American Councils, CRRC Georgia and ARISC present the 17th talk in the Spring 2015 Works-in-Progress Series!

Timothy Blauvelt, American Councils and Ilia State University
Giorgi Khatiashvili, Georgia Regents University
"Stalinism and Islam in the Soviet Periphery: The 1929 Muslim Uprising in Ajara"

Wednesday, June 3, 2015 at 6:30pm
EPF/CRRC-Georgia, Kavsadze St. 3, Tbilisi

In 1929 local officials in the mountainous region of upper Ajara in the Georgian SSR tried to force Muslim women to remove their veils and to close religious schools, provoking the local Muslim peasant population to rebellion in one of the largest and most violent of such incidents in Soviet history. Based on Party and secret police files from the Georgian archives in Tbilisi and Batumi, this project explores the ways in which local cadres interpreted regime policies and the interaction of the center and periphery in dealing with national identity, Islam, gender and everyday life in the early Soviet period.

Timothy Blauvelt is Country Director in Georgia for American Councils and Associate Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Ilia State University.

Giorgi Khatiashvili is a graduate of Tbilisi State University and an MPA student at Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Georgia in the US.

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W-i-P is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the Eurasian Partnership Foundation at Kavsadze St. 3. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), the American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS, and the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC). All of the talks are free and open to the public.

The purpose of the W-i-P series is to provide support and productive criticism to those researching and developing academic projects pertaining the Caucasus region.

Would you like to present at one of the W-i-P sessions? Send an e-mail to natia@crrccenters.org.