POWERS OF EXTRADITION
Beria had to request Central Committee authorization not just for appointments of province, county, and city party officials, but also factory directors and candidates for local soviet elections.49 Orgburo directives (of October 15 and December 26, 1936) now required regional party machines to submit six reports a year on their activities, an effort to enforce compliance with central directives, a Stalin obsession. Beria made sure that the Georgian party complied, submitting its full summary report for 1936 after making lower-level organizations do the same, but he used the occasion to point out to Stalin (February 17, 1937) that the new paper mandates had not released locals from submitting other required detailed reports or statistical summaries to the orgburo and various Central Committee departments. “The Central Committee of the Communist party of Georgia is not certain that such reporting requirements could bring any kind of benefit,” Beria wrote. “Instead of the utterly necessary permanent living link between lower and upper party organizations, a written paper link is established, which takes up a lot of party organizations’ time.” The businesslike critique and accompanying illustrations were spot-on, yet astonishing. Stalin chose not to discipline the impudence.50
Beria incarnated the terror-facilitated ascendancy of the NKVD vis-à-vis the party, but he had achieved that status years before. During stays in Moscow, he had gotten his own apartment in the NKVD residences on Troitsk Alley (near Samotyochnaya Square), where raucous drinking, singing, dancing, and women were observed in abundance, and which he retained after switching to the party apparatus.51 Yagoda had continued to send a car from the central NKVD garage to pick up the Caucasus party boss. When Yagoda was arrested, Beria easily maneuvered the changeover to Yezhov.52 He had not worked for Yagoda over the course of many years, and when Yezhov had taken a holiday at Georgia’s Abastumani sanatorium, Beria had played the consummate host; Yezhov reciprocated on Beria’s visits to Moscow.53 Yezhov knew that Beria received invitations to the Near Dacha. At the February–March 1937 plenum in Moscow, Beria had to wait until one of the last speaking slots (morning session on March 4). He followed his winning approach of stating, multiple times, how comrade Stalin was correct.54
After the plenum, on March 20, Mekhlis, at
Beria had long detested how old Caucasus party comrades who despised him would gather at Orjonikidze’s Kremlin apartment or dacha near Moscow (first in Volynskoe, then at Sosnovka) to badmouth him—another circumstance Beria shared with Stalin. But seizing the opportunity afforded by the terror, Beria had his Caucasus operative Vsevolod Merkulov go after the former Caucasus higher-ups now outside the region.55 Levan Gogoberidze was arrested in the Azov region and extradited to Beria’s custody. Bogdan Kobulov, the Beria protégé who headed the Georgian NKVD, reported in November 1936 that Gogoberidze had confessed to disseminating “counterrevolutionary and slanderous fabrications about the past of Comrade Beria . . . on the basis of what he had heard from Comrade Orjonikidze.”56 Mamiya Orakhelashvili, whom Beria had replaced as South Caucasus party boss and who had received sanctuary in Moscow as deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, thanks to Orjonikidze, was exiled to Astrakhan in April 1937, several weeks after Orjonikidze’s suicide; then he was arrested (June 26, 1937) and extradited to Beria. “I learned,” Orakhelashvili was said to have testified, “that Sergo Orjonikidze had been joined by Levan Gogoberidze, Pyotr Anishvili, and Nestor Lakoba in waging the most active struggle against the secretary of the Communist party of Georgia, Lavrenti Beria, deliberately spreading slanderous and disturbing fabrications about him.”57