162 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
were not repressed. Bogdan Z. Kabulov, then working in the secret police in Tbilisi,
issued an order not to touch her. (Whether a similar order was issued regarding Kapi-
ton and Kozliakovskii is unknown.) This almost certainly suggests that she performed
special operations in Harbin on behalf of the Soviet government, for neither Beria
nor Kabulov could have protected her simply because she was Beria’s blood relative.
Stalin did not save his own relations. Another relative of Beria’s, Giorgi Dzhakeli, son
of Egor Dzhakeli who ran a restaurant in Harbin, was said to have been recruited to
spy for Japan as early as 1910 (see p. 67). Dzhakeli also worked in Harbin and returned
to Georgia (probably in 1934 with Susanna). Like Susanna, he was accused of being
a Japanese spy, and in 1937–1938, like her, he was protected by Kabulov. In 1938, he
bounced back to Harbin, where he worked for the Japanese railway police and served
in the military units of White Russian émigrés under Japanese command (the so-called
“Asano brigades”). In 1945, he was arrested by the Soviet forces occupying Manchuria,
accused of treachery, and sentenced to twenty- ve years in the Gulag, even though he
almost certainly acted in Harbin by the order of Moscow. Subsequently, after Beria’s
arrest in 1953, Giorgi Dzhakeli “confessed” to having spied for Britain by Beria’s order!
Under arrest, Beria denied such absurd charges.¹⁴³
How did Bammat and the Caucasus group react to the waves of terror that had
eliminated many of those who had worked with them before 1921, and those who may
have maintained some clandestine links to them? Their public statements do not re-
veal much, but they may have misunderstood the events. Bammat, for example, com-
mented on the destruction of the Red Army High Command that it was an “agony of
the regime”: it re ected the “absence of real government” – “a doomed regime and
a doomed country.”¹⁴⁴In any case, one sees no sign of their being intimidated by the
Great Terror or seeking any political accommodation with Moscow. On the contrary,
in 1937–38 they seem to have had “no doubt about the collapse of the Soviet Union in
the impending war”:
While the [émigré] Armenians and Georgians were dealing with their republics’ borders with
Turkey, the fantasy of Greater Azerbaijan, encompassing Iranian Azerbaijan, found adherents
among the Azeri groups. Haydar Bammat criticized this idea severely. The second chance for the
Caucasians (after 1918) wasknocking on the door, and the Caucasian intellectuals had to be awake
and organized. The mistakes of the past could not be repeated.¹⁴⁵143 See O.B. Mozokhin, ed.,Politbiuro i delo Beriia. Sbornik dokumentov(Moscow: Kuchkovo pole,
2012), 183–84, 234–35, 482–83. This does not mean that in deploying his relatives and agents abroad,
Beria did not pursue his personal political goals; in fact, he did. See Françoise Thom,Beria: Le Janus
du Kremlin(Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2013).
144 Mamoulia, Donogo, and Vatchagaev,Gaidar Bammat i zhurnal “Kavkaz”, 319–21.
145 Mitat Çelikpala, “The North Caucasian émigrés between the World Wars.”International Journal of
Turkish Studies9, nos. 1–2 (2003), 312.