26 May 1918: National Council meeting, Tbilisi. Public Domain. The centenary of the Russian Revolution is re-opening debate about the troubled relationship between socialism and democracy, as historians highlight the crimes committed by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. The land where Stalin was born, Georgia, was also the birthplace of a successful social-democratic experiment that was lauded by international statesmen — but crushed by the Bolsheviks. The Georgians’ brave example deserves to be remembered to show that another revolution was possible.
In May 1918, six months after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, the world’s first democratic socialist republic was created. In Georgia, the Mensheviks, or Social Democrats, found themselves ruling a country whose separation from Russia they had always opposed. But under pressure from the Bolsheviks to their north and the Turks to their south, they had no choice.
Their leader was Noe Zhordania. Like Stalin, who was ten years his junior, Zhordania got an unlikely-seeming introduction to revolutionary politics through his education at the Tiflis Theological Seminary. But unlike Stalin, Zhordania spent his formative years abroad, learning about politics and society from leading figures in Europe’s social-democratic and labor parties. When he returned to Georgia, he persuaded the local revolutionaries to embrace a very particular kind of Marxism, one with a strong European and democratic flavor.
