Soviet Georgians between Tbilisi and Moscow

Tens of millions of Soviet citizens lived among a national group to which they did not belong. Upheaval resulting from war, revolution, aggressive industrialization drives, and forced migrations resulted in significant population mixing. Erik Scott, the author of a new book on Georgians living within Russia, reminds us just what a key role various diasporas played in the formation and development of the Soviet Union. Scott stresses: “The Soviet Union was not simply a federation of nationalities confined to titular republics. Instead, it was an empire of mobile diasporas that transcended the borders of the republics, intermixed, and helped construct a truly multiethnic society” (3). To examine this process, Scott offers his case study of the Georgian diaspora, analyzing the political, social, cultural, and economic aspects of its development. An expansive chronological frame—the entire Soviet period with excursions into the late imperial and post-Soviet periods—inspires particular confidence in the work’s conclusions, facilitating a convincing investigation of both the ephemeral (political) and more fixed (sociocultural) qualities of the Georgian diaspora.

An introductory theoretical chapter gives an overview of various theoretical frames concerning diasporas while simultaneously demonstrating the difficulty of the project. Where might one find sources attesting to the intangible processes of social change? What are the parameters of the analytical frames that will adequately capture their essence? These questions present potential pitfalls for every historian who endeavors to employ an interdisciplinary approach, and Scott meets their challenge, successfully balancing theory and historical narrative.

A fundamental triumph of the work lies in having identified a particularly fertile topic of investigation. The Georgian diaspora in Russia, while not particularly sizable in terms of population, was highly active; elements of Georgian culture and tradition spread easily within a foreign cultural sphere, especially in cosmopolitan Moscow. In Scott’s language, Georgians were seen as “familiar strangers,” and even the “most familiar strangers.” This diaspora was organically integrated into an alien society on which it exerted measurable influence. Why was this the case? What role did the Georgian diaspora play in the development of the Soviet empire? These important and undertreated questions focus the author’s work.

Scott shows that the fate of the Georgian diaspora was marked by relative success, even during the more tragic chapters of Soviet history. This contrasts especially starkly with the difficulties faced by many other diasporas within the Soviet Union. Stalin and his regime considered the various “external” diasporas (those that had their roots beyond the borders of the USSR) to be threatening, a potential source of espionage or collaborationism. Between the late 1920s and the 1930s, these groups were subject to periodic repressions on the basis of nationality, which found their apogee later that decade in massive NKVD “national operations” (1937–38). Hundreds of thousands from among more than a dozen ethnic groups (Germans, Poles, Latvians, Greeks, Finns, Bulgarians, etc.) suffered as a result of these operations. In addition, the Korean population of the Russian Far East was exiled in this period. During World War II, Poles, a notionally allied people, were spared; Soviet Germans, in contrast, faced the brunt of repression on the basis of nationality, suffering mass deportation. The postwar years saw the weight of persecution fall on the Jewish population. A convenient lightning rod for social discontent, Jews took on the role that “enemies of the people” and “wreckers” had played in the 1930s and were, in Stalin’s view, the agents of a newly founded Israeli state and, more broadly, American imperialism.

In recent years, scholars have made thorough use of a rich archival record in investigating Stalin’s repression of agents of these “foreign” diasporas.¹ In contrast, the study of internal diasporas in the USSR (i.e., groups of national minorities living outside their dedicated republic) has been less extensive, despite it being well known that they were also subject to various forms of discrimination: there were signs of forced assimilation of...