The Staleen! Chair

“Sit, sit….”

A few years ago I was in Gori , Georgia — the country, not the state — which happens to be the birthplace of Josef Stalin, who is considered to be one of the monster villains of the recent past by almost everyone except tenured political science professors and the editorial board of the New York Times.

The story goes that when Hitler invaded Russia, the news came first to a few generals, who then had to decide who was going to tell Stalin.  

No one, as you might imagine, wanted to be the one who brought the bad news to the well known murderous dictator.  I mean, no one wants to be the bringer of bad news to anyone, even people who are not mass murderers.

But someone had to do it.  Someone had to wake him up and tell him that his plan of sitting World War Two out had gone terribly wrong.  Someone had to nudge him and whisper something like, Chairman Stalin?  Chairman Stalin?  You made a mistake signing a pact with Hitler, who has now broken the treaty and has invaded the motherland.  Any thoughts on the next steps vis a vis that?

But someone did it—the story is that a few of them did it together—and Stalin's reaction was unexpectedly hysterical.  He cried.  He had a break down.  He wept and wailed and then finally pulled himself together to start planning a war.  But as the men who gave him the news left his bedroom they all knew one thing: they would be dead by nightfall.  They had seen the unseeable.  They had seen Stalin weak.

Of course he had them executed. That’s just who he was.

The locals in Gori, it turns out, still harbor a certain amount of pride in their local son and have opened up the Stalin Museum. I went to the museum and brought along a young translator because I am not proficient in Georgian, which is a written language made up of curlicued letters and twig-like scratchings and spoken entirely in swallowed vowels. It sounds less like a language than the last calls for help from a person who is drowning. 

The older lady who ran the place didn’t share the rest of the world’s loathing of the man. I detected this by the way she pronounced his name — the only word of Georgian I could pick up — not Staleen but a more breathy Staleen! with her eyes slightly heavenward as if the name itself made her lightheaded. 

Come to think of it, she pronounced it just like my political science professor at Yale.

The lady guided us through many exhibits, pointing out photos of Staleen! with reverence and delight and it seemed rude to point out the many mistakes and elisions, let alone the mountain of corpses, that Staleen! was responsible for. But then the tour took an odd and creepy turn — although I’m aware that it’s odd and creepy enough already. 

We came to Stalin’s leather club chair. It was nothing special. I think you can buy a pretty reasonable facsimile from the Restoration Hardware catalog. But it was Stalin’s chair. There were two or three cigarette burns on the arm and in a great downward parabola-looking thing there was a darkened area where Stalin’s hair oil had stained the leather. 

The docent motioned to it, hands flat in the international gesture of, Here, have a seat in Staleen’s! chair.

I’m not a superstitious person, but it felt like a moment from some low-budget horror movie, where the hero sits in Stalin’s chair and gets some Stalin mojo embedded in his brain and ends up being one of history’s greatest villains. Except to the editorial board of The New York Times, but still.

I shook my head. She insisted. More gestures, more demurs by me. We were like a weird puppet show — she was doing the Sit, Sit gesture and I was doing the Oh no, thanks, I’m good hand wave and then finally the translator jumped in. 

“She says sit in chair of Staleen!,” said the translator. “Is okay. There is no prohibition.”

“Tell her I’m okay just standing. I prefer not to relax where Stalin relaxed.”

Some Georgian back and forth between the docent and the translator. 

I kept refusing. “I don’t want to sit in Stalin’s chair. I don’t like Stalin, I don’t want to have my head against where his hair product was.”

The translator shrugged. “She want you to sit. Sit. You must sit.”

So I looked from my translator to Staleen! most devoted fan, and I did what you do when you’re in a foreign country and someone really, really wants you to sit. 

I sat. I sat in Stalin’s chair. 

I felt my head against his hair product stain, I felt my index finger trace the burns on the armrest. I wondered what evil this chair had witnessed. 

It was weird, of course, but if you want to know the truth it wasn’t all that powerful. I didn’t feel an evil vibe. I didn’t have the urge to airbrush photographs or liquidate my enemies or engineer a massive famine.

Which is proof that you can sit in Stalin’s chair and not become Stalin. 

And that made me think. We are, all of us, Stalin to somebody. (You knew I was going somewhere with this, right?) We, all of us, occasionally have to sit in Stalin’s chair and be the boss and make tough decisions and deliver bad news. These days, especially, we think a lot about our “chairs” — who has power and who doesn’t, who is in the big leather club chair and who isn’t. 

Some of us, it turns out, have been sitting in Staleen’s chair and acting like Staleen!, which you don’t have to do. 

And that’s a good thing to remember, when next you find yourself in Stalin’s chair.