Stalin

CHAPTER 9 MISSING PIECE

Beria sat in the presidium. Some of the speakers praised him highly, and then everyone stood up and clapped. Beria clapped, too. . . . I was prepared for the applause at every mention of Stalin’s name and knew that if it came at the end of a speech, everyone rose to their feet. But now I was taken by surprise—who was this Beria?

ILYA EHRENBURG, Tbilisi, December 1937, 750th anniversary of Shota Rustaveli’s Georgian epic poem, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin¹

I exalted him for being unafraid to purge the party and thereby to unify it.

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV on Stalin²

DICTATORIAL POWER IS NEVER EFFICIENT, all-knowing, and all-controlling; it shows its strength by violently suppressing any hint of alternatives but is otherwise brutally inefficient. Stalin’s conveyor-belt arrests and executions targeting enemies, however, generated not discipline and security, but disorder and insecurity. In the Kolyma gold-mining camps, productivity per prisoner, near the best in the Gulag, was dropping precipitously. Escapees from the bulging Karaganda camp complex were taking up residence in Alma-Ata, the Kazakhstan capital. Right in central Moscow, in April 1938, a mass protest broke out at the overflowing Taganka prison when thousands of inmates repudiated their torture-extracted testimony en masse; Yezhov and Frinovsky hurtled over to Moscow province NKVD offices to demand resolute countermeasures, deathly afraid that any bit of negative information might reach the Little Corner. (Rumors of the prison unrest were already sweeping Moscow.)³ Then there was the matter of the NKVD’s sheer sprawl. By spring 1938, despite mass arrests of police personnel, the ranks had swelled to a gargantuan 1 million. This included 54,000 in state security (GUGB) proper, both central and regional, which was more than double the number before the terror had started; 259,000 border guards and internal troops; 195,000 militia or ordinary police; 125,000 railroad and road police; and 132,000 who manned the far-flung points of the Gulag archipelago, with its 2 million inmates (even after all the executions).⁴ Simply directing this huge state within the state was an urgent imperative. An overwhelmed Yezhov, getting drunk in the daytime with top staffers in his Lubyanka office, would drive out to Lefortovo to beat up prisoners during “interrogations,” as Stalin knew.⁵ Everyone who came into contact with the secret police chief could see his physical deterioration. Yezhov’s sickly pallor, publicly attributed to an attempted poisoning, had been divulged at the March 1938 Bukharin-Rykov-Yagoda trial, which prompted naïve or careerist rank-and-file party loyalists to write to him “to take care.”

A flow of petitions warned Stalin that the NKVD was engaged in a vast liquidation of loyal Soviet people. His initial response to the NKVD’s faltering operations and legitimacy was to concurrently appoint Yezhov commissar of water transport, on April 8, 1938. The appointment made a certain sense, in that water transport, which stood second after railways in carrying freight, supplied a large number of the NKVD’s Gulag camps and was poorly performing and needed help.⁶ But Yezhov had never worked in water transport, and he was still supposed to be shouldering the responsibilities of a Central Committee secretary, on top of the NKVD. Stalin’s pressure on him to maintain the domestic terror at fever pitch did not abate.⁷ Such a workload would have crushed any official, let alone a neurasthenic and alcoholic. Stalin, therefore, could scarcely have expected Yezhov to set an additional commissariat right. Rather, the water appointment appears to have constituted a typically twisted maneuver in the despot’s final destruction of Yezhov, just as Yagoda’s final destruction had been preceded by his transfer to another commissariat—communications—where Yagoda had served another half a year before his arrest. The menacing moves against Yezhov were similarly ponderous, indirect.

On April 30, 1938, a top Yezhov deputy at the NKVD, Zakovsky, was arrested. He had been a Stalin favorite, the operative who had helped oversee Stalin’s rare trip to the interior of the country (Siberia, in 1928), and had been appointed to exact retribution in Leningrad in the aftermath of Kirov’s assassination. At the January 24, 1938, Moscow meeting of all top NKVD officials, Zakovsky’s maniacal work had been praised to the skies, especially his high percentage of extracted confessions, which had brought a promotion to the central NKVD in Moscow.⁸ (Zakovsky was said to have boasted that he could make Karl Marx confess to being Bismarck’s agent.)⁹ Yezhov, forced to explain Zakovsky’s arrest to other NKVD operatives, averred that his award-winning underling had manufactured “pumped-up cases” and set outrageously high arrest quotas in Leningrad. Of course, these were the very reasons Zakovsky had been named a deputy chief of the USSR NKVD. Yezhov, moreover, told the assembled operatives that the rabid arrests would continue, further reinforcing the impression that Zakovsky had been destroyed against Yezhov’s wishes.¹⁰ A sense of doom began to close in on the secret police. On the eve of Zakovsky’s removal, at Frinovsky’s dacha, Vasily Karutsky, an operative recently promoted to the central NKVD, had “called Zakovsky a traitor and spy and said that he would soon be arrested” to Zakovsky’s face, according to an eyewitness, who added that “Zakovsky, for his part, had called Karutsky a traitor and said that if he himself were arrested, it would only be after Karutsky.”¹¹ Karutsky proved correct: he succeeded Zakovsky at the Moscow NKVD. On the second day on the job, he shot himself.¹²

