Georgian and Soviet: Entitled Nationhood and the Specter of Stalin in the Caucasus

By Claire P. Kaiser

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501766800

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Georgian and Soviet

Entitled Nationhood and the Specter of Stalin in the Caucasus

Claire P. Kaiser

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

To Bo and Niko

Contents

Acknowledgments

Explanatory Notes

Introduction: Pantheon as Past and Present

1 History, Nation, and Local Foundations of the Stalin Cult

2 Entitled Foreign Policy and Its Limits

3 Expulsions and Ethnic Consolidation

4 De-Stalinization, kartulad

5 A Georgian Tbilisi

6 Entangled Nationalisms

Epilogue: Stalin’s Ghosts

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was a decade in the making, and I am grateful for the deep support it has received from numerous institutions and individuals along the way. It began at the University of Pennsylvania, where Peter Holquist and Benjamin Nathans nurtured the project from its earliest days and provided challenging feedback throughout the process to push it in new directions. I was also fortunate to benefit from Bruce Grant’s anthropological eye and, more recently, his guidance on the book publication process. I am grateful for the close and supportive community of history graduate students at Penn, especially Sam Casper, Alex Hazanov, Yakov Feygin, Sam Hirst, and Iuliia Skubytska.

Research for this project was supported by generous grants for extended periods in Tbilisi between 2011 and 2015 from the American Councils / Department of State Title VIII Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union, the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus, the Pew Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania. In Tbilisi, the staff of the Archive Administration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs made my research periods productive, efficient, and enjoyable. I especially thank Ivane Jakhua, Dodo Baghaturia, and director Omari Tushurashvili. My Georgian language teachers Ramaz Kurdadze, Tea Ebralidze, and most of all Nino Sharashenidze equipped me with the tools necessary to carry out the project I envisioned. Frequent conversations about Georgian archives, architecture, history, and memory with Tim Blauvelt, Oliver Reisner, Jeremy Johnson, Angela Wheeler, Giorgi Kldiashvili, Davit Jishkariani, and Levan Asabashvili made for a stimulating intellectual environment in Tbilisi and beyond.

The project also benefited greatly from participation in the following workshops and conferences: Georgian Nationalism and Soviet Power, organized by Jeremy Smith, and the Hoover Institution Workshop on Totalitarian Regimes, organized by Paul Gregory and Mark Harrison. I presented early versions of chapters at the Lithuanian Institute of History (thanks to Vilius Ivanauskas); the Penn Russian Kruzhok and Annenberg Seminar; Harvard Davis Center’s Symposium on Belonging, Politics, and Knowledge in Central Asia and the Caucasus (thanks to Krista Goff and Meltem Sancak); the conference Conflicting Narratives: History and Politics in the Caucasus at the University of Zurich (thanks to Jeronim Perovic); the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus Connections conference at Indiana University and at its Hamilton Lugar School; the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World History; the Caucasus Research Resource Center Works-in-Progress series in Tbilisi; and at various Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) meetings. Feedback from presentations at these and other conferences from Ron Suny, Stephen Kotkin, Jörg Baberowski, Maike Lehmann, Jeremy Smith, James Heinzen, Zbigniew Wojnowski, Krista Goff, Oliver Reisner, Ben Nathans, Kevin Platt, and many others helped improve individual chapters. I am especially grateful for the detailed and thoughtful comments on the entire book manuscript at a critical stage from Peter Holquist, Tim Blauvelt, Erik Scott, and Krista Goff. Further excellent suggestions from anonymous reviewers and the editorial team of Cornell University Press helped tighten and clarify the book’s arguments, as well as broaden its reach. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.

At Cornell University Press, Roger Haydon saw this project’s potential on the eve of his retirement, and I am grateful to Emily Andrew for expertly steering the manuscript process through the review stages and to Bethany Wasik for seeing the book through to publication. I thank Evangeline McGlynn for developing the original maps and Nancy Raynor for her copyediting acumen. A version of chapter 3 appeared as ‘What Are They Doing? After All, We’re Not Germans’: Expulsion, Belonging, and Postwar Experience in the Caucasus, in Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands, ed. Krista A. Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 80–94, and an early version of chapter 4 was published as ‘A Kind of Silent Protest’? Deciphering Georgia’s 1956, in Georgia after Stalin: Nationalism and Soviet Power, ed. Jeremy Smith and Timothy Blauvelt (New York: Routledge, 2015): 92–115. I thank Cornell and Routledge for permission to republish these chapters.

Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies (CERES) has given me an academic home since leaving Penn, thanks to the support of Angela Stent, Jennifer Long, Ben Loring, and Michael David-Fox. I have been fortunate, since 2016, to teach a course on the history of the Caucasus, and my students have, in ways likely unknown to them, substantially improved the book that resulted from our hours together covering the longue durée of the greater Caucasus region. It is a privilege to be back at CERES and Georgetown, where I was an undergraduate and master’s student—and where I first studied Russian and Soviet history thanks to the singular intellect and charisma of the late Richard Stites. My colleagues at McLarty Associates have also supported and improved this book since I rejoined the firm in 2016, in particular by helping me consider the current policy relevance of the history and stories I tell. Nelson Cunningham, Rick Burt, Kellie Meiman, and Lee Feinstein have been invaluable colleagues and mentors, and George Tsereteli has been a great collaborator on all things Georgian at McLarty.

My parents, Paul and Shelley Pogue, nurtured my historical tendencies (and the creative ones of my siblings, Caroline and Parker) from an early age and have provided unwavering support through every stage of this project, including joining me at academic conferences in Indiana and visiting me while I was living in Tbilisi. My husband, Mike, has been a constant source of support and inspiration for this book—and in our life together. I’m grateful that this project was born when our professional worlds serendipitously took us both to Tbilisi in 2011, where we celebrated our first wedding anniversary. I dedicate this book to our sons, Bo and Niko, who encouraged me, in their own ways, to finish this book amid the uncertainties of a pandemic.

Explanatory Notes

Transliteration and Translation

This book incorporates Georgian- and Russian-language sources, as well as names of places and individuals with multiple or contested spellings and transliterations given the multiplicity of local and administrative languages in use in the Caucasus. Russian transliterations follow the Library of Congress system, with exceptions made for more common English-language spellings. Georgian transliterations follow a simplified system familiar in current official and diplomatic discourse that does not distinguish between several Georgian consonants, nor does it deploy diacritical markers. The Georgian language does not use capital letters, a practice I retain in citations for accuracy. I do, however, capitalize most proper nouns in the main text for readers’ ease. I transliterate Georgian names and places into their Georgian variants, and names in Russian, Abkhaz, Ossetian, Armenian, etc., in the Russian transliteration style.

Because the archival trail and its protagonists tell their stories in a mixture of Russian and Georgian, in most cases I use translated abbreviations of Soviet institutions rather than Russian or Georgian versions (e.g., CC for Central Committee rather than TsK or tsk; MFA for Ministry of Foreign Affairs rather than MID). Notable exceptions are the security services (NKVD/MGB/KGB) and the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries and its Georgian branch (VOKS/GOKS), for which I use the more commonly known Russian abbreviations. I also use the Obkom abbreviation (for district committee—oblastnyi komitet) with regard to Abkhazia, as the Abkhazian Obkom of the Georgian Communist Party was the highest party organ in the autonomous republic. I refer to the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast’ (AO), but for other references to the oblast’ level of administration, I use the more neutral district.

Several of the locales discussed in this book went through name changes in the period under examination and/or continue to have disputed nomenclature. For these reasons, I use the common English-language version for Abkhazia (Georgian apkhazeti, Abkhaz Apsny); Sukhumi (Georgian sokhumi, Abkhaz Sukhum); and Tbilisi (called Tiflis until 1936). Abkhazian refers to the territory or institution; Abkhaz refers to the nationality and language. Rather than Mingrelian, I refer to this Kartvelian population as from Samegrelo/Megrelian, which is closer to the Georgian spelling, and to Adjara/Adjaran for the autonomous republic with its capital at Batumi.

