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

164 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan

of the Soviet Communist Party.) Iran, in turn, according to Ezhov, retaliated against

Soviet citizens in its own country.¹⁵³

Needless to say, the Soviet people could not openly express their dissatisfaction

with the Soviet government. A Pole who visited Georgia in 1934, however, left inter-

esting remarks: there were virtually no street signs in Russian, nor did he hear much

Russian spoken in Tbilisi. Professors, most of whom were survivors from the prerev-

olutionary period, lectured only in Georgian. Collectivization progressed more slowly

than elsewhere in the Soviet Union.¹⁵⁴At the time of the Great Terror a foreign visitor

to the Caucasus recorded the following stories. Fitzroy Maclean, a British diplomat,

visited, without permission, the Caucasus in the middle of the Great Terror in 1937.

In Lencoran (Lankaran), Azerbaijan, a port city just north of the Iranian border, he

witnessed the deportation of “Turco-Tartar peasants.” Then he noted:

As we watched the lorries [with deportees] rolling down to the shore a youngish nondescript

man, with nothing to distinguish him from any other Soviet citizen, came up to me with a copy of

Krokodil, the ocial comic weekly. I saw that he was pointing at an elaborate cartoon, depicting

the horrors of British rule in India. A khaki-clad ocer, with side whiskers and projecting teeth,

smoking a pipe and carrying a whip, was herding some sad-looking Indians behind some barbed

wire. “Not so dierent here,” the man said, and was gone. It had been a glimpse, if only a brief

one, at that unknown quantity: Soviet public opinion.¹⁵⁵

Later he managed to reach Tbilisi, Georgia, where he saw

a historical lm in Georgian depicting a rising of the Georgians against their Russian oppressors.

It was received with enthusiasm by the Georgian audience and I could not help wondering if

in their applause there was not perhaps a note of wishful thinking. The uniforms of the Tsarist

troops, who fell such easy victims to the fusillades of the Georgian patriots, did not somehow

look so very dierent from those of the N.K.V.D. [Soviet secret police] Special Troops who were to

be seen walking about the streets of Tiis [Tbilisi].¹⁵⁶

However frightened they may have been, the peoples of the Caucasus had not lost their

critical sense.

153 N. Petrov and M. Iansen,“Stalinskii pitomets” – Nikolai Ezhov(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2008), 375
(statement of 4 August 1939 given under arrest). In 1937, there were approximately forty thousand
Iranians (of whom fteen thousand Iranian citizens) in Soviet Azerbaijan. SeeStalinskie deportatsii
1928–1953, 100. Already in the 1920s, the Soviet secret police envisaged the expulsion of all Persian
(Iranian) citizens from the border regions. Clearly this measure was not implemented in full at the
time. See Baberowski,Der Feind ist überall, 400.
154 See Jan Otmar Berson,Minus Moskwa (Wołga - Kaukaz -Krym)(Warsaw: Rój, 1935), 104, 113, 124.
It was only in 1933 that Georgia began training Russian language teachers. See Stephen Jones, “The
Establishment of Soviet Power in Transcaucasia: The Case of Georgia 1921–1928.”Soviet Studies, 40,
no. 4 (1988), 629.
155 Fitzroy Maclean,Eastern Approaches, with a new introduction by Charles W. Thayer (New York:
Time Incorporated, 1964), 34.
156 Maclean,Eastern Approaches, 42.