The Trial in Tiflis
NICOLAEVSKY, BORIS I.
The Trial in Tiflis Purging Georgian MVD men, Kremlin chiefs admit that trials of top Communists in 1930s were frauds, but blame Beria for their own and Stalin's deeds By Boris I. Nicolaevsky ON...
...Beria of course carried out a bloody purge in Georgia—perhaps even more ruthlessly than was the case elsewhere in the Soviet Union...
...To corroborate this charge, the report cites people who had been liquidated allegedly because Beria "feared exposure" by them...
...This group included Yenukidze, Karakhan, Larin and others...
...Khrushchev was telling the Turks that the Soviet regime is prepared to unload on the person of Beria responsibility for Soviet behavior toward Turkey under Stalin, behavior which turned Turkish benevolent neutrality toward the Soviet Union into irreconcilable enmity and NATO membership...
...But it was impossible to pin responsibility for their liquidation on Beria...
...Buachidze, commander of the Georgian Division of the Red Army...
...but also why the regime had to keep the Tiflis trial secret from the entire Soviet Union outside of Georgia...
...his wife Maria, former Georgian People's Commissar for Education...
...who had fought against Zhdanov alongside Beria...
...Stalin did so wish...
...Stalin's partiality to Beria was at the same time one reason for Yezhov and Poskrebyshev (the real "godfather" of the whole Yezhovshchina) to launch their fight against him...
...Such jurisdiction was, in fact, exercised in all the Georgian trials of the Yezhovshchina: the case of Budu Mdivani and other Georgian Government officials in the early period...
...The only explanation is that the present "collective leadership" wanted to show all Georgia that the Soviet regime in Moscow and the Soviet Army, headed by Russians and Ukrainians, were liberating it from the terrorism imposed for decades by Beria and his Georgian "accomplices...
...And these learned about it even more directly...
...The regime permitted such Georgians to voice loud approval of the sentences...
...The reason: The Politburo, largely on Ordzhonikidze's initiative, had adopted a decision countermanding the Supreme Soviet Military Collegium's decree which condemned Zinoviev, Kamenev and others and turned Rykov and Bukharin over to the courts...
...In addition, the report maintains that Beria waged a struggle "for a number of years" against an "outstanding figure in the Communist party and the Soviet state, Sergo Ordzhonikidze," and speaks of Beria's "terroristic persecution" of "members of Ordzhonikidze's family and his close friends...
...Moreover, this Yezhovshchina is still the sorest spot in the memory of the entire Soviet Communist elite...
...The so-called "Leningrad trial" of Victor Abakumov, Minister of Stale Security from 1946 to 1951, and several close collaborators—December 1954...
...The Kremlin leaders had called specters from the grave of which they were themselves afraid, for even the examples cited in the Tiflis report show that great responsibility for "terroristic persecution" lies with the present "collective leaders," to say nothing of Stalin...
...In the continuing struggle at the Kremlin summit to gain influence with this elite, various groups have been trying to saddle their opponents with responsibility for past "terroristic persecution" of Party militants...
...The Communist industrial managers had suffered in 1949...
...Even more interesting conclusions emerge from the Tiflis remarks on the death of Ordzhonikidze...
...Heretofore, there does not seem to have been a single departure from this rule in the judicial practice of the Georgian Republic...
...The Ryumin trial was inspired by Malenkov...
...Beria came to power in Georgia at the end of 1931...
...Point 7 was a secondary charge in the Leningrad trial of Abakumov et al...
...Many of the top-ranking Party functionaries today experienced personally the "criminal methods of investigation" now mentioned in the Tiflis report...
...Aware that Beria was becoming Stalin's favorite, they were attempting to head him off...
...Khrushchev made this statement to the Turkish Ambassador at a Moscow banquet on November 1. Significantly, the Moscow censor permitted foreign correspondents to report this "private conversation" between the First Secretary of the Soviet Commu-nist party and the Turkish Ambassador...
...As a matter of fact, Point 7 could easily have been introduced...
...The Soviet regime could easily have turned the case over to the Georgian Supreme Court, or, even handling the case through the Supreme Court of the USSR, could have found submissive Georgian judges...
...Not a line appeared about the trial in the Moscow or provincial press—even in such neighboring organs as the Baku Worker or the Erivan Communist...
