Episode 2: Soviet Georgian Migrants, Memory and Rivers with Jeff Sahadeo

During the late USSR, thousands of people from Soviet Georgia relocated to both Leningrad and the all-Soviet capital, Moscow. Many left Soviet Georgia to study in universities, for job placements or other career opportunities. Some of these people stayed, while others returned. Some went to Leningrad and Moscow as traders of fruits or flowers, using trade networks and access to desirable goods in Georgia to forge out comfortable livings for themselves.

We spoke with Jeff Sahadeo about his book “Voices From the Soviet Edge” which uses oral histories to explore the experiences and memories of these Soviet migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. In particular he explains to us what the experiences of the Georgian migrants were, what their lives were like, what the Soviet experience meant to them, and how life in the Soviet Union was remembered as one of freedom, stability and better days.

We also discuss the subject of professor Sahadeo's new research project on water and rivers in Soviet and post-Soviet Georgia. As Georgia is home to thousands of rivers, in the Soviet era they became hugely important to modernization projects and city planning. Towards the end of the USSR, environmental concerns relating to dams in Georgia were issues nationalists seized upon. In Georgia today, the construction of dams and hydroelectric power plants are as contentious as ever -  overseen by multinational corporations which demonstrate a formidable shift  from how Soviet-era projects were undertaken.