Caucasus. Yet the Egnatashvilis were independent of Beria. Furthermore Sasha Egnatashvili served in Stalin’s Guards Department under chief bodyguard General Vlasik, which was also outside Beria’s power, a situation that Beria constantly tried to remedy. After the Second World War, Beria accused Vlasik of corruption in selling the gigantic quantities of food for Stalin prepared at the Base. Vlasik counteraccused Beria of corruption and managed to survive, but Egnatashvili, who ran the Base, would probably have been implicated. The duel between Beria and Vlasik for control of the guards lasted until Stalin’s death. This is the first time that the story of General Egnatashvili and his wife has been told. It fits into a pattern. After the suicide of his wife, Nadya, Stalin distrusted the spouses of his courtiers. The pretty young wives of Alexander Poskrebyshev, his
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Mikha Tskhakaya, the greybeard who had promoted and protected Stalin in the early years before turning against Lenin and retiring to Genevan exile, survived to die in 1950 in his bed, an honoured Old Bolshevik. Inexplicably, Makharadze was allowed to survive the Terror. Stepan Shaumian, Stalin’s roommate in London and junior partner in the Tiflis bank robbery and then Baku, was the brutal master of the Baku Commune in 1918 when he oversaw the murder of around 15,000 Azeris. He was then overthrown and shot by the Whites and the British as one of the legendary Twenty-six Commissars. Stalin then adopted Shaumian’s son, Levan, and brought him up in his own household. Stalin’s Siberian roommate and Soviet head of state Yakov Sverdlov died of influenza in 1919.
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His Jewish wife, Polina, was equally devoted to Stalin and became a Deputy Commissar in her own right, but her strident feminism irritated Stalin, while her friendship with Nadya made him uneasy. He almost destroyed her in 1939, considered having her murdered in a car crash and finally forced Molotov to vote for her arrest in 1949. The full story is in
