The Stalin Museum in Gori

The country's most debated museum

The complex in central Gori is built around the hut where Ioseb Jughashvili was born in 1878: in 1937 a colonnaded pavilion was raised over the cottage, in 1951 a palace in Stalinist style went up beside it, and the museum in its present form opened in 1957.

The display holds documents, gifts to the leader, a study, a death mask; in the yard stands the green armoured railway carriage in which Stalin travelled to conferences. The exhibition has hardly changed since Soviet times, and that is its defining feature.

The museum was closed in 1989; in 2008 the minister of culture announced it would become a museum of Russian aggression, and a plaque about the falsification of history was hung at the entrance, but in 2012 Gori's city assembly dropped the plan and the plaque came down in 2017. It is the country's most visited and most disputed museum, and the argument has not died down.