On December 10, 1937, in the Georgian National Theater of Opera and Ballet, Beria delivered a Yezhov “Center of Centers” speech, detailing a vast plot in the Caucasus, linking poets, theater directors, engineers, and functionaries who aimed to spread typhoid in Kakhetia (eastern Georgia), sell off Ajarisa to Turkey, and assassinate him. Georgia’s intelligentsia responded with “prolonged applause.”99 Ten days later, Beria celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Cheka, also in the Rustaveli, with his devoted gang (Merkulov, Goglidze, Kobulov, Vladimir Dekanozov, Solomon Milstein). The year culminated in celebrations of what Beria designated, with Stalin’s approval, the 750th anniversary of Shota Rustaveli and his twelfth-century Georgian epic
THE RECKONING
Georgia’s population in 1937 was about 3.4 million, or 2 percent of the Soviet total, but of the approximately 40,000 names on the extant execution lists submitted by Yezhov and signed by Stalin, 3,485 names (9 percent) were from Georgia.101 But the extent to which those names reflected Beria’s input, versus Yezhov’s or Stalin’s, remains unclear. About 21,000 were sentenced by troika in the “mass operations” (three quarters were illiterate or barely literate), while another 3,165 were sentenced by the military collegium, numbers in line with the pattern of Soviet quotas.102 But Ukraine, with nine times the population of Georgia, had almost forty-five times more people arrested than Georgia did in the national operations (89,700 to 2,100).103 Of the 644 Communist party delegates to Georgia’s 10th Party Congress, 425 would be arrested and sentenced either to death or the Gulag—66 percent, a figure in line with the destruction of the delegates to the USSR 17th Party Congress.104 Scholars assert that one quarter of the Writers’ Union of Georgia was exterminated, a very rough estimate.105 In a report (October 28, 1937) about the unmasking of a counterrevolutionary espionage group of writers centered around Javakhishvili, Beria noted that sixty-one local NKVD operatives had been arrested.106 And there was still a year of the bloodbath to go.107
This horrific picture was less sanguinary than in Armenia, which had one third the population of Georgia but suffered 4,530 executions in 1937–38, out of 8,837 arrests for counterrevolution. (Just one person had been executed in Soviet Armenia in 1936.)108 Matters were bloodier still in Western Siberia, where at least 300,000 people were executed in 1937–38, about 4 percent of the adult male population there.109 Proportionally, the slaughterhouse in the Soviet Far East was perhaps greater still.110 Overall, Georgia had neither the softest nor the hardest terror.111
Abkhazia, the autonomous republic in Georgia where the ethnic Mingrelian Beria had been born, continued to be his special target.112 Under him, the share of ethnic Abkhaz in the party declined from more than 21 percent to 15 percent. Ethnic Russians declined as well, from 29 to 16 percent, while ethnic Georgians in the Abkhaz party rose from 26 to 48 percent.113 In the autonomous republic’s overall population, ethnic Abkhaz would shrink from around 28 percent (in 1926) to 18 percent (by 1939), thanks to a state-sponsored mass influx of Georgians, especially Mingrelian settlers. In 1938, when the rest of the USSR’s minority nations were switching from Latin letters to Cyrillic, Beria forced the Abkhaz to switch to the Georgian alphabet.114 Beria had also written to Stalin complaining that the Muslim Ajarians had been designated a separate nation for the 1937 census, arguing that they “shared the same language, territory, economic life, and culture with Georgians” (omitting their Muslim religion) and requested a correcting directive.115 Such nationalization efforts by party bosses in other national republics could have provoked punishment for “national deviation.”