Remembering Stalin

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.

He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

– Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Stalin Epigram’, translated by WS Merwin and Clarence Brown

Bushy moustache to the fore, rainbow-hued decorations strewn across a broad, uniformed chest below, the kindly face of political evil beams out from a finely woven Tajik carpet, its borders friskily adorned with equestrian motifs. Another lavishly stitched carpet, from Azerbaijan, depicts the people’s hero fraternally united with a local leader. The hall crammed with official and private gifts to Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Soso, aka Soselo, aka Koba, aka Stalin, confirms how far the cult of the Great Helmsman spread during the decades of his power. Lovingly crafted tributes from the Middle East and Asia abound: an Iranian rug; a bas-relief portrait carved into a cedar of Lebanon; a comradely greeting microscopically engraved in Delhi onto a single grain of rice.

As for the crowds that throng the Stalin Museum in Gori on a fine spring day, they prove that the fascination the Soviet dictator exerts on posterity remains undimmed. People from Africa, the Middle East and many parts of Asia join visitors from Europe and the Americas. Georgia unrolls its welcome mat in many different directions: even, still, to Russia. Anti-Putin refugees mingle in cafés and hotels with the usual tourists who have been coming to the southern land of wine, scenery, and sunshine – their very own Tuscany or Provence, to both the Tsarist and Soviet empires – for more than two hundred years. The United Nations crowd milling through the Stalin Museum suggests as well that the astonishing ascent of a poor kid from a colonial backwater to dominion over half the world may still echo around the global South. With no English-language tour due soon, I tag along with a coachload of Israelis. Their Hebrew-speaking guide considerately adds an English commentary as well.

As many travellers have reported, the Stalin Museum – located in the autocrat’s birthplace – ranks as one of the more surreal destinations on any tourist itinerary. Opened in 1957, four years after Stalin’s death but also after Khrushchev had denounced his predecessor’s crimes, it adorns the city – an hour’s drive west of the Georgian capital Tbilisi – where Dzhugashvili aka Stalin was born, a drunken cobbler’s son, in 1878. A handsome neo-classical edifice, more Italian than ‘Soviet’ in its architectural style, the museum sits in a lush landscaped park. Preserved in the grounds, the Dzhugashvili family shack now sits canopied by a sort of Greek temple: a humble shrine next to the vast basilica of the museum itself. On the main building’s other side stands the sea-green private railway carriage that accommodated the leader on his long train journeys around the Soviet Union and beyond. Green, wooded hills rise beyond the city under an already-fierce spring sun. As Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography of Stalin’s early years points out, Gori (along with much of Georgia) ‘resembles Sicily more than Siberia’. East of the Black Sea, west of the Caspian, the city lies closer to Baghdad than St Petersburg.

Inside the museum, over two grandiose floors, well-lit halls gather photographs, documents, relics and memorabilia to trace the life and afterlife of the Bolshevik revolutionary who rose to exercise supreme power across the world’s largest state for a quarter-century and, after the Second World War, redrew the map of the modern world. I visited Gori in May 2022, weeks after Stalin’s latter-day cheerleader Vladimir Putin had invaded the nation whose inhabitants the Georgian often treated as his curse or nemesis: Ukraine.

Read travellers’ tales about Gori and its Stalin pilgrims and you might assume that the museum represents not just an anomaly but an atrocity: a secular cathedral uncritically dedicated to the worship of a mass-murdering tyrant. You can, for sure, buy various kitsch souvenirs in the gift shop – with ironic intent or otherwise. Still, the overall experience makes the head spin rather than the flesh creep. Captions now uneasily blend the hagiographical tone of the original displays with amendments that nod to the dark side of the Stalinist decades. Downstairs, slightly tucked away, a newer exhibit recreates an interrogation room of the NKVD secret police and recalls the persecution of Georgia’s political and cultural leaders in the 1930s by their tyrannical compatriot. Other visitors have told of guides who bizarrely spout the Communist Party line c.1950. But I went round with an astute and well-informed history student. She argued that the museum’s value rest chiefly in its aspic conservation of the Stalinist mindset. In other words, it becomes a meta-museum: the curated record of an outlook and an ideology.

