Why History Matters: Georgia’s soviet legal inheritance and the structural origins of democratic decline
- Peripheral Histories ISSN 2755-368X
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Giorgi Meladze
More than three decades after independence, Georgia continues to confront a persistent paradox of rule of law reform. In recent years, as concerns about democratic decline and institutional backsliding have intensified, this paradox has acquired renewed significance. Despite repeated constitutional amendments, extensive judicial restructuring, and sustained alignment with European legal standards, courts have struggled to function as independent institutions. Explanations grounded solely in institutional design, public distrust, or deficiencies in professional training remain insufficient. What requires closer examination is the longer historical trajectory through which law came to be understood and practised in Georgia.
This article approaches Georgia’s contemporary predicament through the lens of historical continuity. It argues that the difficulties of judicial independence are rooted in a legal culture shaped during the Soviet period and further conditioned by Georgia’s specific position within Soviet structures of coercion. While sharing features common to other Soviet republics, Georgia’s experience was marked by particular configurations: the involvement of Georgian elites in the construction of coercive institutions; the dense embedding of security networks in social life; the prevalence of corruption and informal governance; the political elevation of policing over party hierarchy; and the normalization of alternative normative orders. These historically specific dynamics contributed to an equilibrium in which courts could exist, professionalize, and operate procedurally without becoming effective sites of political restraint.
It should be noted that only recently have researchers begun to examine the Soviet legal system from a historical perspective. Current discussion on the legal profession in the Soviet Union has been advanced by Irakli Khvadagiani’s study of Georgian lawyers in the early period of Soviet occupation. He argues that the consolidation of the profession into a single institutional structure was completed after the repressions of 1937–38, after which lawyers in Georgia operated largely in line with directives issued by party authorities.[1] The present article seeks to broaden this discussion by offering a more complex interpretation of a legacy that continues to shape contemporary realities but has received limited attention in academic scholarship.
Soviet legality and inherited legal culture
The Soviet legal system, throughout the entire period of its existence, was not conceived as a mechanism to limit political authority. Rather, it functioned as a governance technology through which political decisions were translated into administratively enforceable outcomes. Courts operated within a dense web of party supervision and disciplinary oversight that rendered substantive judicial independence implausible, even when formal procedures were observed. This structural subordination of law to political authority remained remarkably consistent across the different phases of the Soviet state development. While the intensity of repression varied between the Stalinist period and the later decades of “developed socialism,” the institutional relationship between law and power did not fundamentally change. The Communist Party maintained ultimate authority over legal institutions, and the legal profession itself never developed the autonomy necessary to act as an independent guardian of legality.[2]
Evidence from contemporary observers confirms the absence of a legal culture capable of constraining political authority. Mikhail Voslenskii, a former insider of the Soviet elite,[3] noted that the Communist Party apparatus itself contained virtually no professional lawyers, an institutional reality that reflected the regime’s understanding of law as an instrument of administration rather than a normative constraint on power.[4] The very idea that law might operate as a framework binding political authority only emerged as a subject of serious debate during the late perestroika period. As commentators observed at the end of the 1980s, Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev had only then begun to reconsider whether the concept of the rule of law (pravovoe gosudarstvo) could be incorporated into the Soviet political order.[5] By the time these discussions gained momentum, however, the Soviet Union was already approaching systemic collapse, leaving little opportunity for institutional transformation.
Under this system, judges were expected to produce substantively “correct” outcomes aligned with state priorities. Adversarial adjudication and rights-based review were secondary to the maintenance of administrative coherence and predictability.[6] Judicial independence existed as a formal category, but its practical scope was circumscribed by informal expectations and career incentives.
Over time, this structure generated a legal culture characterized by instrumentalism, deference, and caution. Judges internalized the boundaries of permissible action and avoided politically sensitive disputes[7] without requiring explicit instruction.[8]
Compliance did not depend on constant coercion; it was sustained through routinized norms and predictable consequences. These historically embedded practices help illuminate why courts, even in formally democratic settings, may hesitate to assert themselves as autonomous actors.
Georgia inherited this legal culture in its entirety. Yet Georgia’s trajectory within the Soviet Union complicates any straightforward comparison with other post-Soviet cases. Several aspects of its Soviet experience deepened the embedding of coercive governance and shaped local understandings of authority in distinctive ways.
Architects of coercion and the embedding of security institutions
Georgia’s association with Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria is significant not for symbolic reasons alone, but for its institutional implications. Both figures were central to the development of a system in which formal legality coexisted with, and was often subordinated to, extralegal coercion.
Under Stalin, courts were instrumentalized to legitimize repression,[9] transforming legal procedure into a vehicle for political violence.[10] As head of the NKVD, Beria consolidated a security apparatus characterized by overlapping competencies and parallel chains of command[11] designed for durability[12] and opacity.[13] Contemporary and archival accounts alike underscore the structural fusion of legality, secrecy, and coercion.
