Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On today's episode we discuss "The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and their Afterlives" with the book's author David Leupold.

Book description:

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question – what is left of the socialist city? – this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself.

These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country’s Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, the book explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South.

In this book David Leupold brings formidable historical imagination and ethnographic research to enliven the shape, contours, and textures of the "socialist city" and its afterlife beyond the demise of the Soviet Union.

David Leupold is a scholar of memory politics, research fellow at the University of Rijeka and the author of the award-winning book Embattled Dreamlands. The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish Memory (2020). He was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan Department of Sociology and the principal investigator of his DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021-25) at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient.

Episode music:

TAHA - ღამე

On today's episode we explore the development of secondary education in Georgia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent marketization processes.

The education sector widely privatized resulting in lower quality education, poverty wages for teachers and ideological conflicts over curriculum.

Why did this happen and what does it mean for secondary education in Georgia today?

Our guest is education expert and former school teacher Nika Maglaperidze

Nika Maglaperidze is a PhD student and administrator at the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Ireland. His research interests focus on educational theory, continental pedagogy, and curriculum studies. He is a former school teacher.

Read Nika's recent article here:

https://pie.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/pie/article/view/1967

Episode music:

პანიკა - "სიგარეტი კლავს"

On today’s episode we explore the political-intellectual world of Stalin, from his embrace of Marxism in Georgia at the turn of the century to his years in the Kremlin as head of the Soviet Union, with historian Geoffrey Roberts.

Guiding our discussion is Roberts newest book Stalin’s Library (2022). In it, Roberts constructs a riveting intellectual biography of Stalin as a Marxist through Stalin's engagement with other thinkers, his own writings as well as his notes and annotations on books in his personal library.

We also discuss how Georgia shaped Stalin’s political development and much more.

Geoffrey Roberts is an historian, biographer, and political commentator. A leading Soviet history expert, his many books include an award-winning biography of Zhukov, Stalin’s general, and the acclaimed Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War. He is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Check out Geoffrey Robert’s website to read his writing and more:
https://geoffreyroberts.net/

Episode music:
Tkveoba - მოლოდინი

On today’s episode we discuss the ins and outs of the European Union and how it structurally, institutionally and ideologically reinforces its own legitimacy through “civil society” within current and prospective member states.

Our guest is Thomas Fazi.

Fazi is the author of the book The European Propaganda Machine: The Dark Side of NGOs, Media and Universities (2026) - (published in Italian).

Book description:

A topic no one talks about: for the first time, the apparatus through which the European Union has built, financed, and implemented a widespread system of control over public discourse is dismantled piece by piece. Through a documented analysis of the flows of money to NGOs, media, and universities, the text shows how European public resources are being used to generate artificial consensus, marginalize dissent, and promote an integrationist ideology presented as neutral and inevitable. What emerges is a portrait of a largely co-opted “civil society,” a structurally dependent media, and an academia transformed into a vehicle for political legitimacy. This investigation raises fundamental questions about the state of democracy in Europe and the increasingly blurred lines between information, activism, and propaganda.

Thomas Fazi is a critically-acclaimed writer and journalist. His books include The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent — and How We Can Take It Back (Pluto Press, 2014), Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (co-authored with Bill Mitchell; Pluto Press, 2017) and The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor — A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green; 2023). His latest book, published in Italian, is The European Propaganda Machine: The Dark Side of NGOs, Media and Universities (2026). His articles have appeared in numerous online and printed publications. He is a columnist for the British magazine UnHerd and the American magazine Compact.

Episode music:

მინდა და ვთხრი - სმა

On today’s episode we sit down with Max from International Research Centre DDR (IFDDR) to discuss their excellent study on land reform and socialist agriculture in the German Democratic Republic (known globally by it’s German acronym the DDR - Deutsche Demokratische Republik):

The Land to Those Who Work It: From Land Reform to Socialist Agriculture in the DDR

Study description:

Within just 45 years, the conditions in the East German countryside changed fundamentally. This transformation took place in several stages.

The first stage (1945–1948) instituted a land reform that broke up the centuries-old land ownership structures in the countryside. This process of democratisation created the first framework for new relations of production based on cooperation. The second stage (1952–1960) was characterised by the Genossenschaftsbewegung (the cooperative movement), which was able to resolve the contradictions between modern technology and small-scale production in the interests of farmers and agricultural workers, without ruining, displacing, or subordinating them to the interests of big business, as occurs under capitalism. By the same token, the agricultural cooperatives also provided the rural population with previously unattained social and cultural rights and opportunities. The third and final stage (1970s–1980s), built on this foundation and saw the development of large agricultural production complexes and deepening cooperative relationships between the various stages of production, from primary production to processing and distribution.

Of all the changes in East Germany’s forty-year socialist history, the most revolutionary developments occurred in agriculture, as they were the most comprehensive.

International Research Centre DDR (IF DDR) is a research collective tht investigates the history of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and the societal changes it achieved. The DDR’s 40-year commitment to progress, peace, anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, and internationalism stands in sharp contrast to the history of capitalist West Germany and represents a wealth of knowledge for progressive movements seeking to tackle social challenges today.

IFDDR’s objective is to enrich current debates with historical experience. To do so, it examines and analyses the functioning of key sectors of the DDR’s socialist society: the planned economy, the health care system, the legal system, agriculture, education and so on. A critical appraisal of this history offers a deeper perspective on the fundamental possibilities and difficulties that arise when constructing alternative social, economic, and political models.

Read more about IFDDR here

Check out their studies here

Episode music:
შავი პრინცი და ბაბე - “დაკარგული გული”