The Joseph Stalin Museum is located in the city of Gori, a significant landmark in Georgia and the most renowned museum among the many Georgian institutions dedicated to history and culture.
The idea to establish a museum in the house where Stalin was born emerged in the tumultuous year of 1937. It appears this initiative came from higher authorities, as a similar museum was established in Vologda the same year. At that time, Georgia was under the command of Lavrentiy Beria, ensuring that everything was coordinated with him. The first museum was modest, confined to the dimensions of the original house. Had Stalin visited Georgia during those years, he would have had the unique opportunity to reside in a museum dedicated to himself. Interestingly, the museum was inaugurated in the same year that Stalin’s mother, Ekaterine Geladze, passed away, although this seems to be mere coincidence.
However, Stalin never visited Gori. He made a single trip there by car from Borjomi, but stopped in the village of Osiauri, pondered for a moment, and turned back.
A decade later, in 1949, coinciding with Stalin’s anniversary (officially celebrated as his birth year of 1879), it was decided to add a touch of grandeur to the museum. The project was entrusted to Archil Kurdiashvili, the leading architect associated with Stalinist architecture, who developed a design in the Georgian Stalinist Empire style. Construction began in 1949 but was completed in 1955, after Stalin’s death and before Nikita Khrushchev’s report on the cult of personality in February 1956.
In 1951, the museum (then still modest in scale) was visited by Stalin’s children, Vasily and Svetlana. Svetlana was not impressed. She found the marble sarcophagus above the house inappropriate and was uncomfortable with the overall atmosphere of the cult. “Every item was presented to us as a relic, with reverent trembling. It evoked a sense of painful shame and a desire to leave as quickly as possible.”
Today, the museum remains operational, the most expensive in the country, and also the most visited.
Currently, the museum consists of several parts. The largest section is the main exhibition hall, recognizable by its distinctive tower. Inside, all the exhibits are displayed. Adjacent to this is the very house, now enclosed within a sarcophagus. Visitors can view, touch, and photograph the house from the outside for free, but entry inside requires a ticket. Additionally, there is a train carriage that Stalin used to travel to Tehran, which requires a separate admission fee.
The main building is an enormous palace constructed in a Gothic style, featuring several exhibition halls. It houses over 60,000 artifacts, including gifts, busts of the leader, important documents, personal photographs, weapons, and a myriad of other items. The large halls are designed in a Soviet imperial style, sparsely filled with exhibits. The first thing visitors typically see are monumental paintings depicting the youth of the leader.
The remaining space is adorned with photographs and printed quotes from Stalin in Russian. Here, one can also find gifts presented to him during anniversaries in 1939 and 1949. The exhibition concludes with his death mask.
Surrounding the museum is a vast Stalin Park, located along the broad avenue of the same name, with its northern boundary marked by Kutaisi Street.
The House of Stalin is a somewhat ambiguous monument. Stalin lived here for only four years during his early childhood and likely had little recollection of the house later in life.
Enshrined within a Greco-Italianate pavilion is a small wooden hut where Stalin was born in 1878 and spent his first four years. This modest hut has two rooms on the ground floor. Stalin’s father, Vissarion Jughashvili, a local shoemaker, rented the left room of the building and maintained a workshop in the basement, while the landlord occupied the other room. The hut originally formed part of a row of similar dwellings, but the others have since been demolished.
Stalin’s great-grandfather, Zaza Jughashvili, lived in the Aragvi Gorge, near Ananuri, and participated in peasant uprisings, which forced him to flee to Gori, where he became a serf to the Erisztavi princes. However, he escaped from them as well, eventually relocating to the Dzherskoye Gorge in South Ossetia. From there, he moved to Didi Lilo near Tbilisi. According to Stalin’s mother, this move was prompted by the arrival of Ossetians in the Dzherskoye Gorge, making it unsafe for them to remain. After Zaza’s death, his son Vano, who had a son named Beso (Vissarion), worked at a factory in Tbilisi and, following the establishment of a shoe workshop in Gori, he was transferred there as a valued specialist. On May 17, 1874, he married Ekaterine Geladze in the Uspensky Cathedral of Gori. It is reasonable to assume that they began their family life in this very house. Tragically, their first two sons died in infancy, which seemingly shattered Vano’s psyche and led him to alcoholism. On December 18, 1878, Joseph, who would later become known as Stalin, was born. In 1883, Vano abandoned the family and moved to Tiflis, prompting Ekaterine and Joseph to seek a new place to live.
Thus, the House of Stalin in Gori is a site where, in 1874, the happy family life of a good man, Vissarion, and a good woman, Ekaterine, began, only to later experience crises, collapse, and disintegration.
Stalin’s Train Carriage – The train carriage, a green Pullman model, was armored and weighed 83 tons. Stalin began using this carriage for travel in 1941, including journeys to the Yalta and Tehran Conferences. Due to a phobia of flying, he opted to travel across the Soviet Union using this train. The carriage was recovered from the railway yards in Rostov-on-Don in 1985 and is now proudly displayed at the Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia.