Of Murderers and Marketing



 In this photograph, I am standing in the very room in Gori, Georgia, a small city about an hour from Tbilisi, in which Josif Vissarionitch Djughashvili, known to the world as Stalin, was born. It's a tiny room, "humble" as we used to say: just a couple of small tables, a chair and a bed. When little Joey Djugashvili, whose resume ultimately included a real eye-grabber --  the slaughter of millions of people -- was born in 1878, his family occupied two rooms of this house. The rest of it was rented by another family. The other room is as tiny as this one -- probably not 100 square feet in all. We asked the tour guide how the Djugashvili family heated this place. Apparently behind me and to my left, there used to be a stove in the wall. It wouldn't have had to be very big. I've lived in two-room apartments bigger than this place. There is a locked-up working area down in the "basement" (we joked among ourselves that it must be "the dungeon") where Josif's father worked as, what was it, a shoemaker? Something appropriately "umble," as Uriah Heep kept saying in David Copperfield until I was ready to scream.

Now, directly behind this house is the Stalin Museum proper. It's huge, and on a December day, as cold as a mausoleum inside. My friends Dan, Joe, Hannah and I signed up for the tour, even coughing up the extra five GEL they charge for a walk-through of Stalin's private (and you can bet your ass bulletproof) railroad car, which is also on the site.



Hannah and me, sitting on the porch
of the original Stalingrad.



At the current moment in history, Russians are not especially popular in Georgia. The two countries fought a one-week war against each other in 2008, and some of the bloodiest fighting took place in Gori. In fact when my friends and I paused on the street to take our bearings on our way to the Stalin Musum, we found ourselves alongside a building that still had bullet holes in it.

(I don't mean to boast, but that wasn't the first time I'd seen something like that. Many years ago I visited East Berlin, before they took the wall down. Some of the oldest buildings in the city, the ones closest to the wall, still had bullet holes from World War II in them. Still, there was something a tad eerie about these Gori bullet holes -- they were much more recent.)

Popular or not, the Russians have a cultural stake in Georgia, and vice-versa. Stalin was Georgian as everyone knows; our tour guide told us that all of his life he spoke Russian with a Georgian accent. He was fond of Georgian cooking -- as everyone who has lived here for any period of time becomes -- and his favorite wine was Georgian. (I've tasted it -- it's red, and quite sweet.)

And the Georgians have gone to some trouble to preserve the memory and memorabilia of one of the twentieth century's greatest mass killers, a man who, it has been speculated, was responsible for even more deaths than Hitler. (But probably not more than Mao Tse-Tung; my guess would be that Mao takes the prize Lamborghini in the dead-body sweepstakes, but we'll never know, will we? Well, whether he had to settle for the second-place Jeep Cherokee in the killer sweepstakes or not, Stalin was right up there with them. A real pro.)

Just as an hors d'oeuvre, he almost managed to lose World War II by killing off all of his own best generals in a paranoid hissy-fit just before the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941. I love irony: Hitler's invasion of Russia violated his 1938 "non-aggression" deal with Stalin. Just goes to show you what "deals" struck between the likes of Stalin and Hitler are worth. Kind of like Dutch Schultz and Al Capone agreeing to stay off each other's turf.



Josif Vissarionovich Stalin, (1878-1953) The Soviet

Union's legendary "Man of Steel." (Actually, he had

skin as thin as rice paper: poet Osip Mandelstam once

compared Stalin's mustache to a cockroach, and died in

a Siberian labor camp for saying it.)

 Or, if you prefer, like the two characters in Antonio Prohias' classic Spy Vs. Spy, a favorite MAD Magazine cartoon of my 1960s childhood. On the one hand you had the White Spy, in white coat, white hat and sunglasses; and then you had the Black Spy, in black coat, black hat and sunglasses. The two of them sneaked around some place with potted palms called "Embassy," pulling violent practical jokes on each other.  Wordless. Pointless. Just two stupid government hirelings taking turns blowing each other up.


Hitler and Stalin, waltzing.

 
And it was a scream.

 Actually, historians could, and have, written whole "problem" volumes about the 1938 Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the USSR. Hitler agreed to let Stalin grab off a chunk of Poland in return for not being interfered with elsewhere. Stalin was "orthodox" enough a communist to believe that his true enemy was England, not Germany, so he trusted Hitler, who turned out to be as trustworthy as...well, Hitler.

