vivid accounts of encounters with fellow socialists in many other places, such as Britain, Greece, and Mexico. It includes an entire chapter on South Africa, where Sheehan participated in its political and intellectual life for extended intervals of the post-apartheid period. And it offers her unique take on her birthplace, the United States, along with the unfolding realities confronting her chosen home, Ireland. She also reveals major changes in the culture of academe in the decades she has taught in universities.

As a philosopher, she scrutinizes the various intellectual currents prevailing, particularly positivism and postmodernism, and makes a persuasive case for the explanatory and ethical superiority of Marxism. As she moves through time and space, Sheehan pursues the perspectives of the vanquished in a world where the triumphalist narratives of the victors hold sway. The central storyline of the book is her political activism as waves of history swept through the left and challenged it in ever more formidable ways, bringing some victories but many defeats. She raises questions of how to keep going in this time of monsters, when the old is dying and the new cannot be born, when capitalism is decadent yet still dominant."

Helena Sheehan is Professor Emerita at Dublin City University, where she taught philosophy of science, history of ideas and media studies. She is author of many publications on philosophy, politics and culture, including such books as Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, The Syriza Wave and Navigating the Zeitgeist. She has been active on the left for many decades.

On today's episode, we discuss The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire with the book's author, historian Masha Kirasirova

Book description:

"In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"--primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus--with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"--the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter. The Eastern International explores how the concept of "the East" was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Masha Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualized and carried out by students, comrades, and activists--Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and agency to shape Soviet ideology, inform concrete decisions, and allocate resources. Contextualizing these Eastern mediators within a global frame, this book historicizes the circulation of peoples and ideas between the socialist and decolonizing world and reinscribes"

Masha Kirasirova is Assistant Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is an editor of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (OUP, 2023) and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties Between Protest and Nation-Building.

This is a special TWO PART episode with Historian and Jacobin Europe editor David Broder.

In Part I (recorded July 10th 2024), we discuss recent European Parliamentary and French election results, how both the right and left fared in the outcome, and the implications of these results for Europe, EU expansion and more.

In Part II (starts at 50:45), through a discussion of David's 2023 book Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy we explore how the current right wing political imagination in Italy and Europe at large are mobilized through historical memory. We also examine how anti-communist memory politics in Western Europe relate to anti-communist memory politics in post-communist countries.

David Broder is a historian, writer, translator and editor of Jacobin Europe.

Check out David's book Mussolini's Grandchildren here:

https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745348025/mussolinis-grandchildren/

On this episode we discuss how Baku oil shaped Bolshevism, Sovietization, and the structuring of the Soviet state between 1920-1929 in the South Caucasus. Our guest is Sara Brinegar, historian and author of the book Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus: Periphery Unbound 1920-1929.

Book description and author bio below:

The book shows how the politics of oil intersected with the establishment of Soviet power in the Caucasus; it reveals how the Soviets cooperated and negotiated with the local elite, rather than merely subsuming them. More broadly, Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus demonstrates not only how the Bolsheviks understood and exploited oil, but how the needs of the industry shaped Bolshevik policy.
Brinegar reflects on the huge geopolitical importance of oil at the end of World War I and the Russian Civil War. She discusses how the reserves sitting idle in the oil fields of Baku, the capital of the newly independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, and the center of the fallen empire's oil reserves were no exception to this. With the Soviet leadership in Moscow intent on capturing the fields in the first few months of 1920, this book examines the Soviet project to rebuild Baku's oil industry in the aftermath of these wars and the political significance of oil in the formation of the Soviet Union.

Sara Brinegar is historian of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She held a two¬-year faculty fellowship at Yale University’s European Studies Council and was previously a Digital Pedagogy Fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is an independent scholar with a full-time non-academic job and is based in the Washington, D.C. area. 

The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union unleashed an unprecedented mortality crisis. In the years following, the region endured upwards of 7.5 million excess (and thus preventable) deaths. This post-socialist mortality crisis was not only the result of the economic devastation and social fracturing caused by socialism's end, but was exacerbated by the political-economic commitment to market orthodoxy and austerity of post-socialist elites, leading to wide spread socio-economic, physical and mental immiseration.

