August Uprising - Assessment

Assessment

Under the Soviet Union, the August Uprising remained a taboo theme and was hardly mentioned at all, if not in its ideological content. Using its control over education and the media, the Soviet propaganda machine denounced the Georgian rebellion as a "bloody adventure initiated by the Mensheviks and other reactionary forces who managed to implicate a small and undereducated part of the population in it." With a new tide of independence movement sweeping throughout Georgia in the late 1980s, the anti-Soviet fighters of 1924, particularly, the leading partisan officer Kakutsa Cholokashvili, emerged as a major symbol of Georgian patriotism and national resistance to the Soviet rule. The process of legal "rehabilitation" (exoneration) of the victims of the 1920s repressions began under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of Glasnost ("openness") and was completed in 25 May 1992 decree issued by the State Council of the Republic of Georgia chaired by Eduard Shevardnadze. In connection with the opening of the Museum of Soviet Occupation in May 2006, more archival reserves were made public by the Ministry of Interior of Georgia which started to publish the names of the victims of the 1924 purges and other materials from the Soviet era secret archives.