Stalin was also "orthodox" enough a communist to believe that anyone who disagreed with his interpretation of Holy Writ, e.g. Marx and Lenin, should be exterminated. He was his own Inquisition and his own Secular Arm.

He proceeded to exterminate several million people in the name of The People. 

Stalin's personal masterpiece in the "killer" department had to be the time he created an artificial "famine" in the Ukraine in order to force people to relocate elsewhere and to rid himself of the so-called "kulaks," whom he had created, by the way. Go, Joe, go. Pile up them bodies for the Revolution, baby. Kill millions. Remember, it's for La Causa. Someday they'll build a museum to you.

They did!

The Stalin Museum in Gori is huge, as I said. Here is one of its rooms:

And that's just one.  The walls of this particular room are lined with blown-up photographs of various types, and the museum does have a plethora of photos, ancient and not-so-ancient, chronicling Stalin's life from early childhood to his death in 1953.



Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) Stalin's fellow
sociopath. Can you imagine these two
characters dancing together? Legend has it
that after their 1938 Non-Aggression Pact
was signed, Hitler and Stalin waltzed
each other around the room. Hitler
promptly invaded Russia.

Other halls in the museum house every kind of Stalin memorabilia you can think of, from his uniforms and pipes to his private desk to the original Non-Aggression Pact with Germany signed in 1938. (You might be surprised -- for a document which had such profound ramifications for history, it's not much bigger than a five-by-eight index card.) 



Who would ever have thought that I, an "underfed, short-haired leaping gnome" from California, would find myself standing a foot-and-a-half from Stalin's pipes?



One of the things that made our tour of the Stalin Museum in Gori so much fun last (very chilly) Saturday was the felicitous accident of our "tour-fellows." There were four of us in my group: Hannah, who is from St. Louis and made a big point of telling me that I'm exactly her father's age (thank you, dear); Joe, who's from Washington, D.C.; Dan, who's from Britain, and myself, who's from nowhere.

But we were joined in our tour of the main museum by "Martin," "Thomas" and "Paul," three guys from Poland who evidently all work for the same company: they were wearing matching red windbreakers with their company logo emblazoned over the pocket.

Martin, Thomas and Paul "made" this tour for me. Why? Because nobody, and I mean nobody hates Stalin like the Poles do. All through the tour these three guys kept making snide remarks that essentially added up to "Fuck Stalin." They spoke passable English, so we were able to share in their black humor. Personally I was about to double-up laughing. There's no reason why I should make any secret of the fact that I don't hold Stalin in very high esteem. Few people outside of the late Pablo Neruda do, or would own up to it if they did. (Still, there are those flowers on his grave in Moscow. Go figure. Provided you speak Russian to them -- even if you speak it with a Georgian accent, as Stalin did -- the more you kick the snot out of the Russians, the more they love you. I don't understand it.)

Speaking of the Stalin Museum, I never cease to be amazed at the complete lack of entrepreneurial spirit here in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. We lined up, Soviet-style, to buy our little paper tickets for this tour (10 GEL for the main tour, five more for "The wagon" -- Stalin's private railroad car.) That was it, folks. No gift shop, no "Stalin T-shirts," no bumper stickers reading "Stalin Rocks" or "I  Gori." There was one tiny enclosed area where you could buy overpriced bottles of The Killer's favorite wine and a few other such items, but it was locked up tight.

Somebody is missing an opportunity here. Where's the Stalin Disco? Where's the fast-food stand hawking "GULAG-Burgers?" Where's the amusement ride you can enter for a few GEL and get to experience a KGB interrogation of your very own? They do have a fake prison cell in Stalin's fake "underground office," but where's the audioanimatronic "prisoner" moaning and groaning and demanding his rights? Come on, folks, this could be Gori's version of Knott's Berry Farm, but it's nothing except a cold, old museum, and by the way, the second, and I mean the second our tour was concluded, our tour guide disappeared like Barbara Eden going back into her bottle in I Dream of Jeannie. I mean, she was gone. She didn't even wave bye-bye. "I'm done with this group -- I'm scramming for where it's warm," she must have thought, and she was gone.

Too bad, she might have gotten a tip from us. But that's typical of this part of the world. These people are so accustomed, even two decades after the death of the Soviet Union, to thinking socialisme, that they don't even wait around for tips. "I did my job, I'm gone." And they vanish. 



Stalin's private train car. Don't need to tell you
it was bulletproof, do I?



