The USSR consisted of three levels: (1) Union republics, initially reserved for Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the South Caucasus Federation (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), then Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan; (2) autonomous republics inside Union republics for concentrated populations such as the Tatars, Bashkirs, and Yakuts in the RSFSR; the Moldavians in Ukraine; and (3) autonomous provinces, many of them in the RSFSR and the South Caucasus Federation.55 In former tsarist Turkestan, the inhabitants, who were often multilingual, had been compelled to choose one national identity, then fought over territory. The prize cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, despite populations categorized as predominantly Tajik (Persian), had gone to Uzbekistan (Turkic), thanks to Uzbek leaders’ dynamism and Tajik leaders’ fumbling.56 But then Stalin had acceded to Tajik demands for equal status, upgrading their autonomous republic in Uzbekistan to a self-standing Union republic.57 Uzbeks seized the opportunity to become a national elite and aligned their future with the central regime, coercing their cereal-growing republic toward intensive cotton production. Mosques were forcibly shuttered.58 Power was centralized in Moscow, but there were internal ethnoterritorial borders, local state institutions, vernacular official languages, and growing ranks of indigenous Communists.59 The regime fostered not nationalism per se but Soviet nations, with Communist institutions and ways of thinking.
With the “treaty republic” status, Stalin had allowed the Abkhaz to perceive themselves as akin to a Union republic but not join the USSR as a fourth constituent of the South Caucasus Federation. His dispensation stemmed from his wariness of Georgian nationalism, his admiration for Lakoba, and Abkhazia’s uniqueness as the Soviet Union’s only subtropical region. But belated collectivization in the region’s Gudauta district had provoked a mass peasant uprising.60 Lakoba negotiated a settlement without bloodshed, but Stalin terminated the “treaty republic” designation, specifying it as an “autonomous republic” in Georgia.61 This spurred further protests, including in Lakoba’s home village of Lykhny; the local party boss blamed Lakoba’s indulgence of “kulaks.”62 Lakoba managed to disperse the crowds peacefully again, promising to travel to Moscow on their behalf.63 The OGPU arrested putative ringleaders, but Lakoba did manage to see Stalin and extract an accommodation: collectivization would resume, yet exclude horses.64 Still, Stalin’s upheaval affected governing structures, too, and empowered a man who emerged as Lakoba’s cunning rivaclass="underline" Lavrenti Beria.65
“A GOOD ORGANIZER”
Beria’s Mingrelian family was descended from a feudal prince, but he was born, in 1899, to modest circumstances in a hillside village in Abkhazia. He attended Sukhum’s city school, whose subjects included Russian, Orthodox theology, arithmetic, and science. His mother, Marta, like Keke Geladze, worked as a seamstress to pay for school; Beria, also like Stalin, might have been helped by a rich patron (a textile merchant who employed Marta as a domestic). Beria joined the party after the tsar’s abdication, served in the army, and graduated from high school with honors.66 He missed the revolution, and spent part of the civil war on the wrong side: the Musavat (“Equality”) party of Azerbaijani nationalists had established an independent republic through the meddling of Ottoman and then British occupation forces, and after the British left, Beria joined Musavat counterintelligence.67 Following the Bolshevik reconquest, he was arrested. A meeting was called and Orjonikidze and others ruled that the party had likely assigned Beria to infiltrate the “bourgeois nationalists.”68 Beria enrolled at the newly established Polytechnic University, on the premises of his old high school, with a state stipend, to fulfill his dream of becoming an engineer, but Mircafar Bagirov (b. 1896), the twenty-four-year-old head of the Azerbaijan Cheka, recruited Beria and, after a few weeks, named him deputy secret police chief, at age twenty-one.69
Beria’s Soviet secret police dirty work provoked numerous investigations for abuses.70 “I feel that everyone dislikes me,” he wrote to Orjonikidze (May 1930). “In the minds of many comrades, I am the prime cause of all the unpleasantries that befell comrades over the recent period, and I figure almost like a stool pigeon.”71 Underhandedly, Beria attacked everyone else, but he felt perpetually put upon—just like Stalin.
In fact, Beria had become a legend. His early top boss, Solomon Mogilevsky, chairman of the South Caucasus OGPU, had died in a mysterious plane crash whose cause could not be established by three separate commissions of inquiry.72 His next boss, Ivan Pavlunovsky, pleaded at staff meetings for his deputy Beria to cease the intrigues against him.73 Stalin replaced Pavlunovsky with Redens, an ethnic Pole, who knew none of the Caucasus languages or personnel. In the wee hours on March 29, 1931, after a sloshy birthday gathering for Beria at a private apartment, a drunk Redens departed—with no bodyguard detail. He made his way to the building of a young female OGPU operative who had previously rebuffed his advances; Redens tried to break down her door, and neighbors called the regular police, who arrested the disorderly drunk. His identity was established only at the station house. Word of the humiliation spread inordinately quickly. Beria immediately phoned Stalin, who transferred Redens to Belorussia (and shortly thereafter to Ukraine). Stalin was said to have delighted in Beria’s artfulness at compromising the dictator’s hapless brother-in-law.74 Beria was promoted to chief of the South Caucasus OGPU, overseeing Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, including Abkhazia.75 Mężyński noted, on the tenth anniversary of the Georgian branch of the OGPU, that “comrade Beria always finds his bearings precisely, even in the most complex circumstances.”76
Lakoba, six years Beria’s senior, had everything the young secret police operative did not: heroic prerevolutionary and civil war exploits, colossal popularity among the masses, and intimate ties to Stalin.77 But Stalin’s southern holidays were beset by epic local infighting: Georgians against Armenians, Georgians against Georgians. Stalin blamed locals’ ability to appeal to Orjonikidze, and wrote to Kaganovich that “if we don’t intervene, these people by their stupidity may ruin things.”78 Orjonikidze was pushing for the restoration as party boss of Mamiya Orakhelashvili, a protégé (who had the university diploma Beria coveted), while Lakoba pushed for Beria (and sent him a transcript of a three-way conversation he’d had with Stalin and Orjonikidze).79 Lakoba midwifed a three-day Beria visit to Abkhazia to see Stalin.80 Beria soon got appointed first secretary of Georgia and concurrently second secretary of the South Caucasus Federation (under Orakhelashvili).81 He could now see Stalin during the dictator’s holidays without special intercession.82 In summer 1932, Beria poured poison in the dictator’s ear about Orakhelashvili.83 The latter begged Stalin, and especially Orjonikidze, to be relieved of his post as Beria’s nominal superior.84