The town of Gori came to the world's attention during the recent conflict over South Ossetia. But its real claim to fame is as the birth place of Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin.

There’s nothing unusual about Gori – another post-Soviet sleepy town in the middle of Georgia. If it wasn’t for the recent war, few people would ever have heard of it.

But Gori is the birthplace of Joseph Djugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin, one of the world’s most notorious dictators. And while he may have been the Soviet leader who triumphed over the Nazis, Stalin also marked one of the darkest periods in the USSR. He sent millions of people, including many Georgians, to their deaths in the Gulag.

The town has perhaps the world’s only Stalin museum.

When the first bombs started falling in the recent conflict the curator of the museum, Robert Maglakelidze, had only one thought: how to rescue the collection dedicated to his admired leader.

“I was scared for the museum. The bombs and bullets were flying very close to it. I took Stalin’s personal belongings in a taxi to a museum in Tbilisi,” Robert Maglakelidze, Director of the Stalin Museum, said.
  
Neither the museum, nor the huge statue of Stalin standing in the middle of the town square, was damaged in the fighting.

While Stalin, to say the least, remains a controversial figure across the former Soviet Union, for some Georgians he remains a hero. 
 
“He was one of the greatest politicians, everyone in the world says so and I say so too. I don’t know why, but from childhood I felt very connected to this man and my life took me on this path,” Sculptor Tamur Kunelauri said.  

Tamur has transformed his house into a shrine to Stalin. There are more than 40 statues and paintings of the Soviet leader – on walls, in corridors, even among the plants in the garden – watching visitors from every conceivable angle.

“You call this recent fighting a war? During Stalin’s days nothing like this could’ve happened. Today’s leaders are a joke. You cannot compare them to Stalin, because Stalin, during the most difficult war the world has ever had, led his country to victory,” Tamur Kunelauri said.

But people in Georgia are still paying the price for Stalin’s policies. He was the man who decided that South Ossetia was part of Georgia, putting into place a ticking bomb which finally exploded last month.