Stalin's Underground Printing House

A museum where time stopped around the 1970s guards a secret from 1906. In the yard of an ordinary wooden house on Kaspi Street there is a well about fifteen metres deep. From its bottom a tunnel led to an underground chamber where, between 1903 and 1906, Bolsheviks — the young Stalin among them — printed revolutionary leaflets in Georgian, Russian and Armenian. The German-made press had been smuggled into the city in pieces and reassembled below ground.

In 1906 tsarist gendarmes discovered the operation and burned the house; the press survived underneath. Soviet authorities later turned the site into a shrine, and today volunteers of the Georgian Communist Party keep the museum going without any state funding — which is precisely its charm:

• You peer down the brick-lined well, then descend a Soviet-era staircase to the rusting press itself
• Upstairs, rooms full of Lenin and Stalin portraits preserve an untouched Soviet interior
• The caretaker — often a party veteran — tells the story as if it happened yesterday

It is the strangest museum in Tbilisi: a dusty, sincere, entirely unpolished piece of history that no curator has ever smoothed over.