Authors

Megi Kartsivadze¹;  ¹ University College London, UK

Discussion

This paper examines the literary politics of the Soviet South Caucasus under Stalinism, focusing on Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia as comparative case studies. While Stalinist cultural policy has often been treated as largely monolithic, characterised by the dominance of Socialist Realism, institutional centralisation, and extensive state control over cultural production, this paper argues that its implementation at the republican level was more complex and mediated by local political dynamics. To reveal the multilayered nature of literary production in the Soviet Union, this paper examines literary production in Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in light of the power dynamics between the centre and the periphery, as well as within local political contexts. First, it explores how these republics reconfigured their ‘national forms’ to align with the ‘socialist content’ determined by the centre, revealing similar patterns and techniques used by Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian literary elites. However, this apparent uniformity represents only one layer of literary production. To uncover another layer, the paper pays particular attention to the relationships between republican leaders - Lavrentiy Beria in Georgia, Mir Jafar Bagirov in Azerbaijan, and Aghasi Khanjian in Armenia - and examines how these dynamics, alongside their individual political interests and ambitions, were reflected in literary production. As a result, the paper shows that, although republican literary elites formally adhered to a shared ideological model, its interpretation and application varied across these republics, producing distinct patterns of literary production.