Stalin monument taken down in Telavi

A statue of Soviet-era dictator Josef Stalin has been taken down in Telavi, the main city of Georgia's eastern province of Kakheti.

The Telavi Municipality announced the tender for demolition Stalins monument and a local think tank,the Civil Education Fund, won the tender.

According to the Journalist Tamar Chergoleishvili, who herself attended the demolition of the statue, said that the rise of Stalins statue is the 21^stcentury is the cynicism.

The three-meter monument, part of a World War II memorial, was commissioned by the Stalinets social group and the Union of Veterans in the city of Telavi next to a monument dedicated to soldiers who died during World War II in September. A has been vandalized hours after it was unveiled. Unknown individuals overnight poured orange paint.

After the unknown individuals poured orange paint, the Stalinets painted the statue with brown paint. Photo by N.Alavidze

The statues removal was attended by the police because part of city residents, as well as the Stalinist followers, gathered in Telavi and refused to let the statue there be touched.

Joseph Stalin was born to a modest family in Gori, Georgia in 1879.

Though he was not a decisive figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, he quickly rose through the ranks of the Communist Party after the revolution, securing his position as undisputed leader in the years after Lenin's death in 1924.

After Georgia gained independence in 1991, crowds tore down statues of Stalin and Lenin across the country.

Last week, the changes in the Freedom Charter, aimed at distancing the country from soviet era, were approved by the Georgian parliament on the third reading with 87 votes against two.

According to the amendments, the terms Soviet symbolic and Soviet ideology will be changed to the Communistic totalitarian symbolic and Communistic totalitarian ideology.