...This bloody specter having been summoned from its grave, it will be difficult to drive it back...
...The charges also are revealing...
...What has been said explains not only why, in order to discredit Beria in the eyes of the Georgian Party elite, it was necessary to trouble the shades of the Yezhovshchina victims...
...Beria had carefully protected his men...
...then supreme in the Moscow MGB...
...During the Yezhovshchina...
...since it was clear to knowing Communists that this purge marked the opening of a long campaign against Beria himself which, proceeding through various ups and downs, culminated in his execution in December 1953...
...and Nikolai Maximovich Rukhadze, former Georgian Minister of State Security...
...First of all...
...Ordzhonikidze, originally a Stalin man who had done much to help him to power, had since the early 1930s come to balk at Stalin's insistence on resorting to executions in dealing with party oppositionists...
...but the basic count against Abakumov was his fight against the "Zhdanovites...
...of the sentences in the Rykov-Bukharin trial, and indeed of all the sentences handed down during the Yezhovshchina...
...All the judges were Russians, the prosecutor was a Ukrainian (Rudenko), and even the defense attorneys, judging from their names, were Russians...
...Apart from these events in 1952, there was no other "terroristic persecution" of Georgian Communist chiefs in the years Beria headed the Soviet NKVD-MVD...
...These were Mamia Orakhelashvili, Secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee in 1926-31...
...Now the same type of charge is being directed at "agents of Beria" by his former foes...
...then head of the Georgian MGB and an old collaborator of Beria's, in those months was trying to switch to the side of Ignatiev...
...No data that were at all convincing existed over the last fifteen years...
...Some of the Beria men then arrested were liquidated even before Stalin's death (for example...
...The new trial in some respects repeats the earlier patterns, but there are also highly significant new features which help illuminate the struggle now raging at the Kremlin summit...
...until then chief OGPU representative for Transcaucasia, was named to replace Orakhelashvili as secretary of both the Transcaucasian Regional Committee and the Georgian Central Committee...
...In recent decades, outward judicial forms have been more carefully observed: and even in the great purge trials of the 1930s, known as the "Yezhovshchina," no audience expressions of approval were permitted...
...This was calculated...
...This is a gross etror...
...No one thus far has brought up the persecution of ordinary Soviet citizens...
...The Tiflis trial was the first of the post-Stalin trials in which the question of the Great Purges was raised —raised cautiously, but raised all the same...
...shot in July 1954 for attempting to organize the so-called "Jewish doctors" case and to launch a "second Yezhovshchina" in the last months of Stalin's life...
...On October 31 of that year, the Party Central Committee in Moscow had found, on the basis of Beria's report, "political distortions" in Communist activity in Transcaucasia...
...Beria, as de jacto boss of Transcaucasia, quickly brought the whole Party machine completely under his thumb...
...The only Georgians sat on the prisoners' bench (though there were also Russians and an Armenian among the defendants...
...Now the case of Rapava, Rukhadze et al...
...This was the fourth trial of leading figures in Stalin's terror machine to be publicized in the last two years...
...Rukhadze's attempt failed, and he was dismissed (June or July 1952) and then arrested...
...the purpose of the Tiflis trial was to influence opinion among the Soviet elite in Georgia—and only in Georgia...
...For example: Orakhelashvili, now exonerated as a victim of Beria, was shot not in Tiflis...
...The Party apparatus was purged not only of known oppositionists, but of people who were merely suspected of insufficient devotion to Beria personally...
...and Bedia, head of the Tiflis branch of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute...
...the case of Magaloshvili and other officials in the mid-1930s...
...The only attempt at "terroristic persecution" of Party stalwarts in Georgia between 1938 and 1953 came in 1952, with the dismissal and arrest of Charkviani, Secretary of the Georgian Party Central Committee since 1939...
...the official report specifically notes that "the sentence met with unanimous approval from those in the courtroom...
...who urged the court to dispense "merciless justice" (e.g., at the Socialist Revolutionary trial of 1922), but this was never mentioned in official trial reports...
...The organizers of this trial belonged to the Khrushchev-Bulganin camp...
...The Tiflis trial report discusses in unprecedented detail the "terroristic persecution" carried out by the chiefs of the Tiflis NKVD-MVD...
...Charkviani, whose name has not appeared in the newspapers since 1952...