Clouds darkened over the core Yezhovite group in the NKVD, the “clan” of Yevdokimov, whose collective promotions had facilitated the annihilation of the Yagodaites. Already, back on October 19, 1937, the Yevdokimov loyalist Alexander Kaul had been arrested in the North Caucasus, and although Frinovsky managed to get him transferred to Moscow and placed in the internal prison (to sit quietly without being interrogated), in fall 1937, Pravda reported on the connections of Yevdokimov, then head of the Rostov provincial party machine, to “enemies of the people.” In November 1937, Stalin sent a valued top aide in his personal secretariat, Boris Dvinsky, to Rostov to serve as second secretary. Yezhov and Frinovsky had managed to get their person, Yakov Deich, appointed as NKVD chief in Rostov, but Deich shocked them, forwarding materials on Yevdokimov to Moscow. “Yezhov and Frinovsky . . . were so infuriated at Deich,” Alexander Uspensky, another close Yezhov associate, would testify, that “Frinovsky told me personally he would shoot Deich.”¹³ Yezhov ordered Deich recalled, but the latter’s replacement in the Rostov NKVD also chose to follow Dvinsky’s instructions, not Yezhov’s, and began to arrest more of Yevdokimov’s associates. (Deich was arrested March 29, 1938.) On May 3, Stalin had Yevdokimov transferred to Moscow as the new first deputy at water transport, belatedly fulfilling Yevdokimov’s dream of becoming Yezhov’s deputy, only not at the NKVD. Yevdokimov exhorted Yezhov to rehabilitate him in Stalin’s eyes, and Yezhov sent a “commission” to Rostov (headed by the trusted Litvin) that got the many Yevdokimov associates in prison to repudiate their fabricated testimony against their patron, for what that was worth.¹⁴

Yevdokimov’s removal to Moscow and the accompanying onslaught against his cadres back in Rostov—which betrayed Stalin’s hand—manifestly threatened Yezhov. Reasoning that even higher numbers of “enemies” could win back Stalin’s favor, Yezhov urged Frinovsky to notch up the terror, but even Frinovsky began to drag his feet in implementing Yezhov’s orders.¹⁵ From March through May 1938, Kaganovich, who had previously felt compelled to collude in the execution of most of his own subordinates, now did not even respond to NKVD materials sent to him about the need for further arrests in rail transport; when those arrests were force ordered, Kaganovich sabotaged the NKVD’s dirty work.¹⁶ Yezhov threatened Molotov with arrest, telling him, “In your shoes, Vyacheslav Ivanovich, I would not be posing such questions to the competent organs. Do not forget that a chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, A. I. Rykov, was already in my institution.” But Molotov went to Stalin, who advised him to demand an apology from Yezhov, which Molotov obtained.¹⁷ Yezhov appeared to be a wounded animal, and the other animals were acting accordingly. But a secret police boss without fangs is destabilizing for a regime.

Even a despot has to have someone at the end of the phone or telegraph line to implement directives. Stalin’s glaring need for elementary administrative capacity went well beyond the post of NKVD chief. At the top of the state’s now nineteen commissariats, alongside Molotov (the chairman), only five others had survived: Voroshilov (defense), Kaganovich (rail transport plus heavy industry), Mikoyan (trade), Yezhov (NKVD plus water transport), and Litvinov (foreign affairs). Among the five secretaries of the Central Committee—who were supposed to oversee the vast state—two (Kaganovich and Yezhov) concurrently held two government portfolios each, which left, besides Stalin, just Andrei Zhdanov and Andrei Andreyev to oversee the day-to-day work of personnel and propaganda. And Zhdanov ran the huge Leningrad party organization. A glaring indication of the need for capacity at the top was provided by the fact that at the January 1938 Central Committee plenum, Malenkov had been tasked with the main report, and he was not even a member of the Central Committee. As head of the party department overseeing republic and provincial party machines, he was besieged with requests for cadres to fill the gaping vacancies produced by the arrests. And yet, he himself had to be concerned for his life—after all, Malenkov was Yezhov’s former deputy in that same party department.

Given that Yezhov’s days appeared numbered, that Kaganovich was overcommitted and slightly out of favor (owing partly to his closeness to Orjonikidze), and that Voroshilov was both out of his depth and spiritually smashed, Stalin was in urgent need of another top lieutenant alongside the redoubtable Molotov. The choice would fall upon the despot’s Caucasus compatriot.

