History-Making in the Soviet Union

No discussion of the interrelation between history-making, power structures, and national elites can take place without reference to the practices shaped by the communist regime. Regimes of power in the Soviet Union involved an elaborate machinery for manufacturing the historical past. The policy of korenyzacia or “nativization” has created exceptional conditions for harvesting national and ethnic memories. But during the rise of post-Soviet (or even Soviet) nationalism, making or re-making “national histories” became one of the most important instruments for sustaining claims of political legitimacy and at times altogether inventing traditions of peoplehood (for select literature, see Kitaevich Reference Kitaevich2014; Shnirelman Reference Shnirelman, Smith, Law, Wilson, Bohr and Allworth1998; Suny Reference Suny1993; Wertsch Reference Wertsch2000). Scholarship on post-Soviet transformation has shown how the mobilization of historical memories served elites of titular nations to consolidate populations around nationalist goals (see for example Cherchi and Manning Reference Cherchi and Manning2002), and later to draw or redraw national boundaries, while at the same time sustaining the discourse of resistance and dissent within and between states.

Georgia has followed this “transitional” path in many ways, but its tradition of discursive engagement with historical myths has antecedents in pre-Soviet times as well. This is especially evident when one juxtaposes contemporary political discourse with the rhetorical forms and discursive tropes emerging in 19th-century print media, literature, and poetry (Batiashvili Reference Batiashvili2018). Logically so, since memory-making is most acutely needed at the inceptive moments of nation-making, and it is here, in colonial Georgia, that we see a foreign-educated intellectual elite engaging the distant past in its attempt to forge a nation and carve out a national public out of a colonial periphery (Manning Reference Manning2004, Reference Manning2011; Reisner Reference Reisner2009).

Much attention has been paid to the primordialist discourses mobilized in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse and to how nationalist agendas have shaped not only state-ordained memory projects, but also the practice of historiography in general (Kuzio Reference Kuzio2002; Sanjian Reference Sanjian2009; Schwartz and Ramzik Reference Schwartz and Panossian1994; Smith Reference Smith2004; Suny Reference Suny1993). In this process, intelligentsia—a quasi-class formation of intellectuals ambiguously placed between the “state” and the “people”—has held (and to this day holds) an important role in constructing nationalist ideologies. Certainly, not in Georgia alone, but throughout the vast post-Soviet space, intelligentsia has proven to represent an important social node in both the making and unmaking of nationalism, especially through its insistent participation in politics and in memory politics (Raleigh Reference Raleigh1989; Shnirelman Reference Shnirelman2009; Tromly Reference Tromly2014). At the same time, within the same milieu of post-Soviet transformation, the newly emerging western-educated intellectuals, who some identify as the “new intellectuals” (Antonyan Reference Antonyan2016; Shatirishvili Reference Shatirishvili2003), are attempting to create new conditions and idioms of national self-conception. In that, memory-(re)making figures as a distinctive practice for enacting its own cultural role and critically engaging the intelligentsia’s ideological models embedded in the Soviet historiographic tradition.

Who Needs Memory and When?

“Myth … is the language of argument, not a chorus of harmony,” noted Edmund Leach (Reference Leach1954, 278), and his point goes along with the contexts in which mythic representations of the national past surface in public arenas. The mythic nature of these modes of discourse is defined not so much by what they state about the past, how they obscure or manufacture the history, but by how they metaphorically frame reality and create linkages between present threats, given political challenges and abstract historical images. This is, in essence, what Carlo Ginzburg (Reference Ginzburg1980) describes as “the sense of proximity to the people of the past”—something that distinguishes memory as a cultural practice from the history as an academic discipline (quoted in Wineburg Reference Wineburg2001, 10) Cultural instruments that create patterned representations of the past, such as narratives, frames, rhetorical tropes, play a key role in sustaining and mediating historical memories, and it is because of this symbolic mediation that we can talk about the mnemonic continuity between 19th-century rhetorical practices and contemporary memory discourse. Georgian “memoryscape” (Cole Reference Cole2001) is a symbolic field of culturally prefixed meanings and connotations, and they bear upon any dispute with a certain kind of force and gravity because of the inevitable bond between national identity and historical memories. This is to say that political thought—the conceptual frames within which nationhood and national politics are conceptualized—creates what linguist Charles Fillmore (Reference Fillmore1985) calls a common “semantic field” with widely shared historical narratives.

