“Oh, eggs,” Nata Peradze says. “You just empty the shells by poking a hole in the bottom, fill them with paint and seal them with wax so you can carry them in your pocket. It’s easy, really.”
Chatting kind-eyed and shy over a cup of herbal tea in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Peradze is hardly the profile of a remorseless criminal. In February, the 56-year-old was released from a stint in jail after a court convicted her of petty hooliganism for throwing the egg-smuggled paint at a new religious icon featuring Josef Stalin at the city’s Holy Trinity Cathedral, commonly known as Sameba. The act of protest was personal: Two of her great-grandparents served time in Arctic penal colonies before being executed by the Stalinist regime almost a century ago.
In May, Peradze fled Georgia in anticipation of further criminal charges for orchestrating an attempted coup after participating in the mass anti-government protests rocking the country at that time. She was forced to leave behind her stepfather and an elderly friend, both of whom rely almost entirely on Peradze for support. “It was a flat choice, to face many years in prison or to go to Europe,” she told New Lines in a phone interview from the European Union country where she has taken refuge (due to security concerns, she declined to name it). “It was like an awful dream, leaving my house in the dead of night to go away from everything and everyone I love.” Luckily, her two sons, who are both in their 20s, are studying abroad and not in Georgia.
The furor surrounding the long-dead Soviet despot’s sudden appearance at the main cathedral — in which he is depicted in his signature leather trench coat beside the blind St. Matrona of Moscow — goes to the heart of a concerted and long-running campaign by the Georgian Orthodox Church to rehabilitate the dictator’s legacy in his home country.
Though myths about Stalin’s purported superpowers — describing a man who read tens of thousands of books and managed to control time — have existed for decades, it is only in recent years, as the country’s foreign policy pivots toward Russia, that such perceived saintliness has regained momentum.
From Stalin’s supposed powers to the Georgian patriarch’s alleged ties to the Soviet security services, or KGB, the reasons for one of the world’s oldest churches taking an interest in reinventing the image of an atheistic, authoritarian communist who massacred millions are as complex as they are bizarre.
But experts say this campaign’s growing traction of late also serves as a wider sign of the times in the South Caucasus nation. Earlier this year, Georgian Orthodox bishops started trending on the social media platform TikTok, in videos that further reflect an accelerating spread of misinformation and anti-Western propaganda that has, amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine, accompanied the growing thaw in Tbilisi’s relationship with the Kremlin after more than a decade of frozen diplomacy.
When Peradze left in May, the country was in chaos amid a brutal and violent crackdown on dissent ahead of the government passing a Russian-style law on “foreign influence,” itself part of a broader legislative package of authoritarian measures targeting independent media, civil society and the LGBTQ+ community.
“The whole Stalin thing is actually part of a larger menu,” says Giorgi Kandelaki, a project manager at the Soviet Past Research Laboratory (Sovlab), a Tbilisi think tank. He explains how the foreign agents bill, the widespread rumors of Georgia becoming a “second front” of the conflict in Ukraine and conspiracies about the LGBTQ+ community — often portraying Tbilisi’s queer activists as members of a satanic cabal — are part of a whole. “Taken together, they all signal the creeping success of a wider anti-Western disinformation agenda.”
In Russia, Stalin’s legacy has long been a crucial component of the Putinist mythos. It’s a key aspect of the unity of Russian identity and vision conveyed by the Kremlin’s ideological outlook, which is intended as a counterweight to European values. This unity, running from the Romanov era through the Soviet period up to the present day, underplays the atrocities committed under the Stalinist regime by contrasting them with the successes of industrialization and victory in World War II.
“Russian propagandists have modeled Stalin as an enemy to the West and to democracy,” explains Nikolay Epplee, an independent researcher on the memorialization of state terror in Russia. “Putin wants his state to look as strong and aggressive as possible, to align himself with Stalin as a symbolic figure, so he can share in that power as leader of Russia’s newest era.”
And now in Georgia, Russia’s erstwhile foe to its south, revisionist ideas of Stalin as a supposed bastion of faith and a vanguard against Western depravity are finding an audience. Stalin is viewed as an individual who rescued an impoverished nation from the Nazis, fast-tracked an industrial revolution and turned the country into a superpower on the world stage. While all true, such nostalgic reframing, in a country where the vast majority of people identify as Orthodox Christians, forgets the fact millions were murdered on his watch.
Since the launch of Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two and a half years ago, Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, has shown growing signs of a desire for closer ties with Moscow. High-ranking officials have repeatedly parroted Kremlin narratives, such as former Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili attributing the war to NATO expansionism, with Russian politicians praising the Georgian government for not posing as “another irritant” amid the conflict.
Meanwhile, Georgian Dream has become increasingly hostile toward historic Western partners, launching rhetorical attacks against ambassadors and delegates to portray the U.S. and the European Union as members of a “global war party” hell-bent on widening the conflict in Ukraine by creating another front along the boundaries with Georgia’s two breakaway territories, which are under Moscow’s de facto control.
Alongside this sort of hard-line geopolitical grandstanding has emerged a discernible trend toward far-right populism among Georgian officials, with senior politicians stressing a perceived need to protect domestic stability, national identity and the sanctity of traditional values from the threat of Western liberalism.
This perhaps reared its head most spectacularly with the recent “foreign influence” law, imposing punitive restrictions on independent media and government-critical nongovernmental organizations that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad. But it has also persisted more insidiously in the form of ultraconservative narratives targeting Georgia’s LBGTQ+ community, including the initiation of a draft law against “pseudo-liberal LGBT propaganda” which, if passed, threatens to prohibit public gatherings “aimed at popularizing same-sex families or relationships” as well as banning displays of LGBTQ+ intimacy on television.