On today's episode we welcome Gábor Scheiring to discuss how this post-socialist mortality crisis emerged, its political implications for today, and what types of methodologies are most effective for researching these topics and more in post-socialist countries.

Gabor is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Georgetown University Qatar, currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, Center for European Studies. His research addresses the lived experience and political economy of contemporary capitalist transformations using quantitative, qualitative, and comparative methods. His work analyzes how economic shocks fuel precarity, leading to mental and physical suffering, and how these processes affect the stability of democracy. As a member of the Hungarian Parliament (2010-2014), he advocated for a socially just transition to sustainability.

Gabor's website:

https://www.gaborscheiring.com/

One of Georgia's most exciting contemporary filmmakers is Levan Koguashvili. His films are as comedic as they are tragic, focusing on the intricacies (both beautiful and heartbreaking) of the day to day struggles Georgians live through today.

In this discussion, we explore Levan's approach to filmmaking, stories behind the scripts, and the way his films reflect economic and social realities both in Georgia and of those Georgians who have emigrated abroad.

Levan is a film director from Tbilisi and his films include Brighton 4th (2021), Gogitas New Life (2016), Blind Dates (2013) and Street Days (2010).

On today's episode we discuss the emergence of the Georgian tea industry and how its development interacted with processes of economic, political and national consolidation in the first decades of the Georgian SSR.

Our guest is Camille Neufville. Camille is a PhD student at Strasbourg university, France. She is interested in the entangled histories of exotic commodities, their production and consumption in northern Eurasia. She's currently writing her PhD on tea consumption and tea production in Imperial and Soviet Georgia. Her main research questions include land and labor issues, the limits of state control, and subsistence economics in the Western Caucasus.

On today's episode we sit down with political economist Ia Eradze to discuss how extreme rates of dollarization in Georgia emerged after the Soviet Union's demise, why dollarization persists, as well as how the dominance of neoliberal economic policies and exclusion of socio-economic issues from the public and political discourse in post-Soviet Georgia came to be.

Below is a description of Eradze's 2023 book Unraveling Dollarization Persistence: The Case of Georgia followed by a link to an article which summarizes the book's main arguments:

The book engages with the persistence of foreign currency domination at the example of Georgia. Unofficial dollarization remains a challenge for developing countries, as it increases the vulnerability of households, firms and governments with foreign currency debt, limits monetary sovereignty, threatens financial and political stability and hinders economic development. These issues have become even more evident during the Covid 19 pandemic through the increasing debt in foreign currency. This monograph provides a political economic analysis of dollarization and conceptualises dollarization through a state theory, in which Georgia is framed as a peripheral hybrid state. The book is structured around three themes: genesis of dollarization (1991-2003), dollarization persistence (2003-2012) and politicization of dollarization (2012-2019). Thus, the history and persistence of foreign currency domination is explained through embedding dollarization into political debates, governance tactics, policies and institutions, economic interests, accumulation regime, civil society, global processes and interests of international actors.

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/unraveling-dollarization/

Ia Eradze is an associate professor at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs and a CERGE-EI Foundation teaching fellow. She is also a researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies at the Ilia State University. Ia holds a PhD in social and economic sciences from the University of Kassel. She is a political economist with research interest in finance and state formation in the post-socialist space. Ia has worked as a researcher at ZZF Potsdam and was an invited scholar at Harvard University, Sciences Po, Trinity College and University of Vienna.

On today's episode we sit down with journalist and author Vincent Bevins to discuss his recent book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. This wide reaching conversation reviews the main themes and topics of his book, and the broader political lessons and reflections that the global social movements between 2010-2020, with an emphasis on those outside of the global North, can provide today.

Here's a description of If We Burn

"From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. IF WE BURN is a stirring work of history built around a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?
 
From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins provides a blow-by-blow account of street movements and their consequences, recounted in gripping detail. He draws on four years of research and hundreds of interviews conducted around the world, as well as his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.
 
Careful investigation reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change is gravely misguided. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future."

