Everywhere else, associates who had scattered to other provinces were rounded up and tortured to incriminate sitting provincial party bosses. Beria alone enjoyed powers of extradition, partly because of his own audacity, partly owing to the circumstance that his enemies were also Stalin’s enemies. Orjonikidze stood at the center of the Stalin-Beria bond. Orakhelashvili further testified that “I made slanderous remarks about Stalin as the party’s dictator and I considered his politics to be excessively harsh. In this regard, Sergo Orjonikidze exerted great influence on me; in 1936, when he was talking with me about Stalin’s attitude toward the leaders of the Leningrad opposition at that time (Zinoviev, Kamenev, . . .), he said that, with his extreme cruelty, Stalin was leading the party to a split and in the end would drive the country into a blind alley.”58
Beria had even been able to win a tug-of-war with Yezhov. Beria had arrested Polikarp “Budu” Mdivani, an old Stalin nemesis, but “testimony” in Moscow had implicated Mdivani, so Yezhov had forced his extradition to the capital, where he was reinterrogated at Lubyanka and “confessed.”59 But Beria evidently lobbied Stalin, for Mdivani was returned to Georgia. On April 12, 1937, Beria sent Stalin protocols of thirteen different interrogation sessions with Mdivani, extracted in Tbilisi’s Metekhi fortress prison (where Stalin had done time under the tsarist regime). The dossier totaled more than 200 pages, and Stalin underlined several passages, then sent copies to Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov.60 At Georgia’s 10th Party Congress (May 15–21, 1937), Beria, under a portrait of himself, accused Mdivani and associates of having “chattered about a supposedly ‘unbearable regime,’ . . . about the use of some kind of ‘Chekist’ methods, about how the condition of the toilers in Georgia is worsening.”61
Beria attempted to draw boundaries around some of his people. “We should fight all forms of counterrevolution; we must at the same time act wisely, in order to avoid falling from one extreme into another,” he told Georgia’s 10th Congress. “A blanket approach to all former nationalists and Trotskyists, some of whom happened by chance to be in their ranks but abandoned Trotskyism a long time ago, can only damage the cause of fighting with real Trotskyites, wreckers and spies.” But pressure came from the redoubtable Mekhlis in the form of an article by Pravda’s Tbilisi correspondent following the last day of the Georgian congress (May 22, 1937), which reported “insufficient criticism and self-criticism” and “not a few Hallelujah speeches.” Again, Beria differentiated himself: on May 27, he telegrammed Stalin about the “incorrect and tendentious” article, insisting that self-criticism had been extensive not only at the Georgian congress but at the lead-up district and city party conferences, whose intent, he wrote, had been “to profoundly and correctly explain to the party masses the decisions of the March [1937] plenum of the Central Committee and the speech of comrade Stalin.”62
Beria even informed Stalin how he had eavesdropped on the communication with editors in Moscow of the said Pravda correspondent, Mikhail Mezenin, as if he were a foreign agent on Georgian soil.63 Branding Pravda’s reportage a concerted effort to “discredit the work of the congress of the Communist party (Bolsheviks) of Georgia,” Beria requested that the Central Committee direct the newspaper to familiarize itself with the materials of the Georgian congress and publish a correct report, enclosing transcripts for Stalin. It is hard to imagine another regional party boss engaging in, let alone getting away with, such pushback. Beria was permitted to publish his own article in Pravda (June 5, 1937) lauding the Georgian congress for its strict adherence to the party line against Trotskyists and other enemies. In the meantime, on May 31, the first of many enemy lists signed by Stalin and Molotov had arrived in Tbilisi, with 139 names under “first category” (execution) and 39 under “second category” (ten years).64 This direct order Beria could not resist.
A DESPOT’S PREFERENCES
