Dimensions of Memory in Armenia, Georgia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh

A fundamental aspect of the politics of memory in the South Caucasus is the question of how to interpret the imperial and Soviet past. Its memory, as a difficult-to-measure element of cultural-political reality, was almost bypassed (forgotten) while the short twentieth century came to an end (Hobsbawm 1999). The idea of transition and transformation to a desired liberal democracy in post-socialist states made for a time consideration around the essence of post-authoritarian and post-socialist mentality in the context of postcolonialism and post-imperialism impossible. A smooth transition from a society at the modernist turn, in deep crisis, to a society of postmodern consumption occurred. The rejection of analysis of mental processes typical of postcolonialism led to the subsequent surprise and dissatisfaction with regressive anti-democratic political tendencies in the former Second World War. The unrealistic nature of the ideological project of smooth historical transition to liberal democracy was reworked by the historical process and the retreat from the seemingly inevitable progression towards the Western model. The next reconstruction is intellectual demand, revealed post hoc; a need to look critically at post-socialist reality using the achievements of postcolonial theory in the context of traumatic transition. This need for revision emerged when the existence of typically postcolonial mental structures—subordination, creolisation, mimicry, cultural hybridisation, hegemony, or a centre-periphery divide, and in the case of Georgia, an obsession with Russia that is an adaptation of the classic obsession with the West in postcolonialism—became evident in the political spaces of the post-socialist states. This process is manifested differently in Central European countries and differently in the post-Soviet states, considering the differences between the regions. Postcolonial processes are much more pronounced and relevant to the shape of politics and the political in the independent state organisms that were formerly part of the USSR. Nevertheless, it has become necessary to reconsider the alleged theoretical barriers that stand in the way of implementing the achievements of postcolonial analysis in post-socialist space. An anthropological analysis of the representation of memory in the South Caucasus requires the use of postcolonial theories, due to their non-obviousness and the significant approach of their main originators towards the political rather than institutional politics. The social creation of the reality of the political in memory ties into references to a long experience of past subjugation, carrying political and diverse consequences even today. Around the ways of interpreting that “past which creates the present” is built on one of the most important axes of memory discourses within the analysed space. The arbitrariness of reality in the study of mnemonic discourses reduces the use of postcolonialism as one means of analysis to the ideological and value-laden view of colonialism’s early critics. The essence of this study is thus not how legacies of subordination appear in structures of power, but how representations of postcolonial subordination exist in the political. The main subject of analysis is the hard-to-measure elements of cultural and political subordination in mnemonic processes and the ways in which the decolonisation of minds, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o came to call it (2011), is realised. As Frantz Fanon wrote: “[T]otal liberation involves every facet of the personality” (2004: 233). Transferring this idea to the post-socialist space, we focus on the ways in which the processes of de-Sovietisation and decolonisation were carried out, understood as, paraphrasing the title of Czesław Miłosz’s book, a liberation of “captive minds.” To complete the picture, it is necessary to juxtapose this new narrative with representations of irony, nostalgia and unwillingness to move progressively to the next chapter of the historical process in line with Western discursive hegemony. Nostalgia and examples of counter-memory vis-à-vis the imposed discourse do indeed exist in the social consciousness of the South Caucasus. All these elements strongly interact both in the symbolic sphere—of memory and the political—and in the macro-level political conditions, taking on different contours for Georgia and Armenia as well as for Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh.