TITLE:
Re-Thinking of History in Glasnost-Period Georgian Official Press
AUTHORS:
Khatuna Maisashvili, Natia Svanidze, Natia Bregvadze, Kristina Sajaia, Marianna Asanidze
KEYWORDS:
Georgia, Official Press, Glasnost, History, Ideology, Time-Shifting Discourse
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Journalism and Communication,
Vol.10 No.1,
March
16,
2022
ABSTRACT: This article represents the independent part of the broad academic project conducted by the author at Tbilisi State University. The article, on the basis of triangulation content analysis of four official publications of the Glasnost-period Soviet Georgia during 1986-1990, studies the trends of the process of re-writing of the past declared by the last Soviet Authorities. The main focus of the article is an inter-replacement of official and unofficial versions of histories in Georgia, or expressing more imaginably—yesterday as today or restoration of historical truth and justice as ideological change. The author concerns discursive and non-discursive realities in Glasnost-Period official press in Soviet Georgia. The term “official publications” implies newspapers that were official bodies of the Soviet and communist-party authorities of Georgia. The range of these publications in the article includes Georgian-language and Russian-language dailies, as well as the official youth press in both languages. The hypotheses of the study are posed to: 1) the time dimension of the re-assessment of history; and 2) the ideological platform of the re-interpretation of history. The article studies a really unique historical period when the official Soviet power and the informal power of the National Liberation Movement, official communist publications and the party press of newly established parties with different political ideologies coexisted in the conditions of one sociopolitical formation. The main findings of the article can be formulated as follows: 1) the official press of Georgia, despite the freedom of speech allowed from above and the vaguely restricted boundaries of this freedom, did not use the strategies of time-shifting discourse in reproducing history in constructing the Glasnost narrative, and 2) the official press of Georgia still covered historical events from the Marxist-Leninist platform.