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Lenin versus Stalin on Georgia--Revival
of Great Russian chauvinism--The insurrection of 1924—The Stalin Era--Industrial development--Georgian
agriculture collectivized--The war against the kulaks--'Dizziness with
Success'--The rise of Beria--The Five-Year Plans--Georgia under the
purges-Political reorganization and the Stalin Constitution--The Georgian
émigrés--Georgia during World War II--The final terror--Death of a dictator
Lenin versus Stalin on Georgia
The unexpected mildness of the terms offered by the
Georgian Communists to their defeated rivals is to be explained in part by
divergent reactions to the Georgian affair within the Politbureau in Moscow. Lenin and his
colleagues had only given their sanction to the Red Army's advance when they
were assured by Stalin, as Commissar of Nationalities, that a massive
Bolshevik uprising had occurred in Tbilisi.
According to Stalin and his man on the spot, Orjonikidze, the Mensheviks had
already been virtually overthrown by the Georgian masses themselves, and the
appearance of a few Red Army soldiers would simply consolidate a victory
already won. Both Lenin and Trotsky were appalled when they later heard that
heavy fighting was taking place and that the Mensheviks had rallied the
nation to their side; they were most apprehensive of the impression which
would be created among foreign socialists when it was learnt that the Russian
Communists were now overthrowing other, independent socialist régimes by
force of arms.
Joseph Stalin (Jughashvili)
The risk taken by Stalin in simultaneously hoodwinking his
own comrades and defying world opinion in this fashion is partly to be
accounted for in terms of his own past career, and his impatience to settle
old personal scores. Twenty years earlier, in the days of the old Mesame Dasi
when Social-Democracy was first taking root in Georgia, young Jughashvili-Stalin
had been the odd man out. Thrust into the background by Zhordania and the
other Mensheviks, Stalin had thrown in his lot with Lenin and the Russian
Communist party. In October 1917 he had the satisfaction of seeing his
compatriots and rivals Karlo Chkheidze and Irakli Tsereteli, both leading
figures in the Kerensky régime, turned out of Petrograd and banished to their
native Georgia.
But it was a standing affront to Stalin, as Soviet Commissar of Nationalities,
to be defied and held up to scorn in his own native Georgia of all places,
while his sway extended over most of the other territory of the old Tsarist
domains. Georgia
must at all costs be brought within the Soviet fold. The Soviet-Georgian
treaty of May 1920 was simply a tactical manœuvre; by November, Stalin was
declaring: ' Georgia, which has been transformed into the principal base of
the imperialist operations of England and France and which therefore has
entered into hostile relations with Soviet Russia, that Georgia is now living
out the last days of her life.' It was Stalin the Georgian who gave
independent Georgia
the coup de grâce.
Vladimir Lenin (Ulianov)
In an effort to put a good face on the occupation of Georgia, Lenin wrote to Orjonikidze after the
fall of Tbilisi,
urging him to come to terms with the fallen Menshevik régime. 'I must remind
you that the internal and international position of Georgia requires of the Georgian
Communists not the application of the Russian stereotype, but . . . an
original tactic, based upon greater concessions to the petty bourgeois
elements.' When he learnt that Zhordania and his cabinet declined to enter
into a coalition and had embarked for Europe,
with the full intention of turning the Georgian issue into an international
scandal, Lenin was greatly perturbed. However, the Politbureau was obliged to
accept Georgia's
annexation as a fait accompli, and Trotsky, though highly critical of
Stalin's handling of the situation, wrote a pamphlet in defence of Russian
policy towards Georgia.
In accordance with Lenin's directive, the Georgian Communist leaders tried at
first to win over the people by fair words. However, they met with
nation-wide passive resistance. To make things worse, famine prevailed in the
towns and during the summer of 1921 an outbreak of cholera carried off
thousands of victims. The desperate shortage of food and the breakdown of
medical services resulted in heavy mortality, the Georgian
Catholicos-Patriarch Leonid being among the dead.
Even those Tbilisi
workers who were most sympathetic towards Communist doctrines remained
patriots at heart. A mass meeting of 3,000 representatives of the Tbilisi workers'
associations took place on 10 April 1921 at the Opera House on Rustaveli Avenue.
It passed resolutions calling upon the Revcom to defend Georgia's rights to
self-determination and independence; to hasten the formation of a national
Red Army of Georgia; to secure for the working masses of Georgia the right to
select their representatives by free elections; to ensure that the new Soviet
order was introduced into Georgia in such a way as to respect the customs of
the people; and to legalize the existence of all socialist organizations not
actually engaging in activities directed against the régime. Though
acceptable in the main to the local Georgian Bolsheviks, such resolutions as
these were not in accordance with the policies of Stalin and his immediate
associates. Far from permitting the formation of a Georgian Red Army, Stalin
saw that all military formations were disbanded, and posted Russian garrisons
at strategic points. Workers' organizations and trades unions were
subordinated to the Bolshevik party committees, which received their
instructions from Moscow.
Russian agents of the political police or Cheka were sent to Georgia
to mop up the local Mensheviks, whom the Georgian Bolsheviks would rather
have been left to win over or render harmless in their own way.
Stalin also began to toy with the idea of bringing Georgia into a Transcaucasian Federation of
Soviet Republics, into which Armenia
and Azerbaijan
would also be merged. The local Georgian Bolsheviks, on the other hand,
preferred to retain the country as an autonomous Soviet
Republic loosely associated with Moscow, and possessing
its own political and administrative organs. In July 1921 Stalin came to Tbilisi on a personal visit of inspection and addressed
a mass meeting in the working-class quarter of Tbilisi, where he had spent so many months
of revolutionary activity. As soon as he appeared on the platform, surrounded
by Cheka agents and guards, the crowd began to hiss. Old women in the
audience, some of whom had fed and sheltered Stalin when he was hiding from
the Tsarist secret police, shouted: 'Accursed one, renegade, traitor!' The
crowd reserved its ovation for the veteran revolutionary leader Isidore
Ramishvili and another of their leaders, Alexander Dgebuadze, who asked
Stalin straight out: 'Why have you destroyed Georgia? What have you to offer
by way of atonement?' Surrounded by the angry faces of his old comrades
Stalin turned pale and could only stutter a few words of selfjustification,
after which he left the hall cowering behind his Russian bodyguard. The next
day, he stormed into Tbilisi Party Headquarters and made a furious attack on
Philip Makharadze, whom he professed to hold personally responsible for his
humiliation. Addressing a meeting of Tbilisi Communists on 6 July 1921, he
urged them to renounce every vestige of local independence and merge into a
single Transcaucasian Federation, in return for which he promised Georgia unlimited free oil from Baku and a loan of several million gold rubles from Moscow. Changing his
tone, Stalin went on to attack what he called 'local chauvinism' among the
Georgians. The most urgent task of the Georgian Communists was a ruthless
struggle against the relics of nationalism. To smash 'the hydra of
nationalism', the party must purge its ranks of local patriots and get rid of
all who would not subordinate Georgia's interests to those of the entire
Soviet Union.
