OUT OF EDEN WALK

In a mazy suburb of Tbilisi, Georgia, behind a row of gritty automobile repair garages, slumps a derelict house. Under the house plummets a 40-foot tunnel. Near the bottom of this chilly hole, and through a hidden side passage, sits a 122-year-old German printing press orange with rust. This forgotten underground chamber is a “dark Web” bolt hole from the locomotive era. It is an antique hacker’s den. A young revolutionary known in Georgian by the name იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი, and to the Russians as Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili, printed incendiary communist pamphlets, magazines, and newspaper here. We call him by his pen name, Stalin.

Stalin was Georgian. He had webbed toes, cheeks cratered by smallpox, and adolescent yearnings to be a poet. He was educated as an Orthodox priest. As a bank robber, and then supremo of the Soviet Union for 30 years, he killed between 34 and 49 million of his own people. (“A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”) Naturally, the former Soviet republic of Georgia isn’t keen on maintaining the old dictator’s publishing hideout as a cultural prize. This duty falls to the site’s guide, Soso Gagoshvili.

“This is the only museum like this in the world,” Gagoshvili says. “In France, in the Louvre, okay, maybe there’s something like it. But this is the best. I’ll prove it.”

There are, in fact, numerous Stalin museums in the world. There is a Stalin museum at the despot’s birthplace in Gori, Georgia. There is a Stalin’s Bunker Museum in Moscow. There used to be a gulag museum dedicated to the victims of Stalin’s death camps in Perm, Russia, until it was shuttered last year. (Stalin’s reputation is experiencing something of a revival in Russia.) But Gagoshvili, an emphatic, energetic, white-haired man who proudly shows me an ID certifying—in English—his past service as an agent with the KGB, is probably right. There is no museum quite like this one. Gagoshvili, apparently homeless, lives in it.

The year was 1906.

Stalin was in his charismatic 20s, just getting started. He and his hotheaded comrades were cranking out bundles of anti-Tsarist literature from the urban cave below. The famous Greek-Armenian mystic Gurdieff—who advocated swallowing foods whole, without chewing—betrayed Stalin to the police. Prison. Escape. Prison. Escape. The rest is history. Before long, the Generalissimo and Man of Steel was ordering his portrait artists shot. (Unflattering portraits.)

“The Soviet Union under Stalin was too humane,” Gagoshvili says, sadly. “We only killed 5 percent of our enemies. If we had killed them all, we would still be living in the Soviet Union.”

I tell Gagoshvili my father fought against Hitler in the U.S. Navy.

“You are American?”

“Yes.”

“Imperialist!”

“But I grew up in Mexico.”

“Ah, Mexico! Good.” He brightens. “Pancho Villa! Revolutionary!”

We climb out of the cave on rotting spiral stairs. Gagoshvili fills us a tumbler of cold water from the yard hose. I look up at the plane trees. Their leaves rustling. It is good to be alive.

*

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