CC BY
83
Eldar R. ISMAILOV
D.Sc. (Hist.), Professor at Baku State University
(Baku, Azerbaijan).
SOVIET STATE TERRORISM IN AZERBAIJAN
Abstract
The author analyzes the Soviet policy of state terror pursued in 1937 and its specifics and consequences in Azerbaijan. He points out that in a relatively
short period the Soviet totalitarian system reached the absolute limit in terms of human rights violations and personal insecurity of its citizens.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
For a long time Soviet, and later Russian, historians, philosophers, and writers have been interested in the “great terror” in the Soviet Union. In Azerbaijan, however, the issue and its comprehensive study have been ignored. Meanwhile, an in-depth investigation of the subject in the context of Azerbaijan and the Soviet reality of the time might lead to a better understanding of the country’s problems and their roots. It might also help to remove the numerous obstacles which still bar the road of progress for our independent republic. The absence of such studies distorts the ideas about the “great terror” in Azerbaijan and creates the illusion that the tragic events were purely local in nature; sometimes this prompts distorted ideas about the events and the roles of those involved in them.
The local approaches to the subject are inevitably marked by certain specifics. First, there is a desire to blame Mir Jafar Bagirov, who headed the republic at that time, for the scale of repressions in the republic. Some are of the opinion that practically all the Communist Party members and state officials who perished during the mass repressions were honest and staunch communists who had fallen
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victim to slander and lies. It is also believed that the repressions were mainly targeted at prominent members of the Communist Party, cultural figures, and the military. The present article is intended to confirm my doubts about the correctness of the above.
On the Eve
Traditionally, Soviet historiography dates the beginning of “great terror” to 1 December, 1934, the day when a certain Nikolaev assassinated Sergei Kirov, one of the prominent figures of the Communist Party and the Soviet state. This triggered wide-scale repressions across the country; Azerbaijan was merely caught in the wave. A year prior to this, the republic had, once again, acquired a new leader: in December 1933, Mir Jafar Bagirov, a CHEKA man who had worked for some time in the CC All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) administration, was appointed First Secretary of the CC Communist Party of Azerbaijan (CPA) and was destined to head the republic during the wide-scale repressions. It should be said that the “great terror” took some time to gain momentum; it first emerged outside Azerbaijan.
On 11-12 January, 1934, after Bagirov had been in his new post for a month, the CPA gathered for its 12th Congress. Nothing in the newly elected First Secretary’s report hinted at the bloody purges in store for the republican party organization. The First Secretary concentrated on the economic, cultural, and social progress achieved under Soviet power, as well as on party development and the need to enhance the role of its Bolshevist leadership in the republic. In other words, the new leader followed the old groove of party rhetoric. When talking about culture, for example, Mir Jafar Bagirov pointed out that much had been done to educate a new intelligentsia and adjust the old intelligentsia to the new conditions. He pointed out: “We have achieved a lot, not merely in creating new theaters, cinema houses, and radio stations, but also in educating the cadres who are part and parcel of our social context. At the same time, those who thought differently in the past have revised their opinions and feelings. Some of the formerly bourgeois Turkic writers are changing at a good pace. Look, for example, at Hussein Javid, Mushvig, and Jabarly—they are changing albeit slowly; you can see that they are changing. The same is true of the theater.”1 When talking about party unity, Bagirov said that it was safe from encroachment: “The wretched remnants of the Trotskyites, solitary figures still found in some of the party cells, cannot shatter our ranks; these were disjointed efforts.” He deemed it necessary, however, to point out that these efforts would be resolutely rebuffed.2 There was not a trace of aggressiveness in what he said. In February 1934, the All-Union Communist Party gathered for its 17th Congress, known as the “congress of the builders of socialism.” In 1934, people went on living as usual; there was no tension and nothing was done to fan it.
