Vasil Berdzenishvili, 47, was happy to take a moment out from washing his car to talk about Joseph Stalin. He looked across at the bronze bust of the Soviet leader next to the slide in the children’s park and nodded.
Yes, he was pleased that his village of Mukhrani, 30 miles north of the Georgian capital Tbilisi, had honoured this man. “There were plus and minuses but he was very powerful, the most powerful, he won a war, a generalissimo – and he was Georgian,” he beamed.
The statue in Mukhrani is one of 12 of Stalin that have been erected all over Georgia in the dozen years that the country has been governed by Georgian Dream, the party founded by the billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.
The phenomenon started soon after Ivanishvili’s party came to power with an announcement that a 20ft monument to Stalin would be restored in his home town of Gori, 50 miles west of Tbilisi.
Statues of various sizes have since popped up in every quarter of the nation of 3.7 million people. Sometimes the tributes are privately funded but in the case of Mukhrani and Gori it is the local authorities that are behind it. Zarab Mikeladze, the mayor of Mukhrani, declined to comment about his village’s tribute when approached last week.
The trend is seen by some as being inextricably linked to the tumult engulfing Georgia today over a piece of legislation that the US state department claims is “Kremlin inspired”. The law, passed last Tuesday, will oblige media and civil society organisations receiving 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “organisations serving the interests of a foreign power”.
Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in an attempt to reverse what they say is an attempt to take Georgia back to Soviet times and smear dissenting voices sympathetic to the west as traitors.
There have been running battles between the demonstrators and the riot police but Giorgi Kandelaki, a former opposition MP who now works for the NGO Soviet Past Research Laboratory (SovLab), believes that the rehabilitation of Stalin is evidence that an equally important and relevant fight is on about Georgian history.
“The narrative is extremely simple, almost genius: a small town boy who made it so big, who won the war – and of course in this mythology, the war starts in 1941,” said Kandelaki. “There was no occupation of Baltic states, no division of Poland, none of that. It starts in 1941. The most powerful Georgian ever – which is true – shouldn’t we be proud?”
Kandelaki’s contention is that the myth-making around Stalin is part of a strategy pushed by Moscow and its acolytes in Georgian Dream, a party that appears to be going back on its promise to voters to steer a middle ground between the west and Russia.
“Stalin is a sort of gateway of propaganda,” Kandelaki said. “If you as a Georgian concede that there is at least something to be proud of, a tiny bit, then of course, you are much more vulnerable to other narratives. There is an amnesia in the 20th century. The fact that Georgia hasn’t really settled its account with this individual, which is what we’re trying to fix as much as we can.”
In January, Kandelaki was accused by the speaker of the Georgian parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, a Georgian Dream MP, of being behind “a wave of disinformation, manipulation, and hysteria”.
Kandelaki, 41, had reported on his Facebook account that Georgia’s main church, the Holy Trinity Cathedral, was displaying an icon depicting Stalin meeting a Russian Orthodox saint, St Matrona of Moscow, a 20th-century Russian visionary and healer who was canonised in the 1990s. The painting had been given to the church by the anti-western nationalist party Alliance of Patriots, which is suspected of having links to the Kremlin.
The issue exploded when an activist, Nata Peradze, threw some eggs at the painting. The ultra-conservative pro-Russian group Alt-Info protested outside her house. Death threats were made and she went into hiding. The cathedral removed the icon on the grounds that it was historically inaccurate.
Further attempts to correct the historical record have been made by SovLab and a leading Georgian writer, Lasha Bugadze, in a new book Georgia v Joseph Stalin, which has become a bestseller at home and which is due to be translated into English next year.
Kandelaki said that the goal was to show that Stalin, who historians say was responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million of his own people, brought misery not glory to his home country.
“In 1921, our compatriot Joseph Vissarionovich [Stalin] spearheaded the Soviet Russian invasion of the Democratic Republic of Georgia, which had by that time become a functioning parliamentary democracy,” said Kandelaki. “It was of existential importance for him to destroy an independent Georgia because if he wouldn’t do that as soon as possible, if his native land would remain outside, of course, he was going to suffer enormously and possibly lose his struggle for power. Lenin and Trotsky were arguing for postponing this vision because they didn’t want to do an outright invasion.”
Correcting the record has not been easy. In March, a series of NGOs, including Transparency International, and celebrated historians such as Stephen Jones, the director of the program on Georgian studies at Harvard University, wrote to the EU’s ambassador to Georgia complaining of a tightening of restrictions around Georgia’s former Soviet archives.
The former KGB and the former Communist party central committee archives in Georgia were permanently closed last year. The government has cited the EU’s general data protection regulation to delete the names and other details from files in the archives that remain open.
“In addition, there are a number of technical obstacles put in place that in combination make researching the Soviet past extremely difficult,” the academics complained. “Placing a cramped reading room of the former KGB archive next to a police shooting range is one but not the only example.”
Kandelaki believes it is nevertheless a vital battle for Georgia’s soul. While four in five of his compatriots want the country to join the EU, recent polling suggests 45% say that a “Georgian patriot should be proud of Stalin’s Georgian origins” and 66% said his rule has “both pluses and minuses”. Georgia’s past has never felt more present.