Revival of Great Russian chauvinism
Such language, with its unmistakable overtones of new-born
Great Russian imperialism, created a deplorable impression when coming from
the lips of a native-born Georgian veteran of the liberation movement.
Leading Georgian Bolsheviks like Mdivani, Eliava and Makharadze were dismayed
at the abyss which gaped before them and protested vigorously against
Stalin's scheme to abolish the autonomy of the non-Russian republics. Stalin
was obdurate. Back in Moscow,
he ordered the liquidation of all remains of the Georgian Menshevik party and
went ahead with his plan for a new, centralistic constitution for the Soviet
state. In the Politbureau, the protests of the Ukrainians and Georgians were
upheld by Trotsky, who saw in Stalin's proposals an abuse of power which
could not fail to offend the non-Russian peoples and expose as a mere fraud
the Communist doctrine of self-determination for all national groups. The
grip of the Russian Cheka over Georgia was in the meantime
greatly strengthened. The Russian secret police brought with them their
well-tried techniques of torture and intimidation, in which some of their
local recruits proved very apt pupils. The Metekhi fortress jail, which had
served the Tsars as a political prison, was crammed with captives, while the
most obstinate cases were 'worked over' in the dreaded Cheka headquarters
down in the city, where hundreds of miserable prisoners languished and died
in conditions of indescribable squalor. The Georgian Church
was the object of special attention on the part of Stalin and his henchmen,
who egged on mobs of hooligans to attack priests and loot the sanctuaries, in
the course of which many historic relics and works of art were stolen or
destroyed.
The moral dilemma confronting the Georgian Communists
emerges clearly from a report sent by P. Makharadze, then Chairman of the
Georgian Communist Party, to the Central Committee of the Party in Moscow on 6 December
1921.
'The arrival of the Red Army and the establishment of
Soviet power in Georgia,' wrote Makharadze, 'had the outward appearance of a
foreign occupation because in the country itself there was nobody who was
ready to take part in a rebellion or a revolution. And at the time of the
proclamation of the Soviet régime there was, in the whole of Georgia,
not even a single member of the party capable of organizing action or
providing leadership and this task had been accomplished mainly by doubtful
or sometimes even criminal elements. . . . We must realize that the Georgian
masses had become accustomed to the idea of an independent Georgia. . . . We had to
demonstrate that we based our position on the independence of Georgia,
but this was simply a form of words; in actual fact we were rejecting this
and did not have it as our objective at all. This was an intolerable
situation, as it is impossible to deceive the masses in a political question
of this nature, and especially the Georgian people, who had gone through
ordeals of fire and water in recent years. . . . We were announcing that we
were working towards the creation of an independent Georgia . . . while taking
systematic steps to nullify our promise.'
When Mdivani and Makharadze refused to agree to Georgia's
entry into Stalin's new Transcaucasian Federation, Stalin and Orjonikidze
discredited them with trumped-up charges of selfishness and treason to the
Bolshevik cause. Unable to credit that Stalin would knowingly offend the
national dignity of his fellow-countrymen, Lenin upheld him, with the result
that Georgia
was obliged to enter the Transcaucasian Federation and Mdivani and Makharadze
received a stern rebuke.
The excesses committed by the Cheka and the Russian
occupation troops in Georgia
led to the formation of a wellorganized resistance movement. Guerilla warfare
broke out in several regions. In 1922, an underground Independence Committee
was formed, consisting of representatives of most Georgian non-Communist
parties and organizations. The committee set up a military centre, which was
to prepare for a national insurrection. Several members of the former
Menshevik government returned clandestinely from exile, including the former
Minister of Agriculture, Noe Khomeriki, as well as the commander of the old
National Guard, V. Jugheli; both were caught and subsequently shot. A heavy
loss was sustained early in 1923 by the Georgian patriots, when fifteen
members of the military centre were arrested. Among these were the principal
leaders of the resistance movement, Generals Konstantine Abkhazi, Alexander
Andronikashvili and Vardan Dsulukidze; they were executed on 20 May 1923. An
appeal was addressed by the Georgian Catholicos-Patriarch Ambrosius to the
international conference held at Genoa
in 1922, in which he described the conditions under which the Georgians were
living since the Red Army invasion and begged for the help of the civilized
world. Ambrosius was immediately thrown into prison by the Communists and
kept there until they imagined that his spirit was broken. The Bolsheviks
then staged a public trial, at which the aged and venerated head of the Georgian Church demonstrated such moral
fortitude that his ordeal turned into a great victory for his Church and
nation. His concluding words were: 'My soul belongs to God, my heart to my
country; you, my executioners, do what you will with my body.' The Communists
did not dare to execute Ambrosius, who died in captivity in 1927.
Lenin was paralysed during the summer of 1922 by his first
stroke and had to delegate much of his authority to Stalin, now General
Secretary of the Party. Following a spate of rumours and complaints coming in
from Tbilisi, however, an investigation
commission headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the Soviet secret police, was
sent to Georgia
to report on the position there. Even the hardened Dzerzhinsky was horrified
at the excesses committed by Orjonikidze and his associates under Stalin's
orders. Dzerzhinsky's report contributed to Lenin's growing distrust of
Stalin and his decision to exclude him from the future leadership of the
Party. He resolved also to suspend Orjonikidze from party membership. In his
Testament and other documents dictated shortly before his death, Lenin wrote
that he 'felt strongly guilty before the workers of Russia for not having intervened
vigorously and drastically enough in this notorious affair'. He was disgusted
at the 'swamp' in which the Party had landed over the Georgian business.