Kirov’s murder changed everything overnight: there was a gradual yet clearly discernible shift toward drastic measures against those whose political reliability caused doubts. For obvious reasons, all of those who in the past had been associated with all sorts of opposition groups inside the Communist Party and those whose social and class roots caused doubts in the “vigilant” CHEKA men attracted the attention of the correspondingly instructed state security structures. On 25 December, 1934, for example, the Politburo approved, at the suggestion of the CC CPA, the decision “to administratively exile 87 families of kulaks (rich peasants.—E.I.), malicious anti-Soviet elements who in the past owned big capitalist enterprises, and fugitive kulaks from other regions of the Soviet Union to concentration camps and confiscate their property.”3 In the months that followed Kirov’s assassination,
1 State Archives of the Political Parties and Public Movements of the Azerbaijan Republic (hereinafter GAPPOD), Record group 1, Inventory 74, File 17, pp. 70-71.
2 Ibid., p. 95.
3 Russia’s State Archives of Socio-Political History (hereinafter RGASPI), Record group 17, Inventory 162, File 17,
p. 95.
the repressions did not reach their full scope, at least in Azerbaijan. Only extremely incautious people were caught in the machine of purges and criminal persecution. Bit by bit, however, the country, and Azerbaijan along with it, began moving closer to the bloody reprisals.
The time described in academic and publicist writings as the “great terror” in the U.S.S.R. began in the summer of 1936. The trial of the heads of the Trotskyite and Zinoviev opposition held in Moscow can be described as one of its starting points. In Azerbaijan, the “red wheel” of terror was set rolling by an article authored by Lavrenty Beria which appeared on 21 August, 1936 in all the central newspapers published in the Transcaucasus. Called “Razveiat’ v prakh vragov sotsializma” (Let’s Destroy All the Enemies of Socialism), it aroused “total” indignation by explaining that the former followers of Trotsky and Zinoviev could not escape the fall into the quagmire of counterrevolution and were doomed to betray the cause of the working class and socialism. After exposing the ideological sins of the former leaders and rank-and-file members of the opposition, Beria pointed to the former opposition members in the Transcaucasian republics. He insisted that in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia the supporters of the two opposition leaders had a vast following organized into clandestine and well-camouflaged organizations. He insinuated that, engaged in clandestine activities, they were busy in all spheres of economic and cultural life trying to undermine the country’s might together with the working people’s trust in the Communist Party’s guiding role and its leaders. Their hatred of socialism and its achievements drove them to the very limits, up to and including extermination of all true communists, the leaders of the Bolsheviks, and Stalin in the first place.
Lavrenty Beria clearly indicated that those who had ever sided with Trotsky, Zinoviev, or any of the other opposition groups inside the Bolshevik Party should be repressed first. Those who read this guessed that the author was operating with facts supplied by the CHEKA to demonstrate that the former opposition members were beyond reforming. The author went on to specify: “In Baku we have exposed a counterrevolutionary Trotskyite terrorist group consisting of Bagdasarov, Krylov, Kulchin, Konevskiy, Bayramov, Babaev, and others.” And further: “It was established that after their return to Baku from exile the Trotskyites not only did not discontinue their counterrevolutionary activities but, after being restored as party members, gathered together counterrevolutionary subversive groups in Baku.” The author minced no words in saying that their restored membership in the Communist Party was ill-advised and that they remained hostile to the order created by the great Stalin.
This was one of the groups deprived, from that time on, of political trust. Another group was made up of those who belonged to the parties that had opposed the Bolsheviks in the past. It was explained that, having lost hope of taking their revenge for their defeat in the civil war, they (as could only be expected, said the author) closed ranks with the opposition inside the party. Beria argued: “The counterrevolutionary Trotskyites not merely reached an agreement on the aims and means of struggle with the Mensheviks, Dashnaks, and members of the Musavat party, but also with the White Guards and their clandestine agents who had been thrown out of the Transcaucasus. They were the organizing force and led the struggle against the victories of socialism in the Transcaucasian republics.”
