პოლიტიკური სხეულის კონცეფცია დამოუკიდებელი საქართველოსთვის სტალინიზმის გაუაზრებლობის გააზრებისთვის

ანოტაცია

Giorgio Agamben, while arguing on the nature of the power of Sovereign, quotes bible Non Est Potestas Super Terram Quae Comparetur Ei (There is no power on earth which can be compared to him. Job 41:24) (Agamben 2015, 23). It is the quote inscribed on the title page of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan which Agamben focused on. The Sovereign as followed Hobbes by Agamben is entitled by capability to mold and form one out of many. Agamben intentionally pays attention to the visual décor of the cover page to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan by Abraham Bosse. There are two versions of the cover design ordered by Hobbes for Charles II, the king of England. In the first version, tiny bodies that compose the one body of the Sovereign (state) are turned towards supreme power, the Sovereign’s face, thus showing their backs to readers. In the second version, tiny faces are turned towards the reader (ibid), thus making Sovereign to look at the reader with multiplicity of faces that composes the political body of State (Leviathan) personified by Sovereign. This passage of the Agamben’s argumentation on Sovereign as an overwhelming, all-seeing, and prime power, causing happenings and materializing bodies, shows strife of the power of ultimate inclusion of every single body and bodily forces into the ONE and whole body. Thus, the Sovereign produces genuinely demiurgic capabilities in the field of its activities.

Stalin’s power can be viewed through these lenses. A dictator who shaped the Soviet state and the world-view that defined political habitat for generations of Soviet and post-Soviet citizens was endowed with the power to determine the fate of individuals, groups of people, and nations. Equally, his name is related to repressions that killed and tortured tens of millions of people during his „reign“ (Snyder 2011). A memory of the past in the current generation of post-Soviet citizens in various countries is ambivalent in regards to Stalin and relevantly in regards to the newly emerged states that claim their sovereignty to be practiced democratically, thus alienating themselves from the horrors of the totalitarian past. However, the integrity of the newly formed political bodies is disrupted by the impossibility to digest and transform memories of three generations of people who internalized norms and practices of power that are incompatible with democracy. Therefore, the latter becomes a battle-field between different political cultures that, in their turn, elevate the potential of the political conflict to be manifested in civil unrest or violence.

Taking this into consideration, the conceptualized body of Stalin/Sovereign to be viewed from the Hobbesian perspective of a political body that absorbs and gathers forces, strength, aspirations, and dreams of every individual into the ONE, destabilizes post-Soviet sovereignties and makes them vulnerable. The current political elite of Russia attempts to save the paradigm of „Stalin – a great statesman“ and tries to reconcile with its soviet past. As noted by Lev Gudkov, „Putin launched a comprehensive program to ideologically reeducate society, which culminated in 2004-2005 with the preparations for the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany in 1945“ (Lipman et al. 2013, 30). These policies of Russia’s current political regime brought into political discourse and the public arena state-controlled and top-down re-emergence of narrative about Stalin in favorable terms. Surely, this change contradicts Khrushchev’s Reform Communism of the 1960s and Gorbachev’s Perestroika of the 1980s, that viewed de-Stalinization as part of the democratization agenda. And it shows Putin’s intent to overcome the legitimacy crisis that torn the Russian political system in the 1990s through appealing to those models of practicing power internalized by the vast majority of Russian society since the 1930s.

The focus of the given paper is aimed at reflection on the ways how Stalinist past defined traumas of the birth of new nations after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Relevantly, how to locate the conceptualized political body personified by Stalin in the broader historical context of contemporary sovereign political bodies of post-Soviet nations, like Russia and Georgia? Are ongoing discussions and political narratives of the past capable of solving this task of locating the body of a tyrant into the historical context and alienating it from the polity of newly independent states? Or contrary, do they inclose the history in the body of the despot, thus subduing the political bodies of entire nations to the shadow of the past that still needs to be discussed, reflected, and named?