In this light, a thorough overhaul – as some Georgian politicians have demanded – to reflect the whole truth about the Gulag, the Great Terror and the deportations would serve little purpose. In Tbilisi itself, an evocative if strident ‘Museum of Soviet Occupation’ already covers the history of Georgia between the brief independence of its first post-Tsarist republic (1918-1921) and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Historical memory needs to address not only facts but feelings and beliefs. At a time when Putin’s Russia has sought to redeem Stalin in the service of its own expansionist, ‘Great Russian’ ambitions, Gori’s spectacular reminder of the cult and its allure has a time-defying appeal.

‘Retain and explain,’ runs the mantra of many Western curators confronted with calls to topple monuments to slavers or conquerors. Retaining and explaining in Gori would require not just tougher captions but a separate installation, devoted to the victims of Stalinism, of equal size and scope. Berlin’s exemplary ‘Topography of Terror’ about the Third Reich might serve as a model. Nothing like that will happen soon. For now, seekers after the truth about the past can merely hope for guides as enlightened as mine as they stroll through these lofty light-filled galleries towards the inner sanctum where the dictator’s death-mask rests.

How many lives did that serene face, that brain behind it, prematurely end? In the Cold War era when fervently anti-Communist (often ex-Communist) historians such as Robert Conquest did the calculations, popular estimates settled around 15 to 20 million. In The Gulag Archipelago and other works, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn raised the total for the Soviet period as a whole to 60 million. Now, the most scrupulous researchers into Stalin’s policy and legacy – such as Timothy Snyder – attribute six to nine million excess deaths, by torture, execution, massacre, famine, disease, deportation and forced labour, to his regime’s account. Even-handedly, Snyder scores the civilian, non-battlefield victims of Stalin and Hitler together in the eastern European ‘bloodlands’ they fought over at around 14 million.

Both in everyday journalism, and in sober works of scholarship, you will find Stalin routinely described as one of the most evil men who ever lived. If, in the absence of a scientific measure for the corrupted soul, we reckon according to the number of innocent human lives he took, there’s little reason to dispute that claim. Young Soso, or Koba – poet, insurrectionist and sometime bank-robber (a heist undertaken to raise Bolshevik funds in 1907) – may have embraced a take-no-prisoners brand of Marxist materialism from an early age. He started out, however, in a trade that dealt in notions of evil every day, as a Tbilisi seminarian preparing for the Orthodox ministry from 1894 to 1899. Stalin was, in the Irish phrase, a ‘spoiled priest’.

Addressing his earlier schooldays, Sebag Montefiore sketches a pious lad ‘so devout that he hardly missed a mass’. In Stalin’s later displays of hard-headed indifference to others’ suffering (‘no man, no problem’, he notoriously said) you glimpse a personality in furious flight from the code he once pledged to uphold. A fine choral singer and gifted fledgling poet, the cobbler’s boy gained high grades (scripture among them) before, in the later 1890s, a new-found faith in revolution lured him from the church.

Stalin was never a moral illiterate or an unreflecting thug.  Among the forbidden novels he read and annotated at the seminary was Dostoevsky’s lacerating drama of revolutionary struggle and the cost of utopian dreams, The Possessed. After he had shed Orthodox Christianity, Stalin maintained a keen interest in and respect for literature that explored the inner life of values and ideals. To do evil, not merely to inflict harm, you must know what it is. Stalin did.

Yet here I am, under a benign springtime sun, tagging along with the queuers who pay their 15 Georgian lari (about £4.50) to support the shrine to this world-ranking monster. This particular devil can still arouse a kind of sympathy. Or, if not sympathy, then an awestruck curiosity about how humdrum, even genial ‘Uncle Joe’ (as the British and American publics learned to call him during the wartime alliance), could have left such a giant footprint on our times. Even the millions who loathe him with a personal animus – descendants of individual victims or of populations targeted by his crimes against humanity – still want to know why.

