Hundreds more would be shot, none of whom had any link to the murder. (Union-wide, as many as 6,500 people might have been arrested and charged under the December 1 antiterror law in the first month alone.)147 “It’s hard to believe that in the twentieth century there is a corner of Europe where medieval barbarians have taken up residence, where savage concepts are accompanied so strangely by science, art, and culture,” Nina Lugovskaya, an atypical fifteen-year-old student in Moscow, the daughter of a persecuted “bourgeois” economist, recorded in her diary (December 30). “To call Nikolayev a coward! He went willingly to his death for what he believed in, he was better than all those so-called leaders of the working class put together!”148
REWRITING THE CAUCASUS
Beria had been pressing his minions in Tiflis to produce a Stalin hagiography. He had ordered systematic gathering of “recollections” of Stalin in the underground years and appointed Toroshelidze, chairman of the Writers’ Union of Georgia, Tiflis University rector, and director of the Stalin Institute, to galvanize the work. The “reminiscences” were assembled, but the “scholarly” biography did not materialize.149 Lakoba, meanwhile, had been active, too. Hashim Smyrba, an old brigand, had once hidden Stalin in his hut a few miles outside Batum, in the Muslim region of Ajaristan, in 1901–2, when Stalin and his accomplices, disguised with veils to look like Muslim women, transported illegal leaflets to Batum in fruit baskets. Hashim had died in 1922, at age eighty-one. Lakoba had an ethnographer collect material and forwarded to Stalin a pamphlet,
Playfully, the pamphlet noted that Hashim and other villagers had surmised that “Soso” was counterfeiting money and asked for some, but the business turned out to be revolutionary leaflets. Hashim: “You’re a good man, Soso. Only it’s a pity that you are not a Muslim.” Stalin: “And what would happen if I were a Muslim?” Hashim: “If you converted to Islam, I would give you in marriage seven beauties the likes of which you probably never, ever saw. Do you want to be a Muslim?” “Comrade Stalin answered with a smile, ‘OK!’ and shook Hashim’s hand.” (Stalin ended up being imprisoned.)151
Lakoba wrote the preface to the Hashim pamphlet, emphasizing that Stalin, too, was simple, close to the masses—a winning formula.152 By contrast, Beria had a far more ambitious and difficult aim—not two years in Batum, but the entire Caucasus before 1917, and falsification of a past that many people knew firsthand.153 One of those people was Yenukidze, who was the godfather of the deceased Nadya by virtue of his acquaintance with her father, the worker-revolutionary Sergei Alliluyev. Yenukidze was also a founding member of the Baku group of the party (spring 1901) and had established the illegal printing press in the Caucasus—code-named “Nino” (Nina in Russian), with his cousin Trifon—that had reprinted the exiled Lenin’s illegal
LAUGHTER