Under Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, the small nations of Russia were exposed to 'the
irruption of that truly Russian man, the Great Russian chauvinist, who is
essentially a scoundrel and an oppressor, as is the typical Russian
bureaucrat'. Stalin had let his personal vindictiveness run away with him,
showing himself 'not merely a genuine social chauvinist, but a coarse brutish
bully acting on behalf of a Great Power'. The trouble was, Lenin shrewdly
diagnosed, that Stalin the Georgian and Dzerzhinsky the Pole had gone out of
their way to assume true Russian characteristics. 'It is well known that
russified people of foreign birth always overshoot themselves in the matter
of the true Russian disposition.' On 5 March 1923, Lenin broke off personal
relations with Stalin, and urged Trotsky to defend the Georgian
'deviationists' before the Central Committee of the all-Russian Communist
Party. The next day he wired a message to the leaders of the Georgian
opposition, promising to take up their case at the forthcoming Party
Congress: 'I am with you in this matter with all my heart. I am outraged by
the arrogance of Orjonikidze and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.'
Lenin also prepared to send Kamenev to Tbilisi
on another commission of enquiry. In the middle of these moves, on 9 March
1923, Lenin suffered the third attack of his illness, from which he never
recovered; his death took place on 21 January 1924.
The insurrection of 1924
Lenin's illness and death saved Stalin from disgrace. In
spite of Lenin's warnings and his own fears, Trotsky came to terms with
Stalin and his group. He even helped Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev to conceal
from the world Lenin's deathbed confession of shame at the intolerant
treatment of the non-Russian nationalities, the text of which was not
published until 1956. At the 12th Party Congress in April 1923, the Georgian
Communists found themselves isolated. With Lenin's notes suppressed, every
word uttered from the platform against Georgian or Ukrainian nationalism was
greeted with stormy applause, while the mildest allusion to Great Russian
chauvinism was received in stony silence. Stalin bided his time before
actually striking down his opponents among the Georgian Communist leadership.
Budu Mdivani and his associates were not actively molested until 1929, while
the real blood bath among the Georgian Old Bolsheviks did not take place
until the great purge of 1936-37.
Driven beyond endurance, the Georgian people were now
preparing for a last desperate effort to regain their freedom. Plans were
laid for a general insurrection, scheduled for 29 August 1924. The plan
miscarried. Through some misunderstanding, the mining centre of Chiatura and
the surrounding district rose up in arms on August 28 instead of the
appointed day. At first the insurgents achieved considerable success. A
number of Red Army units were eliminated. But the Russian commander in
Georgia, Mogilevsky, reinforced all strategic positions in and around Tbilisi, and repulsed
the chief forces of the patriots, led by Colonel Kaikhosro Choloqashvili.
Mogilevsky was later killed in a dramatic manner. A young Georgian airman who
was piloting his plane crashed deliberately; all the occupants, including the
pilot himself, were killed.
The unequal battle raged for three weeks. The rising was
crushed and terrible reprisals took place. Conservative estimates place the
number of prisoners and hostages killed by the victorious Communists at
between 7,000 and 10,000. Many women and children were slain in cold blood.
In the village
of Ruisi, for instance,
every human being carrying the name of Paniashvili was put to death. About
20,000 persons were sent to Siberia
immediately after the insurrection. Many months later, foreign visitors to Tbilisi would receive
smuggled notes begging them to intercede for individual prisoners held
captive in the dungeons of the Cheka, while lorry-loads of prisoners being
driven off into exile were a common sight on the roads.
The death of Lenin, the onset of the Stalin era, and the
defeat of the 1924 insurrection mark the final establishment of Soviet rule
over Georgia.
Not one of the great powers which had accorded the Georgian Republic
full recognition only three years previously raised a finger to help the
Georgian people in their struggle. At the same time, the abominations
committed by Stalin against his own people created a deplorable impression on
world opinion. As Lenin rightly foresaw, the Great Russian chauvinism of that
vindictive Caucasian exposed the Russian Communist party to world-wide
opprobrium, and proved a great obstacle to the Soviet government's attempts
to come to an understanding with foreign socialist parties and countries
abroad.
THE STALIN ERA: 1924-53
Industrial development
THE SUPPRESSION of the 1924 uprising was followed by an
uneasy calm. Military pacification was soon completed and an appearance of
normality returned to the country. The relative prosperity brought to Russia by Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP),
with its tolerance of private enterprise in commerce and agriculture, had a
beneficial effect on Georgia.
Although the entire land surface had been nationalized following the
Bolshevik occupation in 1921, no attempt was made as yet to enforce
collectivization, so that the peasants continued for the time being to enjoy
the use of the land distributed to them during the period of Georgian
independence. The Communist Party of Georgia preferred for a time to use
peaceful persuasion rather than armed coercion to extend their hold over the
masses. Particular stress was laid on education and the spreading of literacy,
while religious teaching was suppressed as far as possible. Far-reaching
changes were made in the structure, curriculum and personnel of Tbilisi State University.
The Rector, the noted historian Ivane Javakhishvili ( 1876-1940), was
dismissed from his post and replaced by a professor more in tune with
Communist aims; as it turned out, this eclipse probably saved Javakhishvili's
life, since the then Rector of the University was among the purge victims
during the terror of 1936-37.
Substantial progress was made with the industrialization
of Georgia
even during the NEP period. The impressive ZemoAvchala hydro-electric scheme
was completed during this time. A British trades union delegation which
visited the Caucasus towards the end of 1924
saw the scheme under construction and reported:
'Tiflis, like other towns in Russia, is to have a great
electricity power station. Plant that will harness 36,000 horse-power from
the River Kura is now being erected. . . . The distance of the power station
from the city is approximately twelve miles. . . . Already the work has made
such progress that the dam is nearing completion. It will form a huge basin,
harnessing the surging waters, which will accumulate in prodigious numbers
millions of gallons and tons of weight. . . . The machinery is already in
position and a perfect plant has been gathered together. The undertaking has
another twelve months to run before completion. Three busy shifts are
employing approximately a thousand workers in each shift. The men are housed in
the best dwelling accommodation obtainable for such undertakings. . . . The
wages rise from a rouble a day to 4 roubles; the food is obtained on a
co-operative basis and is cheap. Efforts are being made on a practical and
effective scale for the entertainment, training, and even the education of
the workers employed. The Delegation saw a most industrious and orderly set
of men in full and willing co-operation. . . .'113
The Zemo-Avchala hydro-electric station named after V. I.
Lenin was officially opened by M. I. Kalinin on 26 June 1927.