In the aftermath of her defacing the icon at the Holy Trinity Cathedral, Peradze and her family soon began receiving death threats on social media. Not two days later, a mob had assembled outside her house, organized by the ultraviolent Georgian far-right protest movement, Alt-Info. The group, which has documented ties to Russia, has consistently pushed a historically dubious view of Stalin online, seeking to model the late dictator as a misunderstood ethno-nationalist hero.
As a disinformation analyst with Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, Sopo Gelava had been monitoring pro-Stalinist content on TikTok for some time before footage began circulating of the icon at the Holy Trinity Cathedral. “Before the start of this year, the most prominent videos were basically just memes, compilations of historic images with heroic music playing in the background,” Gelava explains. “It was after the icon incident we started seeing more and more engagement with content framing his achievements in a positive light, as well as these myths about his personality — how he supposedly read more than 20,000 books in his lifetime, and of course, that he was actually deeply religious.”
Many of these later clips, in particular those peddled by accounts controlled by Alt-Info, featured church leaders condemning Peradze’s protest as evidence of an ongoing campaign against Christian values in Georgia. In one video, Metropolitan Ilarion Kitiashvili, of Mestia and Upper Svaneti in the country’s northwest, describes the incident as “liberal forces proving their anti-Christian motives.” In another, Deacon Giorgi Razmadze, head of Avchala Ketevan parish in northeastern Tbilisi, decried what he saw as “a deliberate [act of] evil against the church.”
Facebook, meanwhile, used by over 70% of the Georgian population, has been awash with exactly this kind of material for years. It has not just been accounts and groups pushing an apologist view of Stalin’s reign but also content featuring church figures speaking highly of his purported religious virtues and even his perceived saintliness.
“Stalin had tremendous spiritual power. … Not only did he own time and space, but he also had ownership of matter itself,” reads one post, quoting the late Father Giorgi Basiladze of Motsameta monastery, near Kutaisi in western Georgia. “This power was the reason Stalin was able to rule over an evil regime, and at the same time to fight in secret with the founders of this regime and their masonic intentions.”
Sources within the church say Stalin could hardly hope for a more fervent advocate than Georgia’s supreme religious leader, Patriarch Ilia II himself, who gave communion to the despot’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva in the 1980s, according to Russian media. “[He] is an undisguised admirer of Stalin, one whose love of the dictator has survived to this day, and who never hid it even when politically inconvenient,” says a senior Georgian Orthodox cleric who was interviewed for this story, choosing to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “Ilia II is an exceptionally powerful figure, and one of the strongest epicenters for the spread of myths about Stalin in our country.”
One needn’t look far for evidence of how widely Ilia’s admiration for Stalin is shared throughout the church. Take Deacon Ioane Chigogidze of Tbilisi’s Dighomi district, who has claimed it was under Stalin’s (much tempered) easing of religious restrictions that “the golden age of faith began,” or Rev. Ilarion Samkharadze of Samtfuro monastery in Mtskheta, north of the capital, who in 2016 verbally attacked a “provocateur” reporter for being “undeserving” of mentioning Stalin’s name, adding he and other priests “have prayers [for the late leader] just to spite you.”
Church officials also often speak of the communist despot in favorable terms during sermons. Prominent examples include Bishop Spiridon Abuladze of Skhalta in western Georgia, who in January 2019 told his parish: “We offer our greatest thanks to Soso Dzhugashvili [diminutive], Stalin, through whose efforts the Russian church recognized the autocephaly of Georgia in 1943.” Or Archpriest Ilia Karkadze of Kutaisi, who sparked international controversy with his antisemitic remarks during a sermon in December 2020, in which he described the Soviet leader as a “great genius” who refused to be “duped” by a supposed Jewish conspiracy aiming at global financial dominance.
What exactly drives the Georgian patriarch’s adoration of the late Soviet leader remains a subject of much speculation. One of the wilder theories posits that Ilia, an ethnic Georgian born in Russia, is in fact himself a former KGB agent and therefore the chief instrument of a decades-long Kremlin conspiracy to maintain political influence in Georgia. (The patriarch’s office did not respond to a request for comment).
Proponents of this view point to the fact that Ilia studied at the Moscow Theological Academy in the late 1950s, when the institution is known to have been under the control of Soviet intelligence services, as well as various comments the patriarch has made during interviews with the press over the years. “When [Stalin] died, I was just a student at the seminary, and we all stood in the assembly hall and cried when they buried him,” the patriarch told reporters in 2013. “Stalin was an outstanding figure! Those kinds of people are rarely born. He knew the global importance of Russia.”
Experts maintain that, at the least, it was under the Stalinist regime that Ilia’s worldview was formed, with his lifelong admiration for the despot representing the lingering effects of the cult of personality built up around Stalin during his years in power.
“After the church was reinstated in 1943, many priests and bishops were recruited to the KGB, and the seminary in Moscow was established as one of the prime institutions of indoctrination,” says Sovlab’s Kandelaki, referring to Stalin’s sudden wartime rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church (Nikita Khrushchev repressed the church again, beginning in 1959). “That Ilia II studied there says it all, because it was really just an extension of the Soviet state’s repressive surveillance apparatus and its totalitarian ideology.”
It’s difficult to overstate the church’s influence in a country where almost 90% identify as Christian, and where Ilia has been consistently ranked as the nation’s most trusted and respected public figure. Whether the ecclesiastical push toward veneration of Stalin will translate into substantive support for the government’s increasingly autocratic, anti-Western agenda at the parliamentary polls, scheduled for later in October, remains to be seen. But for Peradze, watching Georgia’s accelerating descent into violent authoritarianism from exile abroad, the risks couldn’t be clearer.
“If you believe in god, that’s your business. But we’re a secular state, and the church needs to stay in its place,” she says. “None of this is accidental — it’s the politics of Russia.”
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