Lavrenti Beria had never served in Moscow. Still, he had a supreme achievement in the eyes of Stalin: Beria had crushed not just the Georgian Mensheviks but also the Georgian Bolsheviks. Moreover, he possessed none of the Union-wide standing of that other high-placed Georgian whom he displaced, Orjonikidze. Beria was quick to take offense and blame others, obsessive about perceived slights, and a keeper and settler of scores—just like Stalin. That similarity (or emulation) did not stem primarily from shared cultural proclivities, for although Stalin and Beria were both Georgians (in Beria’s case, a Mingrelian assimilated to Georgia), and both were Russified, countless other Russified Georgians, even among the Bolsheviks, behaved nothing like these two. Rather, both men were products and consummate practitioners of a particular dictatorial system. Each had cultivated patrons in the highest places—Lenin for Stalin; Stalin for Beria—and each had shown an audacity against rivals, evidence of a thirst for power and a profound sense of their own destiny. Beria, unlike almost every other provincial party boss, not only survived the terror in his domain, but ran the terror locally, dictating lines of interrogation, summoning NKVD bosses to party headquarters. No other Soviet region was so dominated by a single figure. “Beria was the absolute-power master of Georgia, and all organizations and agencies, including the NKVD, implemented his demands unquestioningly,” his closest minion, Bogdan “Bakhcho” Kobulov, would testify.¹⁸ Beria ran the Caucasus the way Stalin ran the entire Soviet Union.

Beria would turn out to be the missing piece. The now thirty-nine-year-old was not the only discovery who would fill a void in Stalin’s entourage and the inner regime; there was also a forty-four-year-old up-and-comer named Nikita Khrushchev, who became a core member of the inner circle and, as it turned out, best buddies with Beria. Still, no one encapsulated the evolution of Stalin’s order better than the man he would transfer from Georgia to the Soviet capital in August 1938. And the move would come not a moment too soon. Just before Beria’s transfer, on top of everything else, Stalin would experience his worst crisis since 1932: a very high-level defection from the Soviet Far East to Japan, which was armed to the teeth. In going back to trace Beria’s path upward from Georgia to Moscow during the terror, it will be necessary to visit Ukraine and the Soviet Far East, too. Beria’s move to the capital would reflect the profound changes to Stalin’s regime, and bring its own.

“TURN THE ENEMIES OF SOCIALISM TO ASHES!”

Beria ruled the three-republic South Caucasus Federation—Stalin’s homeland—like a Persian shah.¹⁹ At his well-appointed and beautifully maintained two-story villa in Krtsanisi, on a hilltop outside the Georgian capital, he served grand Sunday luncheons, in large company, of spicy Mingrelian and Georgian specialties for his favored police and party functionaries and their families, whom he invited over from their more modest cottages in the same dacha settlement. Another showcase for Beria’s gifts as host and patron, and a jumping-off point for his ingratiating visits to the southern villas of the shah of shahs (Stalin), was the dacha Beria had built for himself on a raised point above the Black Sea at Gagra. There, Beria was observed to practice photography, excel at volleyball, swim the farthest, and behave especially affably toward children. “Beria attracted everyone back then by his inner power, his ineffable magnetism, the charisma of his personality,” recalled a future daughter-in-law of Anastas Mikoyan, then a little girl, who observed a relaxed Beria at his dachas and his city apartment in 1935–36. “He was not handsome; he wore a pince-nez, which then was a rarity. His look was piercing, hawkish. His leadership, boldness, self-confidence, and pronounced Mingrelian accent stood out.”²⁰

Beria’s takeover of the Caucasus would have been impossible without Stalin’s patronage, but he was no mere satrap. He responded especially energetically to the summons to root out “Trotskyism.” In Georgia, 30 percent of arrested Communists during the 1935–36 party verifications and card exchanges were designated as Trotskyites; by contrast, in Tatarstan, it was 7 percent.²¹ He would make sure to satisfy Stalin, while clearing his own path.

Beria had removed Armenak Abulyan as Armenia’s NKVD chief by promoting him to second deputy commissar of the South Caucasus secret police; Abulyan was then said to have died in a car accident (early 1935).²² Mircafar Bagirov, party boss of Azerbaijan (since December 1933), was Beria’s man, but Aghasi Khanjyan, party boss in Armenia (since 1930), was not. Beria appointed Georgi Tsaturov deputy NKVD chief in Armenia and, at supper in his apartment, tasked him with gathering compromising materials. “It is necessary to remove Khanjyan, but whoever I’ve sent has failed; it’s necessary to do this skillfully,” Beria instructed. As Tsaturov and those he recruited in Yerevan collected and manufactured the slander, Beria duplicitously distanced himself from the efforts: once, when Khanjyan was in Beria’s office and Tsaturov came by, Beria made a show of cursing his minion for giving Khanjyan trouble. “He’s a big-time figure and he must be safeguarded,” Beria said, as if Tsaturov were a rogue.²³ At South Caucasus party meetings, too, Beria simulated magnanimity, pointing out that he preferred that Khanjyan correct his own mistakes (thereby reminding everyone that there were mistakes). These were ruses well known from Stalin’s repertoire, and indeed the repertoire of any practicing authoritarian, though Beria excelled at them.

