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You are here: Home / Archives for leaders

Photo of the Day: Stalin’s Head

January 7, 2011 By Danny

Yes, you read that correctly.

This photo taken from inside the Stalin museum of a cast of Stalin’s face. It is certainly a quirky memorial to the original ‘Man of Steel’ even though it is likely cast in bronze. The museum itself was an entirley strange, somewhat eerie place. Aside from a one sided and interesting account of history it also displayed Stalin’s old uniforms and personal effects.

Special thanks to XIFRES for marking this photo as a favorite.

Visit our flickr page to explore our photos and mark some of your own favorites. We’ll be highlighting a different photo every day.

IMGP5877

Filed Under: photos Tagged With: communism, leaders, photos

Josef Stalin is not who you think he is…

September 16, 2010 By Danny

IMGP5882When you hear the name ‘Stalin’ what comes to mind? Steel. Soviet. Dictator. Evil Man. Iron Curtain. Red Scare. Big Mustache. Nazi Killer. Follower of Lenin. Communism. Roosevelt’s Russian Friend. Not Russian?

That’s right. “The Great Architect of Communism” is not Russian, he is Georgian.

We visited Gori, a town about 90 minutes to the west of Tbilisi, to see the his old home and the museum erected in his honor. We were astonished. His old neighborhood was bulldozed so that only his home, which he lived in until the age of 4, was the only house left standing on the city block, allowing for a whole Stalin park. His father was a cobbler.

IMGP5878Ironically when “The Father of Nations” lived here, his name was Joseb Besarionis dze Jugashvili. He changed his name to Stalin (Steel) much later when he needed a pen name for his communist writings. He rose up through the communist party over the years, being deemed unfit for military service due to his deformed hand; his face scarred with small pox didn’t help either.

The museum though, focuses on these things as something of a hero-worship to “Humanity’s Brilliant Genius”. It somehow manages to ignore all the painfully evil things he did to maintain control within the Communist Party and the broader Soviet system; pacts with Hitler, various famines, the sending of people to the Gulags, etc. IMGP5877The guide did talk about the open disagreements between Lenin and S

Filed Under: Europe, Georgia, Headline, History & Culture Tagged With: history, leaders, museums

The Obama Affect

May 25, 2010 By Danny

About 6 weeks before departing our home for this trip, we witnessed Barak Obama sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. This was a day that history will long remember, but I’m not sure that anything could have prepared us for the level of Obama fever we encountered here in Africa.

In every country we’ve been in, Barak Obama has come up in conversation. In Colombia a bike repair man told me he had a friend in America, Obama. In Kenya I was told where I could find the Obama family and what tribe he hailed from by the man who cut my hair. In Guatemala, despite efforts by the local priesthood to tell people that Obama had started swine flu personally on his recent trip to Mexico City, many people just wouldn’t believe that ‘their’ Obama could have done anything like that.

It doesn’t end with people though. We have every product and building imaginable with the name ‘Obama’ on it. We’ve used Obama pens, eaten in Obama restaurants, shopped in Obama stores, and even ridden on buses with the familiar “yes we can” scrawled on the back with a photo of our president. I’m not sure there has ever been a time in history (maybe in Western Europe immediately following WWII) where American travelers have been greeted by such enthusiasm everywhere they’ve gone. I just saw an election advertisement, for the recent elections in Sudan, where the only English on the sign was the familiar: “Change: Yes We Can!”

Filed Under: Africa, Headline Tagged With: culture, leaders

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