158 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
initial limits given by Moscow were 2,000 and 3,000, respectively.¹²²To be exact, the
order on the kulak operation included “Georgian Mensheviks, Musavats, Ittihads, and
Dashnaks” as well as “bandits” as targets.¹²³A considerable number appear to have
been arrested and executed as part of this operation. Indeed, already at the February-
March 1937 plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow, Lavrenti
Beria, at the time rst secretary of the Party Central Committee in Georgia, stated that
in the Caucasus there used to be strong anti-Soviet parties and that their remnants
had turned into “our cursed enemies,” “Fascist agents,” and “agents of foreign in-
telligence services,” now were “beating down the door of the headquarters of foreign
military forces.”¹²⁴In April 1938 Beria asked Moscow to allow him to execute one thou-
sand “Mensheviks, SRs [Socialist Revolutionaries], Socialist Federalists, and National
Democrats” who had returned from abroad and formed illegal organizations and to
dispatch an additional ve hundred to the Gulag. Moscow approved Beria’s request.¹²⁵
Most tellingly, Stalin approved 3,483 executions in Georgia from the lists submit-
ted to him in 1937–38. Georgia was slightly behind Ukraine (4,132). Given the size of
Georgia’s population (only 12 percent of Ukraine’s), the terror in Georgia was far more
intense than the one in Ukraine. Indeed, proportionately speaking, as far as the Stalin
lists were concerned, Georgia was clearly the hardest hit of all the constituent re-
publics of the country.¹²⁶
Data on other parts of the Caucasus are less complete. Judging from the Stalin
lists and the national operations, the terror in Georgia was more intense than that
in Azerbaijan, which in turn was more intense than that in Armenia.¹²⁷In all these
lands, former Mensheviks, Musavats, and Dashnaks who had returned from abroad
with amnesty were denounced as “saboteurs” and “spies” who had returned home
speci cally to destroy the Soviet Union. In 1936 there were more than fteen hun-
122 See Mark Iunge, Gennadii Bordiugov, and Rol’f Binner,Vertikal’ bol’shogo terrora: Istoriia operatsii
po prikazu NKVD no. 00447(Moscow: Novyi Khronograf, 2008), 522–23. The initial gures were later
raised to 9,000 and 10,530, respectively, although these limits were not actually reached.
123 Lubianka: Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD 1937–1938, 274. On “Ittihads,” see
p. 81 of the present book.
124 Voprosy istorii, 1995, no. 5-6, 13.
125 Iunge, Bordiugov, and Binner,Vertikal’ bol’shogo terrora, 322.
126 See Leonid Naumov,Stalin i NKVD(Moscow: Iauza-EKSMO, 2007), 252, 257. As early as July 1937,
Beria reported to Moscow that two hundred “counter-revolutionary elements” had been executed in
Georgia and requested that no fewer than one thousand people (counter-revolutionary Rightists, Trot-
skyites, spies, diversionists, wreckers, and the like), excluding kulaks and criminals, be shot. SeeLu-
bianka: Stalin i Glavnoe upravlenie gosbezopasnosti NKVD 1937–1938, 255. For the Great Terror in Geor-
gia, see also Georges Mamoulia, “Osobaia troika NKVD Gruzinskoi SSR (1937–1938). Mestnaia speci ka
i mekhanizm funktsionirovaniia,” available http://www.chechen.org/prometheus13.html (accessed
26 December 2012).
127 Naumov,Stalin i NKVD, 253, 307. For the Great Terror in the three areas, see also “Stalinist Terror
in the South Caucasus,”Caucasus Analytical Digest, no. 22 (1 December 2010), 2–16.