This is why I approach memory not so much as a catalogue of historical representations, but as a rhetorical resource that grounds political thought and ideological disputes in the culturally prefigured symbolics that perpetuate national self-awareness. George Lakoff (Reference Lakoff2009) explains the principle of American political thought by exploring the role of metaphors, such as a family metaphor for instance, in structuring political thinking and public attitudes. Memory narratives in Georgian political discourse function as such metaphorical instruments that structure cognitive frames within which politics can be understood, interpreted, and made sense of. So, “history” at times is evoked in political speeches not for the sake of commemoration, but to give meaning to words through a culturally authoritative truth.

If looked at from this perspective, it is easy to understand why political elites, intelligentsia, and intellectuals cling to this particular “language of argument” (Leach Reference Leach1954) to shape public opinion on politically and geopolitically challenging matters. This is so not only because they see through the force and power of this cultural resource, but because their political thought is, in its own right, shaped by these representational modes. This is what I argue throughout this article—that despite ideological frictions and gaps in social positioning between the soviet intelligentsia and the new intellectuals, their political thought on the nationhood is essentially shaped by the same symbolic form and is much closer to one another than each of them imagines. In particular, what ultimately shapes nationally oriented political thinking is the vision of the national public and the mode of discursive engagement with this very public. It is here, in this didactic dialogue with their imagined public, that intellectuals resort to memory as an enticing idiom of identity. This is what we see unravel in state-driven attempts to fix public “mentality” through the idiom of memory that grounds political imagination in the distant realities of the past. Why? Because paradoxically this very distance in time is what eliminates the distance between the addresser and the addressee, because references to the past are supposed to trigger nationalist sentiments that in turn call for particular kinds of political attitudes and civic action in the present.

When and How Can History Fix Public Mentality?

It was in the aftermath of the five-day war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 (Asmus Reference Asmus2010; Jones Reference Jones2010; Toal Reference Toal2012) that an initiative to supplement high school curriculum with the history of the “200 Years of Georgian Occupation” rolled out among the political elites and settled on the agenda of the Ministry of Education. The idea sprang not out of the urge to counterposit Russia’s infringing narrative (Wertsch and Batiashvili Reference Wertsch, Batiashvili, Markova and Gillespie2012) with the nationally crystalized truth, but to dismantle the doubt and ambivalence within the Georgian public itself and to consolidate the country as a single “mnemonic community” (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel2003) Why? Because despite the solid ground that the myth of Georgians’ steadfast resistance and unwavering defiance in the face of all foreign invasions has in the national imagination (see Batiashvili Reference Batiashvili, Assmann and Shortt2012; Wertsch and Batiashvili Reference Wertsch, Batiashvili, Markova and Gillespie2012), much of the public discourse has focused on questioning the sanity of going to war with a giant like Russia. Premised on the arguments of realpolitik, pragmatics, Orthodox brotherhood, cultural affinity, or historical sanguinity, these voices spoke against the geopolitical course chosen by Saakashvili’s administration and stood in the way of Georgia’s European aspirations.

The initiative that in 2010 materialized into a government resolution stated that Georgia’s National Science Fund (Rustaveli Fund, hereafter RF) was to announce a competition for the production of a “thematic” history textbook on Russian–Georgian relations. The group of historians who was eventually granted the award had a solid footing in carrying out state-ordained and politically motivated historical projects. More importantly, this group was composed of historians who considered themselves distinctly motivated by the national interests and envisioned “history” teaching as one of the most significant instruments for both identity-carving and mentality-mending. This is why they took on the task of writing a textbook that would serve national interests in one of the most critical and challenging moments in the history of modern Georgian statehood.

This entire project was carried out with a sense of emergency triggered by the political crisis. Vaja, one of the two authors of the textbook, made a point of this pressing urgency during our interview at the History Institute:

Despite the rush and the urgency, this textbook never saw the light of day, nor did the rival textbook supervised by Bendukidze, different drafts of which still sit on the desk of the Free University’s publishing manager. Amendments to the national curriculum that Saakashvili’s administration intended to make waned away with the shift in power that took place in 2012. The fate of this history textbook project stands as an epitome of modern Georgian politics: politically or rather geopolitically driven intellectual projects that are deferred due to elitist frictions and pigeonholed as a result of the power shifts that have been shaping the fluctuating social, political, and intellectual landscape of the transitional nation-state.

