In the pro-Russian breakaway republic of Georgia, proclaimed in 2008, there is much debate about the need to write new books on the region’s contemporary history. Former parliament speaker Kociev wonders: “How can history be rewritten in the middle of a fist and knife fight?”
Tskhinvali () – In Tskhinvali, the capital of the pro-Russian Georgian separatist republic of South Ossetia, there is a great debate about the need to write new school textbooks and carry out more in-depth research on the contemporary history of the region. The deputies of the Supreme Council also discussed the issue, lamenting that “the new generation of Ossetians does not know the historical circumstances that led to the formation of our republic.”
Some consider that this ignorance “opens the possibility of spreading all kinds of insinuations and distortions of the real facts, which each one feels entitled to comment in their own way”, even compromising the opinion and memory of the personalities who have contributed decisively to the cause of independence. What is being considered is the post-Soviet period, which runs from 1998 to 2008, when the conflict between Russia and Georgia led to the proclamation of the autonomous republic of South Ossetia.
The former president of the parliament and a leader of the local communist party, Stanislav Kochiev, believes that the problem does not lie in the fact that most of the protagonists of those years are still alive, but in that the same protagonists continue to offer different versions and interpretations of the events, fueling the conflict within the country. That is why he opposes the “new textbooks”, which would be written by those who want to get something out of it. Everyone believes they are the first and only hero of our history… how can history be written in the middle of a fist and knife fight?
In order to prevent the memory of significant events and people from being lost, according to Kochiev, everyone should “engage in writing their own memoirs”, which in the future will be studied by neutral and competent historians and researchers. “Historians are the ones who must write the story, and the protagonists will enter this story with the positive or negative sign they deserve.”
For the popular Ossetian blogger Alik Pukhat, post-Soviet history must be studied now, fixing dates and events that would otherwise be forgotten. But before sitting down to write manuals, it is necessary to openly discuss the last twenty years and recover the connections with the previous history. “You can start with the figure of Abdul Bekir Tautiev, the first leader of South Ossetia, a descendant of the Ossetian mukhadzhiry, who believed in the revolution and returned to Tskhinvali from Turkey through Baku,” recalls Pukhat, when North and South Ossetia joined to form a single Soviet republic.
Tautiev was harshly repressed by Stalin and shot, but “neither on the Internet nor in books can one find information about him; they have erased it from history”, observes the blogger. Before 1989, in his opinion, we must remember 1920 and 1937, years in which “the genocide of the Ossetians” took place because of the Soviets, who incited the locals to revolt while making agreements with the Georgian Mensheviks for mutual recognition and the commitment to respect the borders. It was the years when the Bolshevik power was consolidating in Azerbaijan and wanted to avoid problems in the neighboring areas of the Central Caucasus. These events left a lot of resentment in the local population, both against the Russians and against the Georgians.
Even after Stalin’s death there were waves of repression, for example in the mid-1950s, when a large group of students were sent to concentration camps demanding to restore the study of the Ossetian language; some of them spent ten years in jail. “Ossetians didn’t come out of nowhere like goblins when the USSR fell,” says Pukhat, otherwise instead of history we’d just make “neo-Soviet post-punk”. Deputy David Sanakoev observes, for his part, that “there is a lot of discussion, because a lot has happened,” with deep internal and external divisions, typical of a land full of contradictions and diversity like the entire Caucasus. Sanakoev concludes with an invitation to look ahead: “to stop arguing about the past, we must start thinking together about the future”.
