160 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
to Beria, staged armed uprisings to be coordinated with military intervention by a
foreign power or powers. In Georgia, according to confessions by a Georgian accused
as a “foreign spy,” “the number of insurgent organizations that are willing to speak
out at the request of the nationalist center reached approximately 10,000 people.”
According to another, “the rebel organization recruited 3,124 people.”¹³⁹
An explicitly Japanese nexus was seen in some cases. It is well known that the
so-calledkharbintsy(people from Harbin, or Soviet citizens who had been repatri-
ated from China after the 1935 sale of Chinese Eastern Railway to Manchukuo), were
extensively terrorized. As with the rest of the country, any connection to Japan and
Manchukuo proved almost fatal in the Caucasus as well. At the time of the Great Ter-
ror Moscow claimed that “almost all Georgian colonists” in the Far East had been re-
cruited by Japan into intelligence work, and that the Society of Georgians in Harbin,
founded in 1906, along with its branches elsewhere in the Far East, was a cover for
Japanese intelligence.¹⁴⁰Moreover, it was alleged that Japan targeted Georgians who
owned restaurant cars and the waiters who worked in them and travelled between
China and Russia. This kind of intelligence was calledmarshrutnaia agentura(literally
“routing intelligence”). Under Soviet captivity in 1937, Giorgi Pitskhelauri, for exam-
ple, testi ed that he was recruited by Japan as early as 1906. To penetrate the Soviet
Union, Pitskhelauri was urged by Japan to take up Soviet citizenship. Japan allegedly
sent him in 1926 from Harbin to Georgia, where he engaged in “counterrevolutionary”
activity. Arrested in 1937, he was executed in 1938 as a “Japanese spy.”¹⁴¹Other similar
cases were already discussed in chapter 5.
It is impossible to con rm now whether these individuals actually spied for Japan.
Such accusations were standard at the time. Their past association with Japan in the
Far East alone was enough to have them arrested in 1937–38. These cases, in turn,
suggest that Moscow suspected Japan’s long reach in the Caucasus throughout the
1920s and beyond.
Of course, it was most likely the case that many of these people were in fact
Moscow’s secret agents. It is easy to understand why they were executed in view of
the fact that Moscow was killing many of its own o cials of foreign intelligence at
139 Quoted in Levan Avalishvili, “The ‘Great Terror’ of 1937–1938 in Georgia: Between the Two Reports
of Lavrentiy Beria,”Caucasus Analytical Digest, no. 22 (1 December 2010), 5. For the nationalist center,
see Beria’s report to Moscow reproduced in Vakhtang Guruli and Omar Tushurasvili, “Correspondence
between Lavrenty Beria and Joseph Stalin (1937),” Appendix toThe Archival Bulletin(Tbilisi), no. 3 (Fall
2008), 49–52. On Abkhaziia, see the case of Nestor Lakoba as accounted by Beria’s son in Sergo Beria,
Moi otets Beriia: v koridorakh stalinskoi vlasti(Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2002), 49–43. For an account by
Lakoba’s relative, see Stanislav Lakoba,Abkhaziia posle dvukh imperii. XIX–XXI vv.(Sapporo, Japan:
Slavic Research Center, 2004), ch. 4.
140 As late as 1941, the Georgian National Association in Harbin had about four hundred members
and operated a Georgian-language school. Also in Harbin was the Armenian National Society which
also ran an Armenian-language school. SeeRubezh(Harbin-Shanghai), 4 October 1941, 14.
141 File of K.O. Gelovani, Archive of the Ministry of Internal Aairs of Georgia (Tbilisi), 7—107.