Celebrating Stalin in Georgia

Walter Russell Mead:

"Stalin was, without a doubt, one of the two or three greatest, most destructive figures of the twentieth century. Mao might have been responsible for more deaths, and Hitler is in his league, but Stalin did more than any other person to make the twentieth century the darkest, bloodiest and most tyrannical era in the blood-drenched annals of our race.

...Such a career must be studied, remembered, and can never be forgotten; equally, the monstrous social system that he brought to world power deserves a museum and an archival center where the whole ghastly story can be told. There’s no reason that Gori (a modest provincial town in central Georgia with few other claims to fame) shouldn’t host it. The Stalin Museum that currently exists, while it is a must-see for anybody visiting Georgia, isn’t up to the job. With one foot in the old-Soviet celebration of the great proletarian hero and another in a cautious, Khrushchevian reassessment, the museum doesn’t do justice to its real subject: the Great Darkness of the twentieth century and the man who did so much to shape it."

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