A statue of Stalin reflected in a bullet-shattered window in central Gori in August. (AP)

Gori, Georgia, Aug. 31 (Reuters): When Russian bombs began falling on Gori, Robert Maglakelidze took a desperate decision: he loaded his car with a precious consignment and fled along the dangerous road to Tbilisi.

Stowed inside were the personal effects of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin: his military greatcoat, peaked cap, pen, glasses, silver sword and pipe — in total some 50 unique items.

Maglakelidze, the director of the Stalin museum in Gori, says bringing them for safekeeping in the Georgian capital was the only way to ensure their survival.

“I had to take the risk,” he told Reuters. “Thank God, they didn’t bomb the museum, but there was no guarantee. We said ‘let’s preserve these things for future generations’. These personal things can’t be replaced.”

Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, was first bombed and then occupied by Russian troops in the short war that followed Georgia’s ill-fated attempt on August 7-8 to recapture its rebel, pro-Russian province of South Ossetia, just north of the town.

The Russians have left Gori now, but scars from the fighting remain. At the weekend, workmen were clearing rubble and glass from several large apartment blocks heavily damaged by bombing.

Yet the Stalin museum — an imposing, pale stone building with a colonnade and a tall rectangular tower, crowned with a red and white Georgian flag — escaped virtually unscathed.

“We’re clearing up, there is a lot of dirt. There was thick dust, the halls are filthy,” said a museum official, Mziya Naochashvili.

The museum was closed yesterday, but managers allowed reporters to look inside parts of it.

One window was smashed by the entrance, and three more above the red-carpeted stairs leading to a white marble statue of the dictator, Lenin’s successor and Georgia’s most notorious son.

Paintings nearby show him in his various roles: the bearded young revolutionary fronting a 1905 workers’ demonstration; the pensive leader reading papers by a desk; the dutiful son alongside his mother.

Two marble busts survey a landing with more paintings: an idealised portrait of a boy Stalin sitting outside with friends, and Stalin the party leader greeting Communist officials.

The double doors to the galleries were sealed. But outside are the tiny brick and wood house in which the young Iosif Dzhugashvili was born in 1879, and the green railway carriage — formerly belonging to the Tsar — in which he travelled to the Yalta, Potsdam and Tehran conferences in World War II.

You can even buy a replica Stalin pipe, a small silver bust, or a bottle of Georgian wine with his portrait on the label.

“Until the collapse of the Soviet Union there were lots of visitors from the whole world, about half a million a year. Today it’s 18 to 25,000 a year,” said Naochashvili, whose own home was damaged in the bombing.

After 33 years working there, she said,“the museum is virtually my life.”

How does she feel personally towards the man whose shrine she protects, and whom many in the former Soviet Union still admire as a strong national leader and World War II saviour?

“I respect him for his intelligence, for his talent.... He was a statesman. He didn’t do anything against Georgia.”

Director Maglakelidze says the museum aims to reopen on September 8. He will return the precious items now being stored in a Tbilisi museum once the parliament has taken a decision to lift the official state of war with Russia.

And he sounds a note of optimism on the museum’s future and the prospect of attracting visitors from around the globe again.

“I think there will be big interest, for the sake of the town. The whole world knows about Gori now.”