Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori
The Joseph Stalin Museum is a museum in Gori, Georgia dedicated to the life of Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, who was born in Gori. The museum retains its Soviet-era characteristics.
Organization
The museum has three sections, all located in the town's central square. It was officially dedicated to Stalin in 1957. With the downfall of the Soviet Union and independence movement of Georgia, the museum was closed in 1989, but has since been reopened, and is a popular tourist attraction.
Stalin's house
Enshrined within a Greco-Italianate pavilion is a small wooden hut, in which Stalin was born in 1878 and spent his first four years. The small hut has two rooms on the ground floor. Stalin's father
Stalin Museum
The main corpus of the complex is a large
The overall impression is that of a shrine to a secular saint.[1]
Stalin's railway carriage
To one side of the museum is Stalin's personal railway carriage. The green
Planned reorganization
In the aftermath of the
The Stalin Monument in the central square was removed on 25 June 2010 with plans to place it in the museum.[4] On 20 December 2012, the municipal assembly of Gori voted to put an end to plans to change the museum's content.[5][6]
Other suggestions for a transformation include the idea of including an "exhibition about the exhibition" to highlight the many inaccuracies and falsehoods of the original presentation, a proposal made by the historian and museum director Lasha Bakradze.[7] Commentators have also suggested that, based on a comprehensive Ethics of Political Commemoration, the process of transforming the museum would require extensive public engagement to legitimize any eventual design.[8]
References
- ^ "Stalin Museum". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 14 November 2018.
- Gazeta.ru. 2008-09-25.
- ^ Hero and horror: Stalin rebranded. The Independent. 6 June 2012.
- ^ Kabachnik, Peter, Alexi Gugushvili, and Ana Kirvalidze. 2020. “What about the Monument?: Public Opinion and Contentious Politics in Stalin’s Homeland.” Problems of Post-Communism 67 (3): 264–76.
- ^ "Georgia: A Stalinist Restoration", The New York Times, 20 December 2012
- ^ "Georgia to Reinstate Stalin Monument", RIA Novosti, 21 December 2012
- ^ Bakradze, Lasha. "Should Stalin Keep His Own Museum?". TEDxTbilisi 2016. TEDx. Retrieved 11 May 2022.
- ^ Gutbrod, Hans. "The Ethics of Political Commemoration: The Stalin Museum and Thorny Legacies in the Post-Soviet Space". PONARS Eurasia. Retrieved 23 March 2022.