“River Stories in Late Soviet Georgia: Economy, the Environment and the Everyday,” a lecture by Jeff Sahadeo

This presentation will focus on late Soviet Georgia, when hydroelectricity and gravel taken from riverside quarries joined irrigation and fishing as key contributors to Georgia’s development. Decisions on how to use rivers—at the republic and everyday level—governed the type of state and the spaces where Georgians worked and lived. These decisions, often haphazard and sometimes reversed, manifest a far more complicated dynamic than a simple dichotomy between modernization and conservation.