race during the Second World War at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Equally, he deported many other peoples during the war and victimized other races such as the Poles and Koreans with whom he had had no such experience. As for Mukhtarov, he refused to surrender his palace to the Bolsheviks when the Red Army took Baku in 1920. “As long as I am alive, no barbarian in army boots will enter my house!” In a shoot-out, he fired on the Bolsheviks until he was overcome, at which point he shot himself. His beautiful wife, Liza-Khanum, for whom his Baku chateau was built, lived on in the basement, then escaped to Turkey, where she lived until the 1950s. Mukhtarov’s chateau is now the Baku Wedding Palace.
104
When Marshal Voroshilov was out of Stalin’s favour in his last years, he used to plead: “But, Koba, we became friends in Baku in 1907.”
“I don’t remember,” Stalin replied. For his future life, see the Epilogue.
105
In power, he persecuted and arrested Esperanto speakers.
106
Stalin found many of his Mauserist gangsters in the Bailovka (such as his cellmates the Sakvarelidze brothers). His Menshevik opponents, Devdariani from the seminary and Isidore Ramishvili from Batumi, were also in his crowded cell, but now the two factions were again forced to work together, and they turned a blind eye to his banditry.
107
In July 1937, at the height of the Great Terror, the man from Gori who arranged this swap, I. P. Nadiradze, wrote to another of his cellmates, Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s craven but dreaded Procurator-General, to ask him to confirm that he had served time for political murder and had helped arrange Stalin’s swap and escape. Vyshinsky confirmed the former, but on the swap that sinister survivor sat on the fence: “As for the fact of organizing the replacement for Comrade Stalin… I cannot attest to this because I do not remember.” Nadiradze was clearly under investigation in the Terror or he would not have appealed to the dangerous Vyshinsky on this sensitive subject at such a risky moment. But it is almost unthinkable that he would have written the letter were it not completely true as far as it goes.
108
The chief jailer there was named Serov, ironically the father of the future General Ivan Serov, one of Stalin’s top secret policemen, deporter of the Chechens and other peoples, and first KGB Chairman.
109
Soso befriended the post-office clerk who doubled as a jailer and whom he had met when he picked up his money orders. Soso liked to hunt alone in the forests during the summer and would meet the postman-jailer to pass him notes that he would deliver to the prisoners in the local prison. The local priest let Stalin use his library.
110
See the Epilogue.
111
The secret police adapted their own witty code names for their surveillance targets: a baker would be “Bun,” a banker “Moneybags,” the poet Sergei Esenin was “Typesetter,” while a pretty girl might be “Gorgeous” or “Glamourpuss.”
112
Just as he was to despise the happy marriages of his grandees in power, after the suicide of his second wife in 1932. See
113
Until recently, historians repeated that Beso had died about 1890, perhaps in a bar brawl, but the new archives disprove this. Once in power, Stalin’s henchmen and historians tried to find photographs of Beso and showed them to the dictator for identification: the Georgian Party archives contain piles of photographs of local cobblers and Beso candidates. One photograph probably is Beso for it was displayed in the cult museums, but Stalin himself refused to identify it. The local Party bosses also tried to find Beso’s grave but failed there too. In the 1940s, Elisabedashvili, who survived the Terror, presented Stalin with a clock that he claimed had belonged to Beso. Stalin refused to accept it, implying that someone else, probably Egnatashvili, was his real father. He preferred this gap in his life to any hint of the man himself.
114
Gio’s memoirs are remarkable because they were published in the Soviet Union in 1925, just after Lenin’s death but before Stalin had established his dictatorship—virtually the only moment in Soviet history when this could