As was the case in England
during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, the rapid growth
of the urban working population of the Soviet Union
resulted in a shortage of cheap foodstuffs. The peasants, cherishing their
new-found mastery of the land, refused to deliver food to the towns at
government-controlled prices. Both in Georgia and in European Russia,
the breaking up of the old landlords' estates often resulted in loss of
efficiency and a fall in production. Smallholdings operated on a primitive
subsistence basis proved less productive than the larger, systematically
cultivated estates which had existed prior to the 1917 Revolution. This emerges
clearly from figures cited in a recent official history of Georgia, which notes that as late as 1925-26,
the acreage under grain in Georgia
amounted to only 92.8 per cent. of the pre-1914 average, while the harvest as
a whole yielded only 94•4 per cent. of the pre-1914 total. It is instructive
to note, however, that the return from 'technical cultures', i.e.
sub-tropical and specialized crops such as tobacco, tea and citrus fruits,
exceeded the pre-1914 figure by 26.7 per cent.114 This is to be
explained by the fact that these crops were grown on lands newly reclaimed
from the marshy swamps of Western Georgia, and on plantations exploited as
co-operative or state enterprises and equipped with modern tools and
machinery.
Georgian agriculture collectivized
The inception of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928, and the
great drive towards full-scale collectivization of Soviet agriculture, marked
the beginning of a new phase in Georgian as well as in Russian social and
economic history. Enterprises like the Chiatura manganese mines, which had
for some years been leased on a concessionary basis to the American Harriman
interests, were brought under direct state management and expanded at a rapid
rate. The Georgian Communist Party resolved to follow the Russian example of
large-scale collectivization of agriculture and sent a thousand 'activist'
members of the Komsomol or Communist Youth organization to Moscow to study the latest developments in
Soviet economic and social theory. When these young enthusiasts returned to Georgia,
a propaganda campaign was launched in order to persuade the peasantry of the
benefits of the collective farm system. Groups of party workers toured the
countryside, urging the people to abandon their antique methods of
agriculture and embark voluntarily on the new programme. Special conferences
of poor peasants and landless agricultural workers were held, at which their
grievances against the more prosperous kulak class were vigorously
whipped up.
This initial campaign met with scant success. The Georgian
peasantry, to whom such characteristically Russian institutions as the
peasant mir or commune were alien, clung with the courage of
desperation to their individual small-holdings. Opposition to the new
measures was by no means confined to the rich peasants or kulaks, but
was met with among the majority of the middling or poorer ones also. This
fact was admitted by a number of the leading Georgian Communists, who
ventured to express doubt as to whether the elimination of a few socalled kulaks
would suffice to bring about agricultural reform in a land which was
basically one of middling and poor peasants. Holders of such views were
denounced as 'rightist opportunists', and extensive purges of lukewarm officials
and party workers took place: the Kaspi and Telavi regional committees of the
Communist Party, for instance, were drastically overhauled in 1931, all their
leading members being dismissed from their posts.
The war against the kulaks
The Secretary of the Central Committee of the Georgian
Communist Party, Mikheil Kakhiani, ordered a ruthless, all-out campaign to be
launched to achieve full collectivization of Georgian agriculture by February
1931, the tenth anniversary of Soviet rule in Georgia. He declared: 'The kulaks
as a class must be destroyed.' On 19 January 1930, a decree of the plenum of
the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party was published,
containing the following provisions:
1. All kulaks are to be removed from areas scheduled for
complete collectivization.
2. Agricultural equipment belonging to kulaks is to be
turned over to the use of kolkhozes (collective farms).
3. When wine-growing areas are subjected to general
collectivization, wine cellars belonging to kulaks are to be taken
from them and handed over to the collectives.
4. Livestock and implements are to be taken from kulaks.
5. Lands belonging to kulaks are to be confiscated and given
to the kolkhozes.
6. Economic, administrative and legal sanctions are to be applied
against the kulaks, and public trials of them staged; all kulak
property must be confiscated; kulaks agitating against
collectivization are to be arrested.
7. Kulaks are to be forced to engage in public works and
compulsory labour.
Five thousand agricultural students and young Communist
propagandists were recruited for the campaign. One brigade of Party workers,
each with a supporting detachment of OGPU guards or Red Army troops, was
assigned to each district of Georgia. They undertook lightning campaigns in
selected villages, turning alleged kulaks out of their homes and
distributing their goods and chattels to the poorer
peasants. No objective criterion existed as to what constituted a kulak.
Those luckless families whom local Communist committees chose to brand as
such were driven from their native villages with nothing but the clothes they
wore, and drifted homeless and starving about the countryside. Party
Secretary Kakhiani reported jubilantly to Moscow: 'Collectivization is going full
speed ahead, and the new forms of Soviet economy are meeting with a unanimous
and enthusiastic welcome from the peasants.'
In reality, the whole Georgian countryside was in turmoil.
In Mingrelia and Abkhazia, groups of women armed with sticks marched through
the kolkhoz fields, persuading the peasants to abandon work and go home. Oxen
were unharnnessed and driven into the woods. The women besieged the offices
of the local authorities, demanding the release of their husbands from jail,
and the abolition of the kolkhoz system. Violent and sanguinary clashes took
place between NKVD detachments armed with machine-guns and angry peasant
women armed with sticks and stones. Armed uprisings took place in southern Georgia
in Borchalo and Lori, which had to be put down by entire battalions of Red
Army troops. Partisans in mountain Svaneti declared Soviet rule at an end and
set up their own administration. On the Georgian military highway, in the
Dusheti district, the local militia was disarmed by peasants, who then moved
south towards Tbilisi
in the hope of joining forces with other insurgent groups. Fierce fighting
broke out in Kakheti, where a hundred and fifty soldiers were killed. Over a
thousand families were deported to Siberia
from Kakheti alone. Different tactics were employed by peasants in the Gori
district, who agreed to become kolkhoz members and adopted a go-slow
policy and sabotaged kolkhoz property. If any Communist foreman
displayed an excess of zeal, he would disappear in the night and be seen
alive no more.
10 000 000
Transcaucasian Rouble bill of 1923 (source: collection of Dr. George
Partskhaladze)
'Dizziness with Success'
Chaotic as was the situation in Georgia,
that prevailing in European Russia, especially in the black earth lands of
the Ukraine,
was far worse. The overwhelming majority of the peasantry confronted the
government with desperate opposition. A veritable civil war developed as
rebellious villages were surrounded by machine-guns and forced to surrender.
