Collective memory and reputational politics of national heroes and villains

Abstract

The politics of memory plays an important role in the ways certain figures are evaluated and remembered, as they can be rehabilitated or vilified, or both, as these processes are contested. We explore these issues using a transition society, Georgia, as a case study. Who are the heroes and villains in Georgian collective memory? What factors influence who is seen as a hero or a villain and why? How do these selections correlate with Georgian national identity? We attempt to answer these research questions using a newly generated data set of contemporary Georgian perspectives on recent history. Our survey results show that according to a representative sample of the Georgian population, the main heroes from the beginning of the twentieth century include Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Ilia Chavchavadze, and Patriarch Ilia II. Eduard Shevardnadze, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and Vladimir Putin represent the main villains, and those that appear on both lists are Mikheil Saakashvili and Joseph Stalin. We highlight two clusters of attitudes that are indicative of how people think about Georgian national identity, mirroring civic and ethnic conceptions of nationalism. How Georgians understand national identity impacts not only who they choose as heroes or villains, but also whether they provide an answer at all.

Keywords:

• heroes
• villains
• Georgia
• national identity
• memory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Giorgi Babunashvili and Nino Rcheulishvili, as well as CRRC Georgia and its president, Koba Turmanidze. We would also like to thank the participants of the fourth Academic Swiss Caucasus Network Annual Conference “Protest, Modernization, Democratization: Political and Social Dynamics in Post-Soviet Countries” held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in September 2015; the editor of Nationalities Papers, Peter Rutland; and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

ORCID

Alexi Gugushvili http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3933-9111

Notes

1. Collective memory is defined broadly in the literature, and there are often contradictions and ambiguity in how the term is used. There are also many related terms that have been advanced in lieu of collective memory, though they are referring to similar processes, such as social memory (Connerton 1989), public memory (Bodnar 1992), and cultural memory (Assmann 1995).

2. It must be noted that some scholars find the ethnic/civic division problematic. Brubaker (1998) decries the typical Manichean dichotomizing of these terms, and calls for the avoidance of seeing ethnic pejoratively and civic positively. These terms are also simultaneous and overlap, not operating exclusively of one another (Suny 2006). Nevertheless, these terms continue to influence how people debate national identity.

3. See the first issue of Identity Studies in the Caucasus and the Black Sea Region (Ratiani 2009; Tevzadze 2009) for a number of articles related to Georgian national identity.

4. For more details on the survey, see http://www.stalintoday.com.

5. At the time of writing, Saakashvili remains active in politics, although this time in Ukraine.

6. We added the answer option “respect Georgian traditions,” based on our knowledge of the country’s culture. For a discussion of one of the most important markers of Georgia’s cultural identity, the tradition of Georgian feast-making, or supra, see Nodia (2014).

7. See Bahry (1993) for a discussion of education’s role in individuals’ political thinking in post-socialism.

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by an Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN) grant. This work was also supported, in part, by the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in South Caucasus Studies at the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre of St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, in association with the ASCN at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.