Giorgi Maisuradze

Georgian Cultural Elites from late socialism to post-communism

Georgia’s overall development since the 1980ies through the fall of the Soviet Union up to the contemporary state of affairs is a unique showcase of the complex interplay and permanent shifts between different elites and levels of institutional and discursive change orchestrated from above. The late Soviet Georgian intelligentsia was the source of the repertoire of chauvinist nationalism that nurtured the intensifying conflicts with ethnic minorities in the early 1990ies. Dissidents formed the major driving force behind the “national liberation movement” (the so-called “neformaly”) and it was their most influential segment headed by Zviad Gamsakhurdia who ousted the old Soviet nomenklatura out of power in the elections of 1990.  Both the intelligentsia and the dissident circles have been at the source of the general discreditation of the socialist idea, which ideologically paved the way for the radical substitution of the communist economic organization of society by market relationships on nearly all institutional levels, from the gradual privatization of state assets, public services, goods and spaces since the early 1990ies to legal, even constitutional mechanisms of radical deregulation since the Rose Revolution of 2003. In this respect, the post-Communist independent Georgian state, successively or concurrently under the rule of the former nomenklatura and paramilitary groupings during the 1990ies or young, Westernized leaders after 2003, has been the motor of the mentioned radical socio-economic changes. However, the state came to be the author of the weakening of its own effective sovereignty by handing over nearly all control on economic matters to local or international business elites. Under these circumstances, Georgian society, profoundly concussed by the experienced shock on social, economic and cultural levels, came to be the passive spectator of and the passive “material” for an increasing conflict over the domination upon public space and societal self-determination between an ever invigorating NGO sector as the major representative of Western political and economic interests and the ersatz for an unrealized civil society, on the one hand, and the Georgian Orthodox Church as the self-proclaimed protector of Georgian nationhood and its cultural, religious and ethnic identity, on the other.  

A joint interdisciplinary effort will be necessary to outline the respective dynamics of the above-mentioned elites as well as of their interaction over the timespan between the 1980ies to the present in order to demonstrate on the basis of concrete empirical material how cultural, economic or political capital formed throughout the 1980ies played over into post-Soviet Georgia and underwent (and still undergoes) permanent transformation and re-functioning. In accordance with the specificity of the respective elites (cultural, political, economic, clerical) a set of methodologies will be mobilized: discourse analysis, group biographies and the analysis of economic or legal reforms.