The First Social Democracy

The enthralling, forgotten story of how the world’s first social democracy took shape in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the small nation of Georgia established its independence in May 1918. Its leaders surprised the world by creating the first social democratic state. Based on a combination of parliamentarianism and direct democracy, it was a representative government of the peasants and workers themselves, with ballots in their hands.

The First Social Democracy is the definitive history of a government that should inspire social democrats today. Stephen F. Jones chronicles how the founders of the new state navigated myriad challenges, including territorial threats from abroad, internal ethnic conflicts, and geopolitical rivalries between the imperial Ottomans, the British, and Germans. In the midst of these existential challenges, Georgia’s social democrats set about writing a constitution to put the country on a distinctive path of genuine self-government—protecting democratic rights, promoting political pluralism, and championing equality. Jones brings to life the passionate debates that shaped Georgia’s democracy during a moment of acute global instability.

The Democratic Republic of Georgia was strangled in its crib. Just four days after the constitution was ratified, its capital fell to the Red Army. Under Soviet rule, the republic was lost to history. Soviet scholars were forbidden to research this Georgian story, and Western scholars had little interest in a small and peripheral state that was independent for only three years. Recovering a forgotten experiment in democratic citizenship and statecraft, Jones reminds us of those audacious times when Georgians created and defended political freedom against the rise of Soviet communism.

Author Biography

Stephen F. Jones is Professor Emeritus of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Mount Holyoke College and Professor of Modern Georgian History at Ilia State University, Georgia. The founder of the Program on Georgian Studies at the Davis Center at Harvard, he is the author of Socialism in Georgian Colors: The European Road to Social Democracy, 1883-1917 and Georgia: A Political History Since Independence.