For this episode, we go to the far Western edges of ‘Asia’, the Republic of Georgia. Georgia is in some ways ‘a land between’. Red Star tends to focus on East Asian topics, but we had the opportunity to have on a good friend of the show, Sopo Japardize. She's a labor organizer based in Tblisi, Georiga, a fascinating country located at the nexus of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Most listeners will probably know Georgia as the former USSR republic. Sopo and her comrades host a great podcast focused on this legacy called ‘Reimagining Soviet Georgia’, links to which are below. In this two part episode, we talk about the legacy of Soviet Georgia, the country’s experience having been the laboratory for the darkest fantasies of US libertarian think tanks following the socialist bloc collapse in the early 90s, and contemporary social movements in the country. In part 2, we get more into how the new left is attempting to forge and independent path between NATO expansionism from the West and the cynical transgressions of Russia’s oligarchy from the East. Sopo Japardize is on at Twitter @sopjap

Her podcast Reimagining Soviet Gerogia is available here: https://anchor.fm/sovietgeorgia/

You can also check out her written work at Open Democracy and Jacobin:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/sopiko-japaridze/

https://jacobinmag.com/author/sopiko-japaridze