With the Law but in Our Own Way: Rearticulating Legality through Cultural Foundations in 1970s Soviet Georgia

Visegrad Lecture Series

With the Law but in Our Own Way: Rearticulating Legality through Cultural Foundations in 1970s Soviet Georgia

by Katie Sartania - Researcher at Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin, Germany and PhD Student at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The presentation examines the arguments about legality and justice developed by dissident and urban intellectual groups in Soviet Georgia during the 1970s, as expressed through Georgian‑language samizdat publications, literary novels, poems, public appeals, letters, and court cases.

Materials preserved in the Archivum show how this small group on the Soviet periphery sought to formulate an alternative, culturally grounded understanding of legality—one that operated in parallel with, and in partial alignment to the principles of socialist legality, but drew its authority from cultural foundations and historical memory.