The Last Soviet Generation: Women, Music, and the Legacy of the Soviet Union in Independent Georgia and Estonia

• In Event: Cohen Tucker Fellows: Papers in Honor of Stephen F. Cohen

Abstract

Following anti-Russian protests in Tbilisi, Georgia in March 2023, I interviewed Georgian composer Nino Davadze. Born in 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, she grew up in a world defined by the legacy of the USSR’s policies and cultural norms, especially those shaping women’s roles in Soviet society. Davadze explained that she viewed herself and other women born after the USSR’s fall as “the last Soviet generation,” acknowledging how patriarchal Soviet attitudes and policies had shaped her life in an independent Georgia that was, in reality, never truly independent of Soviet influence.
In this paper, I follow Davadze’s provocation about the “last Soviet Generation” through an analysis of her composition, The Geometry of Soviet Women. I place Davadze’s composition in conversation with contemporary Estonian female composer Kaisa Ling’s composition, The Feminist’s Handbook for Eastern Europe. Through musical analysis and oral history interviews, I examine these artists and their compositions to trace the legacy of Soviet feminism and its Georgian and Estonian iterations to the present, while also questioning the role of historical memory in studying the relatively recent late Socialist era. Furthermore, by identifying how gendered experience intersects with the tension between hegemonic Soviet experience and localized ethnic experience, I emphasize the precarity for women in the former Soviet Union. In their respective compositions, both artists complicate the usual periodization of Soviet and post-Soviet, demonstrating renewed urgency with which the legacy of the Soviet Union must be addressed, especially as this legacy is weaponized as justification for war in Ukraine.

Author

• Allison Brooks-Conrad, U of Pennsylvania