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

EZHOV MAY NOT HAVE BEEN first choice to replace Iagoda; Stalin had considered someone very different, his Abkhaz friend Nestor Lakoba, who had very little blood on his hands and genuine popularity among his people. In the summers of the early 1930s Stalin, Beria, Lakoba, their wives and children played together in villas and on beaches at Sukhum or in shepherds’ huts on the shores of Lake Ritsa. Stalin trusted Lakoba enough to go hunting wild boar with him. Lakoba was a crack shot, whose party trick was shooting a raw egg off his cook’s head. It was on one such occasion that Stalin made his famous quip “Me Koba, you Lakoba.” Lakoba sent Stalin hundreds of lemons and planted mandarin trees around his villa. Nadezhda Allilueva gave Sarie, Lakoba’s wife, the gift traditional for the highest ranks of OGPU, a gold-plated pistol.

Stalin talked at greater length to Lakoba than to anybody else. ⁹ In 1930, Stalin had exempted Abkhazia from collectivization, criticizing officials who did not “take account of the specific peculiarities of Abkhaz social structure and made the mistake of mechanically transferring Russian models of social engineering to Abkhaz soil.” Nevertheless, Stalin did gently note Lakoba’s errors: “despite his old Bolshevik experience, he mistakenly lets his policies rely on all layers of the Abkhaz population (that is not a Bolshevik policy) and finds it possible not to submit to the provincial committee’s decisions. . . . I think that Comrade Lakoba can and must free himself from this mistake.”¹⁰ Although not the idyll of Fazil Iskander’s novel Uncle Sandro from Chegem, Abkhazia under Lakoba was cunningly steered between Stalinism and its ancient pagan traditions.

Surviving relatives say that when Stalin asked Lakoba to take on the NKVD in Moscow Lakoba refused. Why did Stalin ask? Lakoba, like Sergo Orjonikidze, was as personal a friend as Stalin could have and, as a fellow Caucasian, Stalin could judge his intonations and responses with certainty. But it was inconceivable that Lakoba would turn the NKVD into the slaughterhouse that Stalin wanted. Certainly, Stalin’s behavior in autumn 1936, when Lakoba last saw him, just before Ezhov’s appointment was announced, was grim; hell had no fury like Stalin spurned.

The blots in Lakoba’s copybook would have damned others long before. In 1924 he had guarded Trotsky, another fine marksman, and come to like him. Even in 1926 the Lakobas had sent affectionate letters to Lev Davidovich. A Caucasian vendetta, hidden behind smiles, raged between Lakoba and Lavrenti Beria, who wanted Abkhazia back under Georgian rule. Beria showed his duplicitous character in letters to Lakoba.¹¹ Beria’s servility wore thin in 1935 when Lakoba’s half-brother Mikhail put a Brauning revolver to his temple after Beria had uttered an obscenity in the presence of women.¹²

On November 20, 1936, Lakoba went to Moscow with Orjonikidze to see Stalin. They resurrected the long-standing suspicion that Beria had in 1920 been a genuine, not a double, Azeri nationalist agent.

But by this time Stalin’s trust in Lakoba had evaporated. Lakoba found it hard to grasp that his position had changed and that he was no more exempt from Beria’s control than any local Caucasian leader. On December 26 Beria summoned Lakoba to Tbilisi where his wife pressed Lakoba to come to their apartment for dinner. Lakoba was reluctant; a few months earlier a girl had been found dead in Lakoba’s villa, shot with his handgun, and Beria’s inquest implied that she had been Lakoba’s mistress. Beria’s wife and mother cooked Lakoba a trout. Two hours later at the opera, Lakoba doubled up and died in convulsions.¹³ The body, minus its vital organs, was returned to Sukhum, where Beria and his wife were chief mourners, and Lakoba was ceremoniously buried in the botanical gardens.

The doctors who autopsied the victim were arrested. A month later Lakoba’s tomb was flattened and the body exhumed. Lakoba was declared an enemy of the people; Sarie, his widow, was charged with plotting to kill Stalin with the pistol Allilueva had given her and tortured for two years until she died. Lakoba’s mother was bludgeoned to death by Beria’s hangman Razhden Gangia. Beria slaughtered almost the entire Lakoba clan, keeping the children in prison until they were old enough to execute. Lakoba’s young son Rauf was tortured in Moscow by the notorious Khvat, sentenced to death by Ulrikh and shot in 1941. One brother-in-law and two nieces survived. Most of the Abkhaz intelligentsia perished; Georgians and Mingrelians colonized southern Abkhazia. Beria’s revenge was directly sanctioned by Stalin without Ezhov’s signature. After Lakoba’s murder Stalin stayed away from the Caucasus for nine years.