In Stalin Park on Stalin Avenue in the Georgian town of Gori sit the preserved peasant house where Josef was born a cobbler’s son, and a museum dedicated to the life – or an airbrushed version of the life – of the blood-soaked Soviet dictator that he became.
The park lost its six-metre bronze of Stalin in 2010 – much to the disgust of some locals – but a dozen new Stalin statues have gone up around Georgia during the 12-year rule of Georgian Dream, a party that is accused of moving the country back towards Russia and autocracy by its opponents in Saturday’s parliamentary election.
Georgian Dream has “embraced a positive or ambivalent outlook on the Soviet period” and done nothing to counter Russia’s “weaponisation of the image of Stalin tailored to the Georgian context, which presents him as a symbol of Georgian patriotic pride”, says Giorgi Kandelaki of Tbilisi’s Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab).
“A long-term strategy of Russian disinformation in Georgia is to cultivate an anti-western, ethno-religious, chauvinistic nationalism or nativism, in which the western world is a danger to our souls – to oversimply it, we will all become gay – and the Russian world is our salvation,” he adds.
“In this project, the figure of Stalin serves as a kind of umbrella, something that brings the whole project together, and they’ve been rather successful in this effort.”
Georgia suffered no less than other Soviet republics during Stalin’s near 30-year rule, but a significant part of the nation has always been proud that one of its own became master of the Kremlin and its empire, beat Nazi Germany – without much help from the West, as they see it – and made the Soviet Union a military and industrial superpower.
The millions of people shot, tortured and starved to death by Stalin’s regime are, to his apologists in Georgia and elsewhere, mere historical footnotes or exaggerations and lies spread by enemies of the Soviet Union and Russia.
Visitors to the Gori museum first follow a red carpet up a marble staircase to where a tall Stalin in pale stone stands beneath a blue stained-glass window; the military-religious aesthetic recurs through a museum that opened four years after the dictator’s death in 1953.
Its rooms tell a story of how Josef Dzhugashvili was born into poverty in Gori in 1878, lived as a daring bank robber and revolutionary under the pseudonym Stalin (from the Russian for “steel”), and succeeded Vladimir Lenin as Soviet leader in 1924; so began three apparently glorious decades of military triumph, astonishing progress in industry and agriculture and visits from admiring foreign dignitaries bearing gifts.
The newspaper headlines, photographs and paintings are from the repertoire of Soviet propaganda: Stalin addressing workers in a train factory; hugging a happy young girl on Red Square; even offering a welcoming hand and warm smile in a portrait that hangs over the Kremlin desk where he would have set the seal on so many lives.
The tone is entirely uncritical and often reverential, as in the mausoleum-like chamber of red and black where a bronze cast of Stalin’s death mask sits on a white plinth; meanwhile, in a less sombre setting downstairs, the souvenir shop offers Stalin-branded bottles of wine, pipes, clocks, fridge magnets and other mementos.
An employee checking tickets complains that Gori’s Stalin statue was removed in 2010 when Mikheil Saakashvili was Georgia’s president, and a guide tells a group of Russian visitors that he wanted to close the museum “but thank God it didn’t happen”.
Saakashvili was jailed in 2021 for exceeding his authority and ordering an attack on an opponent, but allies regard him as a political prisoner of Georgian Dream.
Its billionaire leader Bidzina Ivanishvili says that after the election he will seek to ban Saakashvili’s party and prosecute other opponents, while protecting Georgia from western attacks on its “traditional values” and attempts to drag it into war with Russia.
At the same time, Georgian Dream insists that it wants to join the European Union, is not pro-Russian and fully respects democracy and the rule of law.
Kandelaki argues that by mirroring Moscow in glossing over Soviet crimes, Georgian Dream is bolstering a Kremlin worldview that glorifies the “Russian world” as an enduring conservative bulwark against a decadent and destructive West.
“In the last year they have shut down access to two of Georgia’s most important archives completely – the KGB and the Central [Communist] Party archives,” he says. “This is not a coincidence, it is a policy – for them, the Soviet past is something to protect.”
There are even attempts in Russia and Georgia to align Stalin – an atheist and prolific persecutor of believers – with the Orthodox Church, and he briefly appeared on an icon in a Tbilisi cathedral this year before it was defaced by a protester and removed.
Polls shows that favourable or ambivalent attitudes towards Stalin span generations in Georgia, and depictions of the dictator on Georgian TikTok are mostly positive, according to a recent report by the digital forensic research lab of the Atlantic Council.
[ Georgia’s high-stakes election clouded by fears of foul play and street protestsOpens in new window ]
The homes of two of the think tank’s Georgian experts on Russian influence and disinformation, Sopo Gelava and Eto Buziashvili, were searched by the authorities on Thursday, sending a chill through civil society and opposition circles in Tbilisi just two days before an election that Moscow and the West will be watching.
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