Mesaĝo nur por David Curtis [1 Attachment]

Bonvolu pardoni pro la misuzo de la listo, sed mi ne sukcesas ricevigi ĉi
tiun tekston por traduko al David Curtis. Mi provas nun per la listoj.

David, jen la teksto tradukinda, kaj ne la mesaĝo kaj en la aldonaĵo.

Amike

Renato

 1 1



FIFTH COLUMN









During the Spanish Civil War, one of Franco’s generals boasted to a jour
nalist that Madrid would fall not only to his four columns of troops then co
nverging on the city, but also to a “*quinta* *columna*” based inside the
Spanish capital. The phrase “fifth column” entered our language at that
point, but fifth columns had existed long before 1936.

Prior to 1917, the Bolsheviks represented an insignificant force both in
Georgia and throughout Transcaucasia, with the popular- ity of the
Social Democratic
Party over many years ensuring that no significant rivals emerged on the
left. When Zhordania and his comrades took the side of the Mensheviks
in the dispute
within the Russian party, they took all of the Georgian Social Democratic Pa
rty with them.

There were, though, some Georgian Bolsheviks, among them Stalin. Stalin took
Lenin’s side in the party split and over a number of years tried without gr
eat success to build Bolshevik organisations across the region. In late 1
898, the twenty-year- old Stalin had gone to speak with Zhordania in order
to ask his advice about quitting the Tiflis Theological Seminary and

devoting his life to becoming a full-time revolutionary. Zhordania








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interrogated him and concluded that the young man’s knowledge was
superficial and that he would benefit from another year in the seminary.
According to historian Robert Conquest, Stalin “seems to have taken some
offence at this rebuff, and was heard making a heated attack on Zhordania to
a group of students.”1

Zhordania remembered that Stalin was not a good speaker and could only r
ecite speeches as if he were giving lessons in school, and used vulgar language
for rhetorical effect.2 Furthermore, Stalin was plagued during his whole car
eer as a revolutionary in Transcaucasia with accusations of improper
conduct, including charges that he colluded with the tsarist police.

Stalin’s possible role as a tsarist police spy was first raised by people who
knew him during his long years in the Social Democratic underground in T
ranscaucasia. Many accusations were made about him by Georgian Menshevik
leaders, including the assertion that he revealed the location of the secret
party printing press in the Tiflis neighbourhood of Avlabar in 1906, or that
he betrayed the location of a safe house used by the famous Armenian Bolshe
vik Stepan Shaumian. Some of Stalin’s former comrades insisted that he was
the subject of a party “court of honour” at one point, and that he may even
have been expelled from the party or ordered to leave the region.
Early biographies
of Stalin included many such stories. But the most important evidence about
his possible secret involvement with the tsarist police appeared in 1956, th
ree years after his death.

The American mass-circulation magazine *Life* published two major articles
in the same issue on the subject. One, by Soviet secret police general
Alexander Orlov, who had defected to the West several years earlier, told a
story he had heard about a secret

file that had been discovered in the tsarist police archives in the








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1930s. According to Orlov’s account, when Stalin learned of this discovery,
he began the wave of purges of Communist officials, some of whom may have
been conspiring to topple him from power using that file.

The other article, by Isaac Don Levine, an American journalist who had pub
lished the first biography of Stalin in English in the

1930s, revealed the existence of the “Eremin Letter,” a document that appear
ed to come from the tsarist Department of Police and which named Stalin as a
paid police agent, who spied on the Bolsheviks. The American diplomat and
historian George F. Kennan, who inspected the Eremin Letter at the request
of the State Department in the 1940s, wrote that it was “one of those cur
ious bits of historical evidence of which it can only be said that the marks
of spuriousness are too strong for us to call it genuine, and the marks of
genuineness are too strong for us to call it entirely spurious.”3

Today most historians dismiss the charge that Stalin was a tsarist police sp
y, though Edward Ellis Smith’s 1967 book *The **Y**oung* *Stalin* raises
important questions about the future dictator’s early career that are rarely
addressed. Though he dismissed the Eremin Letter as a forgery, Smith was con
vinced that a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointed to Stalin’s
collaboration with the police.4

Regardless, after several short periods of prison and exile, Stalin was
finally sent away to Siberian exile on the eve of the First World War and
there he remained until the revolution of March

1917. Finally free to resume his political activity, he returned not to his
Georgian home but to the Russian capital, Petrograd. He did not set foot in
Georgia again until it had been occupied by

Soviet troops in 1921.








