News by Countries

Georgia's Ilia State University has launched a master’s program in Soviet and post-Soviet systems

05.11.2010

TBILISI - The 1968 student movement in Germany was the first time young people en masse asked their parents publicly: were you a Nazi? Many historians cite the era as the start of the country’s reassessment of its Nazi past.

 In Eastern Europe, the reassessment of the totalitarian past began in the 1990s and continues. Lustration laws were adopted almost simultaneously in the mid-1990s in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states.

 But despite 70 years under the Soviet regime, that period of history has not been systematically studied in Georgia. The facts that most people think they know are superficial and mainly based on oral accounts.

The country has produced practically no serious literature analyzing the period. And the national security archives, which might have provided fruitful ground for scholars, were opened only several years ago and are not complete; some records were destroyed in the 1990s and some material remains in Russia.

This year, however, scholars will start to fill in the blank spots. Ilia State University has launched a master’s program in Soviet and post-Soviet systems, an organization was launched devoted to researching the Soviet past, and a trickle of young people has begun studying the security archives.

“The Soviet era for us is the past that hasn’t become history. Actually we still live with those traditions, because we haven’t studied our most recent past,” said Sergo Ratiani, director of the university’s new Soviet studies program, which has attracted 14 students in its inaugural year.

 The courses will start in January, with lectures by Georgian and foreign professors. The university will also have books and other foreign materials translated into Georgian and will make information from the country’s security archives more accessible to students, Ratiani said.

Tako Tolordava, a third-year social sciences student at Ilia State University, was one of the first to sign up. She became interested in Soviet history last year when she attended lectures on the Soviet regime and its legacy.

“I discovered that my knowledge of the Soviet past was really spotty. If we don’t analyze that period properly, the problems that we have today won’t get solved, we won’t even be able to create a civil society for a long time,” Tolordava said.

Lasha Bakradze, a historian and critic who teaches a course on the fundamentals of Soviet history at the university, said Georgians may have been reluctant to confront this part of their past because they live in a small society, with many clan connections. Genuine lustration and research into security archives could unearth uncomfortable information about people close to them.

Bakradze also cautioned that these new studies must not be co-opted by ideologues and that Georgians must not think of themselves only as victims. “We were victims and we were offenders. This must be a scientific pursuit without ideological pressure,” he said.

Keeping that distance could be a challenge, said Timothy Blauvelt, country director for the American Councils for International Education in Georgia. Blauvelt has lectured on the history of Sovietology in Western countries. “I know that when you have experienced it yourselves, it’s hard to stay objective, but if you want to research and study the issue from the scientific point of view, it’s better to be distanced from the epoch and from your own feelings” Blauvelt said.

But Ratiani, the program’s director, said objectivity should not necessarily be the scholar’s goal. He said the Soviet Union, just like Nazi Germany, was a definite evil and to look for the positive sides of the regime would be misguided. “We must find the reasons that led us to totalitarianism. We must stand for our principles and values.”

Though it lacks a similar program in Soviet studies, Tbilisi State University has seen mixed interest in the subject in the last two years. A Russian studies program launched there in 2008 includes courses on the history of the Soviet Union and on the ideology of the Soviet system. Still, only 10 students have enrolled in Russian studies at the university.

The director of the program, Dali Kandelaki, blames the university for not properly promoting the courses.

According to one of the program’s students, however, it also suffers from a lack of literature and professors sufficiently versed in the subject. David Jishkariani, 24, who said he supplements his studies with outside research, chose Russian studies as his master’s program after the 2008 Georgian-Russian war. “I finally came to the conclusion that we need to study Russia thoroughly, especially the Soviet and post-Soviet epoch. We’re in a transitional period in Georgia and if we want to get over it successfully, we must know where we’ve been,” he said. Jishkariani is researching the Stalinist persecutions of 1937 in Georgia, during which thousands were murdered or deported.

Along with Bakradze, the historian, Jishkariani and a handful of others helped launch a new organization called the Soviet Past Research Laboratory. Its first project will be a map of places in Georgia connected with terror and repression, including houses where the repressed families lived, prisons, places of execution, and houses where secret organizations met. By the end of the year the group plans to launch a website where it will upload photos and texts about the Soviet period as well as some materials from the country’s security archives.

Bakradze said Georgia can learn from Germany’s experience. “No real changes will come until we investigate and understand the past.”

Source

http://www.tol.org/client/article/21909-the-past-that-hasnt-become-history.html

Back to List