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

At these meetings Georgia’s finest prose writer, Konstantine Gamsakhurdia (father of Georgia’s future president), defended Titsian Tabidze from abuse and refused to speak unless NKVD agents were silenced. He reported an assurance received from Orjonikidze that dissident intellectuals would not be sent to concentration camps, “because this would be imitating Hitler.” Gamsakhurdia was a Mingrelian, like Beria, and had been the independent Georgian government’s envoy in Germany. He had been sent to the Solovetsky islands as a bourgeois nationalist. On his return he had translated Dante’s Inferno and then written an outrageous novel about collectivization, Stealing the Moon, in which a Beria-like party activist rapes his mother and murders his father. Beria nevertheless gave Gamsakhurdia an inscribed revolver, and when he was arrested for an affair with Lida Gasviani, the “Trotskyist” director of the state publishing house, he was released. Gamsakhurdia’s relations with Beria were based on mutual respect and detestation. Gamsakhurdia was the only living Georgian novelist whose work Stalin, despite scribbling abuse in the margin, admired.

Georgia’s other major novelist, Mikheil Javakhishvili, was a marked man. On July 26, 1937, the union voted: “Mikheil Javakhisvili, as an enemy of the people, a spy and diversant, is to be expelled from the Union of Writers and physically annihilated.” One brave friend, Geronti Kikodze, walked out of the hall.¹⁷ Javakhishvili was beaten in Beria’s presence until he signed a confession; he was shot on September 30. His property was looted, his archives destroyed, his brother shot, his widow turned into a recluse for the next forty-five years.

Beria wiped out most of the major writers of Armenia, Abkhazia, and Osetia but he could not touch any Russian writers except for those already arrested. On December 10, 1937, Beria addressed the survivors. He linked all his victims—engineers, theater directors, poets—with a plot to spread typhoid, to sell Ajaria to the Turks, and to kill Lavrenti Beria.

 Like Ezhov, Beria seduced or raped women by first arresting their husbands, lovers, or fathers. Unlike Ezhov, he made his sexual predilections public. Sandwiched on the backseat of an open-top Buick between two guards—appropriately named Sikharulidze (son of joy) and Talakhadze (son of mud)—Beria curb-crawled Tbilisi, abducting schoolgirls. On moving to Moscow, Beria at first refrained from these expeditions, but soon after the war his black car and two guards, now Sarkisian and Nadaraia, the latter the executioner of Metekhi prison, resumed cruising for young girls. Beria inspired loathing among his party colleagues, many as murderous as he, largely because of his predilection for their wives, mistresses, and daughters.

Mopping Up After Ezhov

TWO MONTHS AFTER ARRIVING in Moscow, Beria refined the terror. After November 15, 1938, victims were no longer chosen at random, but, as before 1936, for their links to others. Purges that Ezhov had begun in the armed forces, the NKVD, the Communist Youth Movement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the intelligentsia were either wound up or stepped up. The NKVD was, after Ezhov’s appointees had been shot, also a happier place. They now had a leader supposedly trusted by Stalin and, instead of Ezhov’s unpredictable and scorpionlike ingratitude to his own juniors, a Caucasian set of relationships between boss and underlings: treachery was cruelly punished, but Beria stood by his men and loyalty was rewarded.

Beria learned faster than Ezhov, but had at first to seek Stalin’s advice—he lacked his predecessors’ familiarity with the Moscow elites: writers, journalists, army officers, diplomats. From September 1938 to Stalin’s death there were few periods when Beria and Stalin did not meet at least twice a week—and often daily. At first the meetings lasted less than an hour but by spring 1939 the two were talking for two hours at a time. In 1940, Beria was sometimes closeted with Stalin from 6:00 p.m. until 5:00 the next morning. Even after 1949, when Stalin was seventy and saw fewer people for less time, Beria usually visited weekly for two hours.

Beria’s first task was to purge the NKVD of Ezhov’s appointments and the remnants of Iagoda’s men. From September 1938 to February 1939 ninety-seven NKVD bosses were arrested, as many as in the whole two years of Ezhov’s rule. Most were shot in 1939, well before Ezhov died, but some were milked for two years to provide material for future arrests. Among the victims was Beria’s former boss Stanislav Redens. Beria personally signed the warrant. Vacancies were filled by Beria’s own men.