Stalin's Telephones

Today I stood in the little one-room house where the 20th Century's greatest mass-murder, Joseph Stalin, was born and lived as a child. 

It was cold, it was simple, and it was entirely 'ordinary' ... which of course, considering the man who grew up here, makes it a rather chilling place to visit.

It also reminded me of something which has always struck me as one of the weirdest facts of the 20th Century: namely the fact that Stalin, inheritor of the Bolshevik Revolution and co-architect of the Cold War, was not Russian. Not only that, but he was Georgian – in other words, not even close to being Russian.

Stalin's Boyhood House

Gori, Sakartvelo, 06.04.15

The Georgians are a Kavkaz (Caucasian) people, like the Chechens, Armenians, Dagestanis and several others. Kavkaz folk are 100% ethnically unrelated to Slavic peoples (barring some intermarriage, of course). They live near a lot of Slavs, true, but to say that this makes them similar would be like saying that France's proximity to the UK demonstrates that French people are virtually English.

In the USSR, you had a majority Russian population as well as other closely-related races like Byelorussians, Ukrainians etc. If Stalin had been, say, Byelorussian, that would've been noteworthy but not incredibly strange; but to hand over the entire USSR to a Georgian ... well, almost as random as appointing an Argentinian guy from the Falklands as the King of Thailand. 

On top of that, Georgia itself was not an entirely willing participant in the great Soviet project. There was quite a bit of state-sanctioned murder and repression here in the 1920s and '30s, to try and get rid of the country's intelligentsia and aristocracy. They had to be eliminated, because they weren't at all keen on being a part of the Union of Republics.

So for all those reasons, I find it extremely odd that the Russian people even 'let' Stalin rule them in the first place.

Even weirder, from a western perspective, are some of the attitudes towards him today in former Soviet countries. You've got a bunch of people who despise Stalin because of his murderous behaviour, but you've also got many others who point to his achievements – which, let's face it, were considerable. (As Winston Churchill allegedly put it, Uncle Jo "took the country with the wooden plough, and left it with nuclear power".)

In other people's minds, his credentials as a great moderniser don't even begin to make up for the disastrous Five-Year Plans, and the mass executions, and the gulags, and the sinister Cult of Personality, and all the other things we associate with Comrade Stalin.

I've heard both sides of this argument from various people in different settings, and occasionally even seen proponents of the two viewpoints face off against each other. The occasion that sticks most vividly in my memory happened in a Moscow classroom in 2006, when four or five of my students ganged up on one of their classmates called Alla, after she claimed that Stalin was the greatest leader Russia had ever had and that they needed a man like him today to fix the country's problems.

However, for obvious reasons, this conflict of ideas is perhaps at its rawest in Georgia.

Stalin was born in a town called Gori, about 80kms from Tbilisi, and his birthplace is kind of a 'must-see' for tourists in Georgia. The house pictured above is now covered by a monumental structure which somewhat resembles a grand mausoleum, and behind it is the Stalin Museum.

I travelled to Gori with a local driver and two Irishmen. Once at the museum, the three of us joined a guided tour, given in English. It was lucky that we did, because the museum was a mass of biographical detail, organised in somewhat mysterious ways. 

There were photos of Stalin with other world leaders, pics of people I didn't recognise who turned out to be his family members (including a few living ones), lots and lots of newspaper clippings in Russian, and a great profusion of personal belongings and objects of state, like ceremonial sashes and swords and the like.

Sultan Josef

Stalin Museum, Gori, 06.04.15

There was also a room devoted to the gifts which Stalin received from other Heads of State. Two Polish guys in our tour group were, I think, a little taken aback to see the beautifully-crafted tableware which their government had presented to Uncle Jo back in the day; Stalin was one of the chief military commanders in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-21, the object of which was to completely absorb Poland into the Bolshevik state. But these were far from being exceptional – there were trinkets here from all over the world.

My personal favourite was Stalin's face on a Turkish carpet. Erdoğan, Turkey's current president and a man who's attempting to cultivate a kind of 'latter-day Sultan' personality cult around himself, may just die of envy if he saw it ;-)

Also rather striking were several portraits, like this one of Stalin visiting his mother 'Keke' shortly before she died. Like the endless photos of Stalin with children, which issued more or less continuously from the Kremlin during his reign, this painting is obviously intended as propaganda. The straightforward 'attentive son' expression on his face here doesn't reflect the complexity of Stalin's and Keke's relationship at all.

