Everyone knows where Josef Stalin was born, in the republic of Georgia in Gori, but I bet you didn’t know where he spent most of his time when he was puffing his pipe. The location was kept a secret till sometime in the late 1980’s for fear that it would be transformed into a post Stalinist shrine. You be glad to know in this travelogue special, we the brotherhood press managed to ferret out Uncle Joe’s hide out. It’s not easy getting there, like all sensible dictators Stalin was intensely paranoid so even the location isn’t featured in the local maps and its smack in the middle of no where.
Some 10 miles from the Black Sea in Abkhazia just next to a corn yellow Byzantium domed monastery is a heavily camouflaged double storey building surrounded by a thicket of cedar trees. Even from this distance of less than 200 meters we could have easily missed it, but our gypsy guide Anatoly insist its there. “Where is it?” I ask, “There! Cant you see it” he blares out – we stop and peered with field glasses, nothing. Suddenly a shape appears followed by another angular form, the invisible house surfaces.
This was where Stalin worked, lived and played. Read the rest of this entry »
THE INTELLIGENT SINGAPOREAN 