Remembering precarious statehood: Public recall of Georgia’s modern past

Modern Georgian history has been marked by war, territorial loss, sovereignty struggles, and political rupture, and these experiences shape which events become publicly salient. Drawing on a nationally representative face-to-face survey conducted in 2015, we analyze responses to two open-ended questions asking respondents to name the most important events since the beginning of the 20th century. The findings indicate that recall is focused on a relatively limited set of events, structured by a precarious statehood framework, and is marked by significant uncertainty and nonresponse. The most salient nominations are largely drawn from the post-Soviet period, although World War II remains a notable exception. Event recall is structured by cohort and internal displacement and further patterned by education, settlement context, and the national identity factor score. These results show how event salience reflects socially patterned access to historically available narratives.