Sources

This book draws from extensive research in Georgian- and Russian-language archival holdings, primarily in Tbilisi but also in central collections in Moscow and including some institutions and collections that no other foreign scholar has used to date (such as the Tbilisi Central Archive and Georgian National Academy of Sciences), in addition to more well-known party and security services holdings. The 1991 archival revolution in Soviet history saw a similar effort to move beyond Russian-language sources and perspectives. This book is one of few studies to draw from Georgian sources for the postwar period and thus illustrates a different story when taking non-Russian perspectives into account: Russian proficiency penetrated Georgia less than most other republics, and Georgian often proved a more useful means of discourse than Russian when engaging with co-ethnics in Georgia (and in Moscow). In the post-Stalin era, institutional archival holdings were increasingly in Georgian; they contain surprising candor and nuance in the post-Stalin period, particularly on topics related to nationality, culture, and language.

In addition to the party and government reports, memoranda, and decrees that help construct the political narrative of Soviet Georgian history, I use letters and petitions from citizens to better convey the nuances of the experience of nationality in the postwar Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (GSSR).¹ As historical sources, such letters bear specific merits and caveats. Though a letter conveys opinions of an individual writer or group of writers, the authors were politically engaged enough to send a letter in the first place, making it somewhat difficult to tell just how representative such opinions were within the broader populace. At the same time, similarities between several letters—in diction, appeal, argumentation, or location—suggest the existence of more commonly held beliefs and signal the limits and possibilities of a Soviet Georgian culture and worldview. Signed letters that frequently included detailed contact information suggest that letter writers did not view this action as an act of dissent but one that was firmly within the bounds of their duties as engaged citizens.² Anonymous letters, on the other hand, suggested a fear of reprisal due to the sensitivities of the opinions expressed.

The several hundred letters I analyzed addressed a diversity of issues, citizen positions, and agendas: from deportees advocating return to complaints about the housing list; from defenses of Stalin’s Georgian reputation to appeals to repatriate co-ethnics from abroad; and from protesting a constitutional change about language to complaints about violations of minority rights. Writers were Georgians and non-Georgians, urban and rural, young and old, male and female, and their letters spanned the entire period covered in this book, moving beyond elite perspectives. While I do not claim that these letters represent public opinion writ large or the viewpoint of an ordinary citizen, they still permit us to chart changes over time in the vocabulary, narrative, and argumentation mobilized by diverse citizens attempting—and succeeding—to negotiate Soviet and national forms of belonging. In other words, this helps us to see not just how policymakers approached nationality but also how citizens themselves actually experienced entitled nationhood in Soviet Georgia.

Introduction

Pantheon as Past and Present

In 1929, on the cliffs of Mtatsminda (Holy Mountain) overlooking Tbilisi, the capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic (GSSR), the Georgian Communist Party marked the centenary of the Russian writer and diplomat Alexander Griboedov’s death by inaugurating a pantheon as a symbol of Russian-Georgian friendship at the site where Griboedov and his wife, the Georgian noblewoman Nino Chavchavadze, were laid to rest. A renowned writer and friend of the poet Alexander Pushkin, Griboedov represented Imperial Russia in the Caucasus and Persia, married into the Georgian nobility, and, while serving as the Russian ambassador to Persia, was assassinated at the Russian Embassy in Tehran during negotiations to end the 1828–29 Russo-Persian War that would bring what is today Armenia and Azerbaijan into the Russian Empire. Once his mutilated body was returned to Tbilisi, he was buried ceremoniously at St. David’s monastery on Mtatsminda. A century later, the Russian Empire that Griboedov served had fallen, and an enterprising native of Georgia, Joseph Stalin, had just solidified his power over the young Bolshevik state. The Russian-Georgian relationship that Griboedov embodied would thus need to be recast to fit the ideology and worldview espoused by the world’s first workers’ state.

Map 1: A map of the Georgian SSR (GSSR), with 1957–1991 borders and the Black Sea to the left and Turkey to the southwest.

Map 1. GSSR borders, 1957–1991. Credit: Evangeline McGlynn.

