For it is a cursed site and not so much because it’s where Iosif Dzhugashvili – better known by his pseudonym of Stalin – was born on Dec. 21, 1879, as for its post-Soviet transgressions.
Inexplicably, the government of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and Gori’s city fathers permitted it to remain a center for the whitewashing of Stalin’s brutal legacy, allowing for the veneration of the greatest mass-murderer in 20th Century Europe.
Not only did its Stalin Square frame what is, quite probably, the last original Stalin statue standing in Europe, but even the hovel in which he first stole breath was enshrined in a colonnaded building, part of a museum complex that once attracted thousands.
The most recent tourists were Russian soldiers, who began infiltrating Gori around Aug. 13, although they have since decamped.
Just before they rolled in, the shrine’s intrepid director, a Stalin apologist named Robert Maglakelidze, spirited various unique artifacts away to safety, including the dictator’s military greatcoat, boots, pen, glasses, a used shaving brush, an open pack of cigarettes with 10 left untouched inside, and even one of his trademark pipes.
Now secured in the Tbilisi state museum, these items will be repatriated and put back on display when the museum re-opens, which is scheduled to happen today. Remarkably, given the firestorm Gori sustained under air and artillery bombardment and its subsequent looting by Ossetian irregulars, the Stalin museum was left unscathed, albeit dustier for all the shelling nearby.
It seems Georgia’s violators knew where they were going and what they were shelling.
Some troopers even erected a sign outside the city announcing: “J Stalin’s Home Country – Gori,” which begs the question – why would combat soldiers pause to do that? Was it out of admiration? That might seem preposterous, but it’s not if one reads Sarah Mendelson and Theodore Gerber’s article “Failing the Stalin Test,” published in the January-February 2006 issue of the prestigious journal, Foreign Affairs.
Their extensive survey research confirmed how “a majority of young Russians … do not view Stalin – a man responsible for millions of deaths and enormous suffering – with the revulsion he deserves.”
They began their commentary with a provocative statement: “Imagine that a scientific survey revealed that most Germans under 30 today viewed Hitler with ambivalence and that a majority thought he had done more good than bad. Imagine that about 20 percent said they would vote for him if he ran for president tomorrow. Now try to envision the horrified international response that would follow.”
Yet, when their results were revealed, no significant outcry was heard. The crimes of communism, as personified by “Uncle Joe,” just do not excite us as much as Adolf’s evildoing.
Only a month or so before Georgia’s dismemberment, other interesting, if preliminary, poll results were released.
Sponsored by the state-funded Rossiya TV channel, online respondents identified the most popular Russian. A commanding majority selected Stalin, even though his father was Ossetian and his mother Georgian. Meanwhile his “comrade” Lenin scored a distant third.
Stalin’s rehabilitation, which began around the centenary of his birth in 1979, is yet again being promoted from the Kremlin, as plans for incorporating South Ossetia and Abkhazia into the Russian Federation were announced, international protests be damned.
How these minorities will fare inside a Russian-dominated imperium, whose masters have never shown any patience for regional autonomy or human rights – just go ask the Chechens – remains to be seen.
Of course, there are Georgians who know what Stalin was. They are not nostalgic for an imagined past when they were supposedly much better off under Moscow’s rule. These Georgians appreciate that their culture and historical experience give them a right, and good reason, to want to reconnect with the Western civilization of which they are part.
Their way back to where they, and for that matter, Ukraine, also belongs, can come only through membership in the European Union and NATO.
Lado Vardzelashvili, the Georgian governor whose office overlooks Stalin’s monument, gets that.
Pointing out that both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev “think exactly the same way as Stalin,” he tried to cut a deal with the Russian general commanding troops around Gori, asking that they take the Stalin statue with them and “never come back.”
His offer was not accepted. That’s a pity.
Europe’s last statue of Stalin would be far more appropriately located in today’s Moscow than in tomorrow’s Gori.
Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at The Royal Military College of Canada. This article is reprinted with the author’s permission and was originally published in the Kingston Whig-Standard in Ontario, Canada.
