Authors

Discussion

The proposed paper attempts to uncover how Georgian literature was used by the local as well as central Soviet authorities under Stalin’s leadership to legitimise Stalinist ideology in Georgian society and examine to what extent this process has contributed to the creation and promotion of Stalin’s Georgianised cult of personality. The analysis of the processes that took place in the field of literature in Georgia reveals that although the production of the cult of personality was an all-Union phenomenon and the central government was its initiator and the driving force, the creation of Stalin’s Georgian cult was not a project run directly by the centre but a product of multiple power relations between the centre and the periphery as well as a result of local power dynamics. Relying mainly on archival sources, this paper makes several key arguments that mutually contribute to the exposure of the heterogeneous character of Stalin’s cult of personality. First, by following the local Communist Party boss, Lavrenty Beria's career path, it highlights the interests of the local political elite to emphasise Stalin’s Georgianness through literature for increasing its influence at the centre and strengthening its hold over the periphery. Second, it shows that the terror and colonial subjugation, which in Georgia started long before the Cultural Revolution, had created such a paradoxical background that the new political environment created after Beria's accession to local power was seen by many intellectuals as an opportunity to recover professionally and reset relations with the regime. In this regard, I attempt to uncover the gradual emergence and spread of a kind of silent, intuitive understanding among the Georgian literary community that the literary works that would aid the construction of Stalin’s Georgianised cult at the political and research institutions could be a guarantee for their physical and professional survival. Moreover, I argue that besides being a tactic for the literary community to ensure its physical and professional survival and a tool for the political elite to increase its influence, over time, the production of Stalin’s Georginised cult also revealed a genuine urge among Georgians to express colonial identity in an attempt to resist the assimilation with the centre. As a result, the literary activities in the Georgian SSR under high Stalinism gave rise to the unique archetypes of Stalin’s cult of personality in Georgian literature that have outlived the de-Stalinisation campagns. By uncovering these unique characteristics of Georgian Stalinism, I argue that from the very beginning, Stalin’s cult of personality has been anything but a centralised, heterogeneous and fixed phenomenon, as observed by the majority of the existing studies.