Irakli Khvadagiani (Tiflis): Owning the past – to control the present. Post Soviet know-how in Georgia

After the collapse of the USSR, the new Georgian society failed a peaceful transition and all necessary steps for dealing with a live legacy of totalitarian rule and reconstructing a collective memory on the bases of a deideologized narrative. No lustration, no legislative frame for investigation of communist crimes, no restitution of material losses… 
One of the obvious elements, which guarantees an essential step in the process of dealing with a totalitarian past – transparency and accessibility of archives of the regime – was never ensured in Georgia since 1991. During post-soviet hybrid statehood, sometimes there was a legislative vacuum, sometimes direct restrictions and lately only rhetoric about transparency. Nowadays, researchers are dealing with a double trouble – highest prices for copying archival documents and restriction to access “personal data” since 1946. Same time, even the professional community of historians are not able to understand how the archive system was structured and transformed during the soviet totalitarian regime from 1921 to 1991 and where to find a trace of documentation which now officially are declared as lost.