ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how the memory of Soviet past was used in Georgian public discourse in the 2004-2012 period, marked by the political hegemony of Mikheil Saakashvili and his United National Movement (UNM). In post-Soviet countries the emergence of a whole series of new independent states imposed with urgency the re-imagining of their respective titular' nations. Jurij Lotman argued that architectural space is always a semiotic space: it shapes the world, but at the same time it is itself the result of a modelling activity which reproduces the worldview of its creators. The fierce opposition to the removal of Soviet-era monuments and to the most extreme projects of urban reshaping suggest that Saakashvili's narrative exceeded this shared narrative template' in pushing too far its anti-Soviet drive and in its radical neoliberal agenda. The Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab) is a Georgian non-governmental organisation established by a group of researchers in March 2010.