Whichever mind-boggling statistic of his death-toll finds favour, the singularity of Gori – or of other commemorations such as a planned ‘Stalin Centre’ in the Nizhny Novgorod region of Russia – lies in its very existence. Though Nazism and Maoism may still flourish, overtly or disguised, a well-appointed institution to honour the memory of Hitler or Mao remains, for the moment, unthinkable. Dzhugashvili-Stalin is the only wholesale slaughterer among the alpha despots of the twentieth century who has kept his grip on both sentimental and strategic disciples. No other ‘evil’ dictator from the totalitarian epoch can still convince – even charm. The sentimentalists recall the ‘Great Patriotic War’ that crushed Hitler’s own genocidal system (after two years of close Nazi-Soviet collaboration) or the blood-stained achievements of the Soviet dash for industrial development. The strategists stand in awe of the extraordinary land grab that made great swathes of central-eastern Europe a Soviet fief and, just as significantly, consolidated Moscow’s hold on middle Asia.

The victor over Nazism and the peerless empire-builder fuse in Putin’s own decade-long rapprochement with Stalin’s memory: a process well advanced when he deplored the ‘excessive demonisation’ of the dictator to film-maker Oliver Stone in 2017, and near-complete when his forces entered Ukraine in February 2022. In 2023, a commentator for the Russian state press agency voiced mainstream Kremlin opinion in maintaining that criticism of Stalin is ‘not just anti-Soviet but is also Russophobic, aimed at dividing and defeating Russia’. Stalin rehabilitated Ivan the Terrible as a mighty patriotic warrior; Putin and his allies do the same for the architect of purges, famines and massacres. At the same time, historians and human-rights groups who have painted a more complete portrait of the Stalin era face harassment and, recently, outright bans. A Moscow court outlawed Memorial International, the leading resource for documentary evidence of Soviet repression, in December 2021 – just weeks before the Ukraine war began.

In the West, meanwhile, the nostalgic loyalties of diehard Stalinist ‘tankies’ stir indulgent derision of a gentleness that unrepentant neo-Nazis would never be allowed. Martin Amis’s freewheeling study of Stalin’s life and myth, Koba the Dread, makes much of the laughter that old Stalinists, but never old Hitlerites, provoke: ‘And what kind of laughter is it? It is, of course, the laughter of universal fondness for that old, old idea about the perfect society’. In the eyes of later utopians, Stalin’s annihilating evil wins, if not a free pass, then a reduced sentence, because it once wore the mask of good. Faith in a glorious future clothed – and for some, still clothes – ugly acts in beautiful raiment. Solzhenitsyn, in the course of his own tormented interrogations of the Stalinist myth, lays the blame on ‘ideology – that is what gives evil-doing its long-sought justification and gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination.’  

For Bolsheviks in the Soviet period, and their supporters abroad, memories of the revolutionary quest for hope and joy still clung to the man whose absolute power had buried their dreams under a mountain of corpses. Even a Gulag survivor such as Eugenia Ginzburg, in her great memoir Into the Whirlwind, refuses to break with the Bolshevik good that, for her, underlay the Stalinist evil that had engulfed the USSR. ‘What interesting lives we had led,’ she writes of her radical youth, ‘and how wonderfully everything had begun!’

In this reading, a lingering tenderness for utopian ideology dilutes revulsion against the calamities Stalin unleashed. The high ideals and good intentions of the Bolshevik revolution form one aspect of the mitigating circumstances that have allowed a celebratory Stalin Museum – but not a Hitler museum – to thrive within a democratic state in 2023. Another is what might be called the argument from rationality. In contrast to the deranged barbarism of the Nazis, it runs, Stalin and his cohorts worked according to a plan – indeed, they mapped the Soviet present and future as an unfolding vista of Five-Year Plans. They drew inspiration from the philosophical heritage of the European Enlightenment, as Kant and Hegel yielded to Marx, Lenin and the Soviet Union’s master-thinker, Stalin himself.

Terry Eagleton’s book On Evil, for instance, in no sense exonerates Stalin’s tyranny. But he distinguishes, as many have, between the Nazis’ racialised savagery and Marxist-Leninist planned catastrophe. Stalin and Mao ‘massacred for a reason,’ Eagleton asserts, and ‘for what they saw as honourable ends’. That hardly ensures that they did so in a reasonable way. Stalin’s record reveals many episodes of wanton destructiveness as crazily self-harming as anything in Hitler’s dossier: from the war on ‘kulaks’ in Ukraine and elsewhere that devastated food production, and the mass execution of Red Army officers prior to the Second World War, to the deportation of loyal (often Muslim) national minorities to Siberia when the war effort needed them most.

