Staring at Stalin

The keychain costs about 50 cents. It comes in a little plastic bag with a staple through the middle, and is sometimes given away free to visiting foreigners. On one side of the keychain is a thumbnail size photo, a scratchy black and white of the revolutionary when he was in his early 20s. On the flip side of this cheap souvenir is an image of the same man about 30 years later, no longer a revolutionary, but a despot who commanded one of the most heinous reigns of terror in the history of mankind.

Welcome to the Stalin Museum.

Actual facts are of little consequence here, much as they were when the museum opened in 1937, when Stalin was still very busy arranging mass murders and ethnic cleansings, the tremendous scale of which are still being felt half a century after his death.

Josef Stalin is a hero to many here in his hometown of Gori, Georgia, and most certainly in the halls of this museum--a local boy done good. He is the man who put Russia on the map and transformed it into a mighty superpower, the man who liberated Europe from the Nazis and saved it from fascism. He is the good son, the poet, the brave freedom fighter, the diplomat, and even the genius inventor. And in these hallways of praise, he is Ghandi, DaVinci, Galileo, Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama all rolled into one.

He is, as many Georgians like to say, "the great son of the Georgian
nation."

The feeling was never mutual, the great son holding such contempt for his countrymen that he dismissively referred to his homeland as "that small area of Russia, which calls itself Georgia."

This sad city of Gori is everything that is wrong with Georgia today, and what is wrong with Georgia today is rooted in Stalin. It is wreckage, hopelessness, alcoholism, vandalism, poverty, joblessness, paranoia, violence, pollution, grime, neglect, despair. But what drives Georgia's misguided reverence of their fallen hero is the same force that drove Stalin to become the monster he was: a massive inferioritycomplex. To those who feel small, infamy is equal to fame, and without Stalin, this little country is just "that small area.......which calls itself Georgia." A nothing, nobody.

He didn't hate himself, but he hated who he was, Josef Jugashvili from Georgia, a poor cobbler's son. He was born in the one room, ramshackle house that sits adjacent to the museum. In America it would be known as a humble log cabin, Lincolnesque.

A garish, marble, parthenon-style structure has been erected around Stalin's boyhood home, incongruously dwarfing the tiny house. It hugs the house tightly, squeezing out whatever charm the tiny house may have once had, mocking its small size; but Stalin was apparently quite pleased with the structure built to honour him, proudly comparing it to the one constructed over the stable in which Jesus was born.

Stalin was born in Gori, but his mother sent him off to the seminary in Tbilisi to become a priest. He became a bank robber instead, an insurgent who stole money for "the cause," and would end up being carted off to jail or hauled to Siberia for his contributions to the Bolshevik revolution. He was the worker bee - the one who handed out leaflets and helped organize worker strikes.

He tried out several names during this period, but what truly shed his skin of Georgia, a land which was an unwilling colony of Russia, was his decision to name himself Stalin, a Russian word meaning "man of steel."

He didn't hate himself for his weaknesses, he hated others for their strengths. After wrestling power away from influential intellectual revolutionaries, which he was not, he eventually had them killed and essentially named himself supreme leader: or rather, transformed the once mid-level, clerical post of General Secretary into one of two most powerful positions in the world.

The museum guide does not mention this. She also fails to mention the multiple millions of displaced citizens--entire republics ethnically cleansed, purportedly for the greater good of Russia. Nor do we learn about the millions of citizens Stalin had murdered - estimates of the number killed go as high as 50 million by some scholars, but most agree he is responsible for the violent deaths of somewhere around 20 million of his own countrymen. In his rush to industrialize the USSR and overhaul the agricultural structure - a process known as collectivisation - the most successful farmers were executed (they were considered counter-revolutionaries), and those that resisted the government takeover of their property met the same fate (also counter-revolutionaries).

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," Stalin is famous for saying, truly proving himself to be made of steel.

The museum is without electricity or proper plumbing, as is much of Georgia today, so the halls are lit by a flashlight or someone's lighter, and are cold and drafty some days. The chill is appropriate, lending itself to the image of what the world has come to understand Stalin to truly be: a monster.

But the evidence is not here. Instead, visitors see photos of Stalin with world leaders, family snapshots of him with his wife and children, and propaganda about how he nearly single-handedly fought off the invading Germans and regained Europe's freedom in World War II.

Visitors are not told that the photos have been airbrushed to place Stalin with the world leaders, that his wife and son committed suicide and his daughter sought political asylum in the United States, and that Stalin's refusal to listen to advisors' stern warnings about Hitler's impending invasion, and his subsequent mismanagement of the war cost millions of innocent lives.

There are photos of the victories, people celebrating in the street at the war's end, but no photos of the millions killed by Stalin in his 30 years of terror, no photos of the displaces citizens and no photos of the intellectual revolutionaries he so despised - including his archrival Trotsky, exiled to Mexico and later assassinated by Stalin's men (they used an ice pick.)

Nor are there any photos of Georgia before the wreckage of Stalin's reign, when she was a nation of poets, with traditions steeped in an ancient language and a mythology that still influences the world; no photos of when she was a bustling trade center, proudly part of the famed Silk Road.

In Kruschev's famous "Secret Speech," in which he forthrightly addressed the Communist Congress about Stalin's murderous mentality, he called him "an absolutely insufferable character....everywhere and in everything he saw "enemies," "two-facers" and "spies."

In this museum, the Red Room is the last room visitors see. It is mostly empty, dramatising the effect of the single item in the room, the death mask, which is positioned in the very centre and encased in a large block of glass.

The excessive size of the empty room, the moody red walls, the thick block of glass, all make Stalin's face look so diminutive, so small. In here he looks like a nobody.