Mr. President, Tear Down This… Statue

Nicholas Krueger / June 25, 2010

It was the dead of night.  Police cordoned off the area and shooed away curious onlookers.  When the townspeople awoke, the city square in Gori, Georgia—the birthplace of Joseph Stalin—was missing its most famous icon.

Last night, Georgian authorities finally removed the 20-ft. bronze statue of the former Soviet dictator to the confines of a local museum.  To most, the statue had been a painful daily reminder of darker days when the forces of communism gutted Georgian society and shrouded the region with tyranny.

The statue had proven remarkably resilient until today.  The Soviets themselves once tried to purge the memory of Stalin as they attempted to rewrite their own history in the 1960s.  In Russia’s 2008 war of aggression against Georgia, bombs fell nearby.  But since that most recent conflict, the statue could not withstand the popular outrage against what it still symbolized.  As Giorgy Baramidze, Georgia’s minister for European integration, explained the government’s decision, “Our historical ideals should be people who tried to build a normal civilised country rather than bloodthirsty hangmen.” (more…)