Yet while the Mtatsminda Pantheon shrouded itself in the banner of Russian-Georgian friendship for its opening, it came to encapsulate modern Georgian national history: its origins, transformation, additions, erasures—and omissions. When the pantheon was inaugurated in 1929, it included other Georgian luminaries such as the father of the Georgian nation Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907). In the 1930s, the imperial-era writers Vazha-Pshavela (1861–1915) and Nikoloz Baratashvili (1817–45) and the educator who penned the seminal Georgian-language primer for schoolchildren, Jakob Gogebashvili (1840–1912), were added to the pantheon. When Stalin’s mother, Keke Geladze Jughashvili (b. 1858), died in 1937, she was interred in the pantheon (and remains there today). By the end of its first decade, the pantheon housed Georgia’s cultural giants—writers, poets, and civic leaders of the pre-Soviet era. Beginning in the 1940s, the Old Bolshevik political leaders Georgia Pilipe Makharadze (1868–1941), Mikheil Tskhakaia (1865–1959), and Silibistro Todria (1880–1936) were enshrined on the Mtatsminda mountainside—until 1987, when vandals blew up Makharadze’s tomb. They were joined on Mtatsminda by the Soviet Georgian historians Simon Janashia (1900–1947) and Nikoloz Berdzenishvili (1895–1965), the writer Nodar Dumbadze (1928–84), and other Soviet-era cultural icons of film, theater, and dance. As Georgia began its exit from the Soviet Union, the dissident and national movement leader Merab Kostava entered the pantheon following his suspicious death in a car accident in late 1989. He was joined by his longtime collaborator and the first president of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia (1939–93), who likewise died under mysterious circumstances: only in 2007 was his body prominently reinterred from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, into the pantheon by President Mikheil Saakashvili.

The Mtatsminda Pantheon’s Bolshevik transformation in 1929 was likely inspired by the French example—a revolutionary effort to remake Paris’s church of Sainte-Geneviève into a secular pantheon for the country’s great men.¹ The Soviets initiated plans to create a Moscow Pantheon, to be known as the Monument to the Eternal Glory of the Great People of the Soviet Land, in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953. It was to inter prominent Communists and relocate those already interred along the walls of the Kremlin. Yet the project never moved beyond the planning stage—likely the victim of de-Stalinization and the subsequent shift away from Stalinist monumental architecture.² The Mtatsminda Pantheon was a rare initiative in the Soviet Union: only in neighboring Armenia did a similar effort occur, with the creation of the Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan in 1936. The location of Mtatsminda presented opportunities in the Stalin era to remake the pantheon and its broader neighborhood in Stalin’s image, at the height of the construction of the Stalin cult in Georgia under the guidance of Georgian first secretary Lavrenti Beria. In the 1930s, the revolutionary heritage and corresponding links to Stalin were highlighted for the Mtatsminda neighborhood, as detailed in Beria’s history of the Bolshevik organization in the Caucasus. For a time, Holy Mountain was even renamed Stalin’s Mountain.³

The Mtatsminda Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures, as it is now known, is a snapshot of the modern Georgian nation-building project, even if the site was created and largely populated in the Soviet era—a period that Saakashvili and many of his contemporaries folded into a narrative framework of Russian occupation.⁴ The pantheon features dutiful servants of empire—both Russian and Soviet—alongside prominent voices of dissent. Yet perhaps more illustrative than what the pantheon contains is what it does not. Georgia’s premodern icons, such as St. Nino (who brought Christianity to Georgia in the fourth century), Shota Rustaveli (a medieval lyric poet), and Queen Tamar, remained under the auspices of the church even during the Soviet period, with burial sites and monuments in monasteries and cathedrals across Georgia—and beyond, in the case of Rustaveli (buried in Jerusalem).

Further, some of the best-known political sons of Georgia are not included in the pantheon: the former president of Georgia, Soviet foreign minister, and first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Eduard Shevardnadze, was buried in a family plot at his residence just outside Tbilisi; his predecessors as first secretary, including Lavrenti Beria, likewise did not make it to the pantheon. The remains of Beria, who was executed in 1953, are interred in Moscow, as are the ashes of his onetime patron, leading Caucasian Bolshevik Sergo Orjonikidze (in the walls of the Kremlin) who committed suicide in 1937. Noe Jordania, meanwhile, the Social Democrat who led the independent Democratic Republic of Georgia from 1918 to 1921, fled the Bolshevik advance and never returned to his homeland, dying in Paris in 1953. And finally, Ioseb Jughashvili (known also as Soso, Koba, or Stalin), the most famous son of Georgia, was entombed next to Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square when he died in 1953 and was reburied in an individual grave along the Kremlin Wall in 1961.

