The museum that symbolises the comeback of authoritarianism

Martin Shipton

Most people would consider the building of a grand museum glorifying a notorious dictator estimated to be personally responsible for the deaths of around 10 million people as an act of grotesque folly and gross insensitivity.

That such a museum – which I visited this week – continues to attract visitors, including young people, in their droves more than 70 years after the dictator’s death can be seen as a matter of serious concern.

In the 1930s, international politics was polarised between Hitler on the right and Stalin on the left. There wasn’t much space left in the middle for ideologues to argue about, and intellectuals on the left found themselves adopting positions that in retrospect seem at best absurd and at worst treacherous.

There is much of interest in the Stalin Museum at Gori, his home town in Georgia, but I was unable to find anything, for example, on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a non-aggression deal between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that lasted as long as it took Hitler to turn the tables on Stalin and mount an invasion of the latter’s territory. Why the omission? Because it’s easy to airbrush inconvenient facts from history if you control the narrative and want to push a certain line.

There is, I can report in the interests of full disclosure, a low-key room on the museum’s ground floor that touches on a small portion of Stalin’s atrocities and their legacy. Apparently, it was added rather grudgingly to the collection in 2010.

Overall, perhaps the best way to regard the museum more broadly is as a monument to authoritarianism of a particularly cruel kind.

If we choose to see it in that light, the Stalin Museum takes on a wider significance than simply the lionised portrayal of a historically dominant figure whose rule led to millions of deaths. Instead, it represents what many will regard with dismay as the revival of pre-democratic governmental behaviours that we believed had been superseded.

Looking at the current state of the world, who can doubt that authoritarianism is making a comeback – and that much of it is cruel?

The despicable behaviour of Jewish settler terrorists towards Palestinian farmers who have held land in the West Bank for many generations never ceases to shock with each successive piece of footage that I see. Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband have taken action that Keir Starmer refused to take, and for that they deserve to be commended.

Plenty of commentators have criticised the current UK Government over the issue, saying the sanctions will be ineffective and are against Britain’s interests.

Such an argument is dishonest, in my view, and reminiscent of similar reasoning used decades ago to argue against any action aimed at bringing pressure to bear on apartheid South Africa. I would rather have a government that did the right thing for the right reason than one that constantly sought to absolve itself from the need to do anything at all.

The UK Government’s new stance will not in itself lead to a solution, and much more needs to be done, but it sets down a marker for other countries to emulate.

Some are already doing so. Israel, which actively endorses the theft of Palestinian land – and has done so since its inception – is too often let off the hook because of spurious allegations of antisemitism levelled against its critics, many of whom are Jewish themselves.

It is nauseating to see far-right politicians from Wales opposing sanctions against settler terrorists in the West Bank on the assumption that Jews in Britain collectively feel hurt if such murderous behaviour is sanctioned. Such a false assumption is surely in itself antisemitic.

It is also an example of cruel authoritarianism, where defending the actions of the worst kind of Israelis is considered more acceptable in the eyes of those that matter than standing up for what is morally right.

Donald Trump’s second presidential term has turned the United States into a country where democracy is in severe peril.

His control of both Houses of Congress has enabled him to bypass scrutiny and introduce a form of elective dictatorship that sidelines freedoms that have been taken for granted for centuries. Trump and his sometime buddy Elon Musk both extol the virtues of freedom of speech while measures are being implemented to curtail it.

Warsaw Pact

Before the collapse of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the 1980s, I made a number of trips to eastern European Communist countries. Perhaps I was fortunate, but on no occasion did border guards examine the written material I had with me.

Now any foreigner who wants to enter the US has to submit their social media output to US immigration officials, who are under instruction to forbid entry to anyone who has criticised President Trump. The other day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made it clear that anyone who had supported the Palestinian cause would not be allowed into the country.

In terms of his support for Israel – and no doubt as a result of lobbying from the Israeli government and its adherents within the US administration – Trump has made it clear that he will impose sanctions on countries that do anything that potentially damages Israel, including measures against settler terrorists.

Other elements of Trump’s cruel authoritarianism include engineering situations where, for example, officers of the International Criminal Court have had their banking facilities withdrawn, making it impossible for them to live normal lives. Such vindictiveness has also been extended to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, an Italian legal scholar and human rights expert.

Sanctions

The UN published a report by Albanese in June 2025 stating that many corporate entities, including Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. and Amazon, were enabling and profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories and the Gaza genocide.

In response, the United States under the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Albanese under Executive Order 14203, naming her a “specially designated national” and forbidding all US persons and companies from doing business with her.

There have been news stories about such huge infringements of personal freedom, but we have reached the stage where such governmental conduct doesn’t attract the outrage it should, but is treated as a human interest story rather than as one which illustrates how cruel authoritarianism has taken hold.

As Stalin would never have said, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

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