Nerses (Nersik) Stepanyan (b. 1898), the director of Armenia’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and therefore Khanjyan’s subordinate, secretly wrote a memoir aimed at correcting the falsehoods of Beria’s claim to fame (his On the History of the Bolshevik Organization in the South Caucasus).²⁴ The NKVD arrested Stepanyan (May 21, 1936) as a “counterrevolutionary nationalist-Trotskyite,” and Beria summoned a meeting of the South Caucasus party bureau on July 9 in Tiflis, now officially called by its Georgian name, Tbilisi. Goglidze, followed by Bagirov and Beria, assailed the “Armenian Central Committee” (meaning Khanjyan) for shielding the enemy Stepanyan and his “group.”²⁵ When the session concluded, around 5:30 p.m., Khanjyan went to the offices maintained by the Armenian republic in Tbilisi. His two bodyguards testified that they found him in his room between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. with a bullet wound to the head. The Tbilisi ambulance service registered a call at 9:25 p.m. Khanjyan was delivered to the emergency room at 10:25. He underwent “an operation” around 1:30 a.m. (July 10) but was pronounced dead, with a death date of July 9.²⁶

Yet another official inconvenient to Beria was dead. Some Caucasus officials, as well as Armenian émigrés, many of whom viewed Khanjyan as a patriot, suspected that Beria, in his own office, had shot him in cold blood. But a visiting Moscow party Control Commission sat in the very next room and would have been able to hear and then observe such an incident. In fact, Khanjyan left suicide notes, at least one of which his wife accepted as her husband’s handwriting. Beria was unscrupulous, but more calculating than impulsive. Khanjyan’s removal as party boss of Armenia, in any case, was imminent. The relentless hounding and arrest preparations by Beria’s henchmen were enough to drive someone to shoot himself.²⁷

Beria informed Stalin on the high-frequency phone. The South Caucasus party bureau reassembled on July 10, for six hours, and resolved to telegram Stalin requesting a plenipotentiary to investigate. “The Central Committee,” Stalin replied, “considers it unnecessary to send its own representative to ascertain the circumstances of Khanjyan’s suicide, since in this matter everything is clear and no investigation is required.”²⁸ Beria went on the offensive. On July 11, 1936, Dawn of the East announced that Khanjyan had taken his own life and labeled the act “a manifestation of cowardice especially unworthy of a leader of a party organization,” while further noting that Khanjyan had “committed errors, demonstrating insufficient vigilance in the case of the discovery of nationalist, counterrevolutionary, and Trotskyite groups,” and suffered from “a severe form of tuberculosis.”²⁹ Khanjyan was buried without public ceremony under a cement grave in Yerevan; Armenian officials were swept up in arrests, some while allegedly trying to escape into Iran.³⁰ On July 20, Dawn of the East, under Beria’s byline, carried a vicious attack on Stepanyan that announced the unmasking of “Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist groups” in Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan. “A Communist who shows conciliation and rotten liberalism in the face of double-dealing,” Beria wrote, “commits the greatest crime before the party, Soviet power, and our motherland.”³¹

On August 19, 1936, the opening day of the first public trial in Moscow of Trotskyites, Pravda reprinted Beria’s article—“Turn the Enemies of Socialism to Ashes!” This was a lightning-bolt Kremlinological signal of his standing. Between 1935 and 1938, Beria would have eight articles printed in Pravda, unheard of for a provincial party secretary.³²

Stalin’s anti-Trotskyite campaign arrived like a gift for Beria. In Armenia in September 1936, a Beria tool (Amatouni Amatouni) was duly advanced from second secretary to party boss. It was the next month that Beria, on Stalin’s orders, arrested Orjonikidze’s brother Papuliya in Tbilisi—sweet revenge: no more “Dear Sergo” groveling.³³ The Mingrelian could further consolidate his grip over the Caucasus. Of course, just about every local party boss interpreted the eruption of the enemy campaign self-servingly: scores to be settled, kudos to be won, apartments and dachas to be freed up and doled out as patronage. But across the Union, of the sixty-five top bosses, few would survive: Zhdanov (Leningrad), Khrushchev (Moscow, Ukraine), Beria (Georgia), and his patron turned client, Bagirov (Azerbaijan). Both of the latter were career secret police officials running party machines.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Stalin liked to needle Beria—who prided himself on being a sportsman—about how the diminutive “Deaf One,” Nestor Lakoba, was a superior rifle shot and billiards player. Stalin would take Lakoba in his car, for all to see, and make Beria ride separately. At a speech in 1936 in Sukhum, Lakoba could say, rightfully, “The Supreme Leader of our party, the Supreme Leader of the working masses of the whole world, this supreme person, this extraordinary comrade, the friend of all toilers, Comrade Stalin, visits us almost every year.”³⁴ Beria constantly connived to trip Lakoba up.³⁵ On a Sunday afternoon in spring 1936, Beria showed up unannounced at the Lakoba compound in Sukhum, 180 miles from Tbilisi, with his wife, Nino, as if it were a social visit, and started asking questions based on a denunciation from the father of a woman (Adile) who said she had been kidnapped, mountain style, as a teenage bride (she married one of the five brothers of Lakoba’s wife, Sarie).³⁶ Another time, when Stalin and Beria were guests in Lakoba’s native village and Sarie prepared the food, Beria switched his plate with Stalin’s at the last minute, as if she might try to poison the leader.³⁷

Lakoba had chased Alexei Agrba, secret police plenipotentiary, from Abkhazia, but Beria, using his power as head of the South Caucasus party committee, appointed Agrba first secretary of the Abkhazia provincial party committee, which gave Lakoba endless grief. During the summer of the anti-Trotskyite campaign and Spanish intervention in 1936, Stalin, on holiday in Sochi, visited his new dacha at Myussera, in Abkhazia, specially built by Lakoba, but the latter was nowhere to be seen. Stalin had his staff inquire, and Lakoba answered that Agrba had not granted him permission to exit the Abkhaz capital and that Stalin had instructed him (Lakoba) to submit to party discipline. Stalin granted permission, and directed Beria to recall Agrba to Tbilisi.³⁸ But on August 17, 1936, Beria managed to get Stalin to have the USSR central executive committee “Georgify” toponyms in Abkhazia: Sukhum officially became Sukhumi, a blow for Lakoba, who had refused even to distribute vehicle license plates in Abkhazia because they said “Georgia.”

