168 Ë The Caucasus Group and Japan
a celebration of the 750th anniversary of the Georgian national poet Shota Rustaveli,
which was to have been held at the Sorbonne.”¹⁶⁴
In fact, it is unlikely that foreign subversion was very eective or widespread
within the Soviet Union in the 1930s, although Stalin’s suspicions knew no limits.
After all, Stalin was well acquainted with foreign machinations against his country,
and as he famously said, even if 5 percent of the suspicions were true, it was still a
serious matter.¹⁶⁵As far as can be ascertained, the Caucasus group, for instance, had
only a very limited link with its sympathizers in Georgia. Meanwhile, untold Soviet
citizens were executed as “Japanese spies” during the Great Terror.
Foreign espionage and subversion were facts of international life. Soviet opera-
tions abroad were incomparably more extensive and eective than those of Japan,
Germany, or Poland in the Soviet Union. In Britain, Japan, Manchukuo, and elsewhere
Soviet espionage far surpassed the wildest imagination of the counterintelligence or-
gans involved. For instance, Sorge penetrated the highest political establishment in
Japan. Soviet agents literally lled Manchukuo, which could not control its long bor-
der with the Soviet Union. Ataman Grigorii Semenov, widely regarded as an anti-Soviet
leader of the émigrés in the Far East in Tokyo’s employ, was in fact working secretly
for Moscow.¹⁶⁶Likewise, the Soviet Union dispatched its agents through the Cauca-
sus to its southern neighboring countries. As mentioned, according to a Polish intelli-
gence report of December 1937, the Soviet Union sent its agents to Kurdistan to incite
rebellions against the Turks, though they were caught and executed by Turkey. In the
mid-1930s, Poland was catching approximately eighteen hundred people every year il-
legally crossing the Polish–Soviet borders; of these, Poland concluded that 85 percent
were Soviet spies.¹⁶⁷Bammat’s Caucasus group, too, was penetrated by Soviet agents.
Giorgi Gegelia, for instance, who once served as Spiridon Kedia’s secretary, continued
working with the Caucasus group at least until late 1938. It appears the group failed to
suspect Gegelia’s involvement in the assassination of Noe Ramishvili in Paris in 1930,
even though he was kicked out of Kedia’s group afterward. In 1947 Gegelia returned to
the Soviet Union, along with other Georgian repatriates.¹⁶⁸
164 David Marshall Lang,A Modern History of Soviet Georgia(New York: Grove Press, 1962), 258.
165 He said: “esli budet pravda khotia by na 5%, to i eto khleb.” His 2 June 1937 speech inIstochnik,
1994, no. 3, 79–80.
166 See Hiroaki Kuromiya, “Ataman Semenov’s Secret Life.”Przegląd Wschodni, 2014, no. 2, 535–556.
167 Information given by Polish to Japanese authorities: “Soren no choh ̄o hanch ̄ o ni tsuite” marked ̄
“Secret” and dated September 1936, BBKT, 14.
168 See Józef Piłsudski Institute of America Archive, New York, Papers of Edmund Charaszkiewicz,
sygnatura 3-1, fol. 25; Mamoulia,Les combats indépendandistes des Caucasiens, 227; Sotskov,Neizvest-
nyi separatizm, pp. 101–02; and Thom,Beria, 78, 506, 512, and 774.