“Soviet Trauma” in Rural Women’s Memory (2016)

TASO Foundation in cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation South Caucasus Regional Office implements project “Soviet Trauma” in Rural Women’s Memory. This kind of activity is defined by combination of various issues. Firstly, favors to Soviet past are eye-catching in Georgia’s villages albeit the some traumatic phenomena were characteristic for them with full acerbity (for example, collectivization etc.). Various factors lead to this situation today but one of them definitely is the lack of discussions and support from civil society for rethinking the soviet past in the villages. Soviet experience, especially women experience, sometimes burked by fear and shame of that time are passed over in silence and it is unknown for youth today. If not so that would give absolutely different dimension to evaluation of the Soviet regime. Perception of soviet past as a trauma kept in women’s individual memories disappears together with “old witnesses”. That is why it is crucial to study and keep the memory in scholarly works and to transmit this knowledge to the younger generation of Georgia’s citizens.

The project will be based on the fieldwork results. Interviews by Oral History method will ve conducted in several villages and relevant photos from family albums will be collected. Based on this material exhibition and a publication on “Soviet Trauma” in Rural Women’s Memory will be prepared. The book and accompanying exhibition will be presented in Tbilisi and Georgia’s regions thus opening space for discussion and deliberation of the Soviet Past in Georgia. Eventually the book will be integrated in curriculum of several Georgian universities.