The Height and Scale of the Repressions
The first wave of repressions reached Azerbaijan in the fall of 1936 to engulf the former opposition members in the Bolshevik Party and everyone suspected of lack of loyalty to the Stalinist leaders, as well as former members of non-Bolshevik parties. Much was done to identify the “mutinous” groups among the peasants (for example, people were arrested in the villages of the Alibayramly District). By the early 1937, a large group of top-ranking Party and Soviet officials had been arrested; criminal proceedings on political accusations were instituted against them. Rukhulla Akhundov,
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former Secretary of the CC CPA and Transcaucasian Committee of the All-Union Communist Party, was the most prominent among those who were brought to court.
While the February-March Plenary Meeting of the CC All-Union Communist Party officially launched total repressions in the Soviet Union, in Azerbaijan this was done by the Sixth Plenary Meeting of the CC CPA in March 1937. It ruled out the immunity of any nomenklatura members; people were expelled from the Communist Party in great numbers; Party and Soviet official and top-ranking economic managers were arrested.
June 1937 saw another wave of repressions in the U.S.S.R. with impressive results: neither the courts nor even the extrajudicial system could cope with the avalanche of cases. It seems that Party officials and the secret services advised Stalin and his closest circle accordingly. The Plenary Meeting of the CC All-Union Communist Party that gathered late in June 1937 made it clear that Stalin did not intend to slow down the repressions; moreover, he was convinced that they should spread far and wide. This probably explains why the repressions accelerated. The plenary meeting set up what became known as “troikas” (three-member courts) together with the target figures for arrests and repressions.
The newly invented courts, which normally included the head of the local structure of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), a public prosecutor or a judge of the local court, and a representative of the local Communist Party organization, were set up in the union and autonomous republics, territories, and regions. In the next four months, each of the so-called courts had to sentence a specific number of people to capital punishment, a long term in prison, or exile. On 10 July, 1937, the Politburo of the CC All-Union Communist Party issued a decision relating to the Soviet Far East, Azerbaijan, and the North-Kazakhstan Region. The part which dealt with Azerbaijan said in particular: “A troika for the Azerbaijan S.S.R. shall be set up consisting of the following members: Comrades Sumbatov, Teymur Kuliev, and Jangir Akhunzade. The following figures were confirmed: 500 kulaks and 500 criminals shall be sentenced to death; 1,300 kulaks and 1,700 criminals shall be exiled. The troika shall be allowed to deal with the cases of the counterrevolutionary insurgent organizations, 500 members of which should be sentenced to death and 750 exiled; 150 families of members of bandit groups shall be sent to NKVD camps.”4 This meant that 1,500 people would be executed, 3,750 sent to concentration camps, and 150 families exiled.
In this way, the NKVD Special Commission, an extrajudicial structure, was complemented with “troikas” and assizes of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. with more or less identical powers. They could examine the cases of those listed by the state security structures, hold court sessions in the absence of witnesses or a public prosecutor and lawyer, and pass sentences, including the death penalty.
The number of sentences increased dramatically, however the differences among all these “judicial” structures remained. The Special Commission was limited by its attachment to the NKVD, while the assizes were conducted by judges of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R., which dispatched them to provinces. This could not be done frequently and sometimes took too much time. This means that the Special Commissions and assizes could not cope with the flood of the accused produced by the wide-flung repressive mechanism. The “troikas,” as the latest invention, worked like a conveyor belt. On 30 July, 1937, as a follow-up to the Politburo decisions on the troika courts and the target figures, People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the U.S.S.R. Nikolay Ezhov issued an order. Its introductory part justified a wide-scale operation to expose and repress “elements” as “the chief instigators of all sorts of anti-Soviet and subversive actions, both in collective and state farms and in transport, as well as in some industries.” The families of the sentenced were sent to camps, while the families of the first category of the repressed who lived in the border areas and large cities, Baku included, but were not involved in political crimes, had to be moved to other districts and cities.5 The order supplied
4 Lubianka: Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD. 1937-1938, Documents, Demokratia International Fund, Yale University Press, Materik Publishers, Moscow, 2004, p. 241.
