Goodbye Stalin Museum

Lol wut? Maybe the people in Gori running the museum could have some say in the matter? Or has the central government in Tbilisi kept this Stalin museum afloat for decades? That would actually be pretty funny. In any case, if they go through with this, I guess the people from the old museum will just pack up their gear and reopen it elsewhere if they can get the funding. And the "Stalinist Crimes Museum" will probably only get visited by bored school kids on those horrible mandatory school trips that nobody likes.

What a bunch of bastards.

Accusations of "Stalinist totalitarianism" from a "totalitarian" leader. Does the Shak have any sense of irony?

'Culture minister'?

The ruling class is ever so blatant.

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I'd often wondered about them and how appropriate it was to make school kids go to places like Auschwitz.

When I went to a Holocaust museum when I was 12, it was completely lost on me and now in hindsight it was disrespectful but when a group of 30+ 12 year olds are being bored to tears by a tour guide you ignore him and mess around and ignore why you are there. For the most part many school trips are a waste of time in that sense.

Erichs_Pastry_Chef wrote:

Accusations of "Stalinist totalitarianism" from a "totalitarian" leader. Does the Shak have any sense of irony?

Meh... At least Stalinist totalitarianism was more or less socialist... And proles weren't particularly likely to get repressed. And it worked (at a great cost) to save the USSR from the Nazis and make'em an industrial superpower.

[Tinfoil Hat] Come to think of it, perhaps Georgia's current authoritarian leader ain't shutting it down to avoid celebrating totalitarianism at all... He's more more likely shuttin' it down to avoid unfavorable comparisons between him and Uncle Joe!!! [/Tinfoil Hat]

This is just another step taken by the Georgia government to move away from Russia's influence and please USA and its western allies. Remember that they have done the same thing with Stalin statue a couple years ago. I just wonder how far the Georgian Government can go to continue this pro-western policy and how much influence USA have over the Georgian Government right now. I really doubt that USA had nothing to do with the removal of the statue and now the opening of a museum, two clearly provocations to Moscow.

This a move by the Georgians to assert their independence from Moscovite imperialism.

Lol some independence.
Georgia is just another bitch of the US, like Kosovo for example.

Political Interest wrote:

This a move by the Georgians to assert their independence from Moscovite imperialism.

Is just moving from one imperialism to another.

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Lol some independence.
Georgia is just another bitch of the US, like Kosovo for example.

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Is just moving from one imperialism to another.

That is true enough but this is the situation. Until a third force is formed, or a unified Caucasus, what alternative is there?

So Georgia is supposedly asserting its independence from Muscovite imperialism by disavowing one of its own? Particularly when said Georgian saw the impressive development of Georgia and massive transfer of capital from Russia to Georgia. A thoroughly idiotic and counterintuitive move, to say the least.

Hopefully the museum exhibit gets moved to a place where it's much more appreciated. Maybe a place like Volgograd...

Shigalyov wrote:

Have you been on one of those trips in Europe?
I'd often wondered about them and how appropriate it was to make school kids go to places like Auschwitz.
I just imagine many kids would think it was all some big laugh. Hardly appropriate.

As far as the Stalin museum... goes this is hardly remarkable ... surprised it didn't happen sooner really.

Nah, I was thinking of mandatory museum trips in general. I think seeing a concentration camp at some point can be quite instructive. An allied anti-fascist organisation happens to be sending a train with 1,000 European youths to Auschwitz next month (they are expected to return though - sorry, had to include a tasteless joke since we're on the subject of "treating it as a big laugh" ).

The thing is that visiting the remains of a concentration camp actually shows you what happened. It's quite different from a blatantly politicised "totalitarian museum" where nothing significant actually happened, which is just there as propaganda. Auschwitz was real, it happened. "Totalitarianism" is just some bullshit term made up by propagandists to attack a large section of the very people who died in those camps for Cold War reasons.

Like if anybody in present day post-communist countries cared about "Stalinist terror". Slovakia, unlike Georgia is one of the more sucessful post-communist countries and not extremely pro-communist, yet since 2008 (the start of the worldwide economic crisis) people are afraid to even say bad words about communists because the present day goverment is just so corrupt, inefficient and evil. People basically realized how really good communists were.

