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Stalin is dead, long live Stalin? Testing socialization, structural, ideological, nationalist, and gender hypotheses

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1060586x.2014.940697

1938-2855

Alexi Gugushvili, Peter Kabachnik,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

AbstractRecently, there has been a renewed focus on analyzing post-Soviet memory, including the rekindling of debate on contemporary perspectives of Josef Stalin. Most notably, the publication of The Stalin Puzzle has helped bring attention to the persistence of positive accounts and admiration, along with ambivalent and contested images, of the former dictator of the Soviet Union. Using survey data and multivariate statistical methods, we test five broad hypotheses – socialization, structural, ideological, nationalist, and gender – to ascertain what factors might shape people's attitudes toward Stalin in Georgia. Our analysis reveals that elderly, poor men from rural areas have the most positive associations of Stalin, whereas young, wealthier women from cities, those who are open to privatization, and perceive Russia as Georgia's biggest threat judge Stalin negatively. Counterintuitively, non-Georgian minorities show higher esteem for Stalin than Georgians. We envision that the effects of cohort replacement, economic development, and urbanization will decrease positive perceptions of Stalin in years to come.Keywords:: Stalinpost-Soviet memoryGeorgiasocializationnationalism AcknowledgementsThis work was supported, in part, by a Dean's Research Scholarship and a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the "Europe in Georgia" International Conference (Center for Social Sciences, Tbilisi State University, Tbilisi, Georgia) and the Association for the Study of Nationalities World Convention (New York, NY, USA). We would like to thank Jesse Driscoll, who served as discussant on our ASN panel, and everyone else who offered comments and questions. We would also like to thank George Breslauer and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Any errors or oversights are our own.Notes1. For example, see the special issue of The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review (Volume 38, 2011) dedicated to the World War II cult in post-Soviet space.2. We do not mean to imply that such data are not useful or that qualitative data in general are less rigorous than quantitative data. However, qualitative data are typically employed in this literature in an ad hoc, limited, and/or anecdotal fashion, rather than in a systematic way (with clearly documented methods and rationale for choosing the survey sample, interview subjects, etc.).3. For more details on the survey, see http://www.crrccenters.org.4. These items are: (1) color television; (2) digital photo camera; (3) automatic washing machine; (4) DVD player; (5) refrigerator; (6) air conditioner; (7) car; (8) land line phone; (9) cell phone; (10) activated internet access from your personal cell phone; (11) personal computer, including laptop; and (12) Internet access from home computer or laptop.5. The obvious exception is Model 3, in which respondents' agreement with the survey question reflects negative attitudes toward Stalin.6. We do not report interactions of birth year with education, objective socioeconomic status, and religiosity because these variables proved to be insignificant in explaining attitudes toward Stalin across and within generations.7. This is done because the low number of observations for non-Georgian ethnicity does not permit making statistically significant tests across consecutive birth cohorts.8. In fact, 6% annual growth is sufficient to double the nominal GDP every 12 years.