5 Ibid., pp. 273-281.
the details of the operation, investigation, and execution of the sentences, which proves beyond a doubt that this was a frighteningly cynical and cruel act. The troikas were guided by the target figures.
The bloody Bacchanalia reached it peak when the troikas and the assizes gathered speed; this ushered in the most sinister period of the “great terror,” which went on until the fall of 1938. The repressive machine exterminated members of the Soviet nomenklatura irrespective of their rank and nationality. In 1937 alone, Azerbaijan lost 22 people’s commissars, 49 secretaries of the Communist Party regional committees, 29 chairmen of the district executive committees, 57 directors of industrial enterprises and oilfields, 95 engineers, 110 servicemen, 207 Soviet and trade union activists, and 8 professors.6 Nearly all of them were executed. In 1937, a troika which worked in the republic sentenced 2,792 people to death and 4,425 people to long terms of imprisonment.
In 1938, the repressive machine slowed down to a certain extent, but by November 1938 it had claimed enough lives. On 31 January, 1938, the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party passed a decision On Anti-Soviet Elements, which offered additional figures. For example, 2,000 people had to be sentenced to death in the Azerbaijanian S.S.R.; during 1938, no less than 10,000 cases were investigated. The troika alone dealt with 7,241 of them (5,061 were accused of political and 2,180 of criminal offenses). One thousand one hundred and eight people were executed for anti-Soviet propaganda.7 People were sent to prison or executed for terrorist, spying, or subversive intents. On top of this, more unfortunates were sentenced by the assizes of the Military Collegium, military tribunals, and regular courts.
A large group of the detained was sentenced after the troikas and the assizes had been withdrawn from the process. Their fates were sealed later, in 1939 and 1940, by the NKVD Special Commission. Practically all of them were found guilty and sentenced, normally to imprisonment rather than death. Fate treated them mildly, but irrespective of the prison term they were doomed to remain there (many never lived to be rehabilitated). After serving their terms in camp, they had to remain there under old sentences.
Those who were arrested and sentenced to concentration camps in 1937-1939 and lived to be rehabilitated in 1954-1956 spent from 16 to 19 years in incarceration. Recently, the Moscow Memorial Society published the so-called Stalin Lists with the names of those earmarked for repression (mainly death). Stalin and some of the other top figures passed the final verdict. As a rule, these lists contained the names of the highest Party and Soviet officials, people’s commissars, and top people in the economic and ideological sphere. They could only be sentenced with the consent of the country’s leaders (Stalin and his cronies).
The lists for the Azerbaijanian S.S.R. contained 870 names; about 340 of them were Azeris.8 This is quite natural—the ratio faithfully reflected the national composition of the republic’s elite. At that time, Azeris were in the minority in all groups; their share among engineers, managers of industrial enterprises and construction organizations, economists, mid-level officials, and even among the medical profession was negligible.
It should be said that the ordinary people suffered even more; this is especially true of the peasants. They were the easiest prey, at the expense of whom the “plan” could be fulfilled without much trouble. In Azerbaijan, the peasants were mainly Azeris, which meant that they were delivered the hardest blow.
Each of the NKVD district administrations had their quotas of repressions divided into the first (execution) and second categories, which, in turn, were allocated to the villages. Not only the arrested and accused can be described as the victims of the “great terror.” The net of repressions spread far and wide to cover all those living in the border zone stretching from Astara to Julfa. Classified as “suspicious,” they were evicted to Kazakhstan. The wives of those exterminated by the “great terror” machine likewise can be described as victims: they were moved to the north of Central Asia, and no one
6 GAPPOD, Record group 1, Inventory 331, File 23, p. 3.
7 Ibid., p. 4.
8 [http//stalin/memo.ru/spiski/pg01005.htm].
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bothered to justify this by court decisions. This fate was in store for present, as well as former wives. The divorced wife (they had separated in 1922) of Sultan Sultanov, brother of Khosrov bek Sultanov, who had gained prominence in the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, was exiled to Kazakhstan.