Masses of so-called kulaks and their families were deported to remote
wildernesses in Siberia and left to starve
or freeze to death. Those that remained slaughtered cattle, smashed
implements and burned crops. Whole regions were cordoned off by troops and
NKVD detachments and starved into submission. At last Stalin himself became
aware of the consequences of his impetuous drive towards complete
collectivization, which threatened the very fabric of Soviet society. On 2
March 1930, he issued a statement entitled 'Dizziness with Success', in which
he blamed all the inhuman excesses which had taken place on over-zealous
local officials. Stalin admitted that many of the collective farms which had
been set up by force were not viable as going concerns, and pretended that
his instructions had been misunderstood. Without consulting the Politbureau
and the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, that same Stalin who
had for months been issuing peremptory directives ordering compulsory
collectivization at all costs now declared: 'Collective farms cannot be set
up by force', and called for a cessation of violence and a pause for peaceful
consolidation.
This volte-face caused consternation in Georgian
and Transcaucasian Communist circles. A temporary halt in the 'building of
socialism' was called while heads of revolutionary committees made a tour of
inspection through the villages. An emergency session of the Central
Committee of the Georgian Communist Party heard a report by the doyen of
Georgian Communists, Philip Makharadze, indicting the local Party
organizations for their misplaced zeal. However, the real culprit was the
Central Committee itself, whose Second Secretary was forced to admit that
local Party committees had been urged to collectivize everything and
everybody in a day, 'right down to the last chicken'. The Georgian Communists
could not deny that many of those who had been victimized and driven from
their homes were not rich kulaks at all. Philip Makharadze stated in the
newspaper Komunisti (The Communist):
'It was not only the kulaks but also the
smallholders and poorer peasants who were affected by the anti-kulak
campaign. A number of facts are now available which prove that a large part
of the 'dekulakized' persons were in fact smallholders. . . . During the
campaign, whole families were moved from their homes, including old people of
eighty and ninety, invalids, women and children. They were moved from their
homes, but where to? No one knew where they were supposed to go. Comrades,
the result of these mistakes was that in many areas the peasant smallholders
expressed their pity for the kulaks. Intimidated by this anti-kulak
campaign, the peasants joined the kolkhozes. We were told here that
they were enthusiastic about joining the kolkhozes, but this was by no
means the case. To crown it all, the cattle taken away from the peasants is
being allowed to die off through lack of proper care and their equipment is
being allowed to spoil.'
In Moscow, S. Eliava, head
of the government of Soviet Georgia, declared at a meeting of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party: 'The situation in Georgia and Transcaucasia
in general is very grave. Not one corner of the Soviet
Union experiences at the moment such difficulties . . . The
Georgian peasantry is only waiting for a chance. . . . Thousands of them have
gone into the mountains and forests to wage battle against us.'
It was no secret that Stalin himself was personally
responsible for all this misery. However, a scapegoat was found in the person
of Kakhiani, who was dismissed from the post of Secretary of the Central
Committee of the Georgian Communist Party and sent off to a minor post in Turkestan. When the disturbances eventually died down,
the net result of Georgia's first collectivization drive was the creation by 1932
of some 3,400 kolkhozes, incorporating about 17,000 former peasant
holdings, representing 36•4 per cent. of the national total. A score or more
of Sovkhozes or state farms were also formed. There existed in the
whole of Georgia only thirty-one tractor stations, and it was a long time
before agricultural production recovered from the chaotic condition into
which doctrinaire folly had plunged it.
The rise of Beria
The Georgian Communists could not help resenting the
invidious role in which Stalin's bungling had placed them, with the result
that mutual antagonisms between him and the local Georgian Party leadership
flared up afresh. In 1932, when Stalin's popularity in the Soviet
Union had sunk to a low ebb, memoranda on the need to depose him
from the post of General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party began to
circulate in the highest quarters. Instrumental in the campaign to oust
Stalin were the leading Georgian Bolshevik, Beso Lominadze, who had been
secretary of the Communist Party of the Transcaucasian Federation, and
Syrtsov, premier of the Russian Federative SSR, both of whom had rendered
Stalin loyal aid in defeating his Trotskyist and Bukharinite opponents in the
Party. Lominadze and Syrtsov were merely urging the Central Committee to depose
Stalin constitutionally by voting him down at a meeting of the Committee;
however, they were charged with conspiracy, imprisoned and liquidated.
Morbidly sensitive to hostility on the part of his Georgian compatriots,
Stalin felt it necessary to place in charge of Caucasian affairs an
individual on whose unwavering personal loyalty he could count. His choice
fell upon L. P. Beria ( 1899-1953), a man who was many years later to be
unmasked as an enemy of the people and condemned to die as a traitor to the Soviet
fatherland.
Lavrenti Beria
(Source: TIME cover / 20 - July - 1953)
Lavrenti Beria came of a poor Mingrelian peasant family
living in the Sukhumi district of Abkhazia,
near the Black Sea. He joined the Bolshevik
party in 1917 while studying at a technical college in Baku, and thereafter took part in
organizing an illegal underground group of Bolshevik technicians. His skill
in this work led to his appointment in 1921 to a post in the Caucasian Cheka.
By the time he was thirty-two, he had been Vice-president of the Cheka in Azerbaijan and Georgia,
President of the Georgian GPU, and then President of the Caucasian State
Police and chief representative of the OGPU in Transcaucasia.
His special task was the elimination of all anti-Bolshevik groups in the
Caucasus, for success in which task he was decorated with the order of the
Red Banner of the Republics of Georgia, Armenia
and Azerbaijan.
In October 1931, Beria was transferred from his post in the secret police and
made Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Transcaucasian
Communist Party, the First Secretary of which, Kartvelishvili by name,
strongly disliked Beria's unsavoury personality and methods. Kartvelishvili,
a personal friend of the influential Bolshevik leader Sergo Orjonikidze,
categorically refused to Beria fabricated a series of untrue charges against
Kartvelishvili, who was soon deported from the Caucasus
and put to death. The vacant post of First Secretary of the Transcaucasian
Party organization was then occupied by Beria himself.
The Five-Year Plans
From 1932 until 1938, Beria exercised dictatorial powers
in Transcaucasia. He played a leading role
in implementing the Second Five-Year Plan in Georgia between 1933 and 1937. At
the cost of immense effort and sacrifice, Georgian industrial development
made great strides forward. The Zestafoni ferroalloy plant went into
production during this period, as did the Tbilisi machine-tool factory named after S.
