How is memory about Stalin kept in contemporary Georgia?

[This blog post was written by Rati Shubladze and Tamar Khoshtaria within the auspices of the CHIEF project. It was originally published here. The opinions expressed in this blog are the authors alone, and do not represent the views of CRRC-Georgia, the CHIEF Project, or the European Union]

On May 12, 2019, the Joseph Stalin museum hosted a public lecture in his hometown, Gori, dedicated to the “Day of Georgia’s Allotment to the Virgin Mary”, a holiday that the parliament of Georgia minted into the calendar a week prior in special session. Rather than a scene from a postmodern farce or satire, this is Georgian reality. In that reality, memory is bifurcated. As Nutsa Batiashvili  has argued, this bifurcation in collective memory presents Georgia as glorious or heroic and wrong or inadequate at the same time. Memory of the legacy of Joseph Stalin in Georgia is no exception to this broader pattern, and the Stalin Museum in Gori is a clear manifestation of this.

The fact that a Georgian became one of the most powerful people in the world awoke national pride in Soviet Georgia. In the peak of his power, in 1937, the house where Stalin was born was turned into a memorial museum. Later, but still during Stalin’s lifetime, next to the memorial house, construction started on a new building, which would become the museum. The building was finished in 1957, four years after Stalin’s death.

Today, the two-floor building is considered a monument of cultural heritage. The museum has kept its Soviet aesthetic. The first thing a visitor sees in the gigantic hall of the building, built in the best practises of Stalinist architecture, is a white statue of Stalin. The size of the hall gives the impression that you are visiting a Soviet bureaucracy with red carpets and old wallpaper. Inside are artefacts related to Stalin’s life, including childhood and family photos, materials from his school days and the revolution, his works and his poems.

As one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century and a leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin is considered a national hero and saviour of the country from Nazism. At the same time, he is perceived as a bloody dictator. A survey that CRRC Georgia conducted in 2012 showed that nearly 45% of Georgians had positive attitudes (respect, sympathy, or admiration) towards Stalin, while 20% reported having negative feelings (antipathy, irritation, fear, disgust, or hatred).  The same study showed that while half of Georgians (53%) agree that Stalin was a cruel tyrant, responsible for the deaths of millions, a significantly higher percentage (68%)  perceive Stalin as a wise leader who brought power and prosperity to the Soviet Union.

The Stalin Museum, as a storehouse of memory of Stalin, is a vivid manifestation of the bifurcation of memory in Georgia. In it, the official soviet iconography of Stalin and contemporary attempts to show the horrors of Stalin’s rule co-exist in one space. When entering the museum, a wise and powerful portrayal of Stalin in Soviet style greets the entrant. Though, not many things have changed in the permanent exhibitions to reflect recent Georgian history, the museum added two small exhibits dedicated to victims of the Great Purge of the 1930s and the 2008 Russian-Georgian military conflict, during which Gori was largely affected. These small exhibits are meant to emphasize the Soviet Union’s and Russia’s destructive side. However, the image of Stalin overshadows these minor updates.

The subject matter of the museum is sometimes challenging. During field visits within the CHIEF project, one of the museum’s staff noted that visitors are divided in their assessment of Stalin’s legacy and arguments and debates occur regularly among visitors. Guides try to remain neutral to avoid arguments with visitors. However, they find it difficult to talk objectively about Stalin’s deeds in a quasi-temple of the “Father of Nations”.

Today, as a local hero in his hometown, many schools organise field trips to the Stalin Museum. Interviews conducted with school children near the Stalin Museum indicate that young people frequently visit the Museum with their school. These young people noted that they respect Stalin, as he was a strong man and a local, who remains a source of pride in the community.

The notion of Stalin as a sort of local hero is clearly illustrated in a study Alexi Gugushvili and a number of collaborators published in 2016. It shows that there are clear links between people’s attitudes and where they live in Georgia. In settlements around his birthplace and locations in Georgia where he usually spent his holidays attitudes are more positive.

Another 2016 study Peter Kabachnik and colleagues published argues that positive attitudes toward Stalin among young people relates to the process of socialization in schools and families. They argue that “while parents in families cannot be prevented from transmitting positive attitudes toward Stalin to their offspring, schools and universities are public spaces in which positive indoctrination about Stalin can be prevented by way of governmental policy and the crafting of national curricula.

What efforts there have been to erase Stalin from Georgian public life have achieved limited success. A study Carnegie Endowment published in 2013 suggests that the de-Stalinization process in Georgia was superficial and that attitudes toward the leader remained positive. More recently, in 2008, Georgian authorities tried to revise Stalin’s place in the public discourse through removing a bronze statue of Stalin from the central square in Gori. The move angered the Gori public as, the government removed the statue without consulting them. Since 2012, following the loss of power of the government that removed the Gori statue, new Stalin monuments were raised in other villages, towns, and cities.

Politicians and civil society groups have proposed different policies on the Stalin museum since independence. In the book The Stalin Puzzle, Lasha Bakradze, the director of the Georgian State Museum of Literature, together with Maria Lipman and Lev Gudkov, discuss two proposals. In 1995, then Georgian president (and former Communist Party leader), Eduard Shevardnadze proposed transforming the museum into a “centre to study the ‘phenomenon’ of Stalin.” Civil society groups in the mid-2010s advocated for it to be renamed the “Museum of Stalinism”. However, neither of these proposals gained traction.

