Introduction: Rethinking Memory Sites and Symbolic Realms of Georgian National Identity

Abstract

The study of memory, and of history, grew alongside the nationalist revival in the 1980s and 1990s. The bloody conflicts in the Balkans and the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe, revived academic interest in nationalism, and with it an examination of how “useable pasts” could be exploited and manipulated by nationalist elites. The study of memory and its relationship to history and identity underwent a period of “creative and intensive development” in the 1990s (Tota and Hagen 2016, 1). In post-Soviet states, national identity and memory were inextricably linked to the risk of social “amnesia or forgetfulness” (Simine 2013, 14). The forgetting of history and the erasure of memory was central to Soviet life before 1991. Pierre Nora’s assertion that “we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” (Simine 2013, 14; Nora 1989, 7), can also describe the great anxiety experienced by Georgians to this day. The interest in memory studies in Georgia emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new national governments (and the Orthodox Church) embarked on reviving pre-Soviet memory, constructing a new story of national beginnings, intertwined with heroic kings and saints. Bringing back “lost” historical memories became central to the domestic contest between Georgia’s political parties, as well as to the reinterpretation of Georgia’s relations with Russia and Europe. For example, the “silenced”memories of the Democratic Republic of Georgia (DRG) (1918-1921) became an effective mnemonic bridge, which connected the new independent state after 1991 with its democratic and pro-European predecessor. New political elites in the early 1990s instrumentalized the short-lived Georgian republic in 1918-21, whose existence was ended by the Red Army, as a foundation for the legitimate restoration of Georgia’s independence in 1991. Historical analogy was a mnemonic tool which represented Russia (and not just the Soviet Union) as a historical aggressor and occupier. However, in the 2000s, the DRG was forgotten once more, this time the victim of a neo-liberal ideology which rejected the DRG’s social democratic foundations (Jones 2021). But during the RussoGeorgian war in 2008, parallels between the Soviet Russian occupation in 1921 and the attack in 2008 were reiterated in the media to aid the mobilization of national sentiments around the common threat to the country’s territorial integrity (Toria 2014). The DRG was revived as a “usable past.”