On 9 April, 1938, the wife of former Chairman of the Azerbaijanian Trade Union Council Zulhaji Amiraslanov was arrested and sentenced to a term in a labor camp. This is one of the stories of great suffering which befell women during the “great terror.” She, together with her three children, was thrown out of her apartment; the expectant mother who could barely read and write was sent to prison, where her fourth baby was born.9 The same day, Sitara Karaeva, wife of former secretary of a district party committee Asad Karaev, was sentenced to a term in prison (where she later died). One of Karaev’s daughters was expelled from the Communist Party; the underage children were thrown out of their apartment.10
Children of the repressed top figures also suffered; as a rule they were sent to orphanages; branded as “children of enemies of the people” they were long deprived of an education, decent jobs, and the chance for personal happiness. This fully applies to the children of ordinary people caught in the machine of the repressions. Every questionnaire contained a question about parents, which meant that the children of the repressed remained outcasts in the Soviet Union.
Close and distant relatives of the “enemies of the people” did not escape a similar fate: the regular purges organized before 1953 to identify people like them in Soviet and law enforcement structures cost them their jobs and, more likely than not, party reprimands. This meant that the figure of 80 to 100 thousand victims of the “great terror” in Azerbaijan in 1937-1938 quoted by some authors (which I fully agree with) is very close to the truth.
Between mid-1936 and mid-1938, 13,356 Azeris were arrested for political offences. These figures, compared with the figures of the repressed of other nationalities, do not indicate an anti-Azeri campaign. The same is true of the absolute figures and shares of the repressed in any given nationality. For example, 16,988 Armenians were arrested and 16,488 Georgians, the compatriots of “great” Stalin, were arrested. In the same period, the NKVD registered nearly 15 thousand of the arrested as Iranians.11 It takes no wisdom to guess that they were also Azeris. This means that the repressions in Azerbaijan were of a much greater scale than elsewhere.
Strange as it may seem, this is probably explained by the fact that the “leader of all nations,” as Stalin was frequently called, imagined himself to be an expert in Baku and Azerbaijan and practically never objected to executions of his former acquaintances in the republic. His avid attention to what was going there is confirmed by his telegrams about specific people; an unknown number of people were sent to death on the strength of his verbal orders.
Stalin’s contacts with the republic dated to prerevolutionary times and the post-revolutionary period, which can be described as the republic’s bad luck. In October 1937, at one of the regular Plenary Meeting of the CC of the CPA, Bagirov informed the gathering about two letters he had received from Stalin. The first instructed him to go to Nakhchyvan to fortify the border together with Politburo member Anastas Mikoian and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. Bagirov insisted that this had been done. Another letter dealt with the fate of Secretary of the Nakhchyvan Regional CPA Committee Hasan Rakhmanov, against whom a pile of compromising materials had been already gathered. It seems that this forced Bagirov to ask Stalin to remove him from his post, along with his brother Useyn Rakhmanov, who filled the post of the republic’s premier. Stalin answered succinctly and clearly: “The CC All-Union Communist Party sanctions the arrest of Useyn Rakhmanov and Hasan Rakhmanov. We also ask you to carefully purge the Nakhchyvan Republic contaminated by Hasan Rakhamanov. You should bear in mind that the Nakhchyvan Republic is the weakest point in the Transcaucasus. It needs genuine and tested Bolshevist leaders.”12
