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

The journal Literary Georgia was Beria’s mouthpiece. It devoted a whole issue to Beria’s review of the progress Georgian writers had made in reforming their verse and behavior to meet his demands and those of Stalin. Giorgi Leonidze was the first of several Georgian writers to compose a work on the childhood of Stalin. The idea was typical of Beria’s bidding system, in which almost every writer participated and in which only bids that were neither too innovative nor too trite succeeded. In 1934 every Georgian capable of versification contributed to a luxuriously produced anthology on Stalin; in 1935 offers were invited for “artistic biography.” By 1939 those that survived had all produced a novel or a poem.

Beria reminded Georgian writers that while the Germans were burning Heine he was reprinting Rustaveli. He insisted on the supremacy of his patronage above all other reasons for writing. By 1937 what was not attributed to Beria was dedicated to him. A young sycophant, Grigol Abashidze, wrote:

To Lavrenti Beria

You are everywhere, wherever coal is cut Or open meadows heartily plowed, You lead in front and in our land Stalin’s idea has become fact.

The great blow came on May 15, 1937, in Beria’s report to the party. Under a photograph of Beria in NKVD uniform came a list of works published or aborted, like trees planted or uprooted, coalfields exploited or abandoned. Achievements and failures in poetry, prose, drama, and criticism were enumerated group by group. Beria’s venom was reserved for critics who had misled fellow writers. The first arrest was of Benito Buachidze, a critic trying to live down the connotations of the name he had chosen when Benito Mussolini was admired by Russian poets. Buachidze had terrorized non-proletarian Georgian writers with his hard-left criteria; ironically, his strictures were plagiarized by Beria.

To Davit Demetradze, an ineffectual critic, Beria entrusted the conduct of writers’ union sessions from May to October 1937, at which writers had to incriminate themselves and others. Only two stayed away: Georgia’s most popular poets, Galaktion Tabidze and Ioseb Grishashvili. Beria exempted them as Stalin had exempted Pasternak, and controlled them as Stalin controlled his protégés.¹⁵ Everyone else underwent sessions that went on from 7:00 p.m. until 3:30 in the morning. ¹⁶

After ritual adulation of Beria’s speeches, writers had to confess their links to those previously arrested. The wretched victim was then led off by NKVD agents waiting in the foyer.

Blue Horns poets incriminated themselves, or exculpated themselves and incriminated others. Nikolo Mitsishvili, who had recruited Osip Mandelstam as a translator and thus brought his own poetry and Tabidze’s to the attention of Russian readers, was arrested during the proceedings. Mitsishvili’s apogee had been in 1934: his panegyric had been printed on the first page of Beria’s anthology of poetry to Stalin and then translated by Pasternak. His nemesis followed a drunken party where he said what he thought of Soviet leaders; he was the first Blue Horn to be shot.

The Georgian poet whose doom most horrified Russian poets was Paolo Iashvili—friend of Pasternak, translator of Pushkin. Seated on a white horse, Iashvili had in 1921 greeted the communist invaders at the city boundaries. Iashvili’s downfall was precipitated by his intimacy with Red literati from Moscow and Paris, leading scientists such as Gogi Eliava and Volodia Jikia, and discredited party leaders. Iashvili had shouted loudest for Kamenev and Zinoviev to be shot, but sensed his vulnerability, replying to his fellow writers’ interrogation: “What is a Soviet writer supposed to do when he is drinking wine in some dubious cellar and some drunk, a stranger, stands up and makes an insincere speech to you, praising your literary achievements to the sky and you are forced to stand up and publicly respond with a speech of thanks to a man who is very often extremely suspect?”

On July 22, 1937, during a session debating his expulsion, Paolo Iashvili pulled out a concealed gun and shot himself dead. The writers’ union plenum then passed a resolution expressing the wish that Iashvili would be remembered with “unbounded loathing” and condemning his “treacherous work.” Titsian Tabidze walked out of the proceedings and was denounced for decadence and for loyalty to the defector Robakidze. Titsian resigned himself to his fate, and his lyric genius returned:

Many more races will pass, Perhaps the Pontus Euxine may dry up, All the same the poet’s throat, slit from ear to ear, Will live in the atom of verse.

Tabidze was slowly tortured to death.