M. Kirov. Further progress was made in harnessing the power potential of Georgia's
rivers. The Rioni, Atcharis-dsqali and Sukhumi
hydro-electric schemes were completed and a start was made with the
hydro-electric station on the River Khrami. Stakhanovite labour methods were
successfully applied in the Chiatura manganese mines and at the Tbilisi locomotive and
railway wagon workshops named after I. V. Stalin. By the end of the Second
Five-Year Plan, the Avchala cast-iron factory and the Inguri paper combine
were in operation, as well as a new chemical and pharmaceutical laboratory in
Tbilisi, new industrial plant at Kutaisi, and tea factories in the Black Sea districts of
Western Georgia. Drainage and irrigation
schemes were carried out. Private enterprise was eliminated from shopkeeping
and commerce. Restaurants, hotels and shops were completely municipalized,
though this was far from being an unmixed blessing for the consumer and
general public.
Beria kept Stalin supplied with secret denunciations of
Georgian Bolshevik leaders, officials, writers and teachers. At the 17th
Party Congress in 1934 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Soviet
Communist Party; in 1936, he served on the editorial commission for the
presentation of the Stalin Constitution. The rise of Beria coincided with the
downfall of one of the most distinguished Georgian Bolsheviks, Abel Enukidze,
who had begun his career as early as 1904 by running the secret Bolshevik
printing press at Baku,
and was for years regarded as Stalin's intimate friend. Abel Enukidze was
Secretary-General of the Central Executive Committee which was, prior to the
promulgation of the Stalin Constitution, the supreme legislative body of the USSR; its decrees bore Enukidze's signature jointly
with Kalinin's.
Early in 1935, Enukidze was relieved of his post, ostensibly to become Prime
Minister of the Transcaucasian Federation. He was shortly afterwards
disgraced and suffered death during the purges in 1937. Beria ingratiated
himself further with Stalin by building up the famous 'personality cult'. On
21-22 July 1935, he delivered to a meeting of the Tbilisi Party organization
a lecture 'On the history of the Bolshevik organizations in Transcaucasia',
in which Stalin is given almost exclusive credit for the success of the
Caucasian revolutionary movement from 1900 onwards. Beria himself set out to
eliminate any of the Georgian Old Bolsheviks who might have felt inclined to
challenge the truth of his assertions. The lecture itself was several times
republished in book form, each edition containing more adulatory praise of
Stalin, and more vitriolic denunciation of Stalin's rivals, many of whom
Beria had himself tortured and shot. In the English edition of 1949, for
instance, the dead Abel Enukidze is denounced as a 'mortal enemy of the
people', while Budu Mdivani, Vice-Premier of Georgia prior to the great
purges, is vilified as a supporter of the 'arch-bandit Judas Trotsky' and a
fellow-member, with Mikha Okujava, Mikha Toroshelidze, S. Chikhladze, N.
Kiknadze and other liquidated Georgian Bolsheviks, of a Trotskyite spying and
wrecking terrorist centre, which Beria claimed credit for unearthing in 1936.
Georgia under
the purges
Beria was in his element during the great purges of
1936-37. While the unbalanced and degenerate NKVD chiefs Yezhov and Yagoda
were torturing and killing millions of high officials, army officers,
intellectuals and ordinary citizens throughout Russia,
Beria in the Caucasus eliminated every
individual whose adherence to the Party Line could be called in question, or
whose survival might conceivably challenge the myth of Stalin's
infallibility. The Georgian leaders to whom Stalin had extended effusive and
hypocritical congratulations on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of
Soviet Georgia in February 1936 were by then already marked down as purge
victims. Two separate trials of Georgian Communist leaders for 'terrorism and
high treason' were held. The first group included Budu Mdivani and the
Georgian planning chief Mikha Toroshelidze. The second group was headed by
the Georgian Prime Minister, Mgaloblishvili. Among those tortured to death or
shot at this time were Mikha Okujava, Mamia Orakhelashvili, Sergi Kavtaradze,
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Georgia, and Lado Dumbadze,
Chairman of the first Bolshevik Soviet in Tbilisi. Only Philip Makharadze, then
nearing his seventieth birthday, was spared public condemnation. Makharadze
was permitted to save himself by confessing his past guilt and pleading for
mercy, in return for which he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet, an honorific sinecure which he held until his death in
1941.
As in Russia
itself, the holocaust in Georgia
was carried to diabolical lengths. Denunciations by personal enemies or the
receipt of an innocent letter from some friend abroad were sufficient to
bring about imprisonment, exile or death. The witch-hunt was carried to great
lengths at Tbilisi
University, which lost
scores of its most brilliant professors and most promising students. Among
those who perished was the famous classical scholar and papyrologist Grigol
Tsereteli, guilty of having attended international conferences in which
scholars from bourgeois countries also participated. The literary historian
Vakhtang Kotetishvili vanished without trace, while the outstanding Abkhazian
dramatist Samson Chanba ( 18861937) was also put to death. Universal horror
was excited by the execution of two of Georgia's greatest national writers,
the novelist Mikheil Javakhishvili and the poet Titsian Tabidze, the latter a
close friend of Boris Pasternak, who knew him as 'a reserved and complicated
soul, wholly attracted to the good and capable of clairvoyance and
self-sacrifice'.115 A close associate of Tabidze was Paolo
Iashvili, a remarkable poet of the post-symbolist period, 'brilliant,
polished, cultured, an amusing talker, European and good-looking'.116
So horrified was Iashvili at the news of Tabidze's arrest and execution that
he went straight to the headquarters of the Union of Georgian Writers, of
which he was secretary, and killed himself there.
At a congress of Georgian writers held at Tbilisi in July 1954,
the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, V. P. Mzhavanadze,
referred to the terrorism exercised by Beria's agents and said:
'Comrades, you all know what injury was done to our people
by that gang of murderers and spies who now have been unmasked and done away
with by our Party. That gang killed many leading and progressive scientists.
. . . The Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party has found out
that the outstanding masters of the Georgian language--Mikheil Javakhishvili,
Titsian Tabidze and Paolo Iashvili--became victims of the intrigues and
terrorism of that abominable gang of murderers. I have pleasure in declaring
in the name of the competent organs that these men have been rehabilitated.'
This statement was greeted with loud acclamation, as were the
pronouncements of Stalin and Beria in their time; in reality, the fair name
of Georgia's great writers does not depend on Mr. Mzhavanadze and his
'competent organs', but is enshrined in the hearts of the Georgian people and
their friends.
