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

While Beria ruled Transcaucasia—this “super-republic” was on paper dismantled in 1936—he was as ruthless with Armenia as with Georgia and its minorities, Mingrelian, Ajarian, Osetian, or Abkhaz. Jafar Bagirov, by himself, made Azerbaijan a living hell. In July 1936 Beria personally shot dead Khanjian, secretary of the Armenian party, and five months later he poisoned Nestor Lakoba and thus crushed the Abkhaz. ¹³ Stalin and Ezhov packed the Moscow Politburo and NKVD with Russians; Beria put Georgians in charge of Georgia, purging the minorities mercilessly.

Older Georgian Bolsheviks had close links to the intelligentsia. After dealing with them, Beria turned on Georgian writers, artists, musicians, and actors directly and with deadly effect. Between 1936 and 1938 a quarter of the members of the Georgian Union of Writers were destroyed; the survivors lost their capacity to speak or write. The writers were so easily conquered because they were so divided. Before Beria, the poets Paolo Iashvili and Titsian Tabidze had sat in judgment on the works of others. The files of the union are a list of altercations: a drunken remark, quarrels over the union’s Ford car, spawned feuds to which Beria’s purges gave fatal outcomes. Few saw the threat that Beria represented.

Beria’s relations with Georgian intellectuals were forged at parties and during altercations. He liked to walk into theater rehearsals; he liked to summon writers to meetings. In summer 1937 a dozen prominent writers were arrested. “Some of you,” said Beria, “still have undeclared links with enemies of the people. I omit the surnames.” Then Beria called the poet Titsian Tabidze over: “Among the omitted surnames, Mr. Tabidze, was yours.”

Old Bolsheviks like Beso Lominadze had been to school with poets like Paolo Iashvili and Titsian Tabidze, the founding members of the “Blue Horns” school, so called because it aimed to reconcile the blue of French symbolism with the drinking horns of Georgian hedonism and then make them amenable to Bolshevik ideology. Beria’s rise had at first encouraged poets. In 1934 Beria put Paolo Iashvili on the Transcaucasian Central Committee; the poet Galaktion Tabidze joined the Georgian Central Committee; even the feckless Titsian Tabidze sat on the Tbilisi soviet. When they realized the price of participation it was too late to step back.

The previous Georgian regime between 1929 and 1931 had inclined leftward. The Georgian classics had been banned: Shota Rustaveli as a feudalist, Ilia Chavchavadze as a bourgeois. Beria announced celebrations of the centenaries of both Rustaveli and Chavchavadze, sweeping aside Trotskyist fundamentalism and Russian chauvinism at the same time.

Beria showed theatrical talent: his first purge outside the party involved the director of the Rustaveli Theater, Sandro Akhmeteli. Akhmeteli fled to Moscow, only to find that Beria had powers of extradition. The director was imprisoned as a British spy who had plotted to kill Beria and Stalin. He was tortured until mute and paralyzed, then shot, on June 28, 1937, Beria’s final touch being an auction of all his goods in the theater.

Beria’s next target were Blue Horns poets. Their leader, Grigol Robakidze, his wife, and adopted daughter had been allowed by Orjonikidze to travel abroad. Robakidze defected to Germany, where he wrote novels set in Georgia. One, The Murdered Soul, has Stalin’s “horoscope,” a devastating psychopathological study: “Consumed with activity, Stalin sat in the Kremlin, a power-holder, not a ruler: the power line of revolutionary forces, a being, not a human being. A power cable with the warning ‘Danger of Death’ . . . He towered, full of cruel current, undefeatable, the cold, blind fate of the Soviet land and perhaps of the whole world....” ¹⁴ Robakidze’s defection was to provide Beria with all the excuse he needed to kill his friends.

In 1936 Georgian writers competed to offer hospitality to André Gide when he visited Tbilisi, Tsqaltubo, and Sukhum with a party of French communists. Those authors who gave Gide dinner and fulsome praises were, after Retour de l’URSS was published, indicted as fascists. The novelist Mikheil Javakhishvili had remarked, “André Gide has some good ideas.” Paolo Iashvili admitted that hospitality to visiting dignitaries was his sycophantic recidivist disease, and wrote a poem, “To the Traitor André Gide”: “Treacherous, black-faced Trotsky’s cur, following your master.” But to no avail. Nothing that Georgian poets did could exempt them from mass damnation in May 1937.