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By the time the tsarist regime collapsed in March 1917, there was
practically no Bolshevik organisation left in Georgia.The few Bolsheviks in
the country put their factional differences with the Mensheviks behind them,
and established a joint party committee with their formal rivals. But dev
elopments on the battle front with Turkey gave Lenin’s party an unexpected
opportunity.

As the First World War dragged on, Bolshevik agitators worked tirelessly
among soldiers and sailors on every front, demanding Russia’s withdrawal fr
om the conflict. Other left-wing parties, including the Mensheviks, were di
vided in their attitude towards the war. Some Mensheviks had been
sympathetic to the Allied cause, Zhordania among them. Others, most notably
Julius Martov, led a faction of the party known as “internationalists” who
shared the Bolshevik opposition to the war. As a result, the Bolsheviks had
considerable success among ordinary soldiers, who have been described as
“peasants in uniform,” with such successes taking place not only on the fr
onts where the Russian army had suffered military setbacks. The Bolshevik
organisations inside the armed forces grew throughout 1917, during the per
iod of the Provisional Government.They were helped by the Provisional Gover
nment’s decision to honour Russia’s commitment to supporting the Allies, and
by their refusal to enact a land reform programme.The war dragged on, and of
all the blunders made by the Provisional Government, its continued support
for the conflict was surely the greatest. It cost the administration the loy
alty of the army and in the end ensured the victory of the Bolshevik coup in
November of that year.

The bungled “Kerensky offensive” in July 1917 was a turning point. The
offensive against Austria-Hungary and Germany,

which marked a renewal of the Russian war effort, lasted barely








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two weeks and revealed the weakness of the Russian army, which had lost the
will to fight.The Tiflis Soviet had passed a resolution offering lukewarm
support for the war effort on 22 June, not long before the offensive began.
The next day, a huge meeting of radicalised soldiers took place in the
Aleksandr Garden in Tiflis, adopting a resolution put forward by the Bolshe
viks condemning the offensive. And the day after that, the Bolsheviks decided
to make a show of strength by holding a protest march. The Mensheviks
attempted to take over the demonstration, but their speakers were shouted do
wn, and some 10,000 soldiers voted again to condemn the offensive and to
demand a government of the Soviets. It was a high-water mark for the Georg
ian Bolsheviks.

During this entire period, right up until the Bolshevik coup in November 191
7, there was still some hope that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks across the
former Russian empire could be united in a single party, as seemed to be the
case in Tiflis. It was not until Lenin’s arrival at Petrograd’s Finland
Station in April that the Bolsheviks began to be pulled away from the other
revolutionary parties and to strike out on their own. Zhordania’s old comrade
Pilipe Makharadze returned from the April 1917 Bolshevik Party Congress in P
etrograd firmly convinced that with Lenin’s return to Russia and his fierce
opposition to any reconciliation with the Mensheviks, the split within the
party was now permanent.

In Georgia, the Bolsheviks initially controlled the only Social Democratic n
ewspaper published in the Russian language, *Kavkazskii* *r**abo**c**hii *
(Caucasian Worker) and it was not until May that the Mensheviks began pub
lishing their own, *Bor’ba *(Struggle). Finally in June 1917 the Bolsheviks
in Georgia formed their own independent party ‒ which was a branch of the
Russian

Bolshevik Party.