Katherine Verdery has argued that dead bodies have an additional advantage as symbols in that they lend themselves particularly well to politics in times of major upheaval.⁵ While Verdery had in mind the context of post-1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe, the example of the Mtatsminda Pantheon reveals a longer-term, evolving conversation about dead body politics in Georgia that closely paralleled projects of nation-building throughout the Soviet century and beyond. Yet this process was more convoluted than constructing and destroying Stalin statues, replacing Lenin Square with Freedom Square, and selectively adding to the pantheon. Georgians constituted a historic nation with religion as the key marker of ethnic identification in the premodern period, and not until the late nineteenth century did a developing national intelligentsia, epitomized by the writer and politician Ilia Chavchavadze, recognize that a Georgian nation centered on culture and language needed to be actively constructed among the territory’s peasant populace. Yet with this basis, how did Soviet policies produce a Georgian Georgia (sakartvelo in Georgian) for the first time in modern history? Ronald Grigor Suny argues that the re-formation of the Georgian nation was the result of a 150-year project, which crystallized in the post-Stalin era.⁶ The Mtatsminda Pantheon, which drew on a pre-Soviet site to create a Soviet national monument to Georgia’s great men (and two women), encapsulates this process—and its continued resonance as a site of Georgian nation-building into the twenty-first century. The pantheon shows the deep integration of Soviet-style national development in a broader trajectory of modern Georgian nationhood. Far from consigning the seven decades of the Georgian SSR’s existence to mere Russian occupation, the pantheon instead centers many of the cultural and political giants of Soviet Georgia. This suggests that service to the Soviet state (even during high Stalinism or through significant ruptures such as de-Stalinization and the Soviet collapse), much like its imperial predecessor, was more than compatible with Georgian nation-building.

Georgian? Soviet? Georgian and Soviet?

The complex history of dead body politics uncovers important questions about identity in an evolving, nation-building state. What did it mean to be Georgian? Soviet? Georgian and Soviet? How and through which mechanisms did these concepts change over time across Georgia’s Soviet century? In particular, how did the rupture of de-Stalinization affect the trajectory of Soviet Georgian nationhood? I argue that the postwar and post-Stalin era was decisive in the creation of a Georgian Georgia owing to not only the peculiar role played by the Stalin cult in the construction of modern Georgian nationhood but also the subsequent changes that de-Stalinization wrought among Georgia’s populace and in the unusual imperial relationship between Moscow and Tbilisi. More broadly, I ask how those individuals or groups who never sought to be a part of the Bolshevik project (a violent, worldwide revolution in the name of the proletariat) came to engage with and become a part of the postwar Soviet project (as active, participatory citizens living in developed socialism).⁷

Georgians were not exceptional in confronting this tension: peasants throughout the country, for example, and other groups resisted Bolshevism (at times violently) yet ultimately came to be, in most cases, archetypal Soviet citizens.⁸ The Soviet experiment provided a unique environment in which to experience a national birth—or rebirth, creating conditions that influenced the senses of belonging and understandings of the Soviet project experienced by the experiment’s children and grandchildren. In the case of Georgia, these conditions ranged from the role of World War II and the cult of Stalin to a perceived loss of Union-wide status among Georgians during de-Stalinization, but with increased latitude for national development in the post-Stalin decades.

Building on a question posed by Bruce Grant in his study of the Nivkh, an ethnic group on Sakhalin Island, I argue that emphasizing the difference between Soviet and national forms of belonging ignores the very mechanisms that enabled the Soviet administration to recruit a patriotic Georgian collective.⁹ If the interwar period was a crucible of nationalities, it was only in the postwar period—and especially after 1956—that we can actually see what kinds of nations emerged from this crucible among second- and third-generation Soviet citizens.¹⁰ Moreover, moving beyond the implicit or explicit assumption that the Soviet Union was Stalinism (by focusing on the 1930s) exposes the surprising variation in community and experience possible in the Soviet half century after Stalin.¹¹ Historians are only beginning to explore the spectrum of national experiences of Soviet citizens in the postwar era.¹² Thus, this book is one of the first among these to examine such postwar developments on the territory of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, drawing from extensive research in Georgian archives and Georgian-language sources.¹³ With limited access to Soviet archives, Ronald Suny laid the groundwork for such an exploration in his longue durée study, The Making of the Georgian Nation, which he wrote in the 1980s and covered the late- and post-Stalin eras only briefly as a result.¹⁴ Stephen Jones, another pathbreaking historian of modern Georgia, has focused his monographs more on the pre- and post-Soviet periods.¹⁵ More recent work by Erik R. Scott has emphasized the important role of the Georgian diaspora in the Soviet empire rather than on the territory of the GSSR itself.¹⁶

