სტალინური ტერორის (1936-1938)1 მეხსიერება რეპრესირებული ოჯახების ნარატივებში: კულტურული ტრავმა
Abstract
Almost three decades after the Soviet collapse and seven decades after the death of Stalin, the legacy of the ruthless Soviet dictator, including his role in the Great Terror remains the subject of constant contestation in Georgia. Georgian religious and political leaders cannot avoid discussing Stalin’s cult of personality. The Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church Ilia the Second, Georgia’s most trusted person lately, referred to Stalin in 2013: „He was originally from Georgia, and he knew the Georgian language, Georgian songs, and church songs very well. When he died, I was a student of a seminary. We were all standing in the conference hall and crying. Stalin was an exceptional
person.“2 Stalin’s perceived „Georgianness“ gives his image a positive boost among some segments of Georgian society and represents one of the reasons why his role in the Great Terror is diminished. The number of scholarly works in the Soviet period and particularly in Stalin’s Great Terror in Georgia increased during the last decades. Several works have already examined the nature of terror, including, scholarly articles, prisoners’ portraits, documentary films, biographical works about the victims of great terror, etc. Researchers affiliated with various think tanks and academic institutions used diverse methods for studying the topic. Archival and rather descriptive work moved forward. However, the research about Stalin’s Great Terror in Georgia significantly lacks analysis and interpretation, especially from the perspective of cultural trauma. Moreover, ambivalent perceptions towards Stalin’s personality in Georgian society cannot be automatically related to the Soviet patriotism, but more connected to the self-perception of the nation, whose son from the peasants’ family and colonized nation fought against existing order, broke the traditions by rising to the top of a system itself (Waal 2013, 9).
This research represents one of the first attempts of studying Stalin’s Great Terror (1937-38) in Georgia in the survivors’ narratives from the perspective of cultural trauma and formation of the memory of the long and difficult process of survival. Detecting the key factors of remembering past events and carving out the characteristics of cultural trauma contributes to understanding the broader context of the Great Terror. Hence, the research aims at answering the following questions: To what extent has Stalin’s Terror generated a cultural trauma? What factors contributed to remembering those events as trauma? How did the survivors portray Stalin and his role in the Great Terror? The expectation is that the survivors’ narratives can be considered traumatic since they illustrate a particular event, its impact on the society, and the images of victims and perpetrators in a broader context. Moreover, the narratives could illustrate various images of Stalin, but they might avoid explicit condemnation of him in their stories.
This study applies a critical discourse analysis and process tracing strategies. It explores and compares the survivors’ narratives taking the following criteria into account: 1. The biographies of the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror and his/her place in the society 2. The imprisonment of the repressed family members and his/her attempts to establish contact with their families 3. The public perception of prisoners and their families. Since this research examines formation of the memory about discrete historical event, the process tracing approach contributes to analyzing trajectories of change and to describing the observations of phenomena at each step in this trajectory.
Primary sources of the research are oral history interviews of the survivors (interviewees will include the people whose parents were the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror). Those oral history interviews were recorded, transcribed and published after the Soviet collapse by Soviet Past Research Laboratory in Georgia and Heinrich Boell Foundation/The South Caucasus Regional Office. Within the project, the researchers further explored family archives (photos, biographies, or other related documents) and gathered individual stories of the family members about the era. Therefore, this research reviews the narratives considering the status (intelligentsia), generation (the children of the victims of the terror) and nature of the pain (both of the parents were repressed during the Great Terror, specifically, the father was executed, while mothers were sent to exile).
To understand the peculiarities of Stalin’s Great Terror in Georgia, this study employs the revisionist approach, which emphasizes the social aspect of the terror, represented in the survivors’ narratives. The emphasis on the survivors’ experience as a cultural trauma necessitates the detection of the involvement of institutions and of the ordinary people in the Great Terror.
The research is divided into four parts: First part of the research discusses the methodology as well as theoretical framework of the study. Second part of the study presents historical context in the Soviet Union and Georgia, third part introduces the results of the oral history interviews and the conclusive part summarizes the main findings of the research.
