He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Stalin Epigram’,
translated by WS Merwin and Clarence Brown
Bushy moustache to the fore, rainbow-hued decorations strewn across a broad, uniformed chest below, the kindly face of political evil beams out from a finely woven Tajik carpet, its borders friskily adorned with equestrian motifs. Another lavishly stitched carpet, from Azerbaijan, depicts the people’s hero fraternally united with a local leader. The hall crammed with official and private gifts to Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Soso, aka Soselo, aka Koba, aka Stalin, confirms how far the cult of the Great Helmsman spread during the decades of his power. Lovingly crafted tributes from the Middle East and Asia abound: an Iranian rug; a bas-relief portrait carved into a cedar of Lebanon; a comradely greeting microscopically engraved in Delhi onto a single grain of rice.
As for the crowds that throng the Stalin Museum in Gori on a fine spring day, they prove that the fascination the Soviet dictator exerts on posterity remains undimmed. People from Africa, the Middle East, and many parts of Asia join visitors from Europe and the Americas. Georgia unrolls its welcome mat in many different directions: even, still, to Russia. Anti-Putin refugees mingle in cafés and hotels with the usual tourists who have been coming to the southern land of wine, scenery, and sunshine – their very own Tuscany or Provence, to both the Tsarist and Soviet empires – for more than two hundred years. The United Nations crowd milling through the Stalin Museum suggests as well that the astonishing ascent of a poor kid from a colonial backwater to dominion over half the world may still echo around the global South. With no English-language tour due soon, I tag along with a coachload of Israelis. Their Hebrew-speaking guide considerately adds an English commentary as well.
As many travellers have reported, the Stalin Museum – located in the autocrat’s birthplace – ranks as one of the more surreal destinations on any tourist itinerary. Opened in 1957, four years after Stalin’s death but also afterKhrushchev had denounced his predecessor’s crimes, it adorns the city – an hour’s drive west of the Georgian capital Tbilisi – where Dzhugashvili aka Stalin was born, a drunken cobbler’s son, in 1878. A handsome neo-classical edifice, more Italian than ‘Soviet’ in its architectural style, the museum sits in a lush landscaped park. Preserved in the grounds, the Dzhugashvili family shack now sits canopied by a sort of Greek temple: a humble shrine next to the vast basilica of the museum itself. On the main building’s other side stands the sea-green private railway carriage that accommodated the leader on his long train journeys around the Soviet Union and beyond. Green, wooded hills rise beyond the city under an already-fierce spring sun. As Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography of Stalin’s early years points out, Gori (along with much of Georgia) ‘resembles Sicily more than Siberia’. East of the Black Sea, west of the Caspian, the city lies closer to Baghdad than St Petersburg.
The rest of this article is only available to subscribers.
Access our entire archive of 350+ articles from the world's leading writers on Islam.
Only £3.30/month, cancel anytime.
Already subscribed? Log in here.
Not convinced? Read this: why should I subscribe to Critical Muslim?