The anxieties and worries that imprinted the vision of the historians and intellectuals working on the textbooks (as I found out during my interviews) are in their own right historically embedded in many respects—shaped by the experiences of intelligentsia historians in the Soviet system, their vulnerable position in the “transitional” context (especially in relation to the newly emerging elites), but also by most recent fluctuating attitudes concerning Russian–Georgian relations among the wider public. An excerpt from their grant proposal speaks to some of these points, most importantly it demonstrates the extent to which this historical project was aligned with the state agenda and national interests:

The very first paragraph of the history textbook written by intelligentsia historians (Vaja and Dodo)Footnote ³ reveals the extent to which they rely on the narrative template (see Batiashvili Reference Batiashvili, Assmann and Shortt2012; Wertsch and Batiashvili Reference Wertsch, Batiashvili, Markova and Gillespie2012) that underlies most representations of the past and perpetuates Georgian historical consciousness at least since the 19th century, but has been mostly shaped by national historiography of the Soviet period. The moralizing impulse (White Reference White and Mitchell1981) that Vaja and Dodo invoke to address their readers in the foreword of the textbook is an attribute of the national narrative of which this passage is a typical instantiation:

Evident from these introductory passages is the emphasis on Georgia’s victimization at the hands of Russia, and the accent is on the resistance and self-sacrifice of Georgians. It stresses Georgian rulers’ benevolent intent in seeking alliance with the Orthodox power in their struggle to defend Christianity against Muslim invaders. This introduction dialogizes multiple voices present in the contemporary discursive domain but responds to them by framing the argument according to the Georgian national narrative (Batiashvili Reference Batiashvili, Assmann and Shortt2012). The phrase “on the example of one of our invaders” is a figurative speech element that prompts any Georgian reader to recall the rest of “our invaders” and evaluate the present actor—Russia—not in isolation, but as part of the “genera.” The tactic of persuasion that the authors employ here relies on indirect insistence to hint how things must be judged, and this speech genre bases its persuasive power on the “moral impulse” (White Reference White and Mitchell1981) of the historical narrative.

Based on the analysis of historical representations, it can be plausibly argued that while the Georgian national narrative emphasizes heroism, unity, and resistance in fighting every foreign invasion, it also makes a point of friction, treason, and collaboration as one of the recurring motifs in structuring the historical narrative. These two motifs stand for virtues and vices of the national character but serve as interpretive mechanisms—one for the success of cultural preservation, another for the failure to withstand political disintegration. All in all, these two motifs yield certain “bivocality” to the Georgian national narrative (Batiashvili Reference Batiashvili2014) and function as discursive “voices” (in a Bakhtinian sense)—self-idealizing and self-condemning—that pattern discursive habits on the nationhood.

While throughout our interview, Vaja pointed out examples of collaborationism, highlighted the “dualistic nature” of Georgians, their inclination to “give in” and “give up,” when discussing the content of the textbook, he explained why he thought silencing these vices and accenting the voice of idealism was important in the present context:

Vaja believed in what Ilia Chavchavadze, the founding father of Georgian nationalism, wrote in his 1888 text that “when a nation remembers stories of great deeds, it is revamped, encouraged and inspirited … [it] fights steadily, embraced with an example of its ancestors and their will, and only such a relentless fighter gets to keep a playground to itself.” Further comments by Vaja and Dodo were triggered by the events of 1832 Georgian conspiracy against Russian imperialist regime. That attempted rebellion failed as a result of betrayal by the brother of one of the conspirators, but it remains a topic of lively discussion as an iconic narrative of both Georgians’ patriotic self-sacrifice and betrayal from the intimate circle of insiders. This is a point that emerged in their discussion.

If Vaja and Dodo believed that in order to defy Georgia’s current predicament, a historical account must posit a model that reaches out toward an absolute ideal, the group of liberal intellectuals working under Bendukidze was convinced of the very opposite. Their textbook begins its narration of Russian–Georgian relations by presenting a jarring image of Georgians. The opening chapter recasts first several encounters between Russians and Georgians over the course of centuries. Historical episodes are not discussed or analyzed but merely recalled in a general discussion on the topic of the origins of Russian–Georgian relations. The very first image recalled is an episode verified in the work History by Armenian historian Stephen of Taron. In this connection, the author of the textbook’s introductory chapter writes:

Unlike the attempts of Soviet-generation historians to cultivate heroic sentiments and the “spirit of resistance” (White Reference White and Mitchell1981), here we see denigration of the Georgians’ image through a parabolic story, the moral impulse (White Reference White and Mitchell1981) that must be used to convey the irrationality with which Georgians have handled relations with Russians, even before those relations had properly developed. Contrary to the textbook written by intelligentsia historians that posits a model of distant idealism as an example to aspire to, the rival textbook was conceived and intended as a “lesson of mistakes”—“mistakes” that, nevertheless, were envisioned within the frame of the existing narrative structure. Many passages from the textbook drafts, discussions, and deliberations that took place throughout the three-year-long working process and the material chosen to go into the book are a testament to this.Footnote ⁵ This is how one of the members of Bendukidze’s group framed the goal of this textbook:

