Tbilisi, Georgia – When Nata Peradze heard that an icon featuring Joseph Stalin was on display inside Georgia’s largest cathedral, she decided to take action.
“It’s my pain,” Peradze told Al Jazeera. “We have no [discussions] about what happened and no memorials for the people who went through hell because of this guy. There were priests on my father’s side and on my mother’s there were dissidents. Some were deported to Siberia and some were lost and we never knew what happened to them.”
“It’s my pain,” Peradze told Al Jazeera. “We have no [discussions] about what happened and no memorials for the people who went through hell because of this guy. There were priests on my father’s side and on my mother’s there were dissidents. Some were deported to Siberia and some were lost and we never knew what happened to them.”
On January 9, the anticorruption activist and avowed atheist went inside Tbilisi’s Holy Trinity Cathedral to find the offending painting of the Georgian-born Soviet leader.
“I had my method. I had put paint inside three eggs and then waxed them closed. A priest was standing next to me, and I threw the eggs at the painting and he asked, ‘What are you doing?’ I said ‘It’s Stalin, he killed my ancestors!’”
Debates about her vandalism of the icon, named Holy Matrona of Moscow blesses Stalin, turned ugly on Facebook. Peradze received death threats.
Despite archives proving Stalin ordered the executions of thousands of innocent civilians during the Great Terror, including large numbers of clergy, Georgian society is divided over his legacy decades later.
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