Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia

The city of Gori is located around 80 km westwards of Tbilisi. It is reachable by bus or by marshrutka that can be taken from the improvised bus station just outside the Didube Metrostation. 

A trip from Tbilisi to Gori and back costs around 8 GEL (5 USD) and lasts 1 hour.

As disrespectful as it may sound, my only reason to go to this otherwise very lovely city was because it was the place where Stalin was born and grew up. I wanted to see the Stalin Museum, to breath the air of the city and to see what is so special about it that it gave to the world one of its most controversial figures: Joseph Stalin. A God for ones, a terrible dictator for others. 

Later, our guide from the Museum told us: there are people that come here to pay their homage to Stalin - they kiss the things exhibited here, they even kneel in front of some representations of him. But there are other people that spit on them and they curse his name.
The rumor has it that when the Russian troops occupied Gori during the 2008 South Ossetian War, the Russian commander asked forgiveness from Stalin for bombarding his city: "Прости, Батюшка!" (Sorry, Father!)

The people of the city, however, nurture rather a friendly attitude to the memory of their most famous citizen (later I found that the famous Soviet philosopher Merab Mamardashvili was also born in Gori, but as far as I know there is no museum dedicated to him). There is no shortage of reasons to hate Stalin but the citizens of Gori have one particular to love him: he brings more than 30 thousand tourists per year. And this means money for the depleted economy of the city...

The museum is located, of course, on Stalin avenue.

The two buildings of the Museum.

 

 The smaller building represents actually an open air memorial for the house where Stalin was born.

 

 Tourists are awaiting eagerly to see the inside of the house.

 A view of the left side wall of the house.

 The plaque reads, in Georgian and Russian 

Here I.V. Stalin was born on 21

December 1879, and here he

spent his childhood until 1883

 A view from the front side. It is a typical Georgian rural house. 

The house has stood there for almost two hundred years. 

And here is the bed on which supposedly Stalin was born.

A detail of the roof that protects the house.

 

The monument of Stalin just behind the house.

 

 

He looks sad from this angle.

 

The arches at the entrance of the Museum. 

 

Here is a marble Stalin guarding the entrance. 

The museum displays an impressive collection of pictures of Stalin, copies of documents and a lot of things that have belonged to Stalin.

Carpet portraits are by far the most interesting pieces.

General views of the Museum exhibition halls.

 

They say this is how the working space of Stalin was arranged in Kremlin. All the furniture was brought from there.

 

This is a very interesting document - the Soviet Academy of Sciences has awarded Stalin the title of honorary member. 

 

This hall hosts an exhibition of things that Stalin has received as gifts for his 70th birthday in 1949. 

Here is a plate made by the Czechoslovakian workers. 

 And here an accordion with gems.

 This picture of a joyful Stalin supervises the halls with gifts. It protects them from being stolen, probably. :)

My impression is that the Museum is actually a Temple to Stalin. 

I do not think it has suffered any modifications from the Soviet era. There are no mentions of the Gulag, the repressions or the forced collectivization. In fact, there is no collection dedicated to any problematic aspect of Stalin's life and political activity. 

The guides in the Museum also prefer to not talk about Stalin's crimes. They call it "neutrality".

representing doesn't mean knowing

A study by David Broockman and Christopher Skovron finds that American politicians from both sides of the political spectrum hold mistaken opinions about the attitudes among their constituents concerning liberal/conservative policy.

Politicians consistently and substantially overestimate support for conservative positions among their constituents on these issues. The differences we discover in this regard are exceptionally large among conservative politicians: across both issues we examine, conservative politicians appear to overestimate support for conservative policy views among their constituents by over 20 percentage points on average. In fact, on each of the issues we examine, over 90% of politicians with conservative views appear to overestimate their constituents’ support for conservative policies. This misperception is so large that nearly half of sitting conservative officeholders appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than the most conservative legislative district in the entire country despite the fact that over half of these officeholders actually support positions more conservative than their own districts’ median voter. Comparable figures for liberal politicians also show a slight conservative bias: in fact, about 70% of liberal officeholders typically underestimate support for liberal positions on these issues among their constituents. These differences by elite ideology persist among all varieties of politicians: those from highly professionalized legislative bodies, those running in competitive elections, and those who have been in office for many years.

via The Daily Dish.

politics and religion

Emilio Gentile, the author of Politics as Religion (2006) in an interview:

I think this is a very dangerous period, because whenever politics is allied, fused or confused with religion to impose a new rule on man’s life, freedom is at stake. They both express human needs. But when politics and religion join forces, there is always a danger to human dignity and human freedom. Today a lot of people think you have to unify politics and religion to save the world. Whenever this happens, you can have lasting peace, but not freedom, not the dignity of human beings. It’s not my prophecy, but my fear for the future, looking at the experience of the past.