Much like in Ana’s statement, throughout the interviews I conducted with other members of Bendukidze’s group, they all kept coming back to and stressing the notion of “realistic history.” “Realism” in this discourse denoted something very specific: more emphasis on the historically recurring incidents of treason and collaboration—something that I saw just as much in Soviet generation historians’ private discourse as in the discussions of Bendukidze’s group. The difference was that only the liberal intellectuals deemed it necessary to make this kind of “realistic history” part of the school education and thus essential to the process of citizen’s socialization. This is how Bendukidze articulated this sentiment:

As a conceptual category “realistic history,” while it may embody illusory visions of how the past can be analyzed and written down, stands for something that is intrinsic to the worldview and the social positioning of these intellectuals. This in turn is in stark contrast with the intelligentsia’s outlook, especially from where it is and has been sociopolitically positioned. “Realistic history” is an offshoot—a derivative concept bred from the visions of modern civic consciousness. Why? Because it bases its narrative on a critical (as opposed to an idolizing) approach to nationhood and thus prompts its subject toward a rational basis of self-assurance, rather than idealizing self-abstraction. Bendukidze’s quote above on the mission of general education and history curriculum is an ample demonstration of this point. But while civic consciousness, in and of itself, should have no business with mythic realities of the past, intellectuals’ conception of what engraining civic mentality in its political subjects entails is inevitably linked to the pre-existing cultural frames of political address and thus is molded in this shape. This is so because of a longstanding discursive tradition that goes back to the 19th-century founding fathers, which brings memory schemas to the forefront of the political rhetoric.

At the same time, it makes sense in the context of sociopolitical settings within which liberal intellectuals are placed that they stress (and stress over) the notion of civic consciousness as an indispensable aspect of statehood in an aspiring democratic state. Against that, the natural inclination of the intelligentsia is to cling to abstract, idealist visions of national selfhood and be entirely ignorant of the state consciousness of that level. This inclination can be understood as part of the social habitus (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977) among the Soviet-shaped intelligentsia, who were advantageously positioned, yet not in an independent polity but a colonized society, and given power to act for the state, yet induced to camouflage its servitude (see the following section). Thus, disjuncture between intelligentsia’s disinterest in producing the linkage between civic morality and historical consciousness, as opposed to liberal intellectuals’ effort to overturn abstract idealism, is not incidental but is existentially induced.

However, as pointed out earlier, despite the diverting outlooks and approaches to the uses of the past, the two groups share a common cultural ground in their approach to memory as an important medium for “fixing” Georgian mindsets. They were united in the belief that re-projecting the past can create a realm of different order for transcending limitations of existence (Booker Reference Booker2004). This brings us back to the question of friction—the underlying historical legacy of the elitist formations, the tradition of debates that have been shaping these social formations ever since the Imperialist regime and the cultural semantics that define both the idiom of the disputes and the contested visions of the national public that these elites have been upholding and reinforcing. Much of this only makes sense if the phenomenon of intelligentsia and the tradition of politically engaged intellectuals is pictured in a historical context.

Old Intelligentsia and the New Elite

Anthropological approaches to the study of elites are focused on the discursive practices and frameworks that define elites and are oriented toward delving into the cultural and historical contexts that perpetuate their acquired social status and power roles (Nugent and Shore Reference Nugent and Shore2002; Oushakine Reference Oushakine2009; Salverda and Abbink Reference Salverda, Abbink, Abbink and Salverda2013; Verdery Reference Verdery1991). This article builds on this body of scholarship to further point out the significance of the discursive practices and frameworks of thought that perpetuate the nature and function of national elites. Most significantly it is through these habits of discourse that we can see how elites relate to the public and in doing that define the nationhood both in a critically engaging and an idealizing manner. While some culturalist approaches define intelligentsia as “a culturally homogenous stratum of educated people united by charismatic feelings and a certain set of values” (Gella Reference Gella1971, 1), this article suggests that the intelligentsia is neither homogenous nor united in its values. Nevertheless, I try to point to the consistency and coherence even within distinct and counteracting national elites, in (a) how they define nationhood, (b) how they envision the national public, and (c) how they interfere with what they consider to be dominant public attitudes.