The Dutiful Son

Stalin Museum, Gori, 06.04.15

When Stalin was growing up, he defended his mother many times from his violently abusive father, who beat both of them regularly. And Keke was devoted to her son – who she described as a "sensitive child" – taking several beatings for him. Both she and Stalin himself expected him to enter the priesthood; in fact, he tried to do so before becoming a 'revolutionary' (for which we can actually read 'bank robber and violent criminal who terrorised Tbilisi' – but that's a whole other story). 

After the revolution, though, Stalin installed Keke in one tiny room in a Caucasian palace, and assigned his NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria to ensure she was cared for. Stalin had very little contact with her, though he sent her occasional letters from Moscow, and apparently these were quite affectionate. 

But when they met in 1935, two years before she died, Keke is reported to have taken her son to task. She asked him "Do you know who you are now?" – implying that he'd become a monster – and when he replied that he was "sort of like a tsar", she told him that he "would have been better off becoming a priest".

Like Churchill, she was probably right about Stalin too.

By far the most striking thing about this museum, though, is the complete absence of any discussion about Stalin's character as a person or as a leader. The guide simply takes visitors through, explains who's who in all the photos, offers biographical details about various people in Stalin's life ("So-and-so was born in 19-such-and-such, got married in 19-blahty-blah, and moved to Moscow soon after that"), and points out documents he signed, gifts he was given and so on. It's strictly factual – no commentary at all.

One Victim Among Millions

Stalin Museum, Gori, 06.04.15

The only part of the museum that makes any attempt to reflect on Stalin's legacy is a small, recently-opened room on the lower level (well away from the main exhibits), where little triangular pieces of paper are stapled onto a semi-transparent curtain on one wall. On each piece of paper is written the name of someone who died in Stalin's purges in Georgia. 

Then, around the corner from that, there's a little prison cell, about which the guide matter-of-factly says sth like "This is typical of the kind of prison cell which was used to house political prisoners during Soviet times", before hurriedly moving on.

Long after the tour was over, while myself and the two Irish guys were having dinner in Tbilisi, we discussed possible reasons why the tour guide was so coy. 

Could the people of Gori be proud of the local boy who, having been born the poor son of a shoe-maker, rose to become possibly the world's most powerful man? Maybe. That's a theory widely advanced, and as I said before, there are plenty of people in the world who choose to turn the focus away from Stalin's cruelty and towards his achievements.

Another possibility is that the subject matter is just too controversial, and the guides don't want to get involved in discussions that are very likely to turn nasty. Perhaps in the early days of the museum's existence, they got stuck in the crossfire as guests with differing views bickered over Stalin's contribution to the 20th Century and to the USSR, and they decided it would be better if those discussions happened elsewhere.

Or thirdly: because this was the English-speaking tour, the guide may have simply felt that the complexities would be too difficult to explain to foreigners with no background knowledge of the different views regarding Stalin which exist in ex-Soviet countries.

Whatever the reason, though, the experience was quite a strange one.

Strangest of all, though, was the replica of Stalin's Kremlin office that had been set up in one room of the museum. They had his original desk, his original stationery well, and most amazingly, his original telephones – one black and one white.

Coiled Serpents. Altars of Death

Stalin Museum, Gori, 06.04.15

As I stared at these mute objects, resting innocuously on top of Stalin's desk, I thought of the Ted Hughes poem Do Not Pick Up The Telephone, in which the poet likens his phone to (among other things) a coiled serpent ready to spring and an 'altar of death'. And I thought about how many death sentences must have been spoken into these two phones that I was looking at. Obviously it's impossible to put a number on that, but if you could, it would surely be huge.

Later I went back and read the poem. Here are two bits that sprang out at me, the first addressed to the reader and the second directly to Hughes' telephone:

"Do not think your future is yours, it waits upon ... the secret police of the telephone"

And

"you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone"

I always found this a powerful and frightening poem. Now, looking at the photo above, it seems doubly so.

I also remembered the Russian journalist Masha Gessen remarking that, when she went to meet Putin in his Kremlin office, she noticed that he had two telephones on his desk. "Just like Stalin did", I thought. In Putin's case, though, one of them was an old-fashioned KGB phone, identifiable by the fact there were no numbers on it.

*shudder*

Creepy.

That night I thought I might be woken up by nightmares of telephones screeching death wishes at me. It didn't happen ... for which I choose to thank the calming properties of Georgian wine, and the knock-you-out-cold properties of the 50-65% proof spirit known here as 'chacha'. More about chacha later ... but for now, suffice it to say that I felt fortunate to get a good night's sleep after staring down two of the deadliest phones that have ever existed.

See you :-)

Anthony.