9 GAPPOD, Record group 1, Inventory 43, File 275, pp. 50-51.
10 Ibid., File 278, p. 144.
11 V.P. Danilov, “Stalinism i sovetskoe obshchestvo,” Voprosy istorii, No. 2, 2004, p. 174.
12 Lubianka: Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, p. 380.
Stalin remained in charge of the continued repressions in Azerbaijan throughout the entire period covered in this article. On 17 January, 1938, he instructed Ezhov to persecute the former So-cialist-Revolutionaries more energetically: “I deem it necessary to inform you that at one time they were very strong in Saratov, Tambov, Ukraine, the army (among the commanders of all ranks), Tashkent, and Central Asia in general, as well as at the Baku electric power stations where they are still present and engaged in subversions at oil fields.” The same note contains a question which reads like a demand: “What has been done to identify and arrest all the Iranians in Baku and Azerbaijan?”13
The response was a prompt one: the Baku power stations lost many of their workers; the Red Star power station was hit worse than the others. The Iranians were not forgotten either. On 19 January, 1938, the Politburo of the CC All-Union Communist Party passed a decision which said: “It is recommended that the CC Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissars of Azerbaijan immediately inform all citizens living along the border with Iran that within 10 days those who consider themselves Iranian subjects should register as Soviet citizens. All Iranian citizens who become naturalized as Soviet citizens should be moved, within a month, to Kazakhstan, as was done with the Kurds of the Nakhchyvan Republic. All citizens who refuse to be naturalized and prefer to remain Iranian subjects should be immediately evicted to Iran; those who refuse should be arrested.”14
The above is not merely cruel, it is illogical and meaningless: indeed, Soviet citizenship followed by eviction defies logic, which suggests that people would hardly accept naturalization if it meant being moved from their native residences. The document was meaningless for the simple reason that the Soviet leaders obviously mistrusted the Iranians and yet insisted on their naturalization as Soviet citizens. The head of the Communist Part and the country was obviously misled by his prerevolutionary ideas and those of the Civil War period about the Socialist-Revolutionaries and their popularity.
Soviet historical writings frequently associated the repressions in Azerbaijan with Bagirov and the way he ruled the republic. It is asserted that, free to follow his whims, he dispensed death sentences and pardons left and right. This is partly true. He was suspicious to a fault, a shortcoming shared, in fact, by many party functionaries of the time of troubles. He was whimsical—within the viceroy powers Stalin had given him—yet we should not pile the full blame on him for the abuses and crimes of the time. Those in Moscow who wrote the de-Stalinization script for Azerbaijan intended to do precisely this. Under Khrushchev and Gorbachev, the Kremlin was completely satisfied: your leader was to blame, which meant that it was up to you to settle scores with him. In fact, this explains, at least partially, his trial and execution. The role of the Center, however, which had initiated the atrocities, was obvious to all sober-minded people. One has to admit that Bagirov used the mass repressions to settle scores with his rivals. On the other hand, he might have remained within the limits had not Stalin launched the “great terror.” This inspired Bagirov and stirred him into action.
Tortures as a Legal Instrument of the “Great Terror”
In September 1938, the serious changes introduced into the rules of the mass repressions caught many unawares. This all started in August when Lavrenty Beria was appointed First Deputy People’s Commissar for the Internal Affairs of the U.S.S.R. Stalin had probably decided to trim down the scale of the repression. On 15 September, the newly appointed official issued an important decision, under
13 Ibidem.
14 Ibid., p. 464.
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which all cases of counterrevolutionary activities started before 1 August, 1938 had to be completed by the troikas, which were expected to fold up their activities by mid-November.15 On 24 November, 1938, Nikolay Ezhov was replaced with Lavrenty Beria.16
A joint decision of the Council of People’s Commissars and the CC All-Union Communist Party established more order in the Soviet Union’s judicial system and preliminary investigation structure. The troikas were abolished, which narrowed down the field of extrajudicial settlement. This means that November 1938 can be regarded as the end of “great terror” in the Soviet Union and Azerbaijan.
The “great terror” can be explained but hardly justified. It was intended to teach people to fear the system, to make them aware that they were defenseless in the face of the omnipotent state monster. Fear was expected to rule out protests or even banal grumbling; the state resorted to crimes to demonstrate its impudence.
Torture was legitimized for all intents and purposes. One of the Stalin’s telegrams addressed to the local party organizations said: “The CC All-Union Communist Party deems it necessary to clarify that since 1937 the NKVD has been applying physical coercion with the permission of the CC AllUnion Communist Party ... which believes that this method should be used in the future ... in relation to open and still unrepentant enemies of the people as absolutely correct and expedient.”17 This hits the mark: the arrested had to admit that they were enemies, otherwise they would be forced into admission. This was done regularly, which is confirmed by numerous evidence.
