Authors

Discussion

In 2018 in Tbilisi an international group of memory activists created the “Last Address Project Georgia” with the aim of hanging memorial plaques on the last addresses of those people who were shot during the Great Purges (1936-8) in Georgia. Carved on the metal are the names of the victims, the year of their arrest and death, and the date of their rehabilitation. Drawing from 16 months of fieldwork, this paper looks at the interplay between memory activists, relatives of the victims, evasive state politics and the role of neighbours in harnessing the making of some memorial plaques. Embroiled in bureaucratic procedures and the priorities of the everyday, the making of the would-be memorial generates conflictual expectations, future aspirations, moral demands and different ways of envisioning Tbilisi. In this paper, I analyse how the not-yet memorial impinges upon my interlocutors’ contrasting representations of the repressions that create political struggles. Ultimately, waiting for the memorial merges contradictory understandings of the categories of victims and perpetrators showing an overall uncertainty on how to deal with such a difficult past.