Lakoba and Sarie attended the 8th Congress of Soviets in Moscow (November 25–December 5, 1936). Hearsay indicates that Stalin, as per usual, sent a car to the Metropole Hotel to fetch them for dinner and that, in connection with the new Soviet constitution, Lakoba lobbied Stalin to transfer Abkhazia to the Krasnodar region of the RSFSR, out of Georgia, while bitterly complaining, as ever, about Beria.³⁹ Be that as it may, Beria summoned Lakoba to stand before the Georgian “party active,” scheduled for December 28, 1936, and Lakoba set out from Sukhumi on December 26 and checked into Tbilisi’s Hotel Orient, on Rustaveli Prospect.⁴⁰ The next day, he shared a meal (either lunch or supper; the sources conflict) with Beria and Nino at Beria’s home or, according to Lakoba’s driver and bodyguard Davlet Kandalia, at the home of the founder of a Georgian dance ensemble (Sukhishvili). After the meal, Lakoba attended a December 27 performance of the first Georgian ballet, Mzechabuki (“Sun-Like Youth”), composed by Andria Balanchivadze (brother of George Balanchine), at the Tbilisi’s National Opera and Ballet Theater. Lakoba suddenly fell ill and, after the first act, returned just down the street to the Orient. There he died, at 4:20 a.m. (December 28).⁴¹

After Beria and his goons arrived on the scene, a doctor diagnosed a heart attack.⁴² Lakoba had blood problems and was thought to be taking anticoagulants. A year-old confidential medical report from the Kremlin hospital, in Moscow (Vozdvizhenka, 6), had diagnosed him with flu and inflamed erysipelas in the area of the left auricle, which had spread to the nearby parts of the ear and the upper part of the neck, with chronic festering leading to his severe hearing reduction. It also found arteriosclerosis and cardiosclerosis (induration of the heart).⁴³ Still, whispers about a poisoning emerged immediately. Lakoba was forty-three years old.

Beria buried Lakoba with full honors, doubtless after consultation with the Little Corner. The body was brought to Abkhazia on December 29, 1936, and lay in state in Sukhumi’s State Drama Theater. The Abkhaz provincial party committee bureau resolved to name the Sukhumi hydroelectric station, then under construction, after him and to establish ten student stipends in his name at the Sukhumi Pedagogical Institute, publishing word in the press, and to give his Lincoln automobile and a dacha under construction to his family.⁴⁴ Two days later, 13,000 people attended a state funeral; Beria served as a pallbearer. Lakoba was placed in a special crypt in the city’s botanical garden.⁴⁵ Stalin did not send condolences. An NKVD squad from Tbilisi was rifling the Abkhaz archives. Already in January 1937, Lakoba’s portraits began to be removed. His grave was moved outside the city proper, to the Mikhailov Cemetery; the prominent crypt was destroyed. Some whispered that Lakoba’s entire innards—stomach, kidneys, brains, and even larynx—had been removed, and his body burned.⁴⁶ Lakoba’s widow went to Moscow (staying with another recent widow, Zinaida Orjonikidze), but failed to gain an audience with Stalin.

Lakoba’s suspicious death, after Khanjyan’s suicide, enhanced Beria’s mystique and power. Lakoba had been Stalin’s close friend (and midwifed Beria’s introduction to him), but Stalin appears not to have investigated Beria’s plausible role in Lakoba’s death, instead colluding in Beria’s conversion of the genuinely popular Lakoba into a posthumous enemy of the people. He was accused of national deviation, having allowed Trotsky “to escape” into exile in Turkey in 1929, and of having plotted to kill Stalin and Beria. (A man who showed off his marksmanship in Stalin’s presence during target practice with his Brauning scarcely needed to “plot” an assassination.) Beria would now systematically annihilate Lakoba’s kin and associates.⁴⁷ Agrba, the Beria creature, was reinstalled as Abkhazia’s party boss.⁴⁸

POWERS OF EXTRADITION

Beria had to request Central Committee authorization not just for appointments of province, county, and city party officials, but also factory directors and candidates for local soviet elections.⁴⁹ Orgburo directives (of October 15 and December 26, 1936) now required regional party machines to submit six reports a year on their activities, an effort to enforce compliance with central directives, a Stalin obsession. Beria made sure that the Georgian party complied, submitting its full summary report for 1936 after making lower-level organizations do the same, but he used the occasion to point out to Stalin (February 17, 1937) that the new paper mandates had not released locals from submitting other required detailed reports or statistical summaries to the orgburo and various Central Committee departments. “The Central Committee of the Communist party of Georgia is not certain that such reporting requirements could bring any kind of benefit,” Beria wrote. “Instead of the utterly necessary permanent living link between lower and upper party organizations, a written paper link is established, which takes up a lot of party organizations’ time.” The businesslike critique and accompanying illustrations were spot-on, yet astonishing. Stalin chose not to discipline the impudence.⁵⁰

