This is the twenty-third part in a series about riding night trains across Europe, Turkey, and the Near East to Georgia and Armenia—to spend time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of Donald Trump. (Trump devoted this week to browbeating the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate to add more than $3.3 trillion to the national debt so that no billionaire is left behind.)

Creeping through the mountainous country, my train arrived in Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia) around 14:00. From the main station, but without GPS on my phone, I had to navigate on my bike to my hotel, which was on the far side of the city from the station (now folded into a cheap shopping mall).

Tbilisi is an elongated city on two sides of a steep riverbank, so I had to descend to one riverbank, and climb back up the other side. 

Modern Tbilisi is a bad city on a bicycle, as it has cobblestones everywhere and fleets of black SUVs careening at high speed. After a few wrong turns, I made it to my small (bike-friendly) hotel, but, as in Ankara, I wondered how I would fare on the bicycle for the next three days, riding around what felt like a racetrack.

In the new Cold War, Georgia is one of the swing states—with a foot in both the East and West. Many Russian businessmen and companies have operations in Tbilisi, and at the outbreak of war in Ukraine, many young Russians fled here to avoid conscription. 

At the same time, Georgia sees itself as a future member of the European Union, if not NATO, which in 2008 endorsed its “aspirations for membership,”which might well have triggered the 2008 border war with Russia (although mostly what started that fighting were the overlapping claims in contested border areas, such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia, with mixed Russian and Georgian populations).

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I had a friend in Tbilisi, so in the evenings we would have dinner and talk politics (whether it likes it or not, Georgia is in Russia’s sphere of influence, not NATO’s). 

During the days I was on my own, and the next day, at 8:40 a.m. I was on a direct train to the small city of Gori, where Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, aka Joseph Stalin, was born and spent his early years. 

The train arrived in Gori around 9:30 a.m., sooner than I expected. I rode in a leisurely way around the small city, knowing that the State Stalin Museum did not open until 10:00 a.m. 

Unlike Tbilisi, Gori is flat and modest. In twenty minutes on a bicycle it’s possible to see most of the downtown area. Just before 10:00 a.m. I locked my bicycle, seated myself on a bench in front of the museum, and waited until a guard unlocked the front door. 

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Parked next to the museum was Stalin’s private railroad car, which was of an earlier vintage than Atatürk’s “private varnish” (slang for a private railroad car). Also near the entrance is the small dwelling in which Stalin was born—his log cabin so to speak—that was moved to the grounds of the state museum.

I might not think much of Stalin as a man or political leader—he ran Russia as if it were all a Gulag camp—but the Gori museum does an excellent job of outlining his life, using original photographs, paintings, maps and wooden models. 

To be sure, it has the feeling of a folk museum from the 1950s (Stalin died in 1953). At the same time the museum is deadpan in its presentation of the general secretary’s life, as if to say: “Yes, he was from Gori, and we realize he was at the core of the Soviet Union for almost forty years, but all we want to do here is present the facts of his life: it’s up to you decide whether he was a hero or a monster. We’re not in that business.”

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A small watercolor painting represents the early years that Stalin spent in and around Gori, which when he was born in 1878 was part of Russia. The picture shows the young Stalin with three other boys playing with sticks in the countryside; a nearby photograph shows Stalin at age 11 with his ecclesiastical school choir. 

Not mentioned in the museum is strained relations with both his parents: his father was a drunk who beat him, and he later referred to his mother as “that old whore.” 

By age 20, Stalin was not just a young revolutionary, but a Marxist who to support the activities of the Bolshevik party worked as an armed bank robber, and not always successfully; there’s a picture from 1903 of Stalin in the Kutaisi prison (the photograph might well show a college graduating class around that time). 

I liked looking at the black-and-white photographs of the 1905 Winter Palace revolution, although when it happened, in January of that year, Stalin wasn’t there, despite being a rising star in the Bolshevik party. 

By the time Stalin met Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, Stalin had not just served time in prison but had been exiled to Siberia and come to the view that party politics are best practiced in the guise of an underworld mob. He would be in prison or Siberia for many years between 1905 and 1917. The museum has a wooden model of his house in Solvichegodsk, which is northeast of Moscow, to which he was sentenced in 1909.