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In Georgia, the Bolsheviks had little success recruiting followers among the
peasants who made up the vast majority of the population, and even less
success among industrial workers in the major cities. But they did manage to
win over a not inconsiderable number of demoralised soldiers, most of them
Russians, hungry for peace and a chance to go home. In addition to winning o
ver Russian soldiers, the Bolsheviks had some success with Russian workers l
iving in Georgia as well.

Those radicalised soldiers, persuaded by Bolshevik promises of an end to the
war and land reform, were what allowed Lenin’s relatively small party to
seize power in the Russian capital Petrograd, and were the mainstay of Bolsh
evik rule in the first years of the revolution. But while the liberals
and moderate
socialists in the Russian capital were easily overcome by Bolshevik soldiers
and sailors ‒ both at the time of Lenin’s seizure of power and again in Jan
uary 1918 when the Constituent Assembly was dispersed by the Bolsheviks ‒
the Georgian Mensheviks were determined not to allow this to happen on their
home turf.

They reacted to the Bolshevik challenge by setting up the People’s Guard,
and entered into a fierce competition with the Bolsheviks to win the loyalty
of the army garrison in the city. As Ronald Grigor Suny put it, “It was also
a struggle for power in the city, and its outcome would determine whether
the Georgian working class or the Russian soldiery would decide the political
fate of central Transcaucasia.”5

In the end, the Georgian working class won. They seized the Tiflis armoury f
rom Russian Bolshevik soldiers and, now well- armed, were able to maintain o
rder in the Georgian capital even when threatened by armed Russian soldiers
who were passing

through the country.








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Early in 1918, the Bolsheviks made several efforts to cause unrest in T
ranscaucasia, to no avail. On 10 February, the day of the opening of the T
ranscaucasian Sejm (parliament), a Bolshevik protest meeting was again held
in the Aleksandr Gardens in Tiflis, but this time it was dispersed by gunfir
e.

The Menshevik leaders, including Zhordania andTsereteli, were trying to lear
n the lessons from Lenin’s coup in Petrograd three months earlier. Tsereteli
, who had been in the Russian capital, told the Transcaucasian leaders that
the Kerensky government had been excessively timid in its dealings with the
Bolsheviks. This was a mistake not to be repeated. Trotsky later quoted a
Georgian representative’s comment to the Americans regarding the Bolsheviks:
“We have successfully suppressed them.The proofs are self-evident: out of th
e former territory of Russia, Georgia alone is free from Bolshevism.”6 (Which
was something of an exaggeration, as whole regions of the former Russian
empire remained free of Bolshevik rule for several more years.) Bolshevik ne
wspapers were suppressed in Georgia, many Bolsheviks were arrested, and the
party went underground, where it stayed for two long years.

The strong reaction by the government to the Bolshevik protests, and the
successful seizure of the arsenal a few months earlier, persuaded the Georg
ian Communist leaders that they would need a new strategy, which included
stirring up revolt among the peasants. Their efforts focussed for a time on
western Georgia, scene of the earlier Gurian Republic, but the People’s Guar
d was usually able to put a stop to these efforts, often using brutal force.

The Georgian Bolsheviks never accepted the idea of inde-

pendence for the three breakaway Caucasian republics, and








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always fought to reunite them with Russia. In fact, when the Transcaucasian
Sejm voted on 22 April 1918 to break away from Russia, the Bolsheviks joined
the Russian Socialist Revo- lutionaries and the Kadets (Constitutional
Democrats) in opposing the move. This must be one of very few examples of
Bolsheviks and Kadets, which was seen as the quintessential liberal party, w
orking together in common cause.

A month later, the Bolsheviks were among a small minority of Georgians who
did not celebrate the country’s declaration of independence when the T
ranscaucasian Federation fell apart. Despite Georgia’s declaration of
independence, the local Bolshe- viks insisted on calling themselves the Geor
gian branch of the *All-Russian* Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and only adopted
the name “Communist Party of Georgia” several years later, for reasons which
will be become clear.