Beria incarnated the terror-facilitated ascendancy of the NKVD vis-à-vis the party, but he had achieved that status years before. During stays in Moscow, he had gotten his own apartment in the NKVD residences on Troitsk Alley (near Samotyochnaya Square), where raucous drinking, singing, dancing, and women were observed in abundance, and which he retained after switching to the party apparatus.⁵¹ Yagoda had continued to send a car from the central NKVD garage to pick up the Caucasus party boss. When Yagoda was arrested, Beria easily maneuvered the changeover to Yezhov.⁵² He had not worked for Yagoda over the course of many years, and when Yezhov had taken a holiday at Georgia’s Abastumani sanatorium, Beria had played the consummate host; Yezhov reciprocated on Beria’s visits to Moscow.⁵³ Yezhov knew that Beria received invitations to the Near Dacha. At the February–March 1937 plenum in Moscow, Beria had to wait until one of the last speaking slots (morning session on March 4). He followed his winning approach of stating, multiple times, how comrade Stalin was correct.⁵⁴

After the plenum, on March 20, Mekhlis, at Pravda, nipped at Beria’s heels with a front-page article, “A Serious Warning to the Southern Regions,” which mentioned Beria, among others, by name. In April 1937, the South Caucasus party committee was disbanded, which nominally sliced Beria’s bailiwick down to just Georgia. In fact, he would extend his reach even beyond the Caucasus.

Beria had long detested how old Caucasus party comrades who despised him would gather at Orjonikidze’s Kremlin apartment or dacha near Moscow (first in Volynskoe, then at Sosnovka) to badmouth him—another circumstance Beria shared with Stalin. But seizing the opportunity afforded by the terror, Beria had his Caucasus operative Vsevolod Merkulov go after the former Caucasus higher-ups now outside the region.⁵⁵ Levan Gogoberidze was arrested in the Azov region and extradited to Beria’s custody. Bogdan Kobulov, the Beria protégé who headed the Georgian NKVD, reported in November 1936 that Gogoberidze had confessed to disseminating “counterrevolutionary and slanderous fabrications about the past of Comrade Beria . . . on the basis of what he had heard from Comrade Orjonikidze.”⁵⁶ Mamiya Orakhelashvili, whom Beria had replaced as South Caucasus party boss and who had received sanctuary in Moscow as deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, thanks to Orjonikidze, was exiled to Astrakhan in April 1937, several weeks after Orjonikidze’s suicide; then he was arrested (June 26, 1937) and extradited to Beria. “I learned,” Orakhelashvili was said to have testified, “that Sergo Orjonikidze had been joined by Levan Gogoberidze, Pyotr Anishvili, and Nestor Lakoba in waging the most active struggle against the secretary of the Communist party of Georgia, Lavrenti Beria, deliberately spreading slanderous and disturbing fabrications about him.”⁵⁷

Everywhere else, associates who had scattered to other provinces were rounded up and tortured to incriminate sitting provincial party bosses. Beria alone enjoyed powers of extradition, partly because of his own audacity, partly owing to the circumstance that his enemies were also Stalin’s enemies. Orjonikidze stood at the center of the Stalin-Beria bond. Orakhelashvili further testified that “I made slanderous remarks about Stalin as the party’s dictator and I considered his politics to be excessively harsh. In this regard, Sergo Orjonikidze exerted great influence on me; in 1936, when he was talking with me about Stalin’s attitude toward the leaders of the Leningrad opposition at that time (Zinoviev, Kamenev, . . .), he said that, with his extreme cruelty, Stalin was leading the party to a split and in the end would drive the country into a blind alley.”⁵⁸

Beria had even been able to win a tug-of-war with Yezhov. Beria had arrested Polikarp “Budu” Mdivani, an old Stalin nemesis, but “testimony” in Moscow had implicated Mdivani, so Yezhov had forced his extradition to the capital, where he was reinterrogated at Lubyanka and “confessed.”⁵⁹ But Beria evidently lobbied Stalin, for Mdivani was returned to Georgia. On April 12, 1937, Beria sent Stalin protocols of thirteen different interrogation sessions with Mdivani, extracted in Tbilisi’s Metekhi fortress prison (where Stalin had done time under the tsarist regime). The dossier totaled more than 200 pages, and Stalin underlined several passages, then sent copies to Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov.⁶⁰ At Georgia’s 10th Party Congress (May 15–21, 1937), Beria, under a portrait of himself, accused Mdivani and associates of having “chattered about a supposedly ‘unbearable regime,’ . . . about the use of some kind of ‘Chekist’ methods, about how the condition of the toilers in Georgia is worsening.”⁶¹

