Reimagining Soviet Georgia

Latest Episodes:

Episode 34: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution with Vincent Bevins Feb 14, 2024

Show notes

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 BURNis 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

Episode 33: Vacations, Sanatoria and the Soviet Dream with Diane P. Koenker Feb 01, 2024

Show notes

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

Episode 32: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System with Yiannis Kokosalakis Dec 21, 2023

Show notes

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/

Episode 31: Socialist & Capitalist Healthcare with Ana Vračar and Matthew Read Dec 09, 2023

Show notes

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/

Episode 30: Anti-Colonial Bolshevik Historiography with Alexey Golubev Nov 01, 2023

Show notes

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.

Episode 29: Western Marxism & Anti-Communism with Gabriel Rockhill Oct 12, 2023

Show notes

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/

Episode 28: Decolonization and Ukraine with Geo Maher and Volodymyr Ishchenko Jul 06, 2023

Show notes

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

Episode 27: Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, Fascism, Genocide, and Cult with Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe Jun 21, 2023

Show notes

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.

Episode 26: Improbable Nationalists? Social Democracy and National Independence in Georgia 1918-21 with Francis King May 05, 2023

Show notes

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

Episode 25: Workers, Labor and Cars in the Soviet Union with Lewis Siegelbaum Mar 22, 2023

Show notes

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.

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