execution date has not yet been established. The
visit ends in the luxurious train carriage in which
Stalin travelled to the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam
Conferences, which was integrated into the museum
in 1985. By the way, in the small shop in the hall,
you can buy all kinds of objects with Stalin’s image:
busts, cups, magnets, keyrings, liquor bottles, etc.
On the other hand, in the Georgian capital,
Tbilisi, there is the Georgian History Museum,
renowned for its important archaeological collection
dating from the 3rd century BC onwards. On
the fourth floor of the building we can visit the
permanent exhibition called “Soviet Occupation”,
which was opened in 2006 and focuses on the period
1921-1991. As the title suggests, the exhibition offers
a critical view of the time when the country was
part of the USSR. In the first room, there is a train
carriage with numerous bullet holes in which dozens
of Georgians who rebelled against the communist
regime in 1924 were shot, and hundreds of names
of other people who were executed on the orders
of Moscow fill de room walls. Other large-format
objects, such as prison cell doors, and an extensive
collection of archival documents, relate a clear
discourse on the “political and cultural oppression
during the Soviet era” that the country lived through
until independence in 1991 with an important
mention of clandestine resistance. At the end of
the exhibition there is a large screen with images
of the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia for
the control of South Ossetia, the region in Georgian
The Stalin Museum in his hometown, Gori (Georgia), was inaugurated in
1957, four years after the Soviet leader’s death | Picture: Oriol López, EUROM
territory that self-proclaimed its independence when
the USSR disappeared, and now enjoys Moscow’s
support.
In neighbouring Azerbaijan, we also find
museums of the two categories. In Baku, for
example, we can visit the National Museum of
History, located in a wonderful nineteenth-century
mansion in the heart of the Azeri capital. It was
first opened in 1920 as the Museum of the History
of the Azerbaijani Soviet Republic and is now home
to an extensive collection depicting every stage
of the country’s history. The exhibition has been
partially renovated in a humble way, it does not
incorporate modern museographic artefacts, but it
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