Stalin полностью

Lakoba had chased Alexei Agrba, secret police plenipotentiary, from Abkhazia, but Beria, using his power as head of the South Caucasus party committee, appointed Agrba first secretary of the Abkhazia provincial party committee, which gave Lakoba endless grief. During the summer of the anti-Trotskyite campaign and Spanish intervention in 1936, Stalin, on holiday in Sochi, visited his new dacha at Myussera, in Abkhazia, specially built by Lakoba, but the latter was nowhere to be seen. Stalin had his staff inquire, and Lakoba answered that Agrba had not granted him permission to exit the Abkhaz capital and that Stalin had instructed him (Lakoba) to submit to party discipline. Stalin granted permission, and directed Beria to recall Agrba to Tbilisi.³⁸ But on August 17, 1936, Beria managed to get Stalin to have the USSR central executive committee “Georgify” toponyms in Abkhazia: Sukhum officially became Sukhumi, a blow for Lakoba, who had refused even to distribute vehicle license plates in Abkhazia because they said “Georgia.”

Lakoba and Sarie attended the 8th Congress of Soviets in Moscow (November 25–December 5, 1936). Hearsay indicates that Stalin, as per usual, sent a car to the Metropole Hotel to fetch them for dinner and that, in connection with the new Soviet constitution, Lakoba lobbied Stalin to transfer Abkhazia to the Krasnodar region of the RSFSR, out of Georgia, while bitterly complaining, as ever, about Beria.³⁹ Be that as it may, Beria summoned Lakoba to stand before the Georgian “party active,” scheduled for December 28, 1936, and Lakoba set out from Sukhumi on December 26 and checked into Tbilisi’s Hotel Orient, on Rustaveli Prospect.⁴⁰ The next day, he shared a meal (either lunch or supper; the sources conflict) with Beria and Nino at Beria’s home or, according to Lakoba’s driver and bodyguard Davlet Kandalia, at the home of the founder of a Georgian dance ensemble (Sukhishvili). After the meal, Lakoba attended a December 27 performance of the first Georgian ballet, Mzechabuki (“Sun-Like Youth”), composed by Andria Balanchivadze (brother of George Balanchine), at the Tbilisi’s National Opera and Ballet Theater. Lakoba suddenly fell ill and, after the first act, returned just down the street to the Orient. There he died, at 4:20 a.m. (December 28).⁴¹

After Beria and his goons arrived on the scene, a doctor diagnosed a heart attack.⁴² Lakoba had blood problems and was thought to be taking anticoagulants. A year-old confidential medical report from the Kremlin hospital, in Moscow (Vozdvizhenka, 6), had diagnosed him with flu and inflamed erysipelas in the area of the left auricle, which had spread to the nearby parts of the ear and the upper part of the neck, with chronic festering leading to his severe hearing reduction. It also found arteriosclerosis and cardiosclerosis (induration of the heart).⁴³ Still, whispers about a poisoning emerged immediately. Lakoba was forty-three years old.

Beria buried Lakoba with full honors, doubtless after consultation with the Little Corner. The body was brought to Abkhazia on December 29, 1936, and lay in state in Sukhumi’s State Drama Theater. The Abkhaz provincial party committee bureau resolved to name the Sukhumi hydroelectric station, then under construction, after him and to establish ten student stipends in his name at the Sukhumi Pedagogical Institute, publishing word in the press, and to give his Lincoln automobile and a dacha under construction to his family.⁴⁴ Two days later, 13,000 people attended a state funeral; Beria served as a pallbearer. Lakoba was placed in a special crypt in the city’s botanical garden.⁴⁵ Stalin did not send condolences. An NKVD squad from Tbilisi was rifling the Abkhaz archives. Already in January 1937, Lakoba’s portraits began to be removed. His grave was moved outside the city proper, to the Mikhailov Cemetery; the prominent crypt was destroyed. Some whispered that Lakoba’s entire innards—stomach, kidneys, brains, and even larynx—had been removed, and his body burned.⁴⁶ Lakoba’s widow went to Moscow (staying with another recent widow, Zinaida Orjonikidze), but failed to gain an audience with Stalin.

Lakoba’s suspicious death, after Khanjyan’s suicide, enhanced Beria’s mystique and power. Lakoba had been Stalin’s close friend (and midwifed Beria’s introduction to him), but Stalin appears not to have investigated Beria’s plausible role in Lakoba’s death, instead colluding in Beria’s conversion of the genuinely popular Lakoba into a posthumous enemy of the people. He was accused of national deviation, having allowed Trotsky “to escape” into exile in Turkey in 1929, and of having plotted to kill Stalin and Beria. (A man who showed off his marksmanship in Stalin’s presence during target practice with his Brauning scarcely needed to “plot” an assassination.) Beria would now systematically annihilate Lakoba’s kin and associates.⁴⁷ Agrba, the Beria creature, was reinstalled as Abkhazia’s party boss.⁴⁸