...Furthermore, there was not a single Georgian among the judges...
...While striking openly at Beria, they were also aiming at Malenkov...
...In connection with the Tiflis trial, some commentators have alleged that Orakhelaslivili was a Georgian "deviationial" who opposed Stalin's nationalities policy...
...and only the Yezhovshchina could illustrate his "terroristic persecution" of Party stalwarts...
...The others were: -The trial of Beria and his chief lieutenants—December 1953...
...The same trial report was published in the Tiflis Dawn of the East on November 22...
...This point, covering "industrial sabotage," was the only one cited in the trial of Ryumin...
...All the persons named above perished in 1937-38, when Beria was Secretary of the Georgian Party...
...Consequently, the purge strengthened his Party apparatus...
...This is probable—but such material could hurt Ordzhonikidze only if Stalin wished to destroy him...
...1937...
...The trial of Mikhail Ryumin...
...Six of them had been shot, while two lesser defendants had received long prison terms...
...Indeed, the Ordzhonikidze case was one of the most important elements in the whole Kremlin struggle which surrounded the Yezhovshchina...
...In effect, it acknowledges the fraudulence, even under Soviet law...
...Whereas official reports of the three preceding trials flooded the entire press and radio throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, news of the Tiflis trial appeared only in Georgian newspapers and on the Tiflis radio...
...The trial was public, and representatives of the ruling elite of Soviet Georgia filled the courtroom...
...Ryumin and Poskrebyshev...
...Beria could act this way because he felt sure of support from Stalin, whose exceptional favor he possessed for many years...
...But the key to the puzzle may well be the recent pronouncement by Khrushchev that Soviet relations with Turkey had deteriorated as a result of the provocational acts of Beria and his accomplices...
...The trial report does not hint at what constituted this treason...
...Now there was plenty of "terroristic persecution" in Georgia during those years, but it was directed at ordinary citizens and non-Party people, not at members of the Communist elite...
...In these sections, the report sometimes approaches the indignant tone which Beria used in April 1953 to describe the MGB's behavior in the "Jewish doctors" case...
...Rapava...
...Whereas Ryumin was shot for acts performed in 1952-53, and Abakumov was accused of repressions in 1949, the Tiflis defendants were charged with acts performed in 1937-38...
...The Tiflis trial thus sets a new precedent...
...Orakhelashvili had been conneeted with Ordzhonikldze before the Revolution, was purticularls close to him during the civil war in the North Caucasus, and was his Bolsheviention of Grorgia...
...the case of Lordkipanidze and other officials of the subordinate Adzharian Autonomous Republic, etc...
...But he conducted this purge according to a careful plan, striking only at sections of the Party elite that served his own purposes...
...Moscow censors did not stop foreign correspondents' dispatches on the trial, but they did keep the news from all Soviet readers except the Georgians...
...why not Turkey as well...
...The report does not mention any "terroristic persecution" during the period from 1933 to 1953, when Beria headed the all-Union NKVD-MVD...
...When Yezhov in Moscow demanded a purge of this apparatus, Beria sprang to its defense and finally smashed Yezhov...
...At the same time, the organizers of the Abakumov trial were trying to show that they, too, wanted to defend industrial managers from arbitrary acts by the MVD-MGB...
...In condemning the indictment against Orakhelashvili, the recent Tiflis sentence acknowledges the injustice of the whole case against Yenukidze, Karakhan el al...
...Among the charges made against the Tiflis defendants, "treason to the country" stood first...
...then Beria's special bailiwick, but in Moscow, and he was condemned to death by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR...
...Stalin had raged...
...From this one can only infer a drop in the importance of industrial managers within the overall Soviet apparatus...
...Secondly, the defendants were members of the Government of the Georgian Republic, on trial for acts performed in their official capacities...
...There were a great many speeches and greetings, but none from Stalin, and Ordzhonikidze failed to receive the Order of Lenin, traditionally awarded to Soviet leaders on such occasions...
...They had been accused by Rukhadze of "nationalist deviation" at a Georgian party conference in April 1952...
...The report states that the defendants were brought to trial for "crimes covered by Articles 53-16, 58-3 and 58-11 of the Criminal Code, i.e., treason to the country, terroristic acts, and participation in counter-revolutionary organizations...