The military purge of 1937, when Stalin well understood Hitler’s long-term aggressive aims towards the Soviet Union, eliminated around 90 per cent of senior officers. Just before the German invasion of June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), Stalin’s denial of reality had seen him ignore 84 warnings of an impending attack and, a week previously, officially dismiss rumours of imminent war as ‘clumsy fabrications’. Timothy Snyder finds in the state-enforced starvation of Ukrainian peasants in 1932-33, which killed over three million, not a cunning plan but ‘a position of pure malice’. The anti-Darwinian genetic voodoo peddled by Trofim Lysenko, which Stalin zealously backed for two decades, damaged crop yields at times of desperate dearth. If the residue of utopian idealism cannot save Stalin from the taint of evil, neither will the claims of logic, reason and progress.

A linked source of attraction may draw the sort of visitors to a Stalin shrine who would never countenance a trip to some neo-Fascist or neo-colonialist monument. It has become a commonplace to note that the chief killer despots of the totalitarian age had strong artistic and intellectual interests. If Hitler’s watercolours won few accolades, both Mao and Stalin managed to pen decent verse in a fairly conservative style. The young Dzhugashvili had his Georgian poems printed in leading anthologies long before ‘Stalin’ saw the light of day. ‘To the Moon’, typical in its romantic and rhapsodic lyricism, tells us: 
‘Know for certain that once
Struck down to the ground, an oppressed man
Strives again to reach the pure mountain,
When exalted by hope’ (translation by Donald Rayfield). 
As a rebel seminarian he devoured French fiction (Victor Hugo above all) and remained a devoted bookworm – and marginal annotator – all his life. Geoffrey Roberts’s study of Stalin’s Library calculates that his book collection comprised up to 25,000 items, spread around his Kremlin quarters and dachas outside Moscow. In the 1920s, he ordered around 500 new titles a year. And, of course, every aspirant Soviet author sent him a complimentary copy of their works.

This voracious consumer of print – not just politics and economics but history and literature in various genres – had serious and eclectic tastes. Already general secretary of the CPSU, Stalin bothered to find the time to take philosophy tutorials, with an emphasis on Hegelian dialectics, from 1925 to 1928. That did no good for his teacher: Jan Sten, shot during the Terror. In literature, despite his backing for the straitjacket of ‘Socialist Realism’, Stalin could also speak up for artistic diversity and deplore crude propaganda books. ‘You have to let people express themselves,’ he once argued; writers should shun party-line fairy-tales. Take Chekhov, who ‘has no heroes but rather grey people’.

Notoriously, Stalin toyed with and tormented not second-rate hacks but the finest Russian authors of his time: Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel. He lured the renowned Maxim Gorky back to the Soviet Union from Italian exile and, tragically, confined his talent and integrity in a gilded cage of privilege and compromise. In 1934, after Mandelstam’s arrest, Stalin famously phoned the detained poet’s friend, Pasternak. ‘Why haven’t the writers’ organisations come to me?’ Stalin asked. ‘If I were a poet and my friend had fallen into disgrace, I would climb the walls to help him.’ Stalin then turned literary critic to enquire, ‘But is he or is he not a master?’ Pasternak, distraught, replied ‘That’s not the point!’ Stalin hung up. Later, he did not quite murder Mandelstam but let exile, jail and sickness despatch him. With Pasternak, he relented and told his henchmen during the Great Terror: ‘Leave that cloud-dweller in peace.’

A cultivated butcher deserves no more or less mercy than a boorish philistine. But Stalin the reader, critic and even creator has an enduring power to intrigue, even seduce, people who would recoil from an unlettered thug. He could even display a winning sort of ironic self-awareness. Editing the official Short Biography of himself in 1946, he bridled at its unctuous hero-worship: ‘What are people supposed to do? Get down on their knees and pray to me?’ Effectively, they had to do just that.