The postwar period provides an important starting point for understanding this relationship between identity and nation-building, though for different reasons than one might see in other Soviet republics. Although Georgians experienced some aspects of Soviet socialization through the war effort and military service similar to many other non-Russian Soviet citizens in the face of the Fascist onslaught, the more important opening for Soviet Georgian nation-building came with the turning of the war’s tide in Europe and emerging Cold War environment. The shifting landscape presented new opportunities for Georgians, who benefited both from the Soviet system of nationality entitlements as well as a perception of privilege or status (sensed by Georgians and non-Georgians) because of their national patrons in Moscow, who reached the highest echelons of Soviet power. In the Stalin era generally, Georgians were perceived to have had a special status owing to not only Stalin but also other high-placed Georgian elites in Soviet institutions, the frequent visits of the Soviet leadership to Georgian Black Sea vacation spots, and other factors.¹⁷ This perception of privilege emboldened Georgian nation-building elites (in both Moscow and Tbilisi and in Abkhazia’s capital, Sukhumi) to pursue a series of policies designed to further strengthen Georgians’ position in their own republic, as well as expand their influence beyond Georgia’s borders. Stalin was mourned in Georgia as he was in the rest of the Union when he died in 1953, yet Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization drive launched in 1956 inspired exceptional, and tragic, responses in Georgia, as a nationalized cult of Stalin confronted a significant policy change from Moscow.

When Soviet troops fired on Georgian demonstrators defending Stalin’s national honor in March 1956—preceding by eight months the bloody crackdown in the Soviet Union’s Eastern European empire—it forced a reconsideration of the relationship between the cult of Stalin and Georgian nationhood, ushering in a profoundly different relationship between Moscow and Tbilisi that would endure until the mid-1980s. The events of 1956 and thereafter, I argue, widened the space for national expression and development among Georgia’s entitled nationality, emboldening over time not only ethnic Georgian elites but also—crucially—more popular, grassroots efforts to shape Soviet Georgia for the benefit of its entitled populace, in arenas ranging from language policy to urbanization and planning and compromises between modern Soviet practices and older, local ones. Georgians also mobilized en masse both to defend their language’s status in the republic’s constitution and against calls for Abkhazia’s separation from Georgia. This longer-term process took place under the umbrella of a post-Stalin national-social contract, which saw a more laissez-faire approach from Moscow vis-à-vis Tbilisi in exchange for republic leadership keeping excesses such as the 1956 demonstrations in check. In the Brezhnev era in particular, this national-social contract permitted controlled spheres for the expression of non-Russian national identities at the same time as it cultivated deep, often largely autonomous national republic–level polities.¹⁸ Although Georgians may not have had a national patron in Moscow until Eduard Shevardnadze became Soviet foreign minister in 1985, it was precisely in this period that a hegemony of the entitled Georgian nationality flourished in Georgia. This was Soviet nation-building, kartulad (in the Georgian way). Or, in the succinct words of V. N. Merkviladze, the deputy director of the Georgian Institute of Party History, in 1978, Georgia has never before been as Georgian as Georgia is today.¹⁹

Stalin and Soviet Georgia

More recent biographies of Stalin by Stephen Kotkin and especially Ronald Grigor Suny situate a young Stalin in the imperial and revolutionary Caucasus and examine how experiences in this multiethnic imperial outpost shaped the future Soviet leader.²⁰ By contrast, I ask how Stalin’s influence and cult have shaped modern Georgian nationhood across the twentieth century and especially after his death. As the people’s commissar of nationalities, Stalin exercised considerable power over the process of early Soviet nation-building throughout the young state through border-making, language and orthographic reform, census categorization, history writing, and canon-building. While Georgia received the same Soviet nationality template as other republics—one that was ostensibly national in form, socialist in content—Stalin’s Georgian heritage and intimate knowledge of Caucasian affairs complicated the ways in which conceptions of modern Georgian nationhood were defined, disseminated, popularized, and lived among Georgians, especially after his death in 1953. The Stalin cult was a particular expression of Georgian history and nationality that endured in ways unintended by its creators, just as it complicated the image of Stalin popularized from Moscow of a supranational Russian/Soviet figure and vozhd’ (leader). Not only is it difficult to disentangle Stalin from the process of Soviet Georgian nation-building, but this is also what made the Georgian case exceptional yet allowed Georgia and Georgians to, in a myriad of ways, exert disproportional influence across the Soviet Union and test the local bounds of how a national republic was permitted to behave under the Soviet banner, even after Stalin’s death.

