Stalin’s Underground Printing Press

This samizdat (underground) press was the only one literally underground, 15 metres beneath an old house in the Avlabari district of Tbilisi, a somewhat decrepit neighborhood of bleak apartment blocks and car repair garages. Many people don’t realize Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili (იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი in Georgian), otherwise known as Josef Stalin, was born in Georgia and started his revolutionary activities there after abandoning theological studies. [More on his birthplace, Gori, in another post.]

A few of us agreed to meet at this unofficial museum one morning, but we all got lost on the dusty streets before finding each other. Bob and I took a cab, and a potentially friendly driver suddenly turned silent when I showed him the address: 7 Kaspi St. He drove to the neighborhood and dropped us off, gestured brusquely down the street, and left. He wouldn’t take us directly there. We had trouble determining if we were even on the right street, and asked directions of several people, including a delivery truck driver who surely knew the neighborhood, but everyone shrugged and appeared not to know, or didn’t want to give out that they knew where the place was. Very mysterious.

Finally we all found it (the house has an iron door with a hammer and sickle on it) and were treated to a full tour of the property by none other than the 78-year-old chairman of the Georgian Communist Party, Zhiuli Sikhmashvili.

He is energetic and lively, and was happy to show us around the donation-funded museum and attempt to talk to us in broken English. Luckily for us, three people from Poland who spoke both Russian and English showed up soon after we did. They were able to translate from Russian for us, so that we got a much more informative tour than we would have otherwise. We started in an office crowded with memorabilia and books and from there took a tour of Communism seen through Georgian eyes. There were flags, portraits of revolutionaries, newspapers, photos and documents spread out over several rooms.

Then we went out to the yard into a replica of the house Stalin was born in.

The rooms are reconstructed as they might have looked with original furnishings, including a small platen press that was probably used for handbills and small posters.

But the main purpose and focus of this site is the existence of the large underground printing press. We

descended a rusty iron spiral staircase (constructed for the museum) into a dank cellar lit only by a few single lightbulbs, making photography tricky.

The original access to the press would have been through the well shaft hidden by a small shed in the yard.

Between 1903 and 1906 thousands of flyers, pamphlets and newspapers were printed at this location, in Russian, Georgian, Azeri and Armenian. A large printing press made in Germany in 1893 was imported from Baku, then disassembled and its parts lowered down the well shaft. At the bottom, a side tunnel was dug and connected to an underground cellar. There, the press was reassembled. It is now quite rusted, because the cellar flooded a few years ago.

The house had to look “normal”, so two women lived on the first floor, and a few chickens were kept in the yard. In case of potential danger, an electric alarm bell hidden in the wall would serve to alert those underground. The young Bolsheviks worked in shifts, sending completed material in a bucket up to the house. Flyers would be hidden in street sellers’ carts, then taken to the railway station, and from there would travel to the Caucasus region and beyond.

In 1906 the police raided the house, but in 1937 Stalin and Beria--the brutal chief of the USSR secret police and also a Georgian--reopened the house as a museum. It was an official, government-funded museum until 2012 and apparently also contains the offices of the Georgian Communist Party. The day we visited there were other people on the property just sitting and reading or writing.

Throughout our visit we were careful to remain neutral in our comments so as not to offend our host, but we did leave donations and managed to convey our appreciation for the history displayed there. Afterwards, we went even deeper underground and took the high-speed metro back into old Tbilisi.

[photos taken by both Bob and Meg]

[See the Snapshots section of the website for a larger selection of photos taken at the museum.]