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Until we get into the city centre, Gori looks pretty much like everywhere else in Georgia, which is to say that Gori looks like somebody just dropped it. Everything metal is rusty, everything concrete is crumbling, everything glass is broken, everything wooden is rotten, everything painted is peeling. I've been in Georgia nearly two weeks by now, and I'm becoming accustomed to these vistas of relentless urban blight; Gori, so far, is nothing special at all. Then the wheezing Lada I've been travelling in pulls into the vast square in the centre of town, and all of sudden Gori looks like nowhere else on earth.

One side of the square is dominated by an important-looking domed and pillared building. In front of this building there is a charcoal-grey brick plinth, maybe 25 metres high. On top of the plinth is perhaps the last surviving example of its type anywhere in the world: a towering statue of Gori's - and Georgia's - most famous son, Josef Stalin.

Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzughashvili in Gori on December 21st, 1879. He grew up poor, the son of a cobbler. He lived here for the first 15 years of his life, until he went away to Tbilisi to study at the Theological Seminary. Though posterity has visited upon Stalin the condemnation he doubtless deserves, the city of Gori remains a defiantly proud shrine to his memory. This is perfectly understandable when it is considered what might otherwise become of Gori's tourist trade ("Come to Gori, and see our, um, potholes") but it is nonetheless bizarre, like stumbling across an Austrian village which contains utterly uncritical monuments to the life and accomplishments of Adolf Hitler.

Georgians in general still appear to be having trouble figuring Stalin out. His name crops up repeatedly, often as an introductory conversational gambit: "So, what do you think about Stalin?" spoken as if this Stalin character was not a monster fit to be bracketed alongside history's worst, but just another dashing Georgian-born midfielder recently signed by one of Europe's big football clubs. It's true that Georgians have had few reasons to remember this century fondly, and perhaps it is because of this that the fact that one of their own so dominated his time retains an appeal undimmed by Stalin's documented excesses. My driver, who I'll call Giorgi, says one night over dinner that "Stalin was a very great man in some ways." Minutes earlier, he'd been telling me how his own grandmother had lost five brothers to the murderous purges of the 1930s. One morning, my guide Maya buys a newspaper carrying an interview with one Yevgeny Dzughashvili - Stalin's grandson. Maya translates it for me. With no argument whatsoever from the journalist concerned, Stalin Jr. argues that the violence of Grandpa's regime was overstated, and what miniscule horrors did occur were the fault of "Bolshevik Jews".

In the garden behind the Josef Stalin Museum in Gori, Stalin's tiny childhood home is preserved beneath a stone mausoleum. The guards who had been leaning, bored and silent, on the mausoleum's pillars invite me to sit down at the very table where the baby maniac used to eat his breakfast, and charge me two Georgian lari (about 80 pence) for every photograph I take of the sparsely furnished interior. It doesn't look like they get much passing trade. I may well be the only excitement they've had in weeks.

The Josef Stalin Museum itself is enormous, winding through interminable corridors over two floors. The woman at the reception desk mournfully peels me off a ticket, emblazoned with a purple ink hammer and sickle, and points me silently towards a guide, who gestures me upstairs with her torch - today is obviously another of Georgia's bad electricity days. Mumbling distractedly, she conducts me through the hundreds of exhibits. These are mostly letters, photos and the other workaday detritus of a life, interred under glass alongside panels and captions recalling - in Georgian and Russian only - the period of Stalin's life that saw him transformed from a seminarian to a revolutionary.

The overall gist of the thing, as haltingly translated by the guide, seems to be that young Iosif was a good, God-fearing boy who loved his old mum, a bright scholar and a gifted poet, but a regrettably impressionable lad who got led astray by those pesky Russians and their darn Bolshevism. Certainly, the later period of Stalin's life that saw him transformed from a revolutionary to a violent, unpredictable, mass-murdering monster is rather skated over, though there is plenty on his wartime leadership of the Soviet Union in the struggle with Nazi Germany.

The museum also contains a few worthwhile curiosities. There's Stalin's piano - the urge to vault the velvet rope, sit down at it and bash out "Great Balls Of Fire" is all but overwhelming - a few of the fabulously unpleasant offerings made to him by other heads of state, and some of the gifts bestowed upon the beloved leader by his devoted people, as if they had a choice. These include a rhinestone-encrusted piano-accordion crafted somewhere in Siberia in 1949 in honour of Stalin's 70th birthday; the possibility that this singularly grotesque item was assembled in a forsaken, snow-bound gulag as some vengeful deportee's idea of a practical joke is sadly unacknowledged by the label on the case.

On the way out, I stop to buy some of the only souvenirs available: nasty plastic key-rings containing two black-and-white photocopied pictures of Stalin. On one side, a portrait of the tyrant as a young man, neatly bearded, luxuriantly coiffed and wearing a rather dashing cravat - he looks like he should have been playing bass in Spandau Ballet. On the reverse is the more traditional image of Stalin, gazing gimlet-eyed over that great broom of a moustache, burdened with a chestful of medals that seem, in the picture, as if they're causing him to lean markedly to the left.

Outside, next to the museum, on a small stretch of rail that goes nowhere, is the train carriage in which Stalin travelled to the post-war conferences at Teheran, Potsdam and Yalta, at which half of Europe was given away to the Kremlin. The interior is smartly turned out in wooden panels and green quilted wallpaper. The carriage is divided into a kitchen, a couple of sleeping quarters and, towards the back of the carriage, a conference room. This is filled by a large polished table and some wooden chairs, faced with one large, sagging armchair covered in a white cloth. I wonder…

"Yes," smiles the guide. "His chair." She gestures towards it.

"Please."

She offers to take my photograph, and I sit down, stretch my legs, and try to affect an expression that will make it clear to Winston and Franklin that if I don't get Czechoslovakia as well, I'm going to hold my breath until I'm sick.

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