In outlining these similarities, I find the legacies of both imperial rule and the Soviet regime to be implicative of these forms of intellectual practices. It is the peculiar link between state power and intellectuals—their awkward position between people and the regime—that is definitive in their social function, but above all it is the disintegrating order and dissolution of the meanings that shape intelligentsia anguishes and anxieties in the context of post-Soviet transformation (Oushakine Reference Oushakine2009). It is here that we see newly emerging intellectuals (only part of which are represented here by Bendukidze’s group) being set as promulgators of the new system of values and embodiments of the altering social and political order. Part of old generation intelligentsia—cemented to the old practices yet aligned with the new institutional agendas—found themselves stuck in the disorder of counteracting moral orders and structures of meanings. My conversation with the historians in the old building of the History Institute are exceptionally revealing of the anguishes of those who have been lost in this “moral disorder” (Atwood Reference Atwood2006):

Dodo’s monologue is a compilation of fragmentary references to the chain of texts and networks of discourses that comprised Georgia’s political debate and geopolitical challenge at the time. Her evocations echo the very core of social processes and ideological drifts that the post-Soviet transformation entailed in the Caucasus, especially for such a quasi-class formation that the Soviet intelligentsia represents. What is most critical in her words is how she makes use of the geopolitically shaped disputes to place her own role and mission in a structurally meaningful schema. When doing that, her monologue turns into a disjointed and unfiltered, yet somewhat insightful, ethnography of the social structure and the existential setting in which Soviet generation intelligentsia found itself in a modernizing, “Western-oriented” Georgia.

These anxieties over being associated with the machinery of Soviet power are explicit in Dodo’s words, especially when she mentions allegations of being linked to parthistory and komsomol made against her in a competing setting for a RF grant. At the same time she distances herself from “intelligentsia” as a dominantly pro-Russian stratum of the society while defining her own views in terms of civic and state loyalty. Nevertheless, Dodo herself could be attributed to this very stratum by most markers, including professional experience, social alignment, and relations to power. This should become more evident from the ensuing discussion on the history and social function of the intelligentsia, especially if we acknowledge that intelligentsia should not be understood as a single concept or group but as a shifting and evolving web of groups and institutions (Gordin and Hall Reference Gordin, Hall and Kozhevnikov2008).

At the same time, what fosters some of Dodo’s anxieties over being stigmatized as a Soviet historian is the deflating status of the intelligentsia in relation to the rampant progression of the new breed of intellectual elites. It is the ways in which intelligentsia is critically defined in the new intellectuals’ discourse (at times referred to as “Red Intelligentsia” or “Soviet intelligentsia” in a denigrating context) that causes someone like Dodo to have these feelings of unsettlement. In turn, new intellectuals explain and justify their antagonistic attitudes toward older-generation intellectuals by what they often define as a “double moral standard” by which intelligentsia lived in USSR.

In fact, Intelligentsia held no trivial position within the structure of Soviet power. Directly or indirectly, it carried out immensely valuable work for the functioning of the political regime and ideology. But unlike the conventional class, for whom material base is the ultimate provision for its superior position in society, the intelligentsia operated through a distinctly soviet mechanism of social functioning, which meant that its boundaries lay across several layers of national and transnational orders and were hardly ever defined by economic markers. Such ambivalence for defining one’s belonging or nonbelonging had a dual effect: on one hand, one was always uncertain and anxious about gaining and losing this favorable position. Its rules of existence lay outside its own power. But on the other hand, because its relation to the state had always been indirect, obscured, and camouflaged, links to power could never guarantee anyone’s inteligentnost’.

This was the case above all because in the Soviet Union any affiliation to the political establishment could be instantly removed at the whim of the powerful. Stalin’s oscillating attitude toward the intelligentsia—his drastic reversals from hostility to contentment—is one important aspect of this instability of their status (Tromly Reference Tromly2014). This is why, it seems to me, constant worry and anguish over some (national, cultural, civilizational, spiritual, etc.) threat became one of the definitive aspects of the intelligentsia’s public presence, both during the Soviet and post-Soviet times. It is through publicly expressed worries, as Tamta Khalvashi (Reference Khalvashi2015) has also pointed out in her insightful description of the urban shifts in Ajara, that the intelligentsia performatively enacts its social function to this day.

