From the Tsar’s cellar to Stalin’s table, and from Stalin’s table to the auction room

According to a Reuters report published on 29 May 2026, the Georgian government has opened to the public a long-sealed wine cellar in Tbilisi containing some 40,000 bottles. The collection, comprising French and Georgian wines, includes bottles dating back to the early nineteenth century. The government plans to sell the collection at auction and use the proceeds to establish a winemaking school in the country. According to Irakli Gilauri, a wine producer involved in the project, the sale will also help put Georgia on the map for international wine collectors.

The most striking aspect of the story, however, is the history of the collection. According to Reuters, the cellar contains wines from some of Bordeaux’s most celebrated châteaux that once belonged to Tsar Alexander III and his son, Nicholas II. Following the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet authorities seized the Romanov dynasty’s imperial collection. Stalin later became its “custodian” and, over time, added his own favourite Georgian wines to it.

This brief news report is a tangible piece of historical evidence, revealing more about the class character of Stalinism than whole volumes of historical scholarship.

The issue here is not Stalin’s fondness for wine or his taste for expensive vintages. We are not concerned with the personal preferences of a head of state. The real issue is that the tsarist property expropriated by the 1917 Revolution, rather than becoming the property of the people, was gradually turned into an object of private consumption for the man at the apex of the Soviet bureaucracy.

Tsarist property had been expropriated by the Revolution. This represented a historic blow against the wealth of the former ruling classes, struck in the name of the working class and the poor peasantry. Yet in the course of the bureaucratic counter-revolution, part of this nationalised wealth was turned into a source of privilege under a new social order. What remained legally state property was, in practice, placed at the disposal of the bureaucracy. Stalin’s wine cellar is a striking example of how the boundary between state ownership and bureaucratic appropriation came to be erased.

In other words, tsarist privilege was abolished in 1917; but the Stalinist bureaucracy built a new regime of privilege on the foundations of nationalised wealth. The wines from the Tsar’s cellar were now brought to the table of the Soviet bureaucracy’s new master.

To view this story merely as an instance of “personal corruption” would be inadequate. There is, of course, an outright act of bureaucratic appropriation at work here. But this cannot be reduced to Stalin’s personal greed. Rather, it is a symptom of a deeper social transformation. Once the system of state ownership created by the Revolution was severed from the democratic control of the working class, it became the foundation of the bureaucratic caste’s collective privileges.

What Trotsky wrote about the bureaucracy in The Revolution Betrayed described precisely this reality. The bureaucracy enjoyed an enormous income, not so much in money as in the form of privileges in kind: fine houses, motor cars, dachas, and the finest consumer goods from every corner of the country. The upper stratum of the bureaucratic caste lived like the big bourgeoisie in the capitalist countries.

Stalin’s wine cellar is a concrete illustration of this analysis. We are not talking about a few old bottles, a nostalgic historical curiosity, or an intriguing detail of Georgian wine culture. We are talking about the private world of luxury enjoyed by a man who presided over mass famine, the Gulag, forced collectivisation, terror, and the physical annihilation of the Bolshevik leadership.

As Vadim Rogovin documented in his monumental work Bolsheviks Against Stalinism, the Stalinist bureaucracy created isolated oases of luxury amid widespread misery. The atmosphere described in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs points to the same reality: people were divided and ranked according to the additional rations and allocations they received, the documents conferring special privileges upon them, and the different categories of pay and consumption rights to which they were entitled. Over the revolution that had begun with the promise of equality, a new social order based on hierarchy, privilege and fear had been erected.

Stalin’s wine collection is an embodiment of precisely this class reality. The wealth of the tsarist aristocracy had been expropriated by the Revolution; yet rather than being used to meet social needs under the democratic control of the working class, it had been appropriated for the personal consumption of the man at the apex of the bureaucratic counter-revolution.

Trotsky did not call Stalin “the gravedigger of the Revolution” to his face in 1927 for nothing. It is not merely old wines that lie hidden in Stalin’s cellar. What remains there are the tangible traces of how the gains of the Revolution were appropriated, how the Bolshevik Party was liquidated, how the working class was driven from power, and how the bureaucracy became a new ruling caste.

The auction plan reported by Reuters therefore provides the story with an almost perfect epilogue. The Georgian government now intends to sell the collection, use the proceeds to establish a winemaking school, and attract the attention of international collectors to the country. Stalin’s bureaucratic privilege is thus being repackaged for the cultural-heritage and luxury-consumption markets of post-Soviet capitalism.

Stalin is no longer merely a dictator; he is also a brand. His wine cellar is now being marketed not as the site of a historical crime, but as a collection with value at auction. The journey from tsarist property, through revolutionary expropriation and bureaucratic appropriation, to capitalist commodification is thus complete.

This historical chain is profoundly instructive:

It was the Tsar’s private property.

It was nationalised by the Revolution.

It was turned into an instrument of personal privilege by the Stalinist bureaucracy.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was commodified by capitalism.

Such is the logic of Stalinism.

What lies hidden in Stalin’s wine cellar is the true history of Stalinism: the history not only of repression and terror, but also of privilege and luxury, of the bureaucratic appropriation of the gains of the Revolution, and ultimately of capitalist restoration.

The issue, therefore, is not who owns a few thousand old bottles. The issue is who controls and uses the wealth created by the working class and nationalised by the Revolution, and to what social ends. The Soviet bureaucracy’s answer was to safeguard its own privileges. The post-Soviet bourgeoisie’s answer is to turn that same legacy into a marketable commodity.

It was this history that made both the founding of the Fourth International and the struggle for world socialist revolution necessary. The rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy was not a product of socialism, but the result of the working class being excluded from political power. The dissolution of the Soviet Union likewise represented not the bankruptcy of socialism, but the ultimate outcome of the bureaucratic counter-revolution.

Stalin’s cellar speaks this truth in its own silent language. Those dusty bottles contain not only aged wines, but the history of a revolution betrayed.