Do not look up Gori on a map. You might chide me for going to a place that is less than an hour’s drive away from the zone of the Georgian-Ossetian conflict. South Ossetia, a separatist region of Georgia that is closely allied with Russia, is inaccessible to tourists traveling through Georgia.
Gori, however, is lovely and I’m glad that I was able to have enough time to stroll around its old city, buy steaming cheese khachapuri from a random bakery, and see its medieval fortress and quaint old town — Gori sites normally overlooked for its main attraction. History enthusiasts come here for only one reason: It is the birthplace of the most (in)famous Georgian: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Joseph Stalin.
All in a single compound, one can find the wooden house in which he was born and in which his father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, maintained a shoe workshop in the basement; Stalin’s personal bulletproof railway carriage that he used from 1941 onwards; and the stately Stalin Museum that was built in 1951.
Nagged by the question of how someone so dashing and acutely intelligent became the ruthless tyrant that he was, I squeezed this sizable book into my busy schedule while planning this trip. Doing so earned a valid question from my goddaughter as to why I was reading about him if I knew he was a bad guy. Haha! But this book is informative, and engaging, but also heartbreaking. Young Stalin’s life turns out to be the stuff movies are made of. This award-winning biography doesn’t turn one into a Stalin sympathizer, however. It offers an in-depth understanding of the world that nurtured him (“a ferociously Caucasian kaleidoscope of east and west”), the times and the circumstances surrounding the would-be dictator, and a rather sinister intimation of how idealism mixed with unchecked personal trauma and history can dangerously spill into collective trauma and history.
Stalin is celebrated as a hero for defeating the Nazis, but part of me still cannot grasp how anyone can revere him and overlook the Holodomor and the Great Purge of his rule in which the death toll was millions more than that of the Holocaust. But who am I to judge when Filipinos also have a penchant for charismatic strongmen who disregard human cost for political gain?
But before I end up touching on something too sensitive, let me just say this: It should be a crime for a war criminal to be this good-looking. 😅
The Book-Butterfly 