Stalin полностью

In Georgia, Beria tried to implant his protégé Valerian Bakradze as his successor, but Stalin blocked him. Instead, on August 31, 1938, he was replaced by Candide Charkviani, the third secretary, who was thirty-one years old and would try to erect his own local machine.²⁶⁴ On August 31 in Moscow, Blyukher appeared before the Main Military Council, chaired by Voroshilov, with Budyonny, Kulik, and two other high military officers, as well as Molotov and Stalin. Frinovsky attended, too. The group roundly castigated the marshal for Lake Khasan’s high casualties and disorganization, and for false reporting. Voroshilov and Frinovsky accused him of gross incompetence “bordering on conscious defeatism.” Stalin removed Blyukher from the Far Eastern command.²⁶⁵ Voroshilov recommended Blyukher take a holiday and await his next assignment and gave him his own dacha at Bocharov Ruchei, near Lake Ritsa.²⁶⁶ On September 4, 1938, the semi-autonomous Far Eastern Army was divided into three separate armies, each subordinated directly to Voroshilov.²⁶⁷ On September 8, Stalin officially named Frinovsky naval commissar. On September 13, Beria spent nearly two hours in the Little Corner with Molotov, Zhdanov, and Yezhov, beginning past midnight.²⁶⁸ He got an office in Lubyanka on the third floor, next to Yezhov’s. On September 29, Beria would officially be named head of the NKVD Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB), the secret police within the secret police.

Pravda (October 3, 1938) published a photo of Mikheil Gelovani playing Stalin in The Man with the Gun, a film adaptation of the play about soldiers in the October Revolution. (Maxim Strauch played Lenin.) Gelovani (b. 1893), who worked at the Rustaveli, in Tbilisi, was descended from an ancient Georgian princely house. He had first played Stalin in They Wanted Peace, which also premiered in 1938 and was set in 1917, and displaced Semyon Goldstab, whom Stalin had not especially liked.²⁶⁹ With makeup and fake mustache, Gelovani resembled Stalin closely, except for his height and his thin neck (which had to be hidden), and managed to mimic Stalin’s Georgian accent to perfection. He brought the despot to life. Mikheil Chiaureli, the Georgian director and screenwriter, who had cast Gelovani, kept him from Stalin, trying to monopolize his own access. Chiaureli recalled the film’s screening in the Kremlin cinema. Stalin sat in the front row; behind him were Molotov and Voroshilov, film boss Semyon Dukelsky, and the director. After the lights came on, a long, awkward silence ensued. Stalin, silently, got up to exit. At the door, he suddenly turned and said, “I didn’t know—it turns out that I’m so charming. Well done!”²⁷⁰

Beria’s appointment to Moscow invited conversations about Stalin’s own Georgian origins. Whispers had long ago spread of a “Caucasus group” atop the regime: Stalin, Orjonikidze, Yenukidze, Mikoyan. In effect, Beria was taking Orjonikidze’s place in the inner circle. “At that time I thought that Stalin wanted a Georgian in the NKVD,” Khrushchev would recall. “We thought at the time that the whole matter was that he was from the Caucasus, a Georgian, closer to Stalin not only as a party member but as a person of the same ethnicity.”²⁷¹ In fact, Stalin detested reminders of his Georgianness, and yet he was willing to incur this risk, demonstrating just how much he prized Gelovani—and valued and needed Beria.