Bevins is also the author of The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

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.

The history of Marxism in the 20th century, both as a means to interpret the world and as the basis of a politics to transform it, is marked by a profound intellectual and political diversity. Some of this can be attributed to individuals and their specific readings of Marx's thought. Yet other forms of Marxism - such as that which emerged in the global South during the era of decolonization - can trace their origins to particular applications of Marx's ideas and Marxist predecessors (such as Lenin), as well as the historical experience of really existing socialist states to concrete historical and political contexts.

Many different actors and thinkers have historically held up the banner of Marxism and used its ideas to make sense of the world and mobilize people to create a different one.

Anti-communism has a similar history. A range of actors and thinkers have historically sought to oppose Marxism as both a real movement and set of ideas. Various forms of nationalism and liberalism (though not only) as the guiding ideals of nation states, empires and even grassroots movements, have presented Marxism, communism and socialism as their anti-thesis.

Yet History has no fidelity to simple binaries. In the aftermath of World War II, some Marxists in Europe and North America sought to base their theoretical articulation of the world in critiques of "really existing socialism" through a synthesis of Marxism and anti-communism. Who were these people and what were they arguing for? And what material and political foundations guided and shaped them?

On today's episode, we welcome critical theorist, philosopher, and professor Gabriel Rockhill to interrogate the relationship between post-WW2 Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School and anti-communism.

For background on the topic, here is Rockhill's article in the LA Review of Books from 2022 entitled "The CIA and the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism"

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/

Professor Rockhill currently teaches at Villanova, and his extended bio and bibliography can be found here:

https://gabrielrockhill.com/about/

On this episode we discuss the ins and outs of decolonization - as a set of historical revolutionary politics, intellectual tradition, contemporary framework of analysis as well the limitations and misuses of "decolonization" in the context of Ukraine and Russia today.

To do this we have invited two distinct yet complimentary thinkers to put their ideas into conversation with one another.

Geo Maher is a teacher, political theorist and author of Anti-Colonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance and Decolonizing Dialectics.

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist and writes on contemporary Ukraine, civil society, revolution, nationalism and more. In December 2022 he wrote an article entitled "Ukrainian Voices?" in the New Left Review. Check out the article here:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/volodymyr-ishchenko-ukrainian-voices

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!

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  


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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."

On today's episode we sit down with prolific historian Dr. Gerald Horne to discuss the intimate political relationship in the 20th century between the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of the USA and Black political struggle in the United States. We discuss a number of topics including African American Marxists such as Paul Robeson - who Dr. Horne has written a biography on - as well as the role the Soviet Union's political support of Civil Rights in the United States had in strengthening the movement for black civil rights.

Dr. Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. Dr. Horne received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. from Princeton University.

Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein have recently released a new book entitled "Taking Stock of Shock: The Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions" - this week we have both authors on as guests to discuss their new book, their methodological process, how to make sense of the social consequences of socialist collapse and how it relates to Georgia.

You can check out their new book's website here;

https://www.takingstockofshock.com/

And here's the book's description:

"After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more than 400 million people suddenly found themselves in a new reality, a dramatic transition from state socialist and centrally planned workers' states to liberal democracy (in most cases) and free markets. Thirty years later, postsocialist citizens remain sharply divided on the legacies of transition. Was it a success that produced great progress after a short recession, or a socio-economic catastrophe foisted on the East by Western capitalists? Taking Stock of Shock aims to uncover the truth using a unique, interdisciplinary investigation into the social consequences of transition—including the rise of authoritarian populism and xenophobia. Showing that economic, demographic, sociological, political scientific, and ethnographic research produce contradictory results based on different disciplinary methods and data, Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell A. Orenstein triangulate the results. They find that both the J-curve model, which anticipates sustained growth after a sharp downturn, and the "disaster capitalism" perspective, which posits that neoliberalism led to devastating outcomes, have significant basis in fact. While substantial percentages of the populations across a variety of postsocialist countries enjoyed remarkable success, prosperity, and progress, many others suffered an unprecedented socio-economic catastrophe. Ghodsee and Orenstein conclude that the promise of transition still remains elusive for many and offer policy ideas for overcoming negative social and political consequences."

