Stalin

Yagoda had had a launch sent in, the Red Star, used on the Neva River in Leningrad. Small and unseaworthy, it had only some glass over the cabin, through which everyone was visible. At around 1:30 p.m., the group pushed off southward—Stalin, Voroshilov, and Beria, along with Vlasik and L. T. Bogdanov (bodyguards) and S. F. Chechulin (cipher specialist). “We headed for the Pitsunda Cape,” Vlasik would recall. “Entering the pier, we disembarked on the shore, relaxed, drank and snacked, walked about, spending a few hours on the shore.” Their picnic, beginning around 4:00 p.m., included Abkhaz wine. “Then we embarked again and headed back,” Vlasik continued. “At the Pitsunda Cape, there is a lighthouse and, nearby on the shore, a border post. When we exited the pier and turned in the direction of Gagra, there were rifle shots from the shore.” The boat was some 600 to 700 yards out. Vlasik claimed that he and Bogdanov covered Stalin and returned fire; Beria would claim that he covered Stalin’s body with his own. The bullets from the shore (three in total) landed in the water. The boat pulled farther from the coast. High waves rose up—a storm was in the offing—and it took the launch three harrowing hours to make it back to the Old Gagra pier.⁹⁰

Stalin, according to Chechulin, had initially joked that the Abkhaz were accustomed to greeting guests with gunshots, but after returning to Cold Spring, he sent Bogdanov back to Pitsunda to investigate. A few days later, Chechulin handed Stalin a letter from a local border guard who asked to be forgiven for shooting at the unregistered launch, which he had taken to be a foreign vessel. Sergeant N. I. Lavrov, commander of the border post, further explained that the boat had entered the restricted zone, so, as per regulations, they signaled it to stop, and when it kept going they fired warning shots in the air. Stalin did not label the incident an attempted assassination.⁹¹ Beria had Sergo Goglidze, the head of border guards for the South Caucasus, “investigate,” and he brought forward “witnesses” who testified that the shots were fired at the launch itself, blame for which, in Abkhazia, could be laid on Lakoba.⁹²

But Yagoda evidently instructed Beria to portray it as a misunderstanding (in line with Stalin’s preference). The Georgian secret police sacked the Abkhaz OGPU chief and punished six Abkhaz border guards with two to three years in the Gulag; Lavrov got five.⁹³ Goglidze was soon named OGPU chief for Georgia. Legends circulated that Beria had organized hoodlums to stage the incident to discredit Lakoba, after which Beria’s henchmen had executed the perpetrators.⁹⁴

^{, 95}

GERMAN GAMBIT

While Stalin was in remote Gagra, a trial for the Reichstag fire was taking place in Leipzig. It had opened on September 21, 1933, and among the accused were the German Communist party leader Ernst Thälmann and Georgi Dimitrov, a Bulgarian and undercover head of the Comintern’s Western European Bureau in Berlin. One of eight children from a workers’ family, Dimitrov had been sentenced to death for his political activities in his native country after he escaped to Yugoslavia. In Germany he operated in obscurity, but in the Leipzig courtroom he outdueled the state witnesses, Goebbels and Hermann Göring, and made the three-month trial an international antifascist sensation. (The Nazis did not have prearranged scripts for defendants who were broken to confess publicly.) “I am defending myself, an accused Communist,” Dimitrov said from the dock. “I am defending my political honor, my honor as a revolutionary. I am defending my Communist ideology, my ideals.” Germany’s high court would convict only the Dutch Communist apprehended at the scene, who would be guillotined just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. Dimitrov would be acquitted for lack of evidence. Journalists from the world over were admitted to the proceedings, but two Soviet reporters seeking access were arrested, leading to a diplomatic row. Mikhail Koltsov, however, reported out of Paris for Pravda (September, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30), transforming Dimitrov into a household name in the USSR and fostering the legend of Communists as courageous opponents rather than facilitators of the rise of Nazism.⁹⁶