What is most distinct about the intelligentsia’s role, social function, and ties to power is its ambivalent position. Kirill Maslov (Reference Maslov2015) makes a point of this when he describes intelligentsia as a paradoxical formation that within the Soviet system represented “neither class, nor party.” The intelligentsia was invented for the proletariat’s upward mobility, which was supposed to produce a social layer of administrative and specialist groups drawn from the lower classes devoted to Soviet power (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick1979). But in different places, cultural and political preconditions played distinctly into the weaving of this social fabric. For instance, Georgian intelligentsia of the Soviet period, at least partially, descended from the 19th-century colonial intelligentsia, which in turn arose out of the urban gentry (Reisner Reference Reisner2009). This is why aristocratic heritage has functioned as an additional token of privilege and distinctness among circles of the Georgian intelligentsia (Manning Reference Manning2004, Reference Manning2011).

Hence, membership in this mutated form of class was determined by vague and arbitrary criteria and was far from being egalitarian (Narvselius Reference Narvselius2012). As Eleonora Narvselius points out in her study of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, their “actual sociocultural position in the state socialist system was in discord with their self-proclaimed position as a cultural elite” (2012, 118). In other words, during the Soviet period the intelligentsia enacted a public space of double allegiance: on one hand it served the Soviet system of hierarchy as its “manipulated instrument of manipulation” (Narvselius Reference Narvselius2012, 118); on the other hand, it charged itself with the role of a patriotic cultural guardian and later on, during late Socialism and the emergence of nationalism, became the locus of exclusivist nationalist discourse while maintaining its privileged status within the state structure (Dudwick Reference Dudwick1994).

Perhaps, this dualism could be explained not only in terms of Soviet system and tactics of rule, but in terms of how throughout distinct historical epochs intellectual elites in Russia (or the Russian domain) had to alternate between different grounds depending on how they were drawn into or against the servitude of the state. For instance, Peter the Great “recruited” intellectuals for advancing the social foothold of his great civilizing mission (Schimmelpenninck van der Oye Reference Schimmelpenninck van der2010), but since Catherine II the intelligentsia formed a subculture that resisted Tsarism and opposed class privileges.

However, early in Soviet Russia, the intelligentsia became the indispensable link between “the proletariat” and “the party” for carrying out the role of a Commissioner of Enlightenment and mostly stood as the medium of power for forming model soviet citizens. For example, Anatoly Lunacharsky (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick1971; O’Connor Reference O’Connor1980) played a crucial part in raising education on the agenda of the Bolshevik party and laid the foundation for the intelligentsia’s participation in mediating power and culture, while he tried to reconcile and ease the tension between party and nonparty elites.

While some authors view the relationship between the party and the intelligentsia in terms of tension, it might be plausible to suggest that a somewhat symbiotic mutuality existed between the two. Even though the party never fully trusted the intellectual elite, in fact at different stages Soviet state employed intelligentsia for the advancement of its ideology and proliferation of ideas that inversely and indirectly reinforced its power, including the forms of nationalism that we saw unravel before the collapse of the USSR.

By giving the illusion of freedom, the Party had made the intelligentsia one of its most loyal and tamed subjects. Ethnic and nationalist discourses played very distinctly into this illusion. In particular, academia and the domain of science (as well as art and theater) functioned as the main mechanisms for substantiating the intelligentsia’s double allegiance. While everything was state sanctioned and censored, scholarship and scientific institutions operated on the national level and were oriented toward nationalist goals, such as creating and proliferating knowledge on ethnic, folk, and national culture. In turn, this tradition of cultivating academic disciplines oriented on self-knowledge and auto-description had its roots in imperial politics of knowledge production in the colonies. But in the Soviet Union this rooted principle of colonial governmentality found very specific ramifications especially in the milieu of Korenyzatsia (Nativization) Policy (see Manning Reference Manning, van Assche, Salukvadze and Shavishvili2009; Slezkine Reference Slezkine1994). For instance, history textbooks, while they were framed in terms of Marxist ideology as an overall framework, material dialectism served to cloak or camouflage national histories propagating historical narratives with nationalist sentiments and accents on cultural particularism.

To this day, many Georgians, but most importantly historians, pride themselves on this art of camouflaging that is regarded to have been employed as a “weapon of the weak” (J. C. Scott Reference Scott1985)to resist dominant idioms of the Soviet truth. But “the truth” was far more complex because of the complex and at times countervailing systems of order through which Soviet state operated. Nationalism did not just slip through the filters of power, but it was very much harnessed by it (Brubaker Reference Brubaker1996; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005; E. R. Scott Reference Scott2016).

