Reimagining Soviet Georgia Reimagining Soviet Georgia

This episode was recorded on May 8th/9th 2024 - the situation is still unfolding.



A political crisis is currently underway in Georgia. Sparked by the ruling Georgian Dream party's proposed law on the "transparency of foreign influence", the stand off between the government, NGOs, protestors - both those of the formal opposition and not - and even some within the European Union, has deeper roots and a far from clear trajectory.



Today's episode begins with an outline of the tensions surrounding the proposed law, some informative aspects of Georgia's recent history, and both how domestic dynamics and a dramatically changing geopolitical situation are animating the crisis.



Then we have a discussion with Anatol Lieven and Almut Rochonawski on a range of topics related to the current crisis including the peculiar role of NGOs in Georgia, the European Union, Georgian political economy, a proposed "offshore bill", and how a shifting geopolitical picture is shaping the political calculus of elites in Georgia, the EU and beyond.



Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London.



Almut Rochowanski is an activist who specializes in resource mobilization for civil society in the former Soviet Union, including in Georgia and Russia. Her writing about this issue can be found at https://discomfortzone.substack.com/.

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