Silenced Voices of the Soviet Periphery: Georgian Female Writers and Stalin’s Cult of Personality

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Abstract

While working on the Stalin-era archival documents of the Writers’ Union of Georgia for a research project that did not initially focus on gender, the male-dominated atmosphere of the literary field attracted my attention. Consequently, I decided to examine archival materials from this perspective to explore whether male-dominated ideological narratives exclusively shaped Stalin’s cult-building efforts in Soviet Georgian literature or if they incorporated elements of female participation. Such approach to Georgian Stalinism helps to examine it from multiple theoretical perspectives and use it as a tool for contributing to the decolonisation of Soviet Studies.

Author

• Megi Kartsivadze, U of Oxford (UK)