Tinatin Japaridze on Stalin's legacies: "We were told that everything we had learned was not true"

I'm pleased to bring you this interview with Tinatin Japaridze. She is the author of the 2022 book Stalin’s Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism. She is the Director of Policy and Strategy at The Critical Mass, whose mission is to transcend existing global security assistance silos and give professionals the sustainment architecture needed to meet threats and vulnerabilities. Japaridze also worked for the City of New York as the Field and Digital Community Engagement Specialist at the NYC Census, a Mayoral initiative, and as the Press Secretary for New York’s COVID-19 Response at NYC Health & Hospitals. She has also been United Nations Bureau Chief for Eastern European media outlets. Our conversation took place on February 24, 2022, and has been edited for clarity and flow.

Courtesy of Tinatin Japaridze

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (RBG): We are hearing a lot about Stalin right now, and how Putin is positioning himself in the Stalinist tradition. Your book engages Stalinism and its legacies, and the ways that personality cults take on a life of their own. People find what they want to find in them. There have always been multiple "Stalins."  

Tinatin Japaridze (TJ): As a Georgian-born person who spent a good chunk of my childhood in the 1990s in Russia --a very different kind of Russia, but nonetheless Russia-- I was aware of this ghost, this metaphor for other things beyond the historical figure of Stalin. But I did not really know how to engage with it.

I started writing the book in the midst of the first wave of COVID 19, when we were starting to rethink a lot of things. It was a time of deep reflection and at first the book was sort of a personal narrative...almost like writing in a diary. I haven't told anyone this, but I wrote most of the book by hand.

Why are we so fascinated by the sort of despotic figures, whether we talk about Stalin, Mussolini, or Putin? There's this sort of morbid curiosity. There is the Stalin who is the architect of the Great Purges, and then another Stalin who was the man from Georgia, who put Georgia "on the map."

Every time I would go to Georgia, I would go to the Stalin Museum. My family members said, "You're crazy. Why are you coming all the way from the US to go that museum?"

It was a way to track how the exhibits about Stalin changed over time, but also a way for me to come to terms with what I was feeling as a victim --indirect, but nonetheless, a victim, due to my family history-- of that regime. It was therapeutic.

That's because for a long time, no one talked about Stalin and what he did, and in general we were complicit, whether it was directly or indirectly, through our silence. One of the issues that I had as a millennial growing up in that part of the world was that we did not talk about those very painful instances. Many of us felt that the best way to deal with it was to pretend that it never happened.

RBG: I became worried when I saw that Putin was engaging more directly with Stalin, like authorizing statues of him in several cities, and approving a new Stalin studies center. I felt that Putin was seeking to legitimize himself by more explicitly attaching himself to the hero of the Great Patriotic War in view of some new phase of aggression. Whenever autocrats pay attention to personality cults, either their own or someone else's, it means more repression is coming. It's the same in China.

TJ: That's something I've been thinking about a lot as I've been watching the news unfold in Ukraine and in the surrounding areas. What do these policies and these actions tell us about what Vladimir Putin borrowed from the Stalin playbook? Putin's goals are very different from Stalin's, but we can say that Putin is manipulating Stalin-related narratives in order to fit his own objectives.

RBG: And the spin the Kremlin puts on the war - sorry, the "special operation"-- in Ukraine as a work of "denazification," explicitly recalls Stalin's crusade.

TJ: It certainly does. What Putin does so well is to manipulate history in this shameless manner. He does it so convincingly that it's frightening. For the many who support him, he does make very compelling arguments that are very difficult to argue against, unless you know the other side of the story. And many people ignore that other side, because they're constantly being told that it's a lie. This disinformation machine works so very well that one could even argue that no one does it better than Putin's Russia.

RBG: One of the reasons I wrote Strongmen was dismay at the massive historical revisionism I saw authoritarian leaders promoting. These people depend on our ignorance. So, they legislate what can be said about history, as Putin does with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and they want us to forget, or never know, what has gone on, because then their lies will be more convincing. Can you elaborate on your point that Putin's goals are very different than Stalin's?

TJ: The environment that Stalin inherited from Lenin was different, and then Stalin became so hands-on that he became the architect of that entire era. The environment Putin inherited in the late 1990s and early 2000s was very fluid and the oligarchs had a lot of power beyond Putin.

Putin's strength is that he's been very flexible: it's less that he constantly dictates the environment than he is able to dictate how that environment evolves. I hear all the time, particularly among the more liberal Western media outlets, that Putin is trying to recreate the Soviet Union. I don't think that is what he is trying to do.

He is much too smart to think that he can sort of copy and paste a version of the Soviet Union in 2022. He does, however, want to restore Russia's superpower status vis-a-vis NATO, the US, the West. And I feel that he truly believes  that Ukraine, Georgia and other countries in Russia's vicinity are his backyard. That's why he feels we should be asking his permission before we even consider inviting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, the EU, etc.

I do feel that he is feeling very vulnerable domestically. I kept saying, he's still very popular and it's so disturbing. Now I don't think he is popular, and I think he knows it. I think this is fear. This is him panicking. We don't often see this side of Putin. He trusts fewer and fewer people. We don't know whether [Russian elites] are going to stab him in the back --they might know better than to sign off on what he's doing [if the war continues], because I don't think he is making a lot of sense to them either.

RBG: The title of your book is Stalin's Millennials. Can you talk about how these leaders, and the legacies of authoritarianism, can haunt a population for decades?

TJ: I think it's really about an entire generation of millennials that were born at the tail end of a [Soviet] empire that basically ended up in ashes. My generation grew up on those very ashes and we lost a lot of the pillars that a new generation needs in order to stand on its feet.

We did not really have a chance to understand where we came from, because we were suddenly told that every everything we learned up to that point, when the Soviet Union collapsed, was all a lie.

It was about being told by my father, in what was suddenly becoming post-Soviet independent Georgia, that everything that we had learned was not true. And being told as a six or seven year-old in a Georgian school that we're going to take your textbook away from you because everything in that book was a lie. And looking up to my teacher as my mentor and then having her suddenly turn around and say, I've been telling you lies.

RBG: I imagine that is devastating.

TJ: It is devastating. I tried to give a voice to that generation in the book. Hopefully, as Stalin's millennials living in this post-truth world, we can start to think about how we share information and be responsible in sharing the news so we're not part of the disinformation machine today. I think it's really our duty.