Memory Politics - Articles

In 1989, a wave of revolutions swept the Eastern Bloc in Europe. The reform movement that ended communism in East Central Europe began in Poland. Solidarity, an anti-Communist trade union and social movement, had forced Poland’s Communist government to recognize it in the 1980s through a wave of strikes that gained international attention.

My research focused on the protest rallies that took place on April 9, 1989. Today in Georgia, on the 30th anniversary of the 9th of April, many associate this day with the restoration of Georgia’s independence. In fact, it is undeniable that the sequence of the events that transpired that day, coupled with all the other circumstances unfolding in 1989, created the preconditions for the restoration of Georgia’s independence.

This paper discusses the structural and ideological transformations of the Communist party’s official newspaper Soviet Armenia and follows a case-study approach based on the oral history interview.

Undoubtedly the emergence of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (ADR) was the by-product of a broad range of processes and dynamics in and around of the Caucasus, the developments in the Tsarist Russia as well as in the neighbouring countries of the Russian Caucasus, the Ottoman Empire and Persia. The elites of the ADR, both of Muslim and of non-Muslim faith were socialized in the late Romanov period. Azərbaycan dilində

For a people whose history covers a few millennia, the significance of the First Republic of Armenia far exceeds the number of years it lasted. Other than the Genocide that preceded it, I doubt that there is another period of two and one-half years that has received more attention by scholars, memoirists, and polemicists. հայերեն

In the twilight years of the 19th century, the Georgian people were faced with a number of challenges. Although the abolition of feudalism had liberated the peasantry, they had not been given land and their afflicted state remained the same. A number of freed peasants headed for the cities and filled the ranks of the proletariat, encountering “brute capitalism” in a place where basic labour rights were not regulated.

On 5 March 1917, at 11 o’clock in the morning, many members of the Caucasian workers’ movement and thousands of ordinary citizens gathered in Nadzaladevi’s Theatre Square. The revolutionaries had assembled in order to receive the latest reports of the events then unfolding in St Petersburg. The people were interested in hearing whether the February Revolution had achieved its goal.

Seven Months after the first meeting of 14 Georgian researchers within the workshop on oral history methodology the results of the project were presented at the Europe House in Tbilisi on November 11, 2014.

(closed project) In April, 2014 Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab) with financial support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation South Caucasus Regional Office has started implementation of the project "XX century Georgia in twenty snapshots"

Debating the totalitarian part of a country’s history is a precondition to shape the transition process dedicated to democratic values. To help overcome these legacies of the past, the Heinrich Boell Foundation South Caucasus Regional Office (HBF) has a new initiative to develop new projects on rethinking the Soviet Past. To set up the projects, the HBF and partners are drawing on international expertise, in both coming to terms with a dictatorial past and in engaging the public with such difficult questions.

On April 15, 2011 the Heinrich Boell Foundation organized a presentation at the National Library of the Parliament of Georgia to mark the donation of a collection of publications and academic papers on Soviet history to the National Library.