Georgia - Visiting the Stalin Museum

Ask 100 people, Pointless-style, what pops into their head when they hear ‘Georgia (the country)’. For most people, if there’s any connection at all, it’ll be Stalin. 

You’ll be shocked to learn this inextricable link is largely downplayed in the country as a whole. Killing an estimated 20 million of your own people will have an impact on your legacy, I suppose. 

One city, however, has its entire tourist industry built around the tyrant – Gori, Stalin’s birthplace. 

Gori is just east of Georgia’s centre, some 90km northwest of Tbilisi by road. While technically the country’s fifth-biggest city, it is a small city dwarfed by its nearby capital. I saw no buildings more than a few stories tall. A ruined fortress overlooks the city, which anybody and everybody online will tell you isn’t worth visiting (they’re right). There’s a pleasant old town which can be walked around in ten minutes. 

Study Gori on Google Maps, however, and you’ll see a large road leading up to a perfect triangle of green. The former is Stalin Avenue. The latter is Stalin Park. 

Walk past the enormous Georgian flag, the fountains, the immaculately maintained flowers and grass, and you’ll come to a white shack which has had a stone pavilion built over it. This humble two-room hut is where Joseph Jughashvili was born and raised. It used to be part of a neighbourhood of similarly unassuming homes. That neighbourhood was long since cleared away to be replaced by the current complex dedicated to its most famous son. 

And behind the shack towers the enormous Stalin Museum. 

The entrance hall to the Stalin Museum is tall and extremely Soviet. You buy your ticket from a Russian-speaking woman at a booth to the left, who points you up to the main staircase. This has a red carpet, and a marble statue of Stalin is waiting for you at the top. It is the first of many, many depictions of the man. 

Double back up the staircase, and you’ll show your ticket then enter the first room of the main exhibition. 

This is dedicated to young Jughashvili’s early years (‘Stalin’, like Lenin and Trotsky, was a name adopted later). For yours truly, it was the most interesting part of the whole museum. 

There is some special, almost indefinable feeling you get when you see photos of such figures as babies, as children, as teenagers. When did it all start? When were the seeds planted? How could this infant, looking the same as any other, go on to do the things he did? Despite knowing the connection between this stage and the latter for a fact, it’s still hard to wrap your head around. Here’s Joseph with his primary school classmates. There he is as a teenager, at the seminary, merely one of many priests in training. 

The room progresses to his subsequent struggles, about which I knew nothing. He was arrested multiple times, and – when not incarcerated – was frequently on the run. There’s a mugshot of him young and bearded with long, exquisitely styled hair. His letters, to other young revolutionaries and indeed to his mother, survive (though sadly untranslated here into English). His photos are joined by those of young Trotsky and the other future fathers of the Soviet Union. 

The transformation is complete by the time you enter the second room. Now it is suddenly the Stalin to whom we are all accustomed: moustache, buttoned-up grey jacket, smiling. 

From that point on, the barrage of this very image begins. I’ve never visited a museum with so many photos of the same person; not even close. There are hundreds of them. Here he is visiting a factory, a school, a church (curiously). He shakes hands with world leaders and generals; holds the hands of little girls. He and everybody else is smiling. He is everywhere you look, always with the same smile, the same air of kindly invincibility. 

And I tell you – it works. 

The people who fell for it all weren’t any stupider than we are; humans haven’t psychologically evolved in a century. We can look back on Germany, Italy, Russia, China at this time, and wonder what the hell happened; how those cults of personalities could have been built so impenetrably around men who were, indeed, only men. But it does something to your psyche, even in one building, never mind an entire country, to see the image of one person – exuding strength, confidence, benevolence – everywhere you look. Those facts do melt away. Your brain tricks you into forgetting them, to be replaced instead by this manufactured, airbrushed, immaculately-controlled image. You forget the facts, which you know very well, and think… well, he seems like a nice man! 

(The images of Stalin were, incidentally, an early version of photoshopping. He contracted smallpox as a child which left his face permanently riddled with pockmarks and scars, of which there is rarely even the slightest hint in any subsequently published images. Below is the only photo which wasn’t airbrushed). 

There are two questions, I suppose, which the oh-so-enlightened Western visitor must weigh up after visiting. Should the museum still be there, and – if so – should it be altered?

Regarding the first, it’s a tricky one. I actually latched-on with an English-speaking tour guide halfway around. He said that the museum’s continuing existence was actually voted on by Gori’s residents recently. 60% said that it should be closed. 

The catch there, of course, is that said closure would spell the end of the city’s tourism. There’s nothing else to merit a visit to Gori. It’s right on the highway from Borjomi (a popular hiking destination) to Tbilisi, and people would just go straight through. Leaving the morals of the matter aside, Gori is famous for one thing and one thing only.  

Regarding the second, it’s pretty cut-and-dry for me. Leave it as it is. 

If this museum existed in Britain, there would be warning signs plastered everywhere, caveats to every quote, constant reminders of the purges and all the rest of it. 

We don’t need that. We’re not stupid. Everyone visiting this museum knows the atrocities. In the Soviet Union itself de-Stalinisation began immediately after his death in 1953, never mind in other countries which didn’t have such a directly personal connection.  

The very thing which makes this museum so special is that it is untouched. It remains exactly as it was when it was built. The museum is itself an unsanitised piece of history, allowing us to experience how this sort of propaganda and hoodwinkery really looked; how you would have felt to be exposed to it so forcefully and relentlessly. 

To step inside the Stalin Museum is to be transported seventy years back in time, and is a truly fascinating and challenging experience.