Any visitor to modern Georgia will spot another valuable asset in the portfolio of Stalin memories. Whatever the harm, the damage, the pain or – if we choose the term – the evil that he orchestrated, Stalin looms in hindsight as an outsider of giant stature. He surged from the margins to seize the centre. Dzhugashvili spoke Russian as a second language. He never lost a thick Georgian accent and to the end (Robert Conquest reports) made mistakes with Russian grammar. His Georgian identity, grounds for suspicion among Tsarists and Bolsheviks alike, became a lasting source of pride. He loved Georgian poetry and wine all his life. As an apprentice revolutionary, he modelled his cheek and swagger on the mountain bandits who plagued the unruly fringes of the Tsarist empire. Indeed, some of those bandits turned Bolsheviks under Stalin’s command.

The pre-revolutionary Tbilisi Stalin harboured not only Georgians and Russians but Armenians, Jews, Azeris, Iranians and other Muslims – both local and incomers from elsewhere in the empire. Stalin’s father reputedly spoke not only Georgian and Russian but Turkish and Armenian too. Georgia’s own Muslim minorities included the Laz people of the Black Sea coast: among the forebears of Turkey’s President Erdogan. Russia incorporated parts of Georgia into its empire in 1801 as the Tsars pushed into areas of the Caucasus ruled by khanates with Ottoman or Persian ties; the takeover was complete within a decade. Today, in Tbilisi, the main synagogue, the elegant Tsarist-era mosque and Ottoman-style hammams cluster near the old cathedral under the Narikala fortress, built and re-built by Georgians, Persians and Umayyads. In the usual nineteenth-century imperial vein, however, Stalin’s schooling in Gori exposed him to routine disparagement of Georgian language and culture as backward, provincial, and in sore need of Russian rescue.

He would become the ultimate colonial boy made good: a shrewd operator who could play the rough hick from the backwoods when required, and did so when it suited him. Stalin could turn on the exotic, ‘ethnic’ manner to cajole or to convince, and to wrap chosen guests in what Sebag Montefiore calls ‘an irresistible embrace of folksy intimacy’. His biographer usefully reminds us that, in pre-dictatorial days, ‘the foundation of Stalin’s power over the party was not fear; it was charm’ – a distinctively Georgian charm.

By choice, Stalin never became wholly ‘Russian’. Indeed, after the October Revolution in 1917 Lenin stamped his lieutenant with an ethnic brand by making him Commissar of Nationalities. Not that his official responsibility for non-Russians guaranteed any of them – even Georgians – an easy ride. Stalin spearheaded the suppression of the pluralistic, independent Georgia that flourished between 1918 and 1921, when Soviet forces quenched its autonomy. Notably, he also ousted the Tatar Muslim theorist and militant Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, who worked to combine Islam and Bolshevism across an anti-imperialist, pan-Asian front.

When the Great Terror of 1937-38 struck Stalin’s homeland, it did so with an intimately vengeful force. Around 30,000 Georgians suffered repression at the time; half of them died. In Tbilisi, the handsome Writers’ House of Georgia – built as the town mansion of a cognac magnate, and later the headquarters of the Soviet-era literary union – now hosts a moving ‘museum of repressed writers’. It documents the imprisonment, ruin, exile and murder that Stalin, through his fellow-Georgian terror chief Lavrenti Beria, visited on the intelligentsia of his beloved birthplace. Paolo Iashvili, a charismatic symbolist poet, committed suicide in this very building in 1937 after persecution had driven him to despair. The popular Georgian writer Mikheil Dzhavakhishvili was beaten to death on Beria’s orders. In all, around 25 per cent of Tbilisi members of the writers’ union were executed.

So Stalin never left his own folk in peace; quite the opposite. His and Beria’s origins only sharpened the edge of oppression in their own backyard. Yet Stalin remains incomparably the most famous Georgian who has ever lived. On his home turf, a grudging recognition that the murdering bastard was our bastard persists in some places. In a nation divided by clashing attitudes to their mighty Russian neighbour, views of Stalin tend to track wider assessments of the Soviet era and its aftermath.

Since independence in 1991, Georgian governments have understandably fumbled the hot potato of the dictator’s legacy. Parties which urge distance from Russia, and closeness to the European Union, deprecate his memory. The Georgian Dream movement, currently in power, has proved more willing to indulge Stalin-friendly nostalgists. Disputes flare over the preservation of existing busts and statues or the erection of new ones – even over the ubiquitous sale of miniature effigies in souvenir shops. In Tbilisi, you can still visit the private collection of Stalin memorabilia built up by its late creator, Ushangi Davitashvili.