For Georgia, the importance of this legacy lies in the social integration of coercive institutions. Georgian cadres were disproportionately present within Soviet law-enforcement and security structures.[14] Coercive governance was therefore not experienced solely as an external imposition from Moscow, but as a locally embedded and socially mediated form of rule. This embedding shaped expectations about obedience and authority, narrowing the conceptual space in which courts might be imagined as independent constraints. The persistence of the Stalin cult and the continued recognition of Beria throughout the Soviet period, as well as in contemporary Georgia, provides a powerful signal supporting this argument. Streets named after Stalin (Gori) and Beria (Zugdidi) can still be found in Georgian cities. In the village of Salkhino, at the entrance to the residence of the Patriarch of Georgia, a public school displayed a bust of Beria until recently, when it was finally removed during renovation of the building. In several locations across the country, statues of Stalin remain standing and are maintained by local authorities, even as activists attempt to vandalize them.[15] It should be noted that Beria Street was reinstated after the restoration of independence in the 1990s and continues to exist today as a source of local pride and Stalin’s statues have begun reappearing in public spaces, often with the support or tolerance of the Georgian Dream party government.[16]
Corruption, informality, and the erosion of legal authority
A further dimension of Georgia’s inherited legal culture was the pronounced density of corruption and informal governance in the Georgian SSR. Although corruption was widespread across the Soviet Union, Georgia acquired a reputation for entrenched patronage networks and shadow economic practices.[17]
By the late Soviet period, informal arrangements and corruption shaped much of administrative and economic life in Georgia. Scholarship on informal institutions[18] shows that such practices can operate as complementary governance mechanisms.[19] In Georgia, however, pervasive informality pushed courts out of central decision-making.[20] Governance relied less on legally defined entitlements than on negotiated exchanges between party officials and interested actors, mediated either by thieves-in-law or, later, by the prosecutor’s office during Razmadze’s tenure.[21] Russian-language research associates the dominance of informal norms with the marginalization of formal legal institutions.[22] Law became flexible and instrumental, complicating later attempts to anchor democratic governance in judicial oversight.
Shevardnadze episode and the primacy of coercive authority
The 1972 rise of Eduard Shevardnadze from Minister of Internal Affairs to First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party illustrates the growing prominence of law enforcement officials within party hierarchies. He was the first Interior Minister permitted by Leonid Brezhnev to report against the sitting First Secretary, Vasil Mzhavanadze.[23] Given that the police lacked authority to gather compromising material on senior party officials, it is likely that Aleksi Inauri, head of Georgia’s KGB and a central figure in Nikita Khrushchev’s removal, supplied the information, which Shevardnadze delivered to Brezhnev with Nikolai Shchelokov ’s support. As Voslensky notes, security officials often used control over information and coercion to dominate civilian institutions.[24] Shevardnadze’s ascent showed that security power could outweigh formal party hierarchy.
This episode publicly elevated law-enforcement institutions as decisive political actors and reinforced the perception that enforcement capacity, rather than institutional position, determined authority. Even in the absence of complete archival documentation, the structural significance of this trajectory is evident: coercive authority was privileged over adjudicative authority.
Thieves in law and normative pluralism
Georgia’s high per capita presence of so-called “Thieves in law” (“Kanonieri Qurdi”) introduced an additional layer of normative complexity. Criminological literature describes this phenomenon as an alternative normative order with codified rules and mechanisms of dispute resolution.[25]
In certain contexts, these actors enjoyed social legitimacy and functioned as parallel authorities. However, as one of the architects of the Rose Revolution reforms, Givi (Giorgi) Targamadze noted in an interview, “Thieves in Law” carry real weight only when they are supported by the FSB Russian secret service. Without such backing, they remain little more than an information bubble.[26] It should also be noted that through drastic measures and the adoption of strong legislation, the Rose Revolution government was able to virtually push criminal influences out of public life.[27] The trend was later reversed by Georgian Dream government.[28] Their presence normalized legal pluralism and further reduced the centrality of state courts. From a historical perspective, law became one normative system among several, rather than the uncontested framework of social ordering.
Revolt, legitimacy, and non-legal resistance
Finally, Georgia’s legal culture was shaped by a historical repertoire[29] in which resistance to authority was frequently directed against the state itself rather than articulated through legal claims. Revolt was often perceived as legitimate, but it did not necessarily strengthen legal institutions.[30]
This pattern encouraged recourse to informality rather than engagement through judicial channels. Courts remained associated with domination rather than emancipation, limiting their ability to accumulate moral authority.
Conclusion
Recent concerns about democratic regression in Georgia invite a reconsideration of the historical foundations of its institutions. Constitutional reforms and European integration commitments once suggested a linear trajectory toward consolidation. Yet the limited capacity of courts to constrain political power reveals the persistence of deeper continuities.
The argument advanced here emphasizes that Georgia’s present cannot be disentangled from its past. Soviet legality cultivated habits of deference and instrumental reasoning that survived institutional transformation. Georgia’s distinctive embedding within coercive structures, the entrenchment of informality, the privileging of enforcement over adjudication, and the normalization of normative pluralism collectively shaped a legal culture in which courts were not expected to function as countervailing powers.
