The Eurasian Triangle. Russia, the Caucasus and Japan, 1904-1945

“Pacication” Ë 111

the Caucasus as a whole, regarded as an unruly region of long-standing deance, con-

tinued to plague Moscow.

Moscow linked the insurgents to foreign powers, accusing them of being Turkish

agents. Poland was equally implicated in the anti-Soviet incidents in the Caucasus.

Poland ran an international eort (the Promethean movement, see p. 116) to dismem-

ber the Soviet Union by supporting the independence of national minorities within its

borders. Georgia and the Caucasus were among Poland’s major targets. Poland also

maintained a consulate in Georgia (until early 1938, at the time of the Great Terror,

when it was forced by Moscow to shut down). An Italian diplomat based in Tbilisi

from 1928 to 1931, received numerous reports of the sabotage of the Baku-Batumi oil

pipelines and the destruction of the rail tracks.²²The year 1928 further witnessed mas-

sive arrests of former Musavats and Dashnaks in Azerbaijan and Armenia, accused

of belonging to clandestine nationalist organizations, supported by foreign govern-

ments. The Persian consulate in Baku was placed under close police surveillance,

and peasants and nomads who were Persian citizens were threatened with arrest un-

less they left Azerbaijan immediately. Even Soviet ocials in the border regions were

suspected of being “Trojan horses” of the Persian government.²³In 1931 some former

members of the Menshevik (Social Democratic) party were executed in Azerbaijan.

Shortly thereafter, a number of local people associated with the Polish legation in

Tbilisi were arrested and executed. The Italian diplomat Paolo Vita-Finzi noted that

it was evident that Moscow wanted to isolate the Poles completely in the capital of

Georgia.²⁴

In all these reports there is little mention of Japan. But in view of the close relations

between Japan and Poland in the realm of intelligence against the Soviet Union (see

below p. 117), Japan’s shadow was, not surprisingly, evident in the Caucasus. Indeed,

in 1930 in Ingushetia, a land far from Japan, an elaborate scheme of provocation was

devised by the Soviet secret police to uncover and arrest anti-Soviet elements, and

involved a “Japanese agent” as its key gure (see below p. 126).

In 1929–31, when Stalin’s policy of collectivizing agriculture and liquidating the

kulak reached the Caucasus, the local peoples revolted again with arms in hand. In

some areas of Chechnia and Karachai, whole regions rebelled against the Soviet gov-

ernment with “almost the entire population taking part in armed actions.”²⁵The po-

7–8; and V.A. Sakharov,“Politicheskoe zaveshchanie” Lenina. Real’nost’ istorii i mify politiki(Moscow:
Izd-vo Moskovskogo universiteta, 2003). For a concise discussion of this controversial issue, see Hi-
roaki Kuromiya,Stalin(Proles in Power) (Harlow: Longman, 2005), ch. 3.
22 Paolo Vita-Finzi,Journal caucasien (1928–1931) suivi de Carnet moscovite (1953), tr. Jean-Marc Man-
dosio (Paris: Inventaire, 2000), 155.
23 Jörg Baberowski,Der Feind ist überall: Stalinismus im Kaukasus(Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
2003), 401, 561, 563.
24 Vita-Finzi,Journal caucasien, 155–56.
25 Eliseeva, “Chechnia,” 137.