The political scientist Beka Chedia, who has studied the image of Stalin in contemporary Georgia, cites a 2012 poll showing that almost 45 per cent of respondents expressed a ‘positive attitude’ to the dictator. Most of those would be older people, many with memories of the Second World War. Their numbers will have fallen year by year. Putin’s accelerating neo-Stalinism, allied to Georgian outrage at the invasion of Ukraine, may make the dictator feel less like a cherished native son in his homeland. (In Russia, by 2021, 56 per cent of those polled deemed Stalin a ‘great leader’.)

Meanwhile, historical investigators in Georgia such as the Soviet Past Research Laboratory, or SovLab, work to locate and study the sites of Stalinist terror. I took a walk with a SovLab-produced map around the picturesque Sololaki neighbourhood of Tbilisi. Here chic bars and restaurants sit mind-bindingly near (or even within) mansions that once hosted torture chambers and execution cells. Despite these labours of remembrance, the occasional Stalin monument does still arise, with one unveiled in a village near Gori in 2022. A former Georgian Dream minister comments that ‘although Stalin could not tolerate democracy, democracy must tolerate Stalin.’ Georgia’s reckoning with the evils of the past remains – as in other countries – strictly a minority pursuit. For many citizens, myths and pieties endure.

If Stalin’s deeds and policies do not count as ‘evil’, it would be hard to attach any meaning to the word. Even Terry Eagleton, still vestigially attached to a Marxist vision of future bliss, puts him firmly ‘beyond the moral pale’. However, Stalin’s own mental equipment gave him an exit from the court of judgment – not on the grounds of moral innocence, but of personal irrelevance. In keeping with his doctrines, he disavowed the ‘cult of personality’ even as he fostered and embodied it. He liked to present himself merely as the modest vector of historical inevitability. Stalin once upbraided his adopted son Artyom Segeyev, who had made too much of his family connections. ‘You’re not Stalin,’ the autocrat scolded. ‘I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power.’

But did ‘Soviet power’ rather than one aberrant individual consign all those millions to suffering and death? Pose the question and you blunder into the fogs of ‘counterfactual’ history, with its speculations about alternative outcomes of the succession battles before and after Lenin’s death in 1924. We do know for certain that Stalin, along with many others, ascribed evil to history and its relentless advance rather than to the malevolence of a perverse private will. Not only Marxism makes this exculpatory move. Susan Neiman’s profound study of Evil in Modern Thought shows how, with the Enlightenment, the idea of theodicy – the justification of human sorrow and pain by reference to a divine plan – migrated from religious to secular thought.

Providence came down to earth as progress, which human agency might advance or retard but which would happen anyway. Hegel, Marx and a variety of radical or liberal ideologists came to believe that (in Neiman’s words) ‘If history is the history of progress, it would contain its own cure’. In her classic memoir Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam remembers the ‘determinist theory’ that rendered any attention to ‘real life’ irrelevant: ‘Why undermine the system and sow unnecessary doubt if history was in any case speeding us to the appointed destination?’ From the starvation and deportation of Ukrainian peasants labelled ‘kulaks’ to the ethnic cleansing of long-settled Muslim populations such as Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Meskhetian Turks, Stalin’s historical determinism liked to punish not only rivals and enemies but entire populations as laggards on the march of progress.

As Snyder makes clear, Stalin’s twisted logic dressed up the outcomes of his will, his choice, his policy, as the objective proof of irresistible trends. The massacre of opponents or the ‘terror-famines’ in Kazakhstan and Ukraine ‘could be presented as the verdict of history’. Consider his career and you may pause before judging an argument or cause as being on the wrong – or the right – side of history. The Gulag or the Ukrainian ‘Holodomor’, political strategy posing as historical fatality, may lie at the end of that road.

