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✨NEW TALK ALERT!✨ 📍Where? The Apollo Cinema, 135 Aghmashenebeli Avenue ⏰When? Friday 7 October at 19:00 GMT +4 📺.Can't join us in person? The lecture will be made available on replay on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCj3lSHtg1YLbHOlPnzOYIrg 💸 Donations welcome - all profits go to Helping to Leave fb.me/e/2UyzSkSWV Homo Soveticus: are they still around? In this talk from Dr. George Mchedlishvili, Associate Professor of International Relations at the European University (Tbilisi), we will learn about the elements of mentality that characterized late 70s and 80s, which, according to Dr Mchedlishvili, have gradually evaporated or were forcefully "driven out" as well as those that still stubbornly cling. The widely advertised tasks of the Soviet Union, necessary to achieve the main goal - the construction of communism - included the creation of a "new type of person." It had to be a conscious, "morally stable" and industrious creator. What a chimera communism was is clearly seen in what kind of "human material" was actually produced. This type is diverse, several sub-types can be distinguished, and the collapse of world socialism was largely predetermined by the deficiencies of that very human capital. Naturally, these people, who gained independence in 1991, have not gone away, and even a generation after the collapse of the USSR, when almost half of the population of the countries of the former empire was born after 1991, we can clearly feel the presence of this "Homo Soveticus", sometimes even in the younger generation. Dr. Mchedlishvili will try to tell, mainly on the example of Georgia, about the aspects of the Soviet mentality that have been overcome, as well as those that are still entrenched in people. And what needs to be done in order to finally overcome the protracted "transitional period" and the "post-Soviet" nature. Dr. George Mchedlishvili is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the European University (Tbilisi). He has a PhD in Political Science from Tbilisi State University, the thesis was about Ataturk's reforms and how they changed the Turkish society. The courses George has been teaching include "Foreign Policy Analysis", "Post-Soviet States", "Post-Soviet Transition in the South Caucasus", "South Caucasus in Global Politics". Mr. Mchedlishvili was a Carnegie Scholar at Georgetown University (Washington DC) in the spring of 2016, and a Robert Bosch Fellow at Chatham House, in 2013. All profits go to the Helping to Leave project. Our streams and lecture recordings also support Helping to Leave. Find out more about the project on their website, helpingtoleave.org/en