Between Institutional Memory and Counter-Memory

The ethnographic example I use to describe the reductive, institutional representation of memory—the politics of memory—is the Soviet Occupation Museum, located in the centre of Tbilisi on Shota Rustaveli Avenue. Officially a part of the Georgian National Museum, it was formally opened on 26 May 2006. The date of its opening is already symbolic. In Georgia 26 May is a national holiday, established to commemorate the declaration of independence of 1918. The building where the National Council of Georgia proclaimed the independence of the Democratic Republic of Georgia is located exactly across the street. Celebrations on 26 May were strictly forbidden under the Soviet regime. It was only with the USSR’s collapse that this date was reinstated as Independence Day. The opening of the museum on such a symbolic day was part of the multi-level politics of memory pursued by President Saakashvili’s administration. Its basis was the recognition of seventy years of existence under the USSR as an occupation, continued through Russian support for the separatist republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Consequently, the rejection of such a long era required the creation of an appropriate historical counterpoint to balance the forced revolutionary break with established patterns of commemoration. Considering this, Saakashvili opted for references to the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia, annexed by the USSR after a brief military campaign in 1921. In addition to the restoration of celebrations outlawed in Soviet times, the reconstruction of urban space, using new memorials and renaming streets from Soviet to anti-Soviet heroes, also constituted an important element of this policy. The complexity of this memory project is illustrated vividly by the short note describing the exhibition on the English-language website of the Georgian National Museum: