Stalin State Museum

The Stalin State Museum in Gori, Georgia, showcases over 60,000 items related to Joseph Stalin’s life, including his birth house, personal carriage, and various artifacts.

Planning your visit

The Stalin Museum in Gori is a strange and uncomfortable place, and that is the reason to visit it. Built in 1957 in the town where Iosif Dzhugashvili was born, it remains substantially as the Soviet authorities left it: a hagiographic account of his life across six halls, with gifts from foreign delegations, photographs, documents, his personal effects and a death mask displayed in a darkened circular room.

The repression is barely addressed. A small basement exhibition on the purges was added under later pressure, but the main galleries still present the man as the Soviet Union presented him, and the museum has been the subject of prolonged argument in Georgia about whether to reframe it, close it or leave it as a monument to how propaganda worked.

Outside stand the small wooden house where he was born, preserved under a neoclassical pavilion, and his armoured railway carriage, which he used to travel to Yalta and Tehran.

Bookable options are day tours from Tbilisi combining Gori with Uplistsikhe, the rock-cut cave town nearby, and Mtskheta. Current availability is shown below.