In this episode we sit down with Tbilisi-based researcher and lecturer Archil Sikharulidze, who specializes in securitization, Georgia-Russia relations and more, to discuss the hurdles that dominant forms of nationalism pose to doing research on critical yet politically sensitive topics in Georgia.

His most recent article here on Georgian identity and the West is available here:

https://www.commonspace.eu/opinion/opinion-alternative-view-georgias-european-identity-and-past-history

On today’s show we welcome Anastasia Shesterinina to discuss her excellent new book Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia which, using hundreds interviews and extensive field research, explains how and why Abkhaz did or did not mobilize to fight in the war with Georgia in the early 1990s, and how to many Abkhaz as the war was beginning  it came as an unexpected surprise leading to the uncertain and uneven mobilization of a collective identity both immediately preceding and  during the 1992-1993 war with Georgia.  

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.

We discuss the book Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire with the author Erik Scott and much more.

In the book, Scott discusses the unique opportunities Soviet Georgians were afforded due to their position within Soviet society as a coherent, institutionalized nationality. Unlike other histories that touch on Georgia, or nationality within the USSR, Scott's book tries and complicates the narrative by focusing on Soviet Georgians as a diaspora within the Soviet Union and participated in a dynamic of domestic internationalism - a multinational cultural-political connectedness within the USSR. In particular, Scott focuses on how Georgians in Moscow were able to benefit from and excel within the Soviet system because of their Georgianness. He also problematizes the idea of nationhood as a purely territorial concept, especially within how Soviet society was built and constructed. In the case of Georgians, their active participation as Georgians was a critical dimension of the Soviet project, not only in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic but in the all-Soviet capital Moscow, and beyond. 

On today’s episode, we sat down with Georgia based writer and researcher Katie Sartania. In April of this year, Katie wrote an excellent article entitled “Struggle and Sacrifice: Narratives of Georgia’s Modern History” which critically interrogates the role of Georgian nationalism and independence in the post-Soviet period, and how narratives of independence politically overshadow pressing social concerns in the country.  We discuss not only her article and the legacies of Georgian nationalism, but also what it means to do historical research in Georgia today and the ways that the pressures of nationalism can come into conflict with critical historical inquiry.

You can read the above mentioned article here: 

https://carnegieeurope.eu/2021/04/27/struggle-and-sacrifice-narratives-of-georgia-s-modern-history-pub-84391 

On today’s episode, Sopo Japaridze and Beka Natsvlishvili have an engaging discussion with philosopher Keti Chukhrov. Keti was born in Soviet Georgia in the 1970s and since then has gone on to write articles and books touching subjects such as art criticism, philosophy, political theory and more.

Sopo, Beka and Keti discuss the premise of her recent book Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism. Keti’s book is a much needed intervention into anti-capitalist discourse. Her thorough knowledge of both Soviet philosophy and Marxists from the West allow her to grapple directly with the philosophical and political tensions between how those anti-capitalists in the West imagined communism, how their own ideals reproduced capitalism and how those same ideals or ideas functioned (or didn’t) within Soviet society.  Keti’s work is not only refreshing but takes to task common understandings of the USSR from the Left. 

Her book description is as follows:

“This book, a philosophical consideration of Soviet socialism, is not meant simply to revisit the communist past; its aim, rather, is to witness certain zones where capitalism’s domination is resisted—the zones of counter-capitalist critique, civil society agencies, and theoretical provisions of emancipation or progress—and to inquire to what extent those zones are in fact permeated by unconscious capitalism and thus unwittingly affirm the capitalist condition.

By means of the philosophical and politico-economical consideration of Soviet socialism of the 1960 and 1970s, this book manages to reveal the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporaneous anti-capitalist discourse and theory. The research is marked by a broad cross-disciplinary approach based on political economy, philosophy, art theory, and cultural theory that redefines old Cold War and Slavic studies’ views of the post-Stalinist years, as well as challenges the interpretations of this period of historical socialism in Western Marxist thought.”

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.