Backward and deficient: exploring Soviet imaginations and the modernization of Svaneti, 1920s–1930s

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ABSTRACT This article first analyses the goiter administration in a remote mountainous region of the Georgian SSR called Svaneti in the 1920s and 1930s. The USSR identified cultural ‘backwardness’ and illness-related physical impairments as the main problems of the group that populated a geographically disconnected area. To usher the Svans through the Marxist historical timeline towards communism, the USSR started state-driven modernization of Svaneti. After tracing this process and describing how public health was designated at once the scaffolding and a proxy for modernization, this paper then places the analysis in a genealogical account of goiter that permits to reveal the (dis)continuities between the Soviet Union and the preceding Russian Empire. Based on three months of archival fieldwork in Georgia, utilizing discourse analysis to study historical sources on Svaneti, this article argues that the goiter administration and the large-scale production of statistical information, instead of being indifferent data-gathering processes, created a new category-identity that circumscribed the region’s position vis-à-vis the state. The process conflicted with the systematic homogenizing efforts of the USSR to sculpt a new Soviet person and instead deepened the difference between the goitrous Svans and the rest – a type of governance akin to the techniques employed by the previous empire.