Efforts to erase Stalin are unlikely to work. Therefore, rather than making Stalin “disappear”, it would likely be more effective to start addressing the issue by providing more information about the consequences of Stalin’s legacy in schools and educational centres. The Stalin museum as an education oriented institution could play a role in this process, given its status as a storehouse of memory about Stalin and his legacy.

Nostalgia for Stalin in Georgia: Between Respect and Unjustifiable Actions

A recent assessment of attitudes towards Stalin in Georgia has been broadly discussed within the country, as well as abroad. Many have considered Georgia to be a “Stalin-favorable country” since Stalin himself was an ethnic Georgian. However, using data from the 2012 Caucasus Barometer (CB), this post shows that while there remains widespread respect for Stalin, the methods of his rule are far from desirable in today’s Georgia. Also, attitudes towards Stalin in Georgia are compared to those in Armenia and Azerbaijan. 

Overall, the CB data reveals that Georgians have more positive views towards Stalin than Armenians and Azerbaijanis. However, only a very small proportion in each country admires Stalin. Respect and sympathy are the prevailing characteristics that Georgians use to describe Stalin, whereas it is indifference in Armenia and disgust in Azerbaijan. Azerbaijanis were also most likely to say they don’t know who Stalin is (22%), compared to 9% in Armenia and 5% in Georgia. 

Survey respondents were provided with a list of 7 attributes and asked to select only one word that best described their attitude towards Stalin. “I don’t know who Stalin is”, “don’t know” and “refuse to answer” were not listed as answer options, but were recorded if mentioned by respondents. 

According to the CB, only a small percentage in each country believes that the sacrifice of the Soviet people was definitely justified because of the results achieved (5%-7%). The data also shows that around half of each of the populations think the sacrifice was definitely not justified. Therefore, the positive features attributed to Stalin in Georgia do not overshadow the sacrifices made by the Soviet people during his rule.

Moreover, very few people in the South Caucasus see themselves living in a country ruled by a person like Stalin. This includes Georgians who attributed more respect and sympathy towards Stalin than Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Over half of the population in each country says they would probably or definitely not like to live and work in such a country.

Although many people in the South Caucasus believe the sacrifices made under Stalin cannot be justified and they would not want to live in a country ruled by a leader like Stalin, more than two fifths of adults (55% in Armenia, 44% in Azerbaijan, and 68% in Georgia) believe Stalin was a wise leader who brought power and prosperity to the Soviet Union.  It is interesting to note that even in Georgia, where well over half of the population thinks Stalin was a wise leader who brought prosperity, this positive attitude is not related to a desire for a non-democratic style of leadership. 69% of Georgians who strongly consider Stalin to have been a wise leader prefer democracy to any other kind of government, whereas only 7% prefer a non-democratic government under certain circumstances (another 7% is indifferent). Thus, the majority of Georgians consider democracy to be the best form of government for today’s Georgia even though many feel respect for Stalin as a leader. In addition, 69% of Georgians who completely agree that Stalin was a wise leader support NATO membership and 73% support joining the EU. Thus, respect for Stalin does not indicate support for non-democracy or a turn away from Western institutions.

Finally, CB data shows that Armenians feel that they will always have need for a leader like Stalin to a larger extent than Georgians or Azerbaijanis. 38% of Armenians say they will always feel the need for a leader like him who would come and restore order, compared to 28% of Georgians and 19% of Azerbaijanis who say the same.

This blog has shown that over half of the populations in the South Caucasus feel the sacrifices of the Soviet people under Stalin were not justified and they do not desire to live in a country with a ruler like him. Yet, many people in all three countries view him as a wise leader who brought prosperity to the Soviet Union. Although Georgians have far more respect and sympathy for Stalin than Armenians and Azerbaijanis, most Georgians continue to be oriented towards membership in Western organizations such as NATO and the EU. Thus, the data agrees with the assessment in Carnegie Endowment’s 2013 report entitled “The Stalin Puzzle” that “for Georgians, Stalin is much more a national icon than a political model.” 

For more data on the attitudes towards Stalin in the South Caucasus, please visit the new 2012 Caucasus Barometer dataset. 

Dr. Ronald Suny Lectures in Tbilisi

On October 27, CRRC attended a lecture by well-known and accomplished scholar Dr. Ronald Grigor Suny, presently director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies and the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan. Dr. Suny presented his upcoming book, “The Young Stalin: The Making of a Revolutionary.” In his dynamic lecture, he explained his aim to approach the biography of one of the most written about historical figures of all time.

He takes the stance against one of the traditional views of biographers -- that the fame that the individual achieved was present from childhood, and the author’s task entails describing the development of these inherent traits. Much like the shift from the model of the absolute and unchanging concept of the nation to the now widely accepted view that a nation is the result of social construction and human manipulation, Dr. Suny invited the audience to consider that Stalin was not born a monster, but rather to consider what contributed to his development and formation.