1955: Six Beria men
Add comment November 22nd, 2012 Headsman
On this date in 1955, eight former officials of the Georgia — the country Georgia — secret police were tried publicly in Tbilisi, and six* of them convicted and promptly shot.
Officially, they were in the dock post-Stalin for their various depredations during the late ascendancy of the notorious Lavrentiy Beria. (Both Beria and Stalin himself were native Georgians.)
All their frightening offices for the NKVD had been re-branded, post-Stalin, as counterrevolutionary and terroristic, the same sort of chilling police-state lingo they used to turn against enemies back in their day.
A.N. Rapava, for instance
… was Deputy Head of the NKVD in Georgia. In July 1945, he received the rank of Lt. General. From late 1938 until 1948, he was the Head of NKVD/NKGB/MGB** in Georgia when he was removed under a cloud. (Source)
Georgia’s Stalin-era apparatchiks had vicious infighting, aggravated by a growing rift between Stalin and Beria late in Stalin’s life. (Indeed, if you like some hypotheses, this was why it was late in Stalin’s life: Beria might have poisoned off Uncle Joe to protect himself from purging.)
Rapava was a Beria man, but when Stalin swept his own people into place† in the late 1940s to early 1950s, a Stalin guy named N.M. Rukhadze arrested and replaced Rapava.
A few weeks before Stalin died, when the biography of Beria is thick with curious maneuverings, Beria got Rukhadze replaced; once Stalin kicked off, Beria was free to flat-out arrest Rukhadze.
It was a bit of an irony that when the post-Stalin Bolsheviks came round to mop up in Georgia, the rivals Rapava and Rukhadze had to stand in the dock together, both allegedly part of Beria’s organization. It would have been a bit inconvenient to detail how it was Beria himself who ordered Rukhadze’s arrest.
The others who shared their fate:
- A.S. Khazani, NKVD political department officer who wrote a book with the title The Moral Outlook of a Soviet Man
- N.A. Krimian, who served in the NKVD in Georgia and later in Ukraine, where he orchestrated the execution of political prisoners ahead of the invading Germans in World War II
- K.S. Savitsky, NKVD Georgia official
- Sh.O. Tsereteli, a tsarist officer turned Bolshevik and a Beria ally dating back to the early 1920s
All were shot for the victims of the Georgian purges they had conducted. A translator and a bodyguard were also convicted at the same trial, drawing prison sentences.
* Evidently, the official press initially reported only five executions.
** NKVD, NKGB and MGB is for our thumbnail essentially the same state security entity under various names and reorganizations from the 1930s to the 1950s. It became in the last analysis the KGB.
† See, for example, the Mingrelian Affair.
On this day..
- 1883: Mampuru, Sekukuni rival - 2019
- 1635: The village of Mattau - 2018
- 1872: Thomas Camp, the first hanged in Gibson County - 2017
- 1946: Twice double executions around the U.S. - 2016
- 1613: Matthäus Enzlin, fallen favorite - 2015
- 2011: Chen Weijun, rapist karaoke man - 2014
- 1793: Jean-Jacques Ampère, father of a savant, for Joseph Chalier - 2013
- 1318: Mikhail of Tver - 2011
- Feast Day of St. Cecilia, patron of music - 2010
- 1895: Florence English and Amanda Cody - 2009
- 1538: John Lambert, "none but Christ" - 2008
- 1799: Judith van Dorth - 2007
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Georgia,History,Mass Executions,Murder,Power,Russia,Shot,USSR
Tags: 1950s, 1955, communism, joseph stalin, lavrentiy beria, lavrenty beria, nkvd, november 22, politics, stalin, stalinism, tbilisi
Recent Comments