At first, I was inclined to pass on "the wagon," as the museum called it. Who needed to see a damn railroad car? And besides they charged an extra five GEL for that; five lari will get you two beers in this country -- no, three, unless you're paying overhead at Le Cafe Snotface.

But the rest of my group wanted to see "the wagon," so I plunked down my extra five GEL and came along, (as did our three Polish friends, wisecracking all the way.)

Some of Stalin's biographers will tell you that he was a frugal man who lived simply. Well, you know, if your hobby is having people like Traicho Kostov beaten to death, how much luxury do you need? But I can tell you in all confidence that Stalin's private railroad car was just about the cutting edge of luxury for railroad service of the 1930s. Okay, the President of the United States has Air Force One, and I've seen films of the inside of it -- as airplanes go, it's pretty luxurious. So I suppose the Head Guy is entitled to travel in style, and of course in the 1930s nobody flew unless they were in a big hurry; everyone traveled by train. And yes, the Soviet Union did include vast distances. You might spend a week on a train, maybe more if you were going to Vladivostok.

But Stalin's private railroad car had amenities no other Soviet citizen would dream of in the 1930s: kitchen, sleeping quarters for himself and guests, a conference room, (air-conditioned! How many railroad cars were air-conditioned in the 1930s?)


But now a word about Stalin's private room.

Now, there's only so much you can do with a train -- you have two rails and a few feet of width. No room for a movie theater there, although if anyone could have insisted, it would have been Stalin (and he was a film buff, as people like Sergei Eisenstein discovered to their ultimate chagrin.) And it may be admitted that Stalin's private room on Stalin's private train is rather spartan as compartments for Tsars go: there's a bed, a desk ... oh, yes, and a bathroom.


A few years ago I worked for an investment banker In Washington, D.C., Ralph Taylor, who was almost as big a megalomaniac as Stalin. Ralph's office had its own private bathroom where Ralph could haul his fat butt in its $2,000 Armani suit and deposit his royal turds in complete, royal privacy.



I couldn't resist: here I am

sitting on Stalin's private toilet in Stalin's private

railroad car. I was the only one who got this picture.

Right after Hannah took it, the tour guide yelled

at us to knock if off. "Have more respect

for the great killer's ass!" (You could almost hear her

thinking that.)



Stalin, too, insisted upon The Royal Shitter. Stalin's private railroad car includes, as well as Stalin's private room, Stalin's private bathroom. And I don't just mean a john, either. This facility came complete with bathtub. Stalin could take a bath on his own train. (I wonder what happened when they went around a curve or up a hill? Did Stalin have the curve or the hill punished?)

When I poked my nose into Stalin's private compartment on Stalin's private railroad car, naturally I couldn't help but notice that, just off to the left, was Stalin's private bathroom.

"Hannah! Quick, come here!" (Hannah had the camera.) "I want you to take my picture sitting on Stalin's toilet!"

"Oh, beautiful!" she said, swiveling into position next to the sink. It was pretty snug in there; fortunately the bathtub had created a couple of extra square feet of space. (In the photo, you can see the edge of the tub next to my knee. They boarded it over, presumably so people ((like our Polish friends)) wouldn't spit in it.)

Hannah got the photo you see above. But I was the only one who had the honor of having his picture taken sitting on Stalin's toilet. As soon as the tour guide tumbled to what we were up to, she yelled at us and said she didn't want anyone else taking that particular picture. So that was the end of that. But I got mine, a souvenir better than any "Uncle Joe" T-shirt could possibly be.

The moment we all stepped off the back of the train, our tour guide vanished, as I said before. I mean she was gone.  Yes, it was chilly that afternoon in Gori, and I'm sure she wanted to get back to some place that had a stove. But mostly I think she was just sick of all of us: Poles bad-mouthing Stalin, Americans fooling around having their pictures taken on his toilet...who needs this?, she must have thought.


And she vanished in one quick hurry.

Our Polish friends invited us to join them in climbing up to the ancient stone fortress that overlooks Gori. Many Georgian cities have such fortresses -- Tbilisi does, too -- but Hannah was famished, so we decided to peel off and go have lunch. We climbed up to the fortress later ourselves, through the snow, and got some great pictures from up there despite the icy wind. Unfortunately our Polish friends were gone by then. Too bad; given how they obviously felt about Stalin, it might have been fun to watch one of them climb up on the parapet and "moon" the entire city of Gori.

However, given what I'd already done that afternoon, "mooning" Gori would have been a bit of an anticlimax, don't you think?