61. The status change was formally approved at the 6th Congress of Soviets of Abkhazia on Feb. 11, 1931, although it had not been included on the agenda. Dzhonua et al.,
62. Blauvelt, “Abkhazia Patronage,” 227–8 (citing Arkhiv TsK KPG, f. 14, op. 6, d. 267: “Informsvodki Abkhaz. GPU: dokladnaia zapiska raikoma o rukovodstve obkoma vo antosovetskikh vystupleniakh krest’ian v Gudautskom raione, 177–9).
63. Mamiya Orakhelashvili and Beria arrived, but peasant delegations insisted on speaking to Lakoba. They wanted permission to emigrate to Turkey, like many of their nineteenth-century forebears. Blauvelt, “Abkhazia Patronage,” 227 (citing secret police reports). Danilov, “Tragediia Abkhazskogo naroda.”
64. Ethnic Russians, who constituted just 10 percent of Abkhazia’s population in the early 1930s, accounted for more than 40 percent of the local apparatus, versus around 9 percent ethnic Abkhaz. Lakoba also got the apparatus in Moscow to renew calls for indigenization of Abkhazia’s apparatus. But the ongoing party purges pushed in the opposite direction. Sagariia,
65. Beria denounced the Feb. 1931 Abkhaz “demonstration” to Stalin, suggesting that Lakoba had encouraged the peasants to rebel and that Lakoba’s mother had stood in the front, so the secret police troops could not shoot. Lakoba, “‘Ia Koba, a ty Lakoba,’” 58.
66. Beria’s mother, Marta Jakeli, and her second husband, Pavel Beria, had two other children: Lavrenti’s elder brother died at age two of smallpox; his sister Akesha, or Anna (b. 1905), was rendered a deaf mute by childhood measles. His father died when Lavrenti was school age and, like Stalin, Beria was raised by his mother, who, like Keke, had ambitions for her boy. (She would later marry a Georgian Jew, Levan Loladze.) At age sixteen, Beria left for the oil boomtown Baku and enrolled in its high school for mechanical-building studies, spending a summer working for Alfred Nobel’s concern. Reliable material on Beria’s biography is scant. See Danilov, “K biografii L. Beriia”; Popov and Oppokov, “Berievshchina” (1989, no. 5), 39n1 (citing Chekryzhev), (1990, no. 1), 70–2. See also Popov and Oppokov, “Berievshchina”(1990, no. 3): 81–2; (“Berievshchina” was reprinted in Nekrasov,
67. Beria’s arrests, releases, and rearrests remain murky. Popov and Oppokov, “Berievshchina,” no. 1 (1990): 77–8; Toptygin,
68. RGASPI, f. 85, op. 29, d. 414, l. 3 (Beria letter to Orjonikidze); “Ochen’ vysoko tsenit t. Beria,” 163–5 (APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 788, l. 114–5ob; RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 788, l. 114–16ob, Pavlunovsky to Stalin, June 25, 1937);