Freedom takes different forms – for Soso Gagoshvili, it comes in the shape of a 123-year-old orange rust-covered printing press. Tucked away in Tbilisi’s Avlabari district, among car repair garages and decaying apartment blocks lays a crumbling wooden house. In its cellar, down a 40-foot creaky iron spiral staircase, sits a German-made machine used by budding Communists at the turn of the XX century.

“The Communist Party’s leaflets preached equality among all people, those words unified millions,” pontificates the brash 66-year-old who until recently was the site’s guide. “They laid the foundation of the Soviet Union, the only real democracy.”

For Soso and like-minded die-hard communists, the machine embodies the smithery of the revolution’s literature. Historians agree. In his landmark biography, “The Young Stalin,” British professor and writer Simon Sebag Montefiore defined the press, “the Party’s most invaluable treasure.”