In the mid-50s, former NKVD employee Fedor Goriaev described in detail the methods used during the “great terror”: “Subjected to cruel treatment and merciless repressions, the arrested, unable to stand it any longer, signed protocols worded by investigators and admitted their membership in counterterrorist organizations. Many forced to admit their guilt went on to name 40 or 50 other alleged members of anti-Soviet organizations.” Goriaev went on to provide details of the humiliation to which former party functionaries Lazarev and Mirkadyrova were subjected: Kudin and Grigorian beat up Lazarev, while Kudin and Zheltenkova took care of Mirkadyrova. Tortured to the extent that he could not be moved back to his cell and was left for several days in the investigator’s office, Lazarev admitted his guilt. Kudin later bragged that he had acquired evidence against the heads of the Kaspar Shipping Company. Mirkadyrova, on the other hand, endured the tortures.18 Zheltenkova described how Kudin beat naked Mirkadyrova with a rubber truncheon; the poor woman, she said, first shouted and cried, then fainted.19
In 1954, former official of the NKVD of Azerbaijan S. Zykov said: “I saw how investigator Sher, Grigorian’s assistant, beat up former People’s Commissar for Education Juvarlinskiy. I informed Grigorian about this, who merely smiled.” I. Krotkov, another employee of the same People’s Commissariat, testified: “Once investigator Sher arranged 5 or 6 other investigators in a circle around Juvarlinskiy; they beat him with rubber truncheons and wet floor-cloths. Juvarlinskiy fell down, was raised, and beaten with feet and fists. Later, this became a sort of entertainment. Juvarlinskiy succumbed under the torture and, half conscious, signed everything.”20
One of the former NKVD employees told about how cases were prepared for transfer to the judicial and extra-judicial structures. Late in 1937, Khoren Grigorian, the newly appointed department head, instructed the investigators to bring the cases to a point where the people’s commissar would find it easy to issue a first-category sentence, that is, the death penalty. This meant that guilt or innocence were of no importance. The investigator was free to choose the means and methods to force the accused to vilify himself and others. In the case of innocent people, this required physical violence
15 Lubianka: Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD, pp. 549-550.
16 Ibid., pp. 611-612.
17 V.F. Nekrasov, Trinadtsat' “zheleznykh narkomov,” Versty Publishers, Moscow, 1995, p. 196.
18 The Trial of Mir Jafar Bagirov, Archival Materials, Baku, Yazi9i Publishers, 1993, pp. 102-103 (in Azeri).
19 Ibidem.
20 Z. Buniatov, The Red Terror, Azerbaijan State Publishers, Baku, 1993, pp. 159-160 (in Azeri).
and moral pressure. The final say belonged to the NKVD heads (Sumbatov, and later Raev, Borshchev, Grigorian, and several others).21
Back in 1939, investigator Aga Ragim Aliev testified: “When I worked in the Bailov prison with Garushian and Maximov, I witnessed, and was personally involved in, the beatings of arrested Iranian subjects. For example, Garushian was investigating the case of Iusuf Genjali ogly, who was accused of espionage. Together we beat him up. As a member of the investigatory group, I noticed that about 50 or 60 of the arrested supplied absolutely identical evidence about how they had been recruited by Iranian intelligence. I informed my immediate superior Perelman about this and was told that all Iranian subjects were spies anyway.” Perelman, who was interrogated at the same time, said: “Iusuf Genjali ogly died after being beaten” and added that they decided to say in the report that he had died of old age. He deemed it necessary to point out: “Khentov beat one of the arrested to death right in his own office and got away with it.”22 Indeed, the investigators Khentov and Pivovarov had beaten a certain Kovalskiy to death; several days later the local doctor issued a death certificate stating that Kovalskiy had died of heart failure.23
Many years later, Pavel Khentov supplied interesting information: after being beaten, former Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissar of Azerbaijan D. Buniatzade admitted his participation in a counterrevolutionary organization; he also said that People’s Commissar Raev and investigator Gvozdev, the latter being described as an “extremely strong man,” had personally beaten the arrested. He described “Borisov-Pavlov, Tsinman, Khoren Grigorian, and others as especially cruel.”24
In Lieu of a Conclusion
The required confessions were extorted for the simple reason that those who spurred on the investigators knew that the low level of their professionalism would inevitably cause a Bacchanalia of lawlessness. Meanwhile these people were entrusted with a political task that had to be executed in the shortest time possible. The perpetrators were guided by the primitive psychology of petty officials: the bosses knew best. In their zeal, they lost even the instinct of self-preservation: by torturing and humiliating others they, unwittingly, were moving toward their own end. In an effort to escape it, they demonstrated a lot of ingenuity; some of them failed, while others managed to escape the fire to which all of them had been adding fuel. They were punished much later; those who cleaned the “Augean stables” were appalled by the low level of investigation and the poverty of political ideas of the law-enforcers of the time.
