Stalin’s no hero in hometown

Opinion: July 12, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By Natia Kuprashvili

Institute for War & Peace Reporting

GORI, Georgia

After nearly 60 years, Georgia finally decided it was time to remove a monument honoring possibly its least favorite son. On the morning of June 25, residents of Gori awoke to discover the statue of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was gone.

Of course, like everything else involving Stalin, the move was not without controversy. Some even accused Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili of using Stalinist tactics by whisking away the statue in the middle of the night.

Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in Gori on Dec. 18, 1878. The six-meter tall statue was erected honoring the dictator a year before he died on March 5, 1953.

In the years since Stalin’s death, the statue survived even while other statues of Stalin in other parts of Georgia were quietly demolished by the Soviet authorities. It even managed to survive Georgia’s transition to independence, when other symbols of communist rule were generally removed.

The statue also survived the Russian bombardment of Gori during the August 2008 war over South Ossetia. But that conflict revived calls for an end to the Stalin monument as a symbol of Russian occupation.

Bolshevik takeover

Saakashvili said it was impossible to commemorate the victims of Soviet rule as long as a monument still stood to the man who orchestrated the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia in 1921.

Culture Minister Nikoloz Rurua said that the continued presence of the statue would be “confusing.” Now that the statue has been removed, he said, authorities would also rename streets honoring the dictator.

History is regularly being rewritten in Georgia, one street and monument at a time. For example, a street in the capital Tbilisi is now named after former U.S. President George W. Bush.

But the decision to rename a street Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent critic of Russian tactics in Chechnya who was murdered last year, has left some puzzled.

After all, the street was originally named in honor of Vladimir Jikia, who fell victim to one of Stalin’s purges after he called for the creation of a Georgian national army.

“I don’t think the authorities are very familiar with our history,” said journalist Keti Makhtadze, who lives on the newly renamed Politkovskaya Street.

Natia Kuprashvili is a reporter in Georgia who writes for The Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization in London that trains journalists in areas of conflict. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.