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Come the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stalin was serving as the editor of Pravda, and later, in votes to elect the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party, he came in third, behind Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev. Later that year Stalin became the People’s Commissar for Nationalities (which may explain his later obsession with ethnic cleansing).

During the Russian civil war, Stalin was everywhere—rallying troops or shooting them, as he best saw fit. He was among Lenin’s inner circle on the Central Committee and known for his ruthlessness. 

In the museum, there a picture (seen above) of the two comrades posing in 1922. Lenin is at ease; Stalin is leaning forward on his chair, not quite as comfortable in his skin. In 1923, when Lenin fell ill, Stalin either rushed to his side to comfort his ally or poison him, depending on your reading of Russian history. 

In any case, after Lenin died, Stalin took over the Central Committee and the Politburo, and ran the Soviet Union with an iron first for the next thirty years (not forgetting to have his rival Leon Trotsky killed with an ice pick in Mexico City in 1940). 

The child of a broken, violent home in the Caucasus, when it was shifting between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, Stalin grew up learning to trust no one, and he ran the Soviet Union as if each day he expected Ottoman janissaries to sweep through Gori and behead everyone in his village.

In the museum pictures of the “mature” Stalin, he’s always posing as the “father of the emerging nation,” and when shown greeting Mao or inspecting a tractor factory, he might well be Atatürk (whose troops he faced in the Caucasus).

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For all that Stalin was a ruthless dictator who thought nothing either of purging the officer corps in the Russian army in 1938 or deporting most of the Tatars from Crimea, he allowed the Soviet Union to drift into World War II wholly unprepared. 

His makeshift alliance with Nazi Germany from 1939–1941 allowed him to partition Poland and appear as one of Europe’s new strongmen, but this cynical accommodation with Hitler (who hated Bolshevism as much as he hated Judaism) was, as Talleyrand liked to say, “worse than a crime; it was a blunder.”

The fact remains that without military aid from Britain and the United States in 1942 at the time of Stalingrad, Hitler’s invasion would have driven Stalin from power. 

Stalin was additionally lucky in 1945, when it came time to deal with Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, that the American president was on death’s door and in no position to roll the Iron Curtain back to the Dniester River. Not could Churchill rally the West for yet another Russian intervention (as he did in 1919).

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While making my way around the museum in Gori, I obviously thought a lot about President Vladimir Putin’s current infatuation with the Soviet strongman, although at the beginning of his reign Putin was more associated with Peter the Great, who sought both an enlarged Russian empire and close relations with with western Europe.

I came to the conclusion that Stalin—more than Peter the Great—is the correct antecedent for Putin’s personal reign of terror, which fears contact with the West, runs Russia as a ward of the KGB, thinks nothing of grinding the military into the dust in endless border wars, and dispatches enemies either to prison camps or with poison.

Stalin ran the Soviet economy as a prison-camp assembly line while Putin’s economic policies are those of a new-age fascism, in which state assets—laundered through a captive oligopoly—are deposited directly into the president’s holding companies.

Stalin’s Potemkin Soviet empire collapsed in the early 1990s, in part because imperial wars in places like Afghanistan exposed the hollowness of the party (needless death on the frontiers, bankruptcy at home).

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In Ukraine, Putin thinks he can have it all—guns, butter, and a Soviet resurgimiento in the lands once awarded to Stalin’s stewardship at Yalta. 

If you listen to the Putin interview with the MAGA apparatchik Tucker Carlson, the Russian president’s map of Eastern Europe looks like many in the Stalin museum—with Ukraine and Poland vanquished and Europe partitioned along the banks of of the Oder and Neisse rivers. 

To realize his dreams, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany, and marched into Poland, the Baltics, and Bessarabia, while attacking Finland. Later, more than 2 million persons vanished in his Gulag archipelago.

Putin’s strategy is to use his Trojan horse (Mole President Donald J. Trump) to break NATO and restore the lands of the Warsaw Pact to Moscow.

It could well work, for a while, although the lesson that Stalin and now Putin never quite learned it that their enemies eventually get a vote, too.

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