Stalin’s birthplace
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Both my pairs of long pants were in the laundry, so I went out in my shorts with a pair of long johns underneath:
It looked ridiculous, and children would point at me in the street, but at least I didn’t have to go far – the Stalin Museum was only a few blocks away:
The museum had a monument of Stalin, the first one I had ever seen:
And behind it, in a park in the center of the city of Gori, there was a large sort of pavilion:
And under the pavilion, the house that Stalin was born in:
Yes, this is how they used to do it in the “religion-is-opium-for-the-people” Soviet Union.
Stalin’s train was there, too:
He, like his political bastard son Mao Zedong, loved traveling in his private train:
Among other things, the train had a bath room with a tub:
It had a nice little bed room:
And a meeting area:
Being a dictator sure had its perks.
The museum itself was… well… full of Stalins:
It was all very grand, in fact it had an almost Louvre-like feel to it:
Mainly it was just busts, though:
That and some pretty creepy paintings:
I had come in expecting to see lots of Stalin & Mao bro-ing it out, but there was only one small painting somewhere in a corner. Besides that, there were gifts from the People’s Republic:
I had a good laugh when I got to the place where they showed his original uniform:
Yep.
When I asked the guides at the museum why there was no mention of Stalin’s terror and the millions of deaths, they sighed and took me to a tiny exhibition in the basement:
It wasn’t much, and part of it wasn’t about Stalin at all, but about the non-Russian occupation of parts of Georgia a few years earlier.
When I went to the restroom I came back with this photo I had taken of a door in the administrative part of the museum:
This is what Communism is all about, isn’t it? I asked the guides.
This time we all had a good laugh.
Then I said bye to the dictator on his pedestal in front of his museum in his park:
And I went back to the guesthouse and got a surprise serving of my favorite Georgian dish – lobio, an enormously tasty bean stew:
It had started to rain outside. I could hear it. Drippity-drop on the dictator’s head.
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周苏晓
He, like his political bastard son Mao Zedong, loved traveling in his private train: you really dislike Mao each corner, he did terrrible things with no any doubt, but which one who seizes powder in the river of long human history not? Yesterday, today, tomorrow and on! The sun is rising in the east and sinking in the West, that’s it!
Kurt Scheibl
I enjoyed the Stalin museum far more (and relaxed about the lack of a discussion of his impact) when realizing that it is actually not a museum of Stalin, it is a museum of a museum of Stalin, accurate the way it would have been during his cult of personality period.