Georgia to replace Stalin monument with memorial

Georgia is to replace a controversial statue of Joseph Stalin with a monument to those killed by the Soviet dictator and to victims of the country’s 2008 war with Russia, officials said on Tuesday.

The new monument, chosen after a public competition, depicts a group of naked casualties of Georgia’s conflicts with Russia.

It will be erected in the main square in Stalin’s hometown of Gori, which was hit by Russian bombs during the 2008 war.

“We should always remember the hideousness of the 2008 war and of Stalin’s repressions, so that they will not happen again,” a Georgian culture ministry spokeswoman, Tamar Chikhladze, said.

The memorial will replace an imposing bronze statue of the Soviet dictator, which was taken away in the middle of the night by Georgia’s pro-Western authorities in June last year.

A second Stalin statue in the town of Tkibuli was removed a few days later as part of Georgia’s continuing efforts to break with its Soviet past – although a Stalin museum in Gori which attracts foreign tourists has been allowed to continue functioning.

Born Joseph Dzhugashvili in Gori in 1878, Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist from the late 1920s until his death in 1953.

He was accused of causing the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens in his brutal Gulag prison camps and through the forced collectivisation of agriculture.