Beria attempted to draw boundaries around some of his people. “We should fight all forms of counterrevolution; we must at the same time act wisely, in order to avoid falling from one extreme into another,” he told Georgia’s 10th Congress. “A blanket approach to all former nationalists and Trotskyists, some of whom happened by chance to be in their ranks but abandoned Trotskyism a long time ago, can only damage the cause of fighting with real Trotskyites, wreckers and spies.” But pressure came from the redoubtable Mekhlis in the form of an article by Pravda’s Tbilisi correspondent following the last day of the Georgian congress (May 22, 1937), which reported “insufficient criticism and self-criticism” and “not a few Hallelujah speeches.” Again, Beria differentiated himself: on May 27, he telegrammed Stalin about the “incorrect and tendentious” article, insisting that self-criticism had been extensive not only at the Georgian congress but at the lead-up district and city party conferences, whose intent, he wrote, had been “to profoundly and correctly explain to the party masses the decisions of the March [1937] plenum of the Central Committee and the speech of comrade Stalin.”⁶²

Beria even informed Stalin how he had eavesdropped on the communication with editors in Moscow of the said Pravda correspondent, Mikhail Mezenin, as if he were a foreign agent on Georgian soil.⁶³ Branding Pravda’s reportage a concerted effort to “discredit the work of the congress of the Communist party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia,” Beria requested that the Central Committee direct the newspaper to familiarize itself with the materials of the Georgian congress and publish a correct report, enclosing transcripts for Stalin. It is hard to imagine another regional party boss engaging in, let alone getting away with, such pushback. Beria was permitted to publish his own article in Pravda (June 5, 1937) lauding the Georgian congress for its strict adherence to the party line against Trotskyists and other enemies. In the meantime, on May 31, the first of many enemy lists signed by Stalin and Molotov had arrived in Tbilisi, with 139 names under “first category” (execution) and 39 under “second category” (ten years).⁶⁴ This direct order Beria could not resist.

A DESPOT’S PREFERENCES

Beria’s checkered civil-war-era biography continued to incite whispers. Grigory Gofman (known as Kaminsky), the USSR commissar for health, who, in that capacity, had signed the false heart-attack death certificate for Orjonikidze, blurted out at the June 1937 Central Committee plenum, in Moscow, that Beria had served in the bourgeois nationalist Musavat counterintelligence during the occupation of Baku by the British, making Beria an English spy.⁶⁵ Kaminsky, alone among the attendees, had actually been at the Baku party meeting in 1920 at which Beria’s Musavat involvement had been formally discussed—Kaminsky was then the party secretary of Azerbaijan—so he also knew Beria had been exonerated. Some Central Committee members had not even known of the original accusations. The Sverdlov Hall was thunderstruck. “No one spoke up in refutation,” recalled Khrushchev, an eyewitness. “Even Beria did not speak to offer some kind of clarification. Silence.”⁶⁶ Stalin declared a break.

Kaminsky cut an extraordinary figure. Back in Tula, the original center of ancient Russia’s armaments industry, Kaminsky (b. 1895), then a young, gifted Jewish firebrand, had edited the Bolshevik newspaper Kommunar between 1918 and 1920—roughly the same period when Beria served in Musavat bourgeois counterintelligence. The Tula newspaper had begun life with a print run of 300, but Kaminsky raised it above 10,000 by addressing himself to workers and peasants.⁶⁷ “Kommunar with one hand will help toilers organize life, fix the economy, summon to discipline, labor, and public order,” he wrote in the very first issue (July 4, 1918), “and with the other hand it will mercilessly strangle the head of counterrevolution.” Nineteen years later at the plenum, he became the “counterrevolution.” Instead of allowing discussion of Beria’s past, Stalin had Kaminsky arrested and expelled that very day.⁶⁸ The NKVD ransacked his apartment in the grand House on the Embankment and his state dacha in elite Barvikha, carting away the gypsum busts of him made by the renowned sculptor Vera Mukhina, as well as every photograph and piece of paper, including his eleven-year-old daughter’s drawing of their dacha garden.⁶⁹ His two brothers were also arrested. His mother took to standing in the Alexander Garden, outside the Kremlin walls near closed-off Red Square, anticipating that “any minute Iosif Vissarionovich would come out and then she’d tell him her three sons had been arrested and he would take pity on her and release them.”⁷⁰ Kaminsky got “ten years without the right of correspondence,” which meant he was executed.⁷¹

Stalin was accepting “testimony” of fabricated events as real, but he chose to overlook actual deeds in Beria’s life that, in the case of others, were made retroactively fatal. Kaminsky’s outburst at the plenum appears to have precipitated a letter that same day (June 25) to Stalin from the former South Caucasus secret police chief, Ivan Pavlunovsky, whom Beria had pushed aside way back when. A candidate member of the Central Committee, Pavlunovsky (b. 1888) had served in the vital war mobilization department of the heavy industry commissariat (under Orjonikidze). His private letter to Stalin stated that when he had been named head of the South Caucasus GPU, back in 1926, Dzierżyński had called him in and told him that one of his new subordinates, Beria, had worked in Musavat counterintelligence, but that this should not be held against him, because he had done so on a party assignment. Pavlunovsky added that Orjonikidze had told him, “Comrade Stalin is aware of” Beria’s past and that “he [Orjonikidze] had discussed it with Comrade Stalin.”⁷² Pavlunovsky’s private defense of a Stalin favorite was an effort to save his own skin. It failed. He was arrested on June 28, part of Orjonikidze’s “clan” that Stalin was extirpating.⁷³

