Stalin полностью

Yet another official inconvenient to Beria was dead. Some Caucasus officials, as well as Armenian émigrés, many of whom viewed Khanjyan as a patriot, suspected that Beria, in his own office, had shot him in cold blood. But a visiting Moscow party Control Commission sat in the very next room and would have been able to hear and then observe such an incident. In fact, Khanjyan left suicide notes, at least one of which his wife accepted as her husband’s handwriting. Beria was unscrupulous, but more calculating than impulsive. Khanjyan’s removal as party boss of Armenia, in any case, was imminent. The relentless hounding and arrest preparations by Beria’s henchmen were enough to drive someone to shoot himself.²⁷

Beria informed Stalin on the high-frequency phone. The South Caucasus party bureau reassembled on July 10, for six hours, and resolved to telegram Stalin requesting a plenipotentiary to investigate. “The Central Committee,” Stalin replied, “considers it unnecessary to send its own representative to ascertain the circumstances of Khanjyan’s suicide, since in this matter everything is clear and no investigation is required.”²⁸ Beria went on the offensive. On July 11, 1936, Dawn of the East announced that Khanjyan had taken his own life and labeled the act “a manifestation of cowardice especially unworthy of a leader of a party organization,” while further noting that Khanjyan had “committed errors, demonstrating insufficient vigilance in the case of the discovery of nationalist, counterrevolutionary, and Trotskyite groups,” and suffered from “a severe form of tuberculosis.”²⁹ Khanjyan was buried without public ceremony under a cement grave in Yerevan; Armenian officials were swept up in arrests, some while allegedly trying to escape into Iran.³⁰ On July 20, Dawn of the East, under Beria’s byline, carried a vicious attack on Stepanyan that announced the unmasking of “Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist groups” in Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan. “A Communist who shows conciliation and rotten liberalism in the face of double-dealing,” Beria wrote, “commits the greatest crime before the party, Soviet power, and our motherland.”³¹

On August 19, 1936, the opening day of the first public trial in Moscow of Trotskyites, Pravda reprinted Beria’s article—“Turn the Enemies of Socialism to Ashes!” This was a lightning-bolt Kremlinological signal of his standing. Between 1935 and 1938, Beria would have eight articles printed in Pravda, unheard of for a provincial party secretary.³²

Stalin’s anti-Trotskyite campaign arrived like a gift for Beria. In Armenia in September 1936, a Beria tool (Amatouni Amatouni) was duly advanced from second secretary to party boss. It was the next month that Beria, on Stalin’s orders, arrested Orjonikidze’s brother Papuliya in Tbilisi—sweet revenge: no more “Dear Sergo” groveling.³³ The Mingrelian could further consolidate his grip over the Caucasus. Of course, just about every local party boss interpreted the eruption of the enemy campaign self-servingly: scores to be settled, kudos to be won, apartments and dachas to be freed up and doled out as patronage. But across the Union, of the sixty-five top bosses, few would survive: Zhdanov (Leningrad), Khrushchev (Moscow, Ukraine), Beria (Georgia), and his patron turned client, Bagirov (Azerbaijan). Both of the latter were career secret police officials running party machines.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Stalin liked to needle Beria—who prided himself on being a sportsman—about how the diminutive “Deaf One,” Nestor Lakoba, was a superior rifle shot and billiards player. Stalin would take Lakoba in his car, for all to see, and make Beria ride separately. At a speech in 1936 in Sukhum, Lakoba could say, rightfully, “The Supreme Leader of our party, the Supreme Leader of the working masses of the whole world, this supreme person, this extraordinary comrade, the friend of all toilers, Comrade Stalin, visits us almost every year.”³⁴ Beria constantly connived to trip Lakoba up.³⁵ On a Sunday afternoon in spring 1936, Beria showed up unannounced at the Lakoba compound in Sukhum, 180 miles from Tbilisi, with his wife, Nino, as if it were a social visit, and started asking questions based on a denunciation from the father of a woman (Adile) who said she had been kidnapped, mountain style, as a teenage bride (she married one of the five brothers of Lakoba’s wife, Sarie).³⁶ Another time, when Stalin and Beria were guests in Lakoba’s native village and Sarie prepared the food, Beria switched his plate with Stalin’s at the last minute, as if she might try to poison the leader.³⁷