In 1955, in a report to First Secretary of the CC CPA I. Mustafaev, Public Prosecutor of the Azerbaijanian S.S.R. A. Babaev described how cases had been investigated: the impression was created that “all social groups of our republic were involved in counterrevolutionary activities and belonged to all sorts of counterrevolutionary structures. Old Bolsheviks with the record of pre-revolutionary clandestine work were described as enemies of Soviet power; the leading Party members and Soviet officials were allegedly engaged in mutual conscription into counterrevolutionary organizations. Armenians joined the Musavat Party; Russian workers were trying to set up bourgeois-nationalist power in Azerbaijan; decrepit professors were passed for terrorist fighters.”
A. Babaev, himself an experienced and highly professional jurist, was discouraged by the level of the investigatory efforts on the strength of which people were sentenced to death and to long terms in prison. He blamed the investigators’ political and cultural backwardness, “which resulted in ridiculous accusations such as manufacturing low-quality paper fly-traps, damaging a cart wheel, inten-
21 Ibid., pp. 104-105.
22 GAPPOD, Record group 1, Inventory 41, File 65, pp. 102-108.
23 Ibid., Inventory 331, File 23, p. 53.
24 The Trial of Mir Jafar Bagirov, pp. 63-64.
tions to separate Azerbaijan from the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to make it a union republic or, better still, to separate Azerbaijanian State University from the state.”25
He also pointed out that the NKVD officials of that time were backward “politically and culturally”; the people in power preferred obedient instruments to high professionals. The ability and willingness to extract confessions and mainly false evidence were appreciated more than professionalism, excellent knowledge, and investigatory skills. However, the strategic aim—that of browbeating people into accepting the idea of the perfect nature of the Soviet socialist system—remained unattained. This means that state terror as a method failed. On the other hand, we must admit that it crippled the spiritual and moral potential of all the Soviet peoples, the Azeris being no exception in this respect. Fear of the totalitarian state deformed, to a certain extent, their mentality.
! GAPPOD, Record group 1, Inventory 41, File 100, pp. 2-3.
Mariam LORDKIPANIDZE
D.Sc. (Hist.), Professor at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi University, Academician of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences
(Tbilisi, Georgia).
Georgi OTKHMEZURI
D.Sc. (Hist.), Professor at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi University
(Tbilisi, Georgia).
ABKHAZIA’S STATUS AS PART OF GEORGIA: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Abstract
This article looks at Abkhazia’s status as part of Georgia and the establishment of the Abkhazian nation, which moved in the 15th-18th centuries from the
Northern Caucasus to Western Georgia (Abkhazia); this ethnic group calls itself “Apsua,” while the Georgians call them “Abkhazians.”
I n t r o d u c t i o n
The history of the so-called Georgian-Abkhazian conflict goes back into the distant past. In the 16th-18th centuries, in order to assert its supremacy, the Ottoman Empire tried to spread Islam in Western Georgia (particularly in Abkhazia) and foment hostility between Christians and Muslims,
