„Trup w szafie” – krytycznie o bezkrytycznym Muzeum Stalina w Gori
A “skeleton in the cupboard” – critically on the uncritical Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the paper is to critically reflect on the Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori. The basic question is: what non-spatial values does the Museum evoke? Or, reversing the perspective: how do certain spatial values construct and perpetuate the non-spatial values of this ideologized commemorative premise? In order to answer them, the author prepared in situ photographic documentation during her field study and then compared it with the photos available on the Internet. In order to research the collected empirical material, the author attempted to create her own qualitative method, which she called the political topography method (TPM). The research procedure in which it is used involves four steps and, after the selection of the empirical material, includes: acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data from unwritten sources. The theoretical framework of the study consisted of three conceptions: Michel Foucault's power/knowledge, Pierre Bourdieu's symbolic violence and Yi-Fu Tuan's relations in space. Combining them, it was possible to demonstrate that the spatial solutions used in the museum in Gori serve the apotheosis of Stalin as the winner of the Great Patriotic War. It is a synthesis of practices typical for a museum, funeral and commemoration. The paramount example of this approach is to be found on the upper floor of the museum which constitutes the most important part of the exposition, namely a hall-mausoleum with a posthumous mask of the dictator. It imparts a sacred character to the entire museum complex. This is a reality petrified from times preceding the 20thCongress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which Khrushchev denounced the disastrous effects of the cult of the individual.

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