The Great Terror

He was arrested in early October 1936. To the first attempts to get him to confess, he is said to have answered, “You are telling me that Stalin has promised to spare the lives of Old Bolsheviks! I have known Stalin for thirty years. Stalin won’t rest until he had butchered all of us, beginning with the unweaned baby and ending with the blind great-grandmother!”⁴⁹ He was then “cruelly beaten” and held in “hot” and “cold” cells: from the former, where he spent several days, he was taken out in half-dead condition, with his pulse barely detectable. He was also threatened with the death of his children, and was told that his wife had already been buried in the prison grounds. (The wife, their four sons, and their daughter all perished, though one daughter-in-law survived imprisonment.) On 15 January 1937, he finally confessed.⁵⁰ At the trial, however (where they were accused of terrorism, espionage, and links with émigré Georgian Mensheviks), he and Okudzhava are reported as having “fiercely denied their guilt.”

⁵¹ The Georgian Supreme Court sentenced them to death, and they were shot.

Two parallel trials in the two Autonomous Republics within Georgia—Adzharia and Abkhazia—removed the equivalent veterans there on 29 September and 29 October, respectively. In the former, the Old Bolshevik Nestor Lakoba, who had died on 28 December 1936 as a result (it is now said) of some intrigue of Beria’s,⁵² was posthumously accused of a plot on Stalin’s life.⁵³

Lakoba’s wife was tortured for evidence against her husband. The interrogators threatened to shoot her fourteen-year-old son if she did not testify, but she refused. She died as a result of the torture, and the son was shot.⁵⁴

Meanwhile, a fresh assault on the new generation of second-line leaders was mounted. The dates of arrest of a number of Georgian and Transcaucasian Communists rehabilitated in 1964 and 1965 are given as 1 to 3 September 1937. A general terror operation without the publicity of the oppositionist trials was starting. Over 1937 and 1938, 4,238 promotions to senior Georgian Party, State, and economic posts were made—that is, to leadership posts.⁵⁵ The

total Party membership had been 34,000 at the XVIIth Congress, and the implication is that virtually the whole leading cadre was destroyed.

The Armenian Party had been under general attack since May. “Suspicious people” were found to be in the Party apparatus.⁵⁶ During the summer, TerGabrielian, who had been Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in 1935, was interrogated for seven hours in the office of the head of the local NKVD about alleged embezzlement on the railways, and killed on the spot. Stalin then sent a letter to the Armenian Central Committee alleging that Ter-Gabrielian had been a plotter liquidated by his accomplices to cover their traces.⁵⁷

On 15 September 1937 a plenum of the Armenian Central Committee was held in Yerevan, and the decisive blow was struck. The All-Union Central Committee was represented by Mikoyan, supported by Beria and Malenkov. Under the New Constitution, Armenia no longer formed part of the old “Transcaucasian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic” ruled by Beria. It still came under his aegis in a general way, but in this case it was not thought to be an intrusion when Malenkov was sent “on Stalin’s direct instructions”⁵⁸ to carry out the operation. Malenkov stopped off at Tbilisi on his way to Yerevan to concoct a story about the death of Khandzhyan, whom Beria had shot, to their mutual satisfaction. The rest of the Armenian leadership was now to be blamed for the crime.⁵⁹

The First Secretary, Amatouni, is said to have put up a stout resistance and to have shouted back, “You lie!” He was, however, arrested, together with the Second Secretary, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, the President of the Republic, and the head of the NKVD, and was denounced as an enemy of the people on 23 September.⁶⁰ Almost the entire leadership of Armenia’s Central Committee and Council of People’s Commissars was illegally arrested. Malenkov personally interrogated the prisoners, “using proscribed methods” in the process.

In this third week of September 1937, there was a wave of mass arrests throughout the Republic. Of the Bureau of sixteen members and candidate members elected in June 1935, none were left at the end of September 1937. Of those who formed the new Bureau in 1937, only two remained in 1940. Of the Central Committee of fifty-five elected in June 1937, only fifteen were reelected just a year later in June 1938, and they included the nonlocal names of Stalin, Beria, and Mikoyan. About thirty of those removed can be traced as having been expelled from the Party and probably arrested.