The Guardian: Georgia's Stalin Museum Gives the Soviet Version of the Dictator's Life
Yesterday the British Guardian published an article on the Stalin’s museum in Gori.
The article notices that the house in the central Georgian town where the Soviet dictator was born in 1878 is now “one of the main attractions of Gori’s Stalin Museum – a place where visitors can still experience the Soviet version of his life story, without any mention of the millions of people that he killed”.
The author points out two tourists who commented on the matter. “We looked everywhere for mention of Katyn,” Przemek, a Polish student said, referring to the Stalin-ordered massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials in 1940. “The guide said nothing about Stalin’s crimes,” added Gaby Schulder, a German tourist. “It’s impossible to imagine anything like this in Germany for Hitler.”
Zurab Shalamberidze, a Georgian, whose family is originally from Georgia, and who is depicted with his wife Vera on the picture enclosed with the article, commented quite the contrary:
“Maybe he [Stalin] made some mistakes… but every coin has two sides and we respect him as a strong leader who created a great empire and won the Second World War.”
In the Guardian article, Lasha Bakradze, Georgian historian, who has long campaigned for an alternative exhibition about Stalinism to be built alongside the sanitised version, says “it is an embarrassment”.
He adds that past efforts to show the other side of Stalin – including his deliberate starvation of Ukraine and the great purges of the 1930s – have crumbled because of resistance from admirers of the dictator on the Gori town council. Bakradze now is advising officials as the Georgian government attempts once again to update the nearly 60-year-old museum.
The Guardian article on Stalin’s museum in Gori concludes that in the meantime, thousands of tourists are likely to visit the Stalin Museum each year to see displays which have barely changed since 1979.
The full article by the Guardian can be found here
Nino Japarashvili