Beria ruled the three-republic South Caucasus Federation—Stalin’s homeland—like a Persian shah.19 At his well-appointed and beautifully maintained two-story villa in Krtsanisi, on a hilltop outside the Georgian capital, he served grand Sunday luncheons, in large company, of spicy Mingrelian and Georgian specialties for his favored police and party functionaries and their families, whom he invited over from their more modest cottages in the same dacha settlement. Another showcase for Beria’s gifts as host and patron, and a jumping-off point for his ingratiating visits to the southern villas of the shah of shahs (Stalin), was the dacha Beria had built for himself on a raised point above the Black Sea at Gagra. There, Beria was observed to practice photography, excel at volleyball, swim the farthest, and behave especially affably toward children. “Beria attracted everyone back then by his inner power, his ineffable magnetism, the charisma of his personality,” recalled a future daughter-in-law of Anastas Mikoyan, then a little girl, who observed a relaxed Beria at his dachas and his city apartment in 1935–36. “He was not handsome; he wore a pince-nez, which then was a rarity. His look was piercing, hawkish. His leadership, boldness, self-confidence, and pronounced Mingrelian accent stood out.”20
Beria’s takeover of the Caucasus would have been impossible without Stalin’s patronage, but he was no mere satrap. He responded especially energetically to the summons to root out “Trotskyism.” In Georgia, 30 percent of arrested Communists during the 1935–36 party verifications and card exchanges were designated as Trotskyites; by contrast, in Tatarstan, it was 7 percent.21 He would make sure to satisfy Stalin, while clearing his own path.
Beria had removed Armenak Abulyan as Armenia’s NKVD chief by promoting him to second deputy commissar of the South Caucasus secret police; Abulyan was then said to have died in a car accident (early 1935).22 Mircafar Bagirov, party boss of Azerbaijan (since December 1933), was Beria’s man, but Aghasi Khanjyan, party boss in Armenia (since 1930), was not. Beria appointed Georgi Tsaturov deputy NKVD chief in Armenia and, at supper in his apartment, tasked him with gathering compromising materials. “It is necessary to remove Khanjyan, but whoever I’ve sent has failed; it’s necessary to do this skillfully,” Beria instructed. As Tsaturov and those he recruited in Yerevan collected and manufactured the slander, Beria duplicitously distanced himself from the efforts: once, when Khanjyan was in Beria’s office and Tsaturov came by, Beria made a show of cursing his minion for giving Khanjyan trouble. “He’s a big-time figure and he must be safeguarded,” Beria said, as if Tsaturov were a rogue.23 At South Caucasus party meetings, too, Beria simulated magnanimity, pointing out that he preferred that Khanjyan correct his own mistakes (thereby reminding everyone that there were mistakes). These were ruses well known from Stalin’s repertoire, and indeed the repertoire of any practicing authoritarian, though Beria excelled at them.
Nerses (Nersik) Stepanyan (b. 1898), the director of Armenia’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and therefore Khanjyan’s subordinate, secretly wrote a memoir aimed at correcting the falsehoods of Beria’s claim to fame (his