Joseph Stalin Museum
Museum of the Soviet leader in his birthplace, in a palazzo-style hall built on Stalin Avenue.
The museum stands in the centre of Gori, the town where Ioseb Jughashvili, later Stalin, was born in 1878. Work on the building began in 1951 and it opened in 1957, to a design by the architect Archil Kurdiani in a Gothic-inflected Stalinist manner, with an arcaded loggia and a tower. It was the first purpose-built museum devoted to him and remains in state hands, administered from Gori rather than by the Georgian National Museum.
The complex has three parts. The main hall holds some six rooms of documents, photographs, gifts from foreign delegations, furniture from his Kremlin study and a death mask. In front of it, under a Greek-revival canopy, stands the one-room wooden cottage in which he was born, preserved where it stood when the surrounding district was cleared. Alongside is the armoured Pullman railway carriage used for travel to Yalta and Potsdam. The presentation has long been criticised for leaving out the repressions, and a small room added in 2010 addresses them.
Highlights
- Stalin's birth cottage sheltered beneath a classical canopy
- Armoured railway carriage used for the wartime conferences
- Furniture and personal effects from his Kremlin study
- Kurdiani's 1950s hall with arcaded loggia and tower
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