Stalin and His Hangmen (58 page)

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 Politbiuro 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 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 judgement 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 theatre 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 founder 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 leftwards. 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 Theatre, 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 paralysed, then shot, on 28 June 1937, Beria’s final touch being an auction of all his goods in the theatre.

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.

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 behaviour 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 ploughed,

You lead in front and in our land

Stalin’s idea has become fact.

The great blow came on 15 May 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 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 22 July 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.

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 26 July 1937 the union voted: ‘Mikheil Javakhishvili, 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 30 September. 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 10 December 1937 Beria addressed the survivors. He linked all his victims – engineers, theatre 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 back seat of an open-top Buick between two guards – appropriately named Sikharulidze (son of joy) and Talakhadze (son of mud) – Beria kerb-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 15 November 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 scorpion-like 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 learnt 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 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.