The Russian Bolsheviks had already instructed all the young Communist par
ties then springing up around the world to form both legal and illegal
sections. One would work legally, where possible, spreading propaganda, recr
uiting new members, forming factions in the trade unions,participating in
elections to parliaments and so on. The other section would work undergr
ound, secretly preparing the party for the day when it would need to lead an
armed insurrection to overthrow the existing government. In the view of the
Bolsheviks at that time, based on their experience in tsarist Russia, there
was no peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism. In the end, the working
class would come to power in each country under the leadership of a
disciplined vanguard party, and the seizure of power would be a violent act.

In countries like Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, bordering

on Russia and once part of its empire, the Communists (as the








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Bolsheviks now styled themselves) had an additional task, which was to
challenge the legitimacy of the country’s independence, and campaign for its
reintegration into a Russian ‒ now Soviet

‒ empire. In some cases, as in the Transcaucasian republics, this eventually
meant providing assistance to the Russian Red Army when it crossed the fr
ontiers.

After November 1917, and following their failure to seize power when other
Bolshevik groups were doing so across the Russian empire, the local Bolshe
vik groups in Georgia worked feverishly, trying to exploit peasant r
ebellions that took place sporadically across Georgia, with considerable
success.They exploited peasant discontent with the existing land reform in
northern regions of the country including Dushei, Racha, Tianeti and Lechkhumi.
Many of the Bolsheviks were former soldiers and they organised armed
detachments of peasants, in one case mounting an assault on the town of
Zugdidi, which failed.7 The Bolsheviks also had success with some South
Ossetians. Zhordania challenged the Bolshevik narrative that they had taken
part in genuine peasant revolts, claiming there were just three events over
the course of the three years of Menshevik rule:


In all these three cases, events developed along the same lines: armed Bolsh
evik bands from time to time crossed the frontiers of the Republic and
attempted, each time, by bribery, threats of

violence, to win over some members of the local population; they

even made demagogical endeavours to play on the feelings of the local
separatists, of the more backward sections of the populations of Abkhasia
[sic] and Ossetia.8


But he also acknowledged that “there were instances of excesses towards the
local inhabitants who had been incited by the Bolsheviks and the punishment
of marauders by martial law.”








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Trotsky, in his critique of the Georgians, found quotations from People’s
Guard commander Jugeli that confirmed how terrible those “excesses” were in
practice. But Zhordania would have none of it, writing that those quotes “sh
ow how heartrending it was for our comrades in the ranks of the Peoples Guar
d to have to resort to such excesses.”

One of the reasons why the Bolsheviks were unable to seize power in Georgia
at that time was the presence of the German army from mid-1918 until the end
of the year. Another was the departure of the Russian soldiers who were the
Bolsheviks’ main source of support in the country. As a result, the party w
as forced to relocate its Regional Committee (*Kavk**r**aikom*) from Tiflis to
Vladikavkaz, in the northern Caucasus. Two leading members of the *Kavk**r*
*aikom* found themselves in Baku, cut off from the others. Now based outside
of Georgia, the Bolsheviks tried to maintain control through a small bureau
in the Georgian capital headed by Mikha Tskhakaia. But the main leadership was
cut off from the country by the mountains, and Georgian troops
effectively sealed
their border with Russia.

Probably the main reason for the Bolshevik failure in Georgia, however, then
and in subsequent years, was the enormous popu- larity of the Social
Democrats, who were seen as a party represen- ting the whole nation, with ov
erwhelming public support. And while the Provisional Government in Russia ha
d failed to carry out agrarian reform, which weakened them just as their
continuation of the war had done, the Georgian Social Democrats did carry out
their promise to redistribute land to the peasants.