The Georgian purges were not confined to the capital, but
also enveloped the outlying regions, notably the Autonomous
Republics of Abkhazia and Atchara on
the Black Sea coast. The Abkhazians had long
been subject to colonization both by Russians and Georgians: by 1926,
autonomous Abkhazia, covering 3,240 square miles, had a population of 174,000
of which the Abkhazians themselves accounted for less than onethird. Under
the Second Five-Year Plan, Abkhazia was directed to step up tobacco
production substantially, and more Russians, Georgians, Armenians and Greeks
were brought in to work on new plantations and industrial projects. The
Abkhazians, who resented these encroachments on their cherished autonomy,
protested and in the end fell completely into disgrace with the Kremlin. The
leading spokesman of the dissident Abkhaz Bolsheviks, Nestor Lakoba, died a
natural death in 1936. In the following year, a purge trial was held at Sukhumi, the Abkhazian
capital, at which forty-seven of Lakoba's friends, relatives and associates
were charged with complicity in an imaginary plot to murder Stalin. Ten of
the defendants were executed. A similar mass trial was staged at Batumi, the capital of
Atchara. Eleven persons, headed by Zakaria Lortkipanidze, Chairman of the
Central Executive Committee of Atchara, were accused of belonging to a
'counterrevolutionary and insurgent organization, engaging in espionage,
sabotage and diversion', maintaining contacts with émigré beks, mullahs
and kulaks, and destroying crops in plantations and collective farms.
The Communist-controlled Georgian Press reported these trials under banner
headlines such as: 'Shoot the accused--that is our verdict!' 'Wipe the
fascist reptiles off the face of the earth!' 'Death to the despised enemies
of the people!' Eight of the accused in the Batumi trial were executed: since Stalin's
death, several of them have been posthumously rehabilitated.
Before the Stalin-Beria purges, Tbilisi was famed for 'the
high level of culture of the leading section of society--an active intellectual
life which, by then, was rarely to be found elsewhere.'117 The
events of 1937 resulted in the elimination or demoralization of the élite
among the Georgian intelligentsia. The next fifteen years or more were a
period of utter stagnation in Georgian literature, in which writers eked out
an existence by composing dithyrambs about life in factories or on collective
farms, or sycophantic odes to Stalin the superman. It is only today that a
new generation of Georgian authors is emerging unscarred by the experiences
of that grim era.
A fitting climax to the Georgian purges was provided by
the suicide of the eminent Georgian Bolshevik, Sergo Orjonikidze (
1886-1937), long Stalin's right-hand man, a member of the Politbureau and
People's Commissar for Heavy Industry for the entire Soviet
Union. Vigorous and ruthless when necessary, Orjonikidze had a
reputation for decency and tried to thwart Beria's wholesale executions in Georgia.
Beria denounced Orjonikidze to Stalin, who sanctioned the liquidation of Orjonikidze's
brother. According to the account given by N. S. Khrushchev, Beria and Stalin
between them deliberately brought Orjonikidze to such a state of nervous
collapse that he killed himself. He was then accorded a grandiose state
funeral and admitted to the pantheon of the great dead Bolshevik fathers.
Political reorganization and the Stalin
Constitution
Once he had set in motion the necessary machinery to
eliminate all potential opposition in the Caucasus, Stalin dissolved the
artificial Transcaucasian Federation into its constituent parts, the
Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijan
Soviet Socialist
Republics. To these was
granted, in theory at least, a large measure of political devolution,
including the right to secede at will from the Soviet
Union. This change took place in 1936, when the Stalin
Constitution was promulgated. Two years later, Beria was summoned from
Tbilisi to Moscow to take over the NKVD in succession to Yezhov and Yagoda,
both of whom, after destroying millions of Soviet citizens, had themselves
been declared expendable and put to death. The Caucasus
was left in charge of officials who owed their promotion to Stalin and Beria,
and whose reliability was beyond doubt.
The Georgian émigrés
After Orjonikidze's death and Makharadze's recantation,
there was none of Stalin's old associates among the Georgian Bolsheviks who
could question his omniscience or bring up the various unsavoury episodes in
his revolutionary past. At the same time, the Georgian Menshevik government
in exile in Paris
continued to present a certain nuisance value. Karlo Chkheidze had died in
1926, and Noe Ramishvili, the forceful Minister of the Interior in the
Zhordania government, was struck down in Paris in 1930 by a Georgian assassin
reputedly in the pay of the Soviet government. Most of the émigré ministers,
however, were distinguished by their longevity, one or two venerable
octogenarians being alive even today. For some years after the fall of
independent Georgia, until 1933, the Georgian Mensheviks were able to maintain
their legation in Paris; the International Committee for Georgia, the
president of which was Monsieur Jean Martin, director of the Journal de
Genève, kept up a running fight against the admission of the Soviet Union
to the League of Nations, which nevertheless took place in 1934. The
importance which Stalin attached to the activities of the Georgian émigrés
was displayed in 1938, when the Soviet embassy in Paris brought effectual pressure to bear on
a pusillanimous French government to ban a celebration of the 750th
anniversary of the Georgian national poet Shota Rustaveli, which was to have
been held at the Sorbonne. With the rise of Nazi Germany, a number of
Georgian exiles joined the Fascist movement. A Georgian Fascist Front was
formed, the nucleus of which consisted of a nationalist organization called Tetri
Giorgi or White George, after the patron saint of Georgia.
The leaders of Tetri Giorgi included General Leo Kereselidze and
Professor Mikhako Tsereteli, the former Kropotkinite anarchist, who had in
the meantime won a high reputation in the German universities as an expert on
the Sumerian and Hittite languages.
