Stalin полностью

Yet another way Beria imitated Stalin was by setting himself up as sole “patron” of the arts in his domain. He was known to strut into rehearsals and summon actors and actresses for private audiences, and he made the intelligentsia understand that they existed for service to the state and panegyrics to the leadership.⁷⁴ This went fist in glove with a certain artistic preference. Whereas many Georgian Bolsheviks had argued that Shota Rustaveli was a “feudal,” and Ilya Chavchavadze a “bourgeois idealist,” Beria deemed them great national artists and had them published in new editions in huge print runs. He also made sure to assert his control over the Rustaveli Theater, his Bolshoi equivalent. (The Rustaveli’s rococo facility in the city’s heart had been completed in 1901, with money from the Armenian oil magnate Aleksandr Mantashov, at whose concern a young Jughashvili had stirred political trouble.) First, Beria chased the Meyerhold of Georgia, the Rustaveli’s high-handed, turbulent Sandro Akhmeteli (Akhmetelashvili), to Moscow (November 1935); then, when the anti-Trotskyite campaign afforded the opportunity, Beria had Akhmeteli arrested and extradited back to Georgia, charged with creating a terrorist organization in the Rustaveli. When Georgian culture took the spotlight for a ten-day festival, staged in both Leningrad and Moscow (January 4–13, 1937), Beria led the delegation and, at the Kremlin banquet (January 14), sat at the presidium table with Stalin.⁷⁵ Akhmeteli was tortured until paralyzed, and soon executed.⁷⁶

Intimidated intellectuals can be still further cowed. In Beria’s report to Georgia’s 10th Party Congress in May 1937, he had called the arrested Akhmeteli “a fascist wrecker” and warned others still at liberty. “It would not be superfluous for [Paolo] Yashvili, [Konstantin] Gamsakhurdia, [Mikheil] Javakhishvili, and [Nikolo] Mitsishvili and several others to think seriously about their activity,” Beria stated, adding that “Paolo is not being noble. . . . He is over forty now and it is time he came to his senses.”⁷⁷ (The journal Literary Georgia printed the text of Beria’s speech as if it were literature.) Beginning in late May, the Writers’ Union of Georgia held a series of presidium meetings to enforce Beria’s strictures upon itself. Long-standing animosities, jealousies, and infighting born of the intimacy of elite life in the shared courtyards off Tbilisi’s Lermontov and Griboyedov streets, and of fear, fed a mutual denunciation frenzy.⁷⁸ Davit Demetradze, a mediocre critic, excoriated the time before Beria’s reign when the Georgian classic authors Rustaveli and Chavchavadze had been banned, condemning the “leftist” extremism of the Russian and Georgian associations of proletarian writers, but also the European “bourgeois” decadence and carousing of the rightist Blue Horn symbolist poets (Yashvili and Titsian Tabidze) and the Academic Group of the novelist Gamsakhurdia. The latter, in response, noted, “I’ve committed every sin under the sun, but never with hooligans, thieves, and enemies of the people,” which induced laughter.

Stalin had sent Alexander Fadeyev, the writer-functionary, to bring back a personal report from Georgia’s 10th Party Congress. “We wrote what bothered us,” recalled Fadeyev (who had taken along an assistant). “What bothered us was that a bust of Beria already stood on the square, and the Congress members stood every time Lavrenti Pavlovich walked in.” Later, over supper at the Near Dacha, Stalin would broach with Beria the matter of the latter’s cult in Georgia. “Who’s raising the steam in my bath?” the experienced Beria was said to have asked. Stalin evidently hinted that he had gotten his information from writers. By Fadeyev’s account, Stalin let Beria read his personal letter.⁷⁹ If true, that action helped reinforce a permanent enmity between Beria and the head of the Union of Soviet Writers.