...then, when Ordzhonikidze was called to Moseon, Orakhelashvili sueereded hun as hrad of the Party apparatus in Transcaucasia and Gorogta (1926-31...
...At the Tiflis trial, though, as at the other post-Stalin trials, persecution of prominent Communists was the only thing involved...
...The Tiflis report says that Beria collected "slanderous material" and waged a "war of intrigue" against Ordzhonikidze...
...Rukhadze...
...The period dealt with by the charges in the Tiflis trial was the original Yezhovshchina period, in which industrial managers were persecuted on a broad scale...
...Stalin's irritation was revealed at the end of October 1936, when Ordzhonikidze celebrated his 50th birthday...
...Nevertheless, Point 7 was omitted...
...has been handled by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR...
...This is contrary to usual Soviet practice...
...Deputy Soviet Minister of State Security in Stalin's last year—July 1954...
...This shows that these considerations have ceased to trouble the Khrushchev-Bulganin group...
...Ordzhouikidze made Orakhelashvili Chairman of the Council of Prople's Commissars of the transcaueasian Federation (1922-29...
...The Trial in Tiflis Purging Georgian MVD men, Kremlin chiefs admit that trials of top Communists in 1930s were frauds, but blame Beria for their own and Stalin's deeds By Boris I. Nicolaevsky ON November 21, Radio Tiflis announced that the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, sitting in Tiflis in September, had tried eight leaders of the secret police in Georgia and had convicted them all of "actively participating in the anti-Soviet activity of the enemy of the people Beria...
...He was not executed alone, but together with seven other prominent Communists, most of whom had nothing whatever to do with Georgia or Transcaucasia...
...Orakhelashvili's execution six years later has now been charged to Beria.* From November 1931 on...
...This was not true, however, during the Yezhovshchina, and this was one of the peculiar features of Beria's policy...
...The reason for lumping such diverse individuals in one group was disclosed several months later: these executions had been a preparation for the big 1938 trial of Rykov, Bukharin et al...
...This abortive purge, which failed with Stalin's death, was basically directed against the Communist industrial managers...
...The report of the sentence was published in Pravda on December 20...
...We read in the trial report: "With the criminal aim of destroying honest people, devoted to the cause of the Communist party and the Soviet regime, the defendants falsified investigations, used against prisoners criminal methods of investigation which are strictly forbidden by Soviet law, and carried out terroristic persecution of honest Soviet citizens, falsely accusing them of committing counter-revolutionary crimes...
...Article 58, Point 7 is omitted in the Tiflis indictment...
...Khrushchev had already used the Beria gambit with Yugoslavia...
...According to the Constitution, the Georgian Supreme Court has jurisdiction over cases in this category...
...In the past...
...The original organizer of the anti-Beria campaign was Poskrebyshev, Stalin's chef du cabinet: he was aided from the start by Khrushchev and Bulganin, who carried the campaign to a "victorious conclusion" after Poskrebyshev himself had vanished at the time of Stalin's death...
...Among those shot, two names stand out: Avksenti Narinovich Rapava, former Minister of Internal Affairs of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic...
...The fact that the 1955 "collective leadership" discusses the Ordzhonikidze case publicly indicates how keen the interest remains in this case among the Party elite...
...Soviet courtrooms have been packed with "delegates of workers' organizations...
...The fisht against "deviationists" in Georgia was led by Ordzhouikidze, Stulin's proconsul for Transeausia until 1926...
...then Georgian Minister of Internal Affairs: and others...
...On the other hand, at the top levels of the regime, among the "collective leadership," are many people who were in greater or lesser degree responsible for the Yezhovshchina...
...Ryumin's "terroristic persecution" of industrial managers in 1952 was classified by the 1954 indictment under Point 7, "industrial sabotage...
...The crushing of the Leningrad "Zhdanovites" in 1949 was the principal subject of this trial...
...Point 7 is missing entirely from the Tiflis trial...
...I cannot take up all the vicissitudes of this struggle, but it should now be clear why the organizers of the recent Tiflis trial had to go back 18 years to show the Georgian Communists that Beria had carried out "terroristic persecution" among them...
...Doubtless the audience included relatives and friends of old Bolsheviks who had been liquidated by Beria...
...Orakhelashvili, The Ordzhumkidze, can hardly be considered a "devrationist...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 3