Georgia during
World War II
After killing Marshal Tukhachevsky and decimating the Red
Army high command during the purges, Stalin proceeded in 1939 to make war
inevitable by concluding the MolotovRibbentrop pact with Nazi Germany. His
inordinate selfconfidence led him to ignore repeated warnings from foreign
governments and from his own agents abroad, with the result that Russia
was caught largely unprepared when Hitler launched his lightning attack in
June 1941. The Georgians contributed greatly to the defence of the USSR during World War II and played an
outstanding part in preventing the Germans from penetrating into Georgia from their advanced bases in North Caucasia. German parachutists were dropped at
various points in Georgia,
but were promptly mopped up by local military units. There were, however,
manifestations of unrest within the country which gave the authorities
grounds for disquiet. It is said, for instance, that a meeting was held in
1942 in the Tbilisi Opera House at which leaflets were distributed calling on
the people to overthrow Russian Communist rule and proclaim Georgia's independence. On the
German side, efforts were made to form a Georgian Legion from émigrés living
in Western Europe, combined with Soviet
prisoners of war of Georgian extraction. This venture was greatly hampered by
the intervention of Rosenberg
and other exponents of Nazi racism, who wanted all Georgians sent to
extermination camps as non-Aryans, along with the Jews and the Gypsies. The
Georgians under Nazi domination were saved only by the intervention of
Alexander Nikuradze, a Georgian scientist held in high esteem in the German
official world. In 1945, a Georgian sergeant hoisted the flag of victory over
the Berlin Reichstag in company with a Russian Red Army soldier. The
inter-allied agreement concluded at the end of the war resulted in the
forcible repatriation to Soviet Russia of thousands of Georgians who had
sought asylum in the West, many of whom were shot or exiled to Siberia on their return home.
The final terror
The last years of Stalin's life were marked by an intensification
of his personal reign of terror. As N. S. Khrushchev declared in 1956, Stalin
carried mistrust to the point of mania. 'He could look at a man and say:
"Why are your eyes so shifty today?" or "Why are you turning
away so much today and avoiding looking me directly in the eyes?" This
sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust even towards eminent party
workers whom he had known for years. Everywhere and in everything he saw
enemies, two-facers and spies.' In metropolitan Russia, Stalin's fantastic
delusions manifested themselves in such sinister incidents as the 1949
Leningrad affair, involving the shooting out of hand of the State Planning
Chairman Voznesensky, and the bogus 'Doctors' Plot', in which leading Russian
physicians narrowly escaped extermination at the hands of the secret police.
In the northern Caucasus, Stalin celebrated the retreat of the Germans by
ordering the deportation in 1943-44 of the entire Karachay-Balkar and
Chechen-Ingush peoples as a punishment for alleged collaboration with the
Nazis; the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous SSR was obliterated from the map of the Soviet Union.
After receiving warm commendation for the successful
completion of the Fourth Five-Year Plan between 1946 and 1950, Georgia
too fell under the dictator's scourge. In 1951, he claimed to have unearthed
a nationalist organization centred on Mingrelia, the Western province of Georgia adjoining Lavrenti Beria's
homeland. N. S. Khrushchev stated in 1956: 'As is known, resolutions by the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union concerning this case were passed in November 1951 and in
March 1952. These resolutions were made without prior discussion with the
Politbureau. Stalin had personally dictated them. They made serious
accusations against many loyal Communists. On the basis of falsified
documents it was proved that there existed in Georgia a supposedly
nationalistic organization whose objective was the liquidation of Soviet
power in that republic with the help of imperialist powers. In this
connexion, a number of responsible Party and Soviet workers were arrested in Georgia.
As was later proved, this was a slander directed against the Georgian party
organization. . . . There was no nationalistic organization in Georgia.
Thousands of innocent people fell victim of wilfulness and lawlessness. All
this happened under the "genial" leadership of Stalin, "the
great son of the Georgian nation", as the Georgians like to term
Stalin.'
Concurrently with the Mingrelian affair, prominent Georgian
Communists were accused of embezzling state funds, stealing automobiles and
plundering state property. Two Georgian Communist Party secretaries, the
Chairman of the Georgian Supreme Court and the Minister of Justice were among
those removed from their posts late in 1951. These changes failed to satisfy
Stalin. In April 1952, Beria, now Vice-President of the Soviet Council of
Ministers, came from Moscow
to attend a meeting of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party,
at which he subjected the party leadership to severe criticism for failing to
instil the Communist creed in Georgian youth and to tear out all traces of
local nationalism. A new First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, A.
I. Mgeladze, was appointed, while the Chairman of the Council of Ministers
and the Chairman of the Presidium of the Georgian Supreme Soviet were
relieved of their posts. Mgeladze set to work to purge the party and
governmental apparatus from top to bottom. In six months he replaced half the
members of the Central Committee of the Georgian Communist Party who had been
returned in the election of 1949, and brought about a complete upheaval in
the administrative hierarchy of the Republic. Many chairmen of collective
farms and officials of the Comsomol or Soviet Youth movement lost their jobs.
The fact that several high officials removed by Mgeladze, notably Valerian
Bakradze, Deputy Chairman of the Georgian Council of Ministers, were personal
nominees of Beria was taken at the time as a symptom of Beria's waning
prestige in the inner circles of the Kremlin, where rising stars such as
Malenkov and Khrushchev were supplanting him in Stalin's favour.
Death of a dictator
At all events, Mgeladze and his deputy, the Georgian
Minister of State Security, N. Rukhadze, made use of the extensive files of
the Georgian MVD to accuse some of Beria's own agents of nationalist
deviation and other crimes. It is probable that these denunciations would in
time have touched the person of Beria himself. N. S. Khrushchev has said that
at the time of his death in March 1953, Stalin was planning the annihilation
of many of the veteran Politbureau members: Marshal Voroshilov was under the
extraordinary suspicion of being an English spy; Andreev had been dismissed
and relegated to limbo; 'baseless charges' had been brought against Mikoyan
and Molotov. 'It is not excluded,' Khrushchev told the 20th Party Congress,
'that had Stalin remained at the helm for another few months, Comrades
Molotov and Mikoyan would probably not have delivered any speeches at this
Congress.' For many leading Soviet statesmen and officials, Stalin's demise
thus came in the nick of time. Whether or not it was due to natural causes is
another matter.
Stalin's death removed from the world stage the most
formidable Georgian of all time, a man who combined almost superhuman
tenacity and force of character with quite subhuman cruelty and criminality.
He took over a Russia
backward and divided, and pitchforked it forcibly into the twentieth century.
By methods which cannot be condoned by any standards of human or divine
morality, he fashioned the social and industrial springboard from which the Soviet Union today is leaping irresistibly forward as
one of the two dominant world powers of our generation.
Click here to continue
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113. Russia: The Official Report of the
British Trades Union Delegation to Russia
and Caucasia, Nov. and Dec., 1924, London
1925, pp. 230-31.
114. N. A.
Berdzenishvili, edit., History of Georgia. Manual for the 8th and
9th forms, Tbilisi 1960, p. 323.
115. Boris
Pastemak, An Essay in Autobiography, London 1959, p. 114.
116. Pastemak, An
Essay in Autobiography, p. 110.
117. Pastemak, An
Essay in Autobiography, p. 111.
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