Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On today's episode we welcome sociologist Jana Tsoneva as a guest to discuss her research into Bulgaria's socialist era and post-socialist energy sector, the political economy of the green transition, and how ecological thinking in Bulgaria's socialist past can help solve environmental crises today.

Jana's most recent work is:

Then People Dug for Light: the Bulgarian Energy Sector from Fossil Socialism to the Green Transition and Heliosocialism (2025)

Book description and link:

The book gathers fragments from the history of the Bulgarian coal-based energy sector and coal mining on the threshold of the Green Transition. The book combines fieldwork among miners and energy workers—who oppose the Green Deal—with archival research into experiments involving so-called "new energy sources" from the late socialist period. It outlines alternatives that lie beyond the market-mediated decarbonization of the Green Deal.

https://koi-bg.org/produkt/jana-tsoneva-togava-horata-kopaeli-svetlina/

Check out an interview with Jana in Red Threads:

https://www.redthreads.media/p/back-when-people-dug-light-an-interview

Jana Tsoneva is a sociologist based at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She works in the fields of energy, memory studies, sociology of work, class and climate change.

Episode music:

დესპანი - მოგონება ქარში

On today's episode we discuss "The Death and Life of Southern Soviet Cities: Urban Futures and their Afterlives" with the book's author David Leupold.

Book description:

What does it mean, three decades after the demise of the USSR, to inhabit cities built for a future that has never arrived? In pursuit of the question – what is left of the socialist city? – this book aims not only to trace the material and mnemonic remains of the socialist city,  but to show how the Soviet discourse of the city at times engendered radical ideas that challenged the narrow confines of state socialism itself.

These ideas are, for instance, the efforts of Esperanto-speaking internationalists from Czechoslovakia to build the internationalist city from below in the Central Asian steppe, the quest of Armenian Futurists to root the architectural style of Soviet Armenia in the country’s Persianate heritage, or a Jewish-Kyrgyz philosopher's vision of turning a science town in the hinterland of Moscow into the first ecopolis of the USSR. In an effort to rethink the life and afterlife of the Soviet city from its geographical South, the book explores the material and immaterial legacies of socialist-era urbanization in Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. To this end, it embarks on a historical and ethnographic journey to urban sites in Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. In a quest to reconstruct competing visions of urbanity that emerged from within the Soviet South, using varied empirical sources in Armenian, Czech, Kyrgyz, and Russian, the book outlines four urban visions: bottom-up urbanity, rooted urbanity, polycentric urbanity, and ecocentric urbanity. By understanding the social vision of a "socialist city of the future" beyond the political center in its trans-local independence, the book highlights the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Soviet South and its historical embeddedness within the regional dynamics of the Global South.

In this book David Leupold brings formidable historical imagination and ethnographic research to enliven the shape, contours, and textures of the "socialist city" and its afterlife beyond the demise of the Soviet Union.

David Leupold is a scholar of memory politics, research fellow at the University of Rijeka and the author of the award-winning book Embattled Dreamlands. The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish Memory (2020). He was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan Department of Sociology and the principal investigator of his DFG-funded research project Future Images of the Past (2021-25) at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient.

Episode music:

TAHA - ღამე

On today's episode we explore the development of secondary education in Georgia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent marketization processes.

The education sector widely privatized resulting in lower quality education, poverty wages for teachers and ideological conflicts over curriculum.

Why did this happen and what does it mean for secondary education in Georgia today?

Our guest is education expert and former school teacher Nika Maglaperidze

Nika Maglaperidze is a PhD student and administrator at the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University, Ireland. His research interests focus on educational theory, continental pedagogy, and curriculum studies. He is a former school teacher.

Read Nika's recent article here:

https://pie.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/pie/article/view/1967

Episode music:

პანიკა - "სიგარეტი კლავს"

On today’s episode we explore the political-intellectual world of Stalin, from his embrace of Marxism in Georgia at the turn of the century to his years in the Kremlin as head of the Soviet Union, with historian Geoffrey Roberts.

Guiding our discussion is Roberts newest book Stalin’s Library (2022). In it, Roberts constructs a riveting intellectual biography of Stalin as a Marxist through Stalin's engagement with other thinkers, his own writings as well as his notes and annotations on books in his personal library.

We also discuss how Georgia shaped Stalin’s political development and much more.

Geoffrey Roberts is an historian, biographer, and political commentator. A leading Soviet history expert, his many books include an award-winning biography of Zhukov, Stalin’s general, and the acclaimed Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War. He is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Check out Geoffrey Robert’s website to read his writing and more:
https://geoffreyroberts.net/

Episode music:
Tkveoba - მოლოდინი

On today’s episode we discuss the ins and outs of the European Union and how it structurally, institutionally and ideologically reinforces its own legitimacy through “civil society” within current and prospective member states.

Our guest is Thomas Fazi.

Fazi is the author of the book The European Propaganda Machine: The Dark Side of NGOs, Media and Universities (2026) - (published in Italian).

Book description:

A topic no one talks about: for the first time, the apparatus through which the European Union has built, financed, and implemented a widespread system of control over public discourse is dismantled piece by piece. Through a documented analysis of the flows of money to NGOs, media, and universities, the text shows how European public resources are being used to generate artificial consensus, marginalize dissent, and promote an integrationist ideology presented as neutral and inevitable. What emerges is a portrait of a largely co-opted “civil society,” a structurally dependent media, and an academia transformed into a vehicle for political legitimacy. This investigation raises fundamental questions about the state of democracy in Europe and the increasingly blurred lines between information, activism, and propaganda.

Thomas Fazi is a critically-acclaimed writer and journalist. His books include The Battle for Europe: How an Elite Hijacked a Continent — and How We Can Take It Back (Pluto Press, 2014), Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (co-authored with Bill Mitchell; Pluto Press, 2017) and The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor — A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green; 2023). His latest book, published in Italian, is The European Propaganda Machine: The Dark Side of NGOs, Media and Universities (2026). His articles have appeared in numerous online and printed publications. He is a columnist for the British magazine UnHerd and the American magazine Compact.

Episode music:

მინდა და ვთხრი - სმა