Business booming in Georgia for Stalin look-alike

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Dan Bilefsky, New York Times

(10-05) 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.
But 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. Looks come with perks
"Looking like Stalin is like having a visa in Georgia," said 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," 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 opini
ons, 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 KGB 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, 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," 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, Guruli said, that Nikita Khrushchev seized upon 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," 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." Stalin sculpture in backyard
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.
In Gori, Stalin's birthplace, a dusty provincial town where a marble
Stalin statue dominates the central square, toasts to "our great comrade"
remain commonplace at births and weddings. Embarrassed Georgians in the
Ministry of Interior said privately that they were disappointed a Russian
bomb had not landed on the statue during the August war.
On a recent day at the Stalin Museum here, young Georgian staff members
wearing Soviet military uniforms sold Stalin T-shirts, Stalin poetry books
and Stalin-embossed bottles of red wine, even as cleaners removed mortar
left over from the recent Russian shelling.
Olga Topchishvili, the museum's senior tour guide, said she had been
extolling Stalin's accomplishments for nearly 30 years, until three months
ago, when the museum added a new "gulag section." The section consists of
a laminated, letter-size piece of paper quoting three sentences from a
1997 issue of Pravda, the Russian newspaper: "About 3.8 million people
were prosecuted between 1921 and 1954," the p
aper says. "About 643,000
people were sentenced to death. And this happened in a country that
experienced three revolutions, two world wars, one civil war and several
local wars."
Exact figures are unknown, but historians say the reality was far more
murderous: that as many as 18 million people were sentenced to the gulag
under Stalin, while up to 10 million peasants died or were killed in the
collectivization of the early 1930s, and nearly 1 million people were
executed in the purges of 1937-38.
But Topchishvili said the new exhibit was progress. "Until three months
ago, no one wanted to talk about this part of history," she said.
Jacob Jugashvili, the dictator's 36-year-old great-grandson, an artist in
Tbilisi, said that if Georgians were nostalgic for Stalin, it was because
he made a small country part of a great superpower.
Jugashvili, who grew up in Moscow, said that when Georgians hear his
famous surname, they almost always respond: "Stalin was Georgian; that is
why he was great!"
Jugashvili, who favors the Westernized spelling of his name, said that
growing up as Stalin's great-grandson in 1980s Russia had been emotionally
difficult, as Stalin's leadership was attacked during the period of
Mikhail Gorbachev. At that time, he said, Georgians were far more
respectful of his legacy - though in Vladimir Putin's Russia, Jugashvili
said, Stalin's stature has again risen.
In 1989 he was in high school, "and perestroika had reached its boiling
point," he said, adding: "Moscow newspapers were publishing stories with
the headline 'Dzhugashvili Is a Killer!' I was 16 years old and I was very
upset. I didn't know how to defend myself." Tattoos of Stalin
These days, respect for Stalin can unite Georgians and Russians.
Nodari Baliashvili, 72, a Gori native who has a large tattoo of Stalin on
his back and another of Stalin and Lenin on his chest, recalled that after
war broke out in early August, he was working as a security guard at a bus
depot when a Russian colonel burst in and pointed a pisto
l at him.
Baliashvili recalled that he took off his shirt and the colonel "put his
gun down, kissed me on the cheek, gave me a bottle of vodka and
chocolates, and said, 'Grandpa, go home.' "
Baliashvili, who got the tattoos as a young soldier in the Soviet army,
said his own grandfather, a poor orphan from Gori, had been adopted by
Stalin's father, who made him an apprentice cobbler.
"I'm proud that Stalin comes from Gori," Baliashvili said. "He built the
U.S.S.R. He brought order where there was chaos. Today, everything is for
sale."