A Monument to the Terror: Georgia's Museum of the Soviet Occupation

Upon entry, the museum feels more like a mausoleum, which is as it should be. You walk into a large, bunker-like space, dark but strangely welcoming, oddly calming. With the sad intimacy of a voyeur peering from darkness to washes of light, you peer at the wall-mounted exhibits. Searing bouquets of memory, they seem to rise at you. After all, the Museum of the Soviet Occupation here is a kind of mausoleum, one that chronicles the merciless quashing of a national destiny for over 80 years--that of Georgia by Moscow under the Soviet system and beyond, from 1919 to the Rose Revolution in late 2003. It may sound like a grim prospect, but the experience of touring the single space for an hour is a humanizing and stirring one, never depressing, rather as if one had just watched a perfectly staged, cathartic tragedy. And it ends in a resurrection of hope with scenes from the Rose Revolution's democratic triumph. [More]