Therefore, I argue that it was both possible and advantageous for members of the entitled nationality to inhabit Soviet and Georgian identity categories simultaneously. Yet being Soviet did not mean being Russian or Russified: the post-Stalin national-social contract in Georgia and increasing hegemony of the entitled nationality in the postwar period meant that Georgians had the most to gain from the republic that Soviets built. And gain they did.

Georgians and Entitled Nationhood

Over the course of the Soviet period, ethnic Georgians comprised between 61 and 70 percent of the GSSR’s population according to all-Union census figures, with significant minority Russian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Greek, Abkhaz, and Ossetian populations—the latter two with their own autonomous territories. Though Georgians had an influential diaspora, an overwhelming majority of ethnic Georgians in the USSR resided in Georgia throughout the Soviet period (more than 95 percent).²¹ These factors affected the positioning and points of reference for Georgians as their republic’s entitled nationality.

I use the term entitled (rather than the more customary titular) to refer to the status of ethnic Georgians in the GSSR (and the Abkhaz in the Abkhazian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic [ASSR], Armenians in the Armenian SSR, etc.). The entitlement terminology embraces both the statistical and legal implications of living in one’s own territory, endowing such individuals with special rights and privileges to which they could appeal in a variety of ways. Entitled nationals in the Soviet Union not only enjoyed such privileges in theory—or merely by default—they likewise demanded these rights in practice. In the case of Georgia, the Stalin divide also reflected a shift in how members of the entitled nationality made claims to entitlements: in the high- and late Stalin era, Georgians (and, in particular, Georgian elites) appealed to patrons in Moscow precisely because they were co-ethnics. After 1956, however, a wider array of Georgians instead increasingly appealed to Soviet institutions as engaged citizens, calling for the state to adhere to the rights promised to entitled nationalities rather than simply by virtue of powerfully placed patrons in Moscow. The form and audience of these demands evolved over the course of the Soviet experiment, yet citizens consistently drew from foundational reference points in Marxist-Leninist texts on the national question and the various iterations of Soviet constitutions (in their all-Union and republic variants) as they made their rights-based claims along national lines. Over time, members of the entitled nationality acted less like imperial subjects than engaged citizens, viewing their entitled status not only as the right to have rights but, more important, as "the right to claim rights," as Frederick Cooper describes a key function of citizenship.²² In some ways, entitled Soviet nations recalled the structure of titled nobility seen in the Russian Empire generally but of more consequence in this instance in local variants of Georgian nobility that developed from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and retained their titled status even after incorporation into the Russian Empire.²³ The intent of Soviet national entitlement, of course, fundamentally differed from that of its imperial precursor, yet both can be viewed as foundational hierarchies that shaped socioeconomic and center-periphery relations, as well as national and supranational conceptions of belonging.

Although all non-Russian Soviet citizens were entitled, at least on paper, to certain rights and privileges on the basis of nationality, as ethnophilia gave way to more support for a smaller number of entitled nationalities by the late 1930s, a republic-level hierarchy of rights likewise emerged along these lines.²⁴ In other words, Georgians would enjoy more rights than did other nationalities within the GSSR—to education, career paths and party membership, housing, national expression, etc. This was not a one-off policy that lost relevance over time, nor was it an automatic handout to members of the entitled nationality. On the contrary, entitled Georgians actively claimed these rights for themselves and tested the extent to which their reach could be expanded to autonomous regions within Georgia, and even to other republics and abroad. Moreover, claims to rights based on entitled nationality were far from static: indeed, for Georgia, the rupture wrought by Stalin’s death and de-Stalinization policies—and attendant changes in the Moscow-Tbilisi relationship—also shifted the means, form, and tenor of Georgian rights claims while revealing the instability of center and periphery in the Soviet Caucasus.

As a system, entitled nationality was