A MINI SUPREME LEADER

Yet another way Beria imitated Stalin was by setting himself up as sole “patron” of the arts in his domain. He was known to strut into rehearsals and summon actors and actresses for private audiences, and he made the intelligentsia understand that they existed for service to the state and panegyrics to the leadership.⁷⁴ This went fist in glove with a certain artistic preference. Whereas many Georgian Bolsheviks had argued that Shota Rustaveli was a “feudal,” and Ilya Chavchavadze a “bourgeois idealist,” Beria deemed them great national artists and had them published in new editions in huge print runs. He also made sure to assert his control over the Rustaveli Theater, his Bolshoi equivalent. (The Rustaveli’s rococo facility in the city’s heart had been completed in 1901, with money from the Armenian oil magnate Aleksandr Mantashov, at whose concern a young Jughashvili had stirred political trouble.) First, Beria chased the Meyerhold of Georgia, the Rustaveli’s high-handed, turbulent Sandro Akhmeteli (Akhmetelashvili), to Moscow (November 1935); then, when the anti-Trotskyite campaign afforded the opportunity, Beria had Akhmeteli arrested and extradited back to Georgia, charged with creating a terrorist organization in the Rustaveli. When Georgian culture took the spotlight for a ten-day festival, staged in both Leningrad and Moscow (January 4–13, 1937), Beria led the delegation and, at the Kremlin banquet (January 14), sat at the presidium table with Stalin.⁷⁵ Akhmeteli was tortured until paralyzed, and soon executed.⁷⁶

Intimidated intellectuals can be still further cowed. In Beria’s report to Georgia’s 10th Party Congress in May 1937, he had called the arrested Akhmeteli “a fascist wrecker” and warned others still at liberty. “It would not be superfluous for [Paolo] Yashvili, [Konstantin] Gamsakhurdia, [Mikheil] Javakhishvili, and [Nikolo] Mitsishvili and several others to think seriously about their activity,” Beria stated, adding that “Paolo is not being noble. . . . He is over forty now and it is time he came to his senses.”⁷⁷ (The journal Literary Georgia printed the text of Beria’s speech as if it were literature.) Beginning in late May, the Writers’ Union of Georgia held a series of presidium meetings to enforce Beria’s strictures upon itself. Long-standing animosities, jealousies, and infighting born of the intimacy of elite life in the shared courtyards off Tbilisi’s Lermontov and Griboyedov streets, and of fear, fed a mutual denunciation frenzy.⁷⁸ Davit Demetradze, a mediocre critic, excoriated the time before Beria’s reign when the Georgian classic authors Rustaveli and Chavchavadze had been banned, condemning the “leftist” extremism of the Russian and Georgian associations of proletarian writers, but also the European “bourgeois” decadence and carousing of the rightist Blue Horn symbolist poets (Yashvili and Titsian Tabidze) and the Academic Group of the novelist Gamsakhurdia. The latter, in response, noted, “I’ve committed every sin under the sun, but never with hooligans, thieves, and enemies of the people,” which induced laughter.

Stalin had sent Alexander Fadeyev, the writer-functionary, to bring back a personal report from Georgia’s 10th Party Congress. “We wrote what bothered us,” recalled Fadeyev (who had taken along an assistant). “What bothered us was that a bust of Beria already stood on the square, and the Congress members stood every time Lavrenti Pavlovich walked in.” Later, over supper at the Near Dacha, Stalin would broach with Beria the matter of the latter’s cult in Georgia. “Who’s raising the steam in my bath?” the experienced Beria was said to have asked. Stalin evidently hinted that he had gotten his information from writers. By Fadeyev’s account, Stalin let Beria read his personal letter.⁷⁹ If true, that action helped reinforce a permanent enmity between Beria and the head of the Union of Soviet Writers.

In Tbilisi on July 22, 1937, during yet another round called to deliberate Paolo Yashvili’s expulsion, Yashvili smuggled a hunting gun into the building, climbed to the top floor, and shot himself dead, emptying both barrels. Outside, it was raining, and the poet Javakhishvili, in deep shock, was said to have paced the foyer muttering about needing a car to take him home so that his white suit would not be ruined.⁸⁰ Javakhishvili perished, too, as did Tabidze, the translator of Pasternak into Georgian (whom the Russian writer deemed “brilliant, polished, cultured, an amusing talker, European, and good-looking”).⁸¹ The faithful hatchet man Demetradze went down, too, but Gamsakhurdia, the intellectual with perhaps the longest list of transgressions, would survive. University educated in St. Petersburg and Berlin, where he had obtained a doctorate—a distinction Beria craved—Gamsakhurdia was a fellow Mingrelian and shared Beria’s loathing of Orjonikidze and the cultural philistine Pilipe Makharadze. But Gamsakhurdia had been among those deported to Solovki in connection with the 1924 uprising, and after his release and return, Beria had had him rearrested for an affair with a young publishing executive arrested for Trotskyism. But then Beria pardoned him, observing that sexual intercourse with enemies of the people was permitted.⁸²

SUPPLICANT