In Stalin’s footsteps in Georgia, from museums in Tbilisi and his birthplace that glorify the dictator to his personal bath, unheralded and unloved
- A visit to Stalin’s birthplace, Georgia, and his hometown, Gori, reveals a somewhat selective telling of the dictator’s early years and later achievements
- In Tbilisi visitors can see an underground printing press where the young Stalin may have worked, and in a spa town, Tskaltubo, his crumbling private bathroom
Georgia’s relationship with its most famous son is complicated, and nowhere more so than in his hometown of Gori, an hour’s drive northwest of the capital, Tbilisi.
For few outside the Caucasus can name any other Georgian, except perhaps for a handful of post-Soviet politicians who have caught the attention of the international press.
But even then Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, who ran the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953, is unrecognisable except under his Russian nom de guerre, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, or Joseph Stalin for short.
Certainly Gori lacks any other famous names, which makes it hard for that city to abandon Stalin despite the almost universal assessment of him as a brutal dictator and a murderer of millions.
Stalinist sympathisers live on even though the current Russian occupation of 20 per cent of Georgia’s territory is all too reminiscent of the invasion of 1921 that made the country an unwilling part of the Soviet Union for 70 years.
Stalin will never be forgotten, and the museum to his memory, on Gori’s Stalin Avenue, remains that city’s principal attraction.