Start to think about evil – in its moral, political or metaphysical guise – and you will soon find that it bends into the disputed territory of free will and human agency. Stalin, the inflexible exponent of the iron laws of history, nonetheless bent those laws towards his will throughout his career. And never more so than in the wake of the cataclysmic shock of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Reports describe a dumbstruck, immobilised leader who could scarcely speak or eat. Nine days after the German invasion, he mumbled ‘Fine’ when Molotov and other ministers arrived – to arrest or shoot him, he apparently thought – and told him that the country should resist, and he must front the fightback. For a while, Stalin really did act, or fail to act, as the powerless plaything of insuperable forces. Then he recovered his will and began to lead the struggle that, for good or evil, would shape the post-1945 world.

So the grotesque idolatry still evident – if now contested – in Gori’s Stalin Museum has at least a foothold in reality. Stalin made a historical difference to his era and ours, as solid, massive and unignorable as the monuments to him that still rise in Georgia and Russia (a new memorial in Volograd, formerly Stalingrad, was inaugurated in February 2023). Charitably, you may judge the cosmopolitan crowd of visitors who tramp up the museum staircase and chuckle over the branded knick-knacks in the shop – as I did – not as disciples of political evil but of human will and choice.

In his less deterministic moods, Stalin the student of history saluted the decisive freedom of pivotal individuals. When he took issue with an over-theoretical Soviet textbook, he insisted about the great Tsars that ‘Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine. They rested on certain classes, expressed their moods and interests, but they acted, they were historical figures’. ‘Historical’ in that they made history, for better or worse, not merely channelled it. As did Stalin himself. However gigantic, his evil stemmed not from a divinity, a demon, or a cog in history’s wheel. It has the human face that smiles out from that gaudy Tajik carpet. 

Citations

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s two-volume biography, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and Young Stalin was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2003 and 2007 respectively. I also consulted Robert Service’s Stalin: a Biography (Macmillan, 2004) and Robert Conquest’s Stalin: Breaker of Nations (Orion, 2000). Conquest’s The Great Terror was re-published by Bodley Head in 2018. On the Gulag, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “literary investigation” The Gulag Archipelago (translated by Thomas P Whitney; abridged edition, HarperPerennial, 2007) and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: a History (Penguin, 2004). Eugenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind (translated by Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari) is published by Persephone Books (2014), Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (translated by Max Hayward) by Everyman’s Library (2003), and The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (translated by Clarence Brown and WS Merwin) by New York Review Books Classics (2004).

The greatest literary testament to life in Stalin’s Soviet Union remains the fiction of Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler; Vintage, 2006) and Stalingrad (translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler; Harvill Secker, 2019). On Stalin the “intellectual”, see Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Library: a dictator and his books (Yale UP, 2021) and, for a fresh account of the relationship between literary and political currents in Russia: Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty (Harvard UP, 2023). On the concept of evil in philosophy and politics I have drawn on Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: an alternative history of philosophy (Princeton UP, 2002) and Terry Eagleton, On Evil (Yale UP, 2010). Eren Tasar’s Soviet and Muslim (OUP, 2017) explores the place of Islam in Stalin’s empire and Donald Rayfield’s Edge of Empires: a history of Georgia (Reaktion, 2019) the past of his homeland. For Stalin’s assault on Georgian culture and its resonance today, see Maya Jaggi, “Resurrecting the poets of Tbilisi”, New York Review of Books, 24 November 2022.

The official website of the Stalin Museum is https://www.stalinmuseum.ge. On Stalin’s memory in Georgia today, see Beka Chedia, “The Ghost of Stalin and the post-totalitarian image of Georgia”, https://caucasuswatch.de/en/insights/the-ghost-of-stalin-and-the-post-totalitarian-image-of-georgia.html, and “Georgia: Still Struggling to Shake off the Memory of Josef Stalin”, 9 March 2023,   https://georgiatoday.ge/georgia-still-struggling-to-shake-off-the-memory-of-josef-stalin/. On Putin’s recent rehabilitation of Stalin, see Eva Hartog, “Putin’s Russia summons Stalin from the grave as a wartime ally”, Politico, 6 March 2023, https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-russia-summon-joseph-stalin-grave-wartime-ally/, Anastassia Boutsko, “Why the cult of Josef Stalin is flourishing”, Deutsche Welle, 6 March 2023, https://www.dw.com/en/why-the-cult-of-josef-stalin-is-flourishing/a-64896549 and https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-putin-decries-excessive-demonization-stalin/28559464.html.