Tbilisi and Gori and Dzhugashvili, Errr...Stalin

A good article, bringing Georgia and Stalin and Gori into focus.

Even After a War With Russia, Many Georgians Revere Stalin

Justyna Mielnikiewicz for The New York Times
Jamil Ziyadaliev, a Stalin impersonator in Georgia, with his wife, Fakizar. He says his resemblance to the most famous Georgian gets him many free meals.
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new_york_times:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/01/world/europe/01stalin.html

By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: September 30, 2008
GORI, Georgia — With his signature mustache, medal-encrusted Soviet marshal’s uniform and determination to be addressed as “Comrade,” the Stalin impersonator Jamil Ziyadaliev should perhaps be out of work in Georgia, a country still reeling from a war with Russia.
Justyna Mielnikiewicz for The New York Times
But Mr. Ziyadaliev, 64, an avuncular father of two who dresses as Stalin even on days off, insists that business has seldom been better. He is a frequent hired guest at weddings, where he dances to Soviet Katyusha music from World War II.
The benefits of looking eerily like the former dictator, he boasts, include free meals, free car repairs — and free passage through Russian checkpoints.
“Looking like Stalin is like having a visa in Georgia,” said Mr. Ziyadaliev, a Muslim originally from Azerbaijan, who drove a taxi, peddled vegetables and worked as an accountant before deciding on a career as a modern incarnation of the brutal, diabolically brilliant Soviet tyrant.
“All Georgians respect Stalin, because he was a great leader who created a great empire — and of course, he was the most famous Georgian who ever lived,” Mr. Ziyadaliev said.
Not everyone agrees. Nika Jabanashvili, a Georgian construction worker whose grandparents were deported by Stalin from Tbilisi to Central Asia as part of his repression of ethnic minorities, views Stalin as little more than a murderer.
“Stalin was a Satan,” he said. “He killed more people than Pharaoh. I don’t care if he was Georgian. He was a bad man.”
Whatever the range of opinions, an enduring cult of Stalin persists in this small but proud nation of 4.6 million, where the Georgian-cobbler’s-son-turned-20th-century-titan remains a towering if contentious figure. A recent survey on Tbilisi Forum, a popular political Web site, asked whether people were proud that Stalin was Georgian; a vocal minority of 37 percent of the several hundred respondents said yes, while 52 percent said no and 11 percent said they did not care.
Vakhtang Guruli, a historian of Georgia who works in the K.G.B. archives in Tbilisi, said that most Georgians regarded Stalin as “higher than man, more than human and less than God.”
He said contemporary Georgian history books still lauded Stalin for vanquishing Hitler’s fascism and transforming the Soviet Union into an industrial superpower, even as they criticized him for engineering the Red Army invasion that ended Georgia’s short-lived independence in 1921.
Stalin’s lust for power, Mr. Guruli added, was a decidedly Georgian characteristic, the outgrowth of having an outsize ego in a tiny, macho country long consumed by banditry.
“Russians tend to forget that Stalin had a Georgian last name, Dzhugashvili, which was overshadowed when he adopted the nom de guerre of Stalin, meaning man of steel, when he was in his 30s,” Mr. Guruli said. “But every Georgian knows Stalin came from here. He may have given his execution orders in Russian, but he did so with a heavy Georgian accent” — a lineage, Mr. Guruli said, that Khrushchev seized on after he denounced Stalin’s rule in 1956, mocking him and his henchmen as uncouth Georgian peasants.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of “Young Stalin,” which chronicles Stalin’s violent upbringing as an aspiring priest who became a Marxist revolutionary in Tbilisi, said that even when Stalin became the supreme Soviet leader, he retained a deep attachment to Georgia.
He wrote frequently to his mother here, vacationed in Abkhazian sea resorts and retained an abiding love of Georgian wine, food, poetry and folk music.
“There are two Stalins: the Russian Stalin and the Georgian Stalin,” Mr. Sebag Montefiore said. “In the Georgian version, Stalin is still the street Marxist, the Georgian boy from Gori. In the Russian version, Stalin is the most important leader of the 20th century and his Georgian identity has been laundered and Russified.”
Liana Imanidze, 71, whose grand home in Tbilisi has a sculpture of Stalin in the backyard and is decorated inside with a replica of his death mask perched on a pedestal, lamented that younger Georgians were ignorant about Stalin, including her own grandchildren, who she complained were more interested in Paris Hilton than in World War II.
She regretted that her Stalin-worshiping husband was “more in love with Stalin than with me,” but she nevertheless lauded Stalin as a flawed genius.
Sociologists here said the residual appeal resulted from the lack of historical reckoning about Stalin’s darker deeds after Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
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