GORI, Georgia -- For decades, visitors have come here to sleepwalk through the violent and tragic history of the early Soviet Union.
In a gloomy neo-Renaissance palace, the footsteps of a single visitor echo up marble steps and thump across parquet floors. The sun slants through towering windows, cutting through the reverent gloom. Here, in a series of lovingly prepared exhibits, is the story of an extraordinary life -- that of Josef V. Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin.
At Georgia's Stalin Museum, tourists can see some of the poems he wrote as a young man, scribbled in his own hand. Hanging on the walls are some of the scores of front pages of Pravda featuring pictures of the perpetually smiling first Communist Party secretary. In a small room resembling a shrine, his death mask sleeps on a stone pillow.
Every aspect of Stalin's life is depicted here, except one. None of the exhibits refers to the hundreds of thousands of people that Stalin ordered shot. Never do the tour guides mention them, or the tens of millions who died in prison or in exile.
Instead, the museum depicts Stalin as a young idealist, a wise but chastising leader. And that's just how most people here in his hometown see it.
"Of course, those who are rich and have always been rich, they dislike Stalin," says Nuzgar Dunduzashvili, 58, who scrapes out a living selling soap and pens in a market a few blocks from the museum. "And those who are poor, like myself, and have always been poor, they have always liked Stalin. He sacrificed his life for the poor people."
What about Stalin's victims? "Should rich, bad people be patted on their heads?" he asks. Terror guaranteed order, he says, which is in short supply in the post-Soviet world. "There was no stealing under Stalin. Everybody was abiding by the law."
Dunduzashvili's views are echoed by many in Georgia, Russia and other former Soviet states. March 5 will mark the 50th anniversary of Stalin's death of a cerebral hemorrhage in the Kremlin. Millions in the former Soviet bloc will commemorate the day marking the end of that terrible era. Many will mourn.
Historians think distortions of Stalin's legacy do matter. Exalting the dictator, they say, may tempt future leaders to emulate him. "We must remember these awful crimes because the current crimes against mankind are the continuation of the crimes of the past," says Arseny Roginsky, chairman of Memorial, a Moscow-based human rights organization.
Judging by attendance at the museum, Stalin's cult of personality isn't as fervent as it once was. In Soviet times, buses jammed with tourists arrived every day of the week. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, at the height of the vacation season, a journalist was the only person to stop by and pay the admission charge, the equivalent of about 30 cents.
Twenty-three people work in the museum, about the same number employed there during its heyday. Now, they appear to have little to do except remember better times. "Times have changed and there are no proper tourist groups in Georgia anymore," Katya Akhobadze, deputy director of the museum, says with a sigh.
Today, Gori is far off the beaten path. It's a sunny, sleepy town where -- in the old quarter -- grapevines grow over trellises across the sidewalks. They love their shashlik -- kebabs cooked on a skewer -- and their favorite son.
The feeling may not have been mutual. After dropping by his hometown in 1926, Stalin never came back, not even for his mother's funeral in the capital, Tbilisi, in 1937.
Chief Scientific Worker Olga Topchishvili, who serves as curator of the exhibit, thinks he was just excessively modest. "He didn't come because he didn't want too much fuss made about it," she says.
There is another explanation for Stalin's absence: He may just have been too busy. Starting in 1937, the secret police across the Soviet Union went on a killing spree.
Roginsky of Memorial estimates that 1 million people were arrested and executed for political reasons during the 32 years of Stalin's reign. The majority of those -- about 700,000 -- were killed during a two-year rampage in 1937 and 1938.
During Stalin's rule, tens of millions more died of disease, exposure and starvation while living in labor camps, in exile or in transit. Others were slain as Soviet troops quelled peasant uprisings or conducted so-called "punitive operations" against rebellious districts.
Even in these sanitized exhibits, there are hints of Stalin's ruthlessness. In most photographs, a relaxed Stalin is surrounded by nervous people with fixed smiles who are not sure where to look. None has the nerve to gaze directly at the great leader himself. And he seems delighted.
Factories and collective farms were forever giving Stalin presents -- boots, coats, hats. Museum guides say he never wore them. There is an elaborate lamp with a brass battle tank climbing a hill of marble, presented to Stalin in 1945 by workers at a defense plant. It looks as if it weighs as much as a washing machine. Stalin turned down the gift, palming it off on Field Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the military hero of World War II.
Other than power, not much seemed to move Stalin. When his son Yakov, an artillery lieutenant, was captured during World War II, the Germans offered to trade him for a German field marshal. Museum guides don't mention it, but Stalin refused even to acknowledge the disgrace of having a son fall into enemy hands. He ordered the arrest and interrogation of Yakov's wife, to make sure it was not part of some plot.
The museum does have a photograph of Yakov Dzhugashvili's body, tangled in barbed wire. After shooting the young officer, the Germans reportedly let him hang there for a couple of days. "War is war," Stalin is supposed to have said. "All soldiers are my sons. What am I going to say to other mothers? I don't exchange a soldier for a field marshal."
One of the most striking exhibits is a display of the furniture from the dictator's Spartan Kremlin office. There is a simple desk, four chairs, a couch -- and, prominently, a single, cream-colored telephone. How many "wreckers" and "conspirators" were killed as a result of calls from this humble instrument?
Out in the museum courtyard stands the tiny corner house where Stalin was born, now sheltered from the elements by a Greek-style temple. The rest of the neighborhood was demolished to create a park the size of an airport runway, which seems to sweep up into the foothills in the distance.
In an interview after the tour, Topchishvili says that Georgians admire Stalin's strength, his success in creating the Soviet Union, his leadership in the victory over Germany in World War II. But, she acknowledges, Georgians love him in part because he is a local boy who made good.
Stalin is toasted and honored at banquets here. Statues and busts stand in homes and restaurants. "In the history of Georgia, there are other popular names," Topchishvili says. "But as much as Stalin is revered? Maybe nobody is revered."
During the era of perestroika, she says, there was a push to change the exhibit to include information about what is euphemistically called Stalin's "repression" of real and imagined enemies of the state. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, the financing evaporated and so did plans for a more honest presentation of the Stalinist era.
Surely it wouldn't cost anything to talk about the dictator's crimes? "People already know a lot about repression and that period," Topchishvili insists, even in Georgia.
Nika Nashkhidashvili, a law student, sits on the shaded porch of the museum with a friend, just to get out of the sun. After years of schooling and hearing about the Soviet leader from his parents, the 17-year-old declares, he knows a lot about Stalin.
"People love Stalin, and I love him, too, because he was a good man, and he was doing the right things," he says.
What about the murder of 1 million political foes? "I don't know about that," he says, looking genuinely surprised.
In the end, it seems, it might be impossible to try to present a clear picture of the dictator in Georgia. Too many Georgians might not want to hear it. Topchishvili cautiously agrees: "The fact is that a lot of people here think there should have been repression."
The key, she says, is balance. "If we say that that repression could have brought some good, and played a positive role," she says, "then they wouldn't mind."