The Georgian case underscores the importance of integrating peripheral experiences into broader debates on rule of law and democratic resilience. It suggests that inherited legal cultures can condition the trajectory of reform long after formal transitions have occurred. History does not predetermine outcomes, but it frames the horizons within which institutions evolve.
Giorgi Meladze is Associate Professor of Public Law at Ilia State University and Director of the Center for Constitutional Research in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Visiting Scholar at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He studied law at Tbilisi State University and was a visiting scholar at Columbia Law School. His work focuses on human rights, civil society, and the rule of law. He is pursuing a PhD in political science on interdisciplinary rule of law reforms in Georgia. His publication record spans Georgia, Europe, and the United States. He collaborated with the Council of Europe, Venice Commission, UNDP, and Global Compact, contributing to a global NSF-funded project published by Cambridge University Press. The publication received 2024 Lawrence S. Wrightsman Book Award from the American Psychology-Law Society.
[1] Irakli Khvadagiani, “Attorney – A Profession in the Shadow of the Totalitarian System,” Constitutional Law Review, no. 17 (2023), https://clr.iliauni.edu.ge/index.php/journal.
[2] Harold J. Berman, Justice in the U.S.S.R.: An Interpretation of Soviet Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
[3] Mikhail or Michael Voslensky was a Soviet historian and former insider of the Communist Party apparatus who later became one of the most influential interpreters of the Soviet elite system for Western audiences. After defecting to the West in 1972, reportedly with discreet assistance from figures connected to the office of FRG President Gustav Heinemann, he settled in West Germany and began publishing analyses of Soviet power structures exposing the privileges and internal mechanisms of the Soviet governing elite. His work contributed to Western understanding of how the Soviet system actually functioned.
[4] Mikhail S. Voslenskii, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 279–281.
[5] Peter B. Maggs, “The Rule of Law in the Soviet Union,” Foreign Affairs 69, no. 3 (1990), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/1990-03-01/soviet-union-and-rule-law.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Kathryn Hendley, Law and Judicial Independence in Russia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
[8] Kathryn Hendley, “Judicial Independence and Judicial Reform in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 61, no. 6 (2009): 985–1002, https://doi.org/10.1080/09668130903068710.
[9] J. Arch Getty, “Stalinism and the Soviet Legal System,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 1985), 155–176.
[10] Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
[11] Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
[12] “Beria: Leader or Traitor?” The World Today 9, no. 8 (August 1953): 323.
[13] Wilson Center, Soviet Counterintelligence in the Early 1950s, Cold War International History Project Working Paper no. 96 (Washington, DC: Wilson Center, 2023), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/uploads/documents/CWIHP_Working_Paper_96_Soviet_Counterintelligence_1950s_(May%202023).pdf.
[14] Interview with veteran law enforcement officer, Tbilisi, August 19, 2023.
[15] “Stalin Statue Vandalized in Georgia,” Voice of America (Amerikiskhma), March 6, 2013, https://www.amerikiskhma.com/a/georgia-stalin-vandalism/1600958.html.
[16] “Stalin’s Cult in Georgia,” Tabula, accessed March 10, 2026, https://tabula.ge/en/news/557982-stalinis-kulti-sakartveloshi.
[17] Louise I. Shelley, “Post-Soviet Organized Crime: Implications for Economic and Political Development,” Demokratizatsiya 2, no. 2 (1994): 341–358.
[18] Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda,” Perspectives on Politics 2, no. 4 (2004): 725–740, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592704040472.
[19] Alena V. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[20] Interview with retired judge, Tbilisi, July 15, 2023.
[21] Ibid.
[22] G. Glonti and G. Lobzhanidze, Professionalʹnaia prestupnostʹ v Gruzii: vory v zakone [Professional Criminality in Georgia: Thieves in Law] (Tbilisi, 2010), open-access PDF, https://polyglotlife.ru/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Глонти-Г.-Лобжанидзе-Г.-Профессиональная-преступность-в-Грузии-воры-в-законе..pdf.
[23] “Iurii Andropov i prikhod Shevardnadze k vlasti v Gruzii” [Yuri Andropov and Shevardnadze’s Rise to Power in Georgia], YouTube video, accessed March 3, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMSKeviZxao.
[24] Michael Voslensky, Nomenklatura: The Soviet Ruling Class (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
[25] Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
[26] Rat’om aris sashishi Givi Targamadze – tsikheze, Bidzinaze da saidumlo shekhvedrebze | saertashoriso aktsentebi (Why Givi Targamadze Is Dangerous – On Prisons, Bidzina, and Secret Meetings | International Accents) YouTube video, accessed March 10, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSeJOfNu7L4.
[27] World Bank, Fighting Corruption in Public Services: Chronicling Georgia’s Reforms (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012).
[28] Council of Europe, Organised Crime Situation Report: Focus on the Threat of Thieves-in-Law (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2020).
[29] Irakli Makharadze, Guruli Piralebi (Gurian Outlaws) (Tbilisi, 2008).
[30] Levan Berdzenishvili et al., Adamianis Uplebebi da Kartuli Kultura [Human Rights and Georgian Culture] (Tbilisi, 2004).