Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

. . . the ten years that the GPU has existed in Georgia have left a glorious page in the history of the Cheka-OGPU . . . full of self-sacrificing, heroic struggle with enemies of the proletariat . . . this enormous, intensive work has basically been done by local cadres, brought up, educated, and tempered in the fire of battle under the unceasing leadership of Comrade Beria . . . exceptional intuition . . . always finding his bearings precisely even in the most complex circumstances.⁸

Beria was on his way up. In 1931 Lakoba sent Beria notes of discussions with Stalin (Koba) and Sergo Orjonikidze:

Koba: Will Beria do for Transcaucasia?

Me: The only person who works properly is Beria. Perhaps we are biased toward him.

Sergo: Beria’s a fine chap, he works. . . .

Sergo: Well, are you pushing Mamia out?

Me: Mamia doesn’t organize anybody or anything, he doesn’t call anybody to order, he doesn’t get a hold on anything. . . .

Koba turns to me, asks: He (indicating Sergo) says Polonsky ought to be put in charge of the Transcaucasian Committee. What do you think?

Me: That would be a very bad mistake.⁹

Beria thus became first secretary of the Georgian party and yet kept de facto control of the GPU in Transcaucasia. To become both the Stalin and Iagoda of the Caucasus, he now had only to take over the secretaryship of the Transcaucasian party. In summer 1932, from Gagra on the Black Sea, Lakoba reported to Beria Stalin’s thoughts:

Koba: . . . Does Beria want to get a voice on the Politburo? . . . when is Beria coming? (He put that question at the beginning of the conversation. . . .)

Me: If needed, Beria will come right away.

Koba: We have freedom of movement, there’s no law against coming by any particular time.¹⁰

In October 1932 Beria was duly appointed first secretary of the Transcaucasian party. Now, by direct appeal to Stalin, he might overrule anyone in the Politburo or the Caucasus. His wife’s cousin Aleksandra Nakashidze now kept house for Stalin in Moscow and fed Beria information for the next ten years. Summer 1933 Beria spent with Lakoba and Stalin and their families. He sat the motherless Svetlana Allilueva on his knee; he flaunted his loyalty, waving an ax at the shrubs in Lakoba’s garden as if they were the heads of Stalin’s enemies. Despite an unfortunate episode during a cruise when border guards fired on their launch, the three following summers the Berias, Lakobas, and Stalin vacationed together, hunting and playing skittles; only Beria’s flirtations with his womenfolk alarmed the patriarchal Abkhaz.

Beria as Satrap

IN TBILISI BERIA commissioned a history of the Bolshevik movement in the Caucasus. Unwilling himself to read a book from cover to cover let alone write one, he selected the university rector and chairman of the Union of Georgian Writers, Malakia Toroshelidze, and the commissar for education, Eduard Bedia, to gather and falsify material on Stalin as the Lenin of the Caucasus. After Stalin’s editorial amendments, Beria assumed the authorship, and the book became required reading in colleges throughout the Caucasus. Beria had not committed the fatal lapse of Abel Enukidze, who had dared to produce a History of Underground Printing in the Caucasus in which Stalin’s name did not loom large.

Conducting the Great Terror on his home ground, Beria outshone both Stalin and Ezhov, with his knowledge of Georgia’s technological and creative elite. Many of the old party guard had been driven out or arrested by Iagoda or Ezhov; the rest were arrested by Beria in 1936 and 1937, their appeals to Stalin, whom many had known as a friend, unanswered. In 1935, when Stalin came to see his mother in Tbilisi, Malakia Toroshelidze had linked arms with Stalin and Beria while they sang folk songs.¹¹ On December 16, 1936, his daughter Susanna begged Stalin: “My father, mother, and elder brother have been arrested. . . . I am seventeen . . . my other brother has been expelled. You can understand, Uncle Soso, my brother Levan has always been highly strung. . . . Uncle Soso, we worship our father.” ¹² Toroshelidze and his co-author Bedia were shot.