Stalin's Museum

We finally made it back to Georgia after a three day stint in Armenia. We were waiting for our plane back to Istanbul and decided to hit up the Stalin Museum, supposedly quite famous in these parts. In Georgia, there aren't any real buses, only mini-buses that travel throughout the country. Think a white van. We were just about to hop on a bus to take us to the city of Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, but a taxi offered us the same price, so we jumped in and off to Gori we went. On the way we got pulled over by a police officer but all was well and we continued on our way. We were dropped off at the museum which was creepy, dark and Soviet in style and architecture. The museum was made up of two floors- the bottom a less than amazing gift shop and ticket center along with differ rooms of realistic recreations of Soviet interrogation rooms and prisons. Creeped out yet?

myself and a young Stalin 

world domination lamp

Upstairs was a small circular movie viewing room decorated only with blown up pictures of Stalin. After moving through that room, we made our way to the long corridor of the museum celebrating Stalin's life. It was the oddest museum I've ever seen. The rooms were every picture of Stalin ever taken, blown up into huge photos with descriptions in Russian and Georgian, printed on paper and glued to card board and taped to the wall.  Literally every picture of Stalin ever taken was in this room, separated by year. Every possession of his they could find was displayed in cases. Unfortunately, we couldn't read anything because there was no English, but lucky for us, the pictures said it all. There were maps of his military routes, glass cases of his world domination lamps, and pictures of him with different women and children. Lots of propaganda was proudly and prominently displayed. At the ed, they had a room with a bust of his head in the middle of a mini-colloseum. His actually body is in Moscow though.

Stalin's original house

Stalin's train car room

After the museum walk through, a nice museum worker gave us a tour of Stalin's personal train car and home. They have the bullet-proof train car perfectly preserved in front of the museum. It was actually pretty impressive. Stalin used this train car to travel to different war conferences and meetings. His house, the original structure, was preserved, once again surrounded by pillars protecting it. They preserved the house he was born in and of course, display some of his families possessions. Stalin came from modest beginnings, a one room house that now sits smack center of the museum property. I think the pictures speak for the museum better than I could!