Many reasons could be the cause of this seemingly contradictory nature of the Soviet elite. Erik Scott (Reference Scott2016), for instance, makes a compelling point that the Socialist state invested resources to produce highly educated national cadres to serve its own agenda of “domestic internationalism.” With that, in Scott’s view, the Soviet state in effect produced its own intellectual opponents. Artists, writers, and scientists, concerned with the issues of cultural authenticity, artistic autonomy, scientific truth, or human rights, aptly resorted to nationalist themes to voice their worries. This was perhaps only one aspect of how nationalism came to be harbored among Soviet intellectuals in Georgia. The Soviet policy of nationalities, in my view, provided more pressing incentives for cultivating nation-centered knowledge and discourses (see, for instance, Hirsch Reference Hirsch2005). As a result, it is because of this sense of a mission invested in history writing in the colonial context, that today, the tradition of patriotic historiography perpetuates professional practice among intelligentsia historians.

“This is the trouble with our historians [of the old generation],” Bendukidze once noted. “They have a mission … and this was invented in the 19th century that we now have to impose on people the myth of a united, strong Georgia [and] with that we will be able to form a united Georgian nation” (personal communication 2013). Bendukidze’s words exemplify the critical and at times cynical view that Georgia’s new political and intellectual elite held against the intelligentsia’s habits of thought. They devised the term “intelligentsia” as a diffuse category to signify the source of an individual’s symbolic capital (education and career path) (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1986), as well as a “nationalist mentality” or thinking pattern different from their own.

Crucially, it must be emphasized that the intelligentsia never existed as a single self-structuring totality or a monolithic entity. In Georgia, perhaps just as much as in Russia, Soviet-era intellectual and cultural elite could at least be divided into the two big clusters of the universalists and nationalists, with the latter emerging especially in the context of the late Soviet socialism. Evolution of the intelligentsia’s internal structure underwent even more dramatic rifts and tremors after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Georgia, in particular, both the national movement and the civil war that broke out in the early 1990s could be described in terms of the tensions and clashes between distinct lineages and clans of intelligentsia representatives. Georgia’s first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who was himself a member of the prominent intelligentsia family, scolded his own social category under the tag of “red intelligentsia” as traitors collaborating with Russian secret agencies. In the following periods of Eduard Shevardnadze’s and Mikheil Saakashvili’s administrations, distinct, mutually clashing, and counteracting intelligentsia clans could be identified as either aligning with the state power or railing against it. Remarkably, the lines of division remained to be fluid and shifting, throughout these periods. Constant regrouping and re-assembling across distinct lineages, clans, and networks of the intelligentsia are and were inherent to Georgia’s sociopolitical landscape. Hence, the division between two elitist groups that this article examines is in part due to these social shifts and movements that prevailed throughout the last decades of Georgia’s political life.

In contrast to the term “intelligentsia,” the notion of “intellectual” wakes associations with new forms of knowledge and cultural capital stemming from the Western-oriented geopolitical alignments. Intellectuals have allegiances and affiliations with a different symbolic market and different ideologies of power. As Narvselius explains, “Unlike intelligentsia this term lacks a connotation of belonging to a community of ascribed virtues and, in principle, the core criterion distinguishing the intellectual is his or her outstanding ability of critical reflection” (2012, 121). But in the definition of intellectuals I would emphasize the role of their affinity with Western intellectual discourses and distinctly non or anti-Soviet patterns of thinking. Their political ideology is less explicitly oriented on nationalist ideals and is more reliant upon idioms that criticize ethno-nationalist visions and work toward the advancement of democratic forms of citizenship. But while it is through this idiom, through borrowing from discourses of Western democratic model, that the new elite distances itself from the older-generation intelligentsia, its practice of engagement with the national public is just as much entrenched in the culturally and historically prefixed discourses of intellectuals.

While part of the new intellectuals emerged out of the milieu of NGOs established through US or EU funds, many of them are embedded in the existing elitist networks. This is true for most of the newly emerging intellectuals and most members of Bendukidze’s group as well. Yet, this newly emerging intellectual elite has defined its role, function, and identity through the political processes oriented toward Georgia’s democratization, Europeanization, and modernization. Their presence in the public arena was either defined in terms of association with Saakashvili’s team of reformers or by the connection with western NGOs and international organizations promoting democracy in a post-Soviet space.

Many of these organizations have played a crucial role in advancing processes leading to the Rose Revolution in 2003 and continued their social activism for the advancement of civic institutions. It was this network of civic actors in Georgia who played a significant part in carrying out educational reform, advancing multiculturalist agenda, propagating religious tolerance, and fighting for the pluralistic media.