These moves like the Georgian goverment makes are just theatre for the West. Talking about "Stalinist crimes" and hating communists is generally a hobby of upper-middle class and upper class rightwingers.

You're Slovakian? I visited Slovakia on an exchange several years ago. How is the Communist Party there doing? What always strikes me is their electoral history. It seems that in 2002, they came out of nowhere to win 11 seats, and collapsed again after that, but I have no idea why that is. Do you know?

No 14 wrote:

You're Slovakian? I visited Slovakia on an exchange several years ago. How is the Communist Party there doing? What always strikes me is their electoral history. It seems that in 2002, they came out of nowhere to win 11 seats, and collapsed again after that, but I have no idea why that is. Do you know?

The KSS (the Communist party) is one of the few parties that are not subsidised by the 2 dominant financial groups in Slovakia (Penta Group and J&T), so they didn't have almost any electoral campaign. They are one of the less corrupt parties, which is also why they will never be allowed to get any power. And the reason why almost nobody votes them is simple, over 40 year old common people generally vote the social-democratic (not scandinavian, more corrupt populism in reality) Smer party, which subtly manifactures its "really just communists by another name" (of course, that is bullshit) image to ensure torrents of votes from nostalgic voters, and has the side effect of being hated by rightwingers. Smer has absolutely won the lastest election by the way. Basically, populist pseudo-socdems have co-opted almost all pro-socialist sentiment.

And yes, I am Slovak. Where are you from btw, if I can ask?

Not to derail this thread but Neuron, how do people feel about the communist past? More positivly than other EBloc countries or worse. I know that in Hungary that they have banned the Hammer and Sickle.

Banning communist symbols says absolutely nothing about the sentiment of the people. The people have no freaking power in any post-communist country. The only thing that it reflects is that a country's ruling class is reactionary. Here is an article written by a Hungarian woman about her childhood and youth in socialist era Hungary http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -life.html . You really think the hammer and sickle was banned because "the people" wanted to ban it? There are many people in Hungary and Slovakia who hate socialism, there are many people who like that time period, and there are many, especially youth, who are ambivalent, think "it is all the same stuff, capitalism, socialism, both bad, in different ways", or simply view it neutrally as the past. In Slovakia, I think the sentiment is about average, more than 60 percent of people answered in a 2004 survey that their lives were better under socialism, but there are also people who think without communism we would be a "second Switzerland" (yeah right, even through in 1939 we had about 15x less electricity consumption than Austria, family size of 7 children because of infant mortality and right after the war, before the establishment of socialist rule in 1948, we almost had a famine in 1946-1947 and the only countries that sent us food aid were Canada and the USSR [which contributed despite suffering hunger in 1946-1947 as well]). Communists modernized life in less than a single generation, compare my grandfather's and father's upbringing - grandfather was one of 12 children, their home had no electricity, they occasionally had to hide in the basement from falling bombs because of WW2, little food except for grain products, hard agricultural labour from childhood, no running tap water, toilet - a wooden latrine. Compare it to my father's upbringing - he was one of 2 children (he has a brother), they lived in an apartment block with electricity, plumbing, flush toilet, shower, they had a radio, TV, a fairly hi-fi record player, a color film moviecamera (Praktika, made in GDR), he spent his childhood playing with other kids instead of working on a field, he had hobbies such as photography and making model airplanes, they had tons of books at home etc.

Many people think people in socialist countries were some diseased mud farming peasants who spent half of their day in "queues for small food rations" (food rationing was abolished in 1952-1953 in Czechoslovakia) and I am freaking tired of that bullshit stereotype. It was not a life as overtechnologized and luxurious as in the West, but in many ways, even more civilized than Western countries, by actually encouraging positive stuff and meaningful activities. Kids at that time didn't have as many sophisticated toys as Western kids, but that is why there were so many hobbies. There was a place and an activity for everyone. I deeply regret being born under capitalism. The computer dependance and addiction in the modern world is destroying society all in the name of fancy "social networking",iphones etc. Parents just feed their kids and leave them to do as they please instead of guiding them to be valuable members of society.

Many people back then did not realize what they had and wanted Western luxury, tropical fruits from South America every day, mansions, freedom to say anything. They got 300 Euro salaries, and wishy washy propaganda about how the European Union will save us by sending billions of euros to german banks to "pay for Greek debt".