One of Georgia's most exciting contemporary filmmakers is Levan Koguashvili. His films are as comedic as they are tragic, focusing on the intricacies (both beautiful and heartbreaking) of the day to day struggles Georgians live through today. In this discussion, we explore Levan's approach to filmmaking, stories behind the scripts, and the way his films reflect economic and social realities both in Georgia and of those Georgians who have emigrated abroad. Levan is a film director from Tbilisi and his films include Brighton 4th (2021), Gogitas New Life (2016), Blind Dates (2013) and Street Da ..read more

On today's episode we discuss the emergence of the Georgian tea industry and how its development interacted with processes of economic, political and national consolidation in the first decades of the Georgian SSR. Our guest is Camille Neufville. Camille is a PhD student at Strasbourg university, France. She is interested in the entangled histories of exotic commodities, their production and consumption in northern Eurasia. She's currently writing her PhD on tea consumption and tea production in Imperial and Soviet Georgia. Her main research questions include land and labor issues, the limits ..read more

On today's episode we sit down with political economist Ia Eradze to discuss how extreme rates of dollarization in Georgia emerged after the Soviet Union's demise, why dollarization persists, as well as how the dominance of neoliberal economic policies and exclusion of socio-economic issues from the public and political discourse in post-Soviet Georgia came to be. Below is a description of Eradze's 2023 book Unraveling Dollarization Persistence: The Case of Georgia followed by a link to an article which summarizes the book's main arguments: The book engages with the persistence of foreign cu ..read more

On today's episode we sit down with journalist and author Vincent Bevins to discuss his recent book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. This wide reaching conversation reviews the main themes and topics of his book, and the broader political lessons and reflections that the global social movements between 2010-2020, with an emphasis on those outside of the global North, can provide today. Here's a description of If We Burn "From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democ ..read more

On today's episode we sit down with historian Diane P. Koenker to discuss the history, development and role of vacations, sanatoria and leisure in the Soviet Union. Koenker is the author of the 2017 study on the topic, Club Red: Vacation, Travel and the Soviet Dream ..read more

On today's episode we put the specific yet shared experiences of healthcare systems in Socialist Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic and the Georgian SSR into conversation. Through the discussion we bring to light both the similarities and differences in three distinct forms of socialism, as well as how the transition to capitalism dramatically changed health and healthcare in each society. Our guests are: Ana Vračar is a Zagreb based researcher and activist with the People's Health Movement and the Organization for Worker's Initiative and Democratization. She researches healthcare in ..read more

In the 1920s and 1930s, Bolshevik historians actively took part in building Soviet socialism. As militant scholars, one of their main tasks was (broadly speaking) to reconceptualize and rearticulate the history of the political entity they had just overthrown - the Russian Empire. The multinational Bolsheviks were not only committed to building a socialist state, but believed this must be done through the dismantling of what Lenin called the Russian "prison house of nations". Writing History was a critical tool in this process. Through the analytical lens of Marxism and a political commitment ..read more

The history of Marxism in the 20th century, both as a means to interpret the world and as the basis of a politics to transform it, is marked by a profound intellectual and political diversity. Some of this can be attributed to individuals and their specific readings of Marx's thought. Yet other forms of Marxism - such as that which emerged in the global South during the era of decolonization - can trace their origins to particular applications of Marx's ideas and Marxist predecessors (such as Lenin), as well as the historical experience of really existing socialist states to concrete historica ..read more

On this episode we discuss the ins and outs of decolonization - as a set of historical revolutionary politics, intellectual tradition, contemporary framework of analysis as well the limitations and misuses of "decolonization" in the context of Ukraine and Russia today. To do this we have invited two distinct yet complimentary thinkers to put their ideas into conversation with one another. Geo Maher is a teacher, political theorist and author of Anti-Colonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance and Decolonizing Dialectics. Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist and writes on ..read more

In terms of post-Soviet memory politics, arguably no figure is more controversial than interwar Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Since the Maidan uprising in 2014, his memory along with that of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists have been mobilized by both far right nationalists and the Ukrainian state - to varying degrees of success - to create a counter-memory to that of both the Soviet past and the current memory regime of the Russian Federation. This process has had a dual effect - simultaneously emboldening a nationalist memory politics through th ..read more