Yet the dualism and ambivalence we spoke of earlier are just as much part of the new elite’s existence as they are of the old one. Being in a vulnerable position within power institutions and a shifting political climate is one aspect of this positional ambivalence; another has to do with cultural and ideological dualisms—something that this article seeks to bring to light. The ideological clash that at different stages of Georgia’s recent history played out between Soviet generation intelligentsia and the new intellectuals found its expression in the language of nationalism, allegiances to the homeland, and Georgian traditions and cultural values (see Batiashvili Reference Batiashvili, Assmann and Shortt2012 for a specific debate on history textbooks and curriculum reform). The Georgian nationalist intelligentsia armed with patriotic vocabulary often accuses Western intellectuals of a lack of devotion to the homeland, pure Georgian traditions, and conservative religious values. The intelligentsia charges them with adhering to universal, globalizing ideas that are threatening to the purity of Georgian culture.

In response to this, the new intellectuals criticize the intelligentsia for its double moral standards—standards that reflect the intelligentsia’s historically shaped dual position: “quasi-nationalists” who participated in the Soviet system and “collaborated” in the reproduction of the “occupant’s” regime. When explaining why knowing “right” history is important, one of my respondents (from the group of intellectuals writing the history textbook on the 200 years of occupation) critically commented on the intelligentsia’s role in Georgian politics:

Ana’s response points to the fact that quite often these ideological battles are also sites for contesting the right to control the dominant cultural forms that dictate social norms to the Georgian public (Verdery Reference Verdery1991). Thus, contests over history textbooks and memory narratives are inherently political and embody conflicting desires on social order in the actual present and in the absolute future. If not always explicit, “historical consciousness” (or the lack of “correct” historical consciousness) is always implied as an underlying matrix of cultural “mentality” and the discourse on memory frequently turns into an instrumental site for judging present political realities.

Pointing to the distinct intellectual legacies and status quos that shaped intelligentsia versus intellectual worldviews seems like a plausible explanation for the existing ideological and cultural chasms. Yet, there is in fact a common cultural premise to the “political” habits of old and new generation intellectuals, habits of national thought, and habits of engaging the notion of the national public. Going back to a discussion on a counter history textbook project where the intelligentsia attempts to write traditional accounts of a heroic past were criticized as deluding myths and legends, it becomes obvious, on one hand that the counter-elite’s efforts, their outlook on certain aspects of the national past are at odds with how old generation historians have habitually narrated historical processes, but more so with the stereotypical, idealizing visions of the national character that these narratives reinforce and reinstate. But what they seek to unravel, what they sense to be the hidden, forgotten, obscured aspects of the historical truth are in fact already there in dominant forms of discourse, even in the old-generation intelligentsia’s narratives and discursive paradigms. Even the forms of polemic that these two elitist groups are subliminally engaged in—rhetorical confrontation of the positive models of nationhood with that of the negative ones—has its longstanding tradition coming from colonial Georgia (Manning Reference Manning2004; Reisner Reference Reisner2009), where images of orientalized savageness have been juxtaposed with the civility of the urban gentry or folk culture. In the Soviet Georgia, one of the most preeminent public disputes took place in 1920s between several intellectuals—writers, poets, academics—sparked by a critical letter by Nikolo Mitsishvili (Mits’ishvili Reference Mits’ishvili1926). His pathos in turn resembled agony and frustration expressed in many publications by the nation’s founding father, Ilia Chavchavadze, more than half a century earlier and can be seen reflected in Bendukidze’s rhetoric. These contemplations on “what kind of a nation are we?” in different epochs and across different social groups have yielded many ideas, but in the end these rhetorical genres boil down to two counteracting, yet mutually constituting, forms of discourse on the nationhood: self-idealizing and self-condemning (see Batiashvili Reference Batiashvili2014).

Rhetorical strategies have their embedded linguistic structures and cognitive frames (Lakoff Reference Lakoff2003) through which they create fields of meaning and thus engender wider dialogicality with a broader public. Both in the debate of 1920s and in the hidden polemic between two history textbook projects, the Georgian national narrative serves as an implicit structure that shapes political thought—the key metaphor that lies underneath the fluid discourse as a symbolic matrix through which meaning is structured. It functions, though, as a double-edged sword, because it provides grounds both for self-reassuring national rhetoric—a heroic past of unwavering struggle for freedom, and for self-condemning sentiments—a repetitive pattern of treason and collaboration that has been shaping the course of the nation’s history just as much as heroism and unity.