The departure of the Germans at the end of 1918, following their defeat in
the world war, opened up new possibilities for

the Bolsheviks. The *Kavk**r**aikom* returned to Tiflis not a moment








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too soon, for with the advances of General Denikin’s counter- revolutionary
White forces, the exiled Bolsheviks in the North Caucasus were driven back
into Georgia. Leading Communists including Sergo Ordzhonikidze hid out in
Tiflis. They “began to publish a newspaper, *V**olna* (The Wave),”
reports Kazemzadeh.
“Organisational work was resumed, with special attention payed to the trade
unions and the army.The army was given importance because it consisted of
peasants, who could easily be influenced, while the proletarian People’s Gua
rd staunchly adhered to Men- shevism.”9 They also began preparations for the
armed overthrow of the hated Social Democratic government.

Communist youth groups were organised across Transcaucasia, and by September
appeared to have recruited up to 1,800 mem- bers. At a conference in Baku,
they adopted the name used by Communist youth across Russia: *Komsomol*.
These young Communists were destined to play a critical role in the Bolshevik
plans to wrest control of Georgia from its elected government.

Kazemzadeh, relying on Soviet sources, speaks highly of their efforts.


When it was necessary to print some proclamations, the Komsomol members w
ould go at night to the press rooms of *Borba* or *E**r**toba*, the two
leading Menshevik newspapers, bribe the janitor and the lonely guard and tak
e them to the nearest tavern, while others would enter the building and pr
int thousands of

copies of their leaflets and pamphlets. On every piece they printed the foll
owing inscription was to be found: “Printed at the Press

of the Regional Committee of the Russian Communist Party.” The Menshevik
police looked everywhere for the clandestine press, except, of course, in
the building of *Borba* and *E**r**toba*.The Komsomol repeated this
operation several times before the trick was discovered.10








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The story has a familiar ring. In pre-revolutionary Georgia, Stalin boasted
that he too was able to use someone else’s press to produce illegal Bolshe
vik propaganda ‒ the press of the tsarist police.That story was one of sev
eral that led Georgia’s Mensheviks to distrust the young revolutionary.

In the late summer of 1919, the Bolsheviks held secret party meetings across
Georgia, and at the one held in Tiflis it was decided the time was ripe to
strike and bring an end to Menshevik rule in the country. In their view, the
economy was in crisis, the Social Democratic government was tottering on the
brink of catastrophe, and it would be relatively easy to seize power.

The Georgian Bolsheviks organised a military staff and set the date for the
revolution: 7 November, the second anniversary of the Bolshevik *coup*
*d’état* in Petrograd. Later the date was moved up by a couple of days.The
*Komsomol* was given the task of scouting around the Georgian capital, deter
mining where the government troops were, drawing up plans of government b
uildings to be taken over, and so on.

Georgia’s “November Revolution” was due to be led not by industrial workers,
but by disgruntled soldiers, with the former remaining stubbornly loyal to
the Menshevik government and forming the core of the People’s Guard.The r
eliance on mutinous soldiers had worked for Lenin two years earlier, and the
Georgian Bolsheviks opted for a time-tested formula.

On the eve of the planned insurrection, twenty-two Bolsheviks who served in
the Georgian army met to make last-minute plans. They were the general staff
of what would have been declared a “proletarian revolution,” even if the
actual proletariat wanted nothing to do with it. The only problem with the
conspiracy

was that it was a conspiracy. All it took was for just one of the








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soldiers to break ranks and inform the government, which is precisely what
happened.The Mensheviks knew all the details of the plot, and sent a special
detachment of loyal men to arrest the conspirators.

As a result, the Communist Party leadership called off the revolt. However,
not everyone in the ranks of the Georgian Bolsheviks had heard the news, and
in some rural areas, local Communist cells rose up and attempted to bring do
wn the government.Their efforts were easily suppressed by the People’s Guard
and the army.

A British journalist, C.E. Bechhofer, happened to be visiting Georgia that
month, and had the opportunity to interview Noe Ramishvili, who was then
minister of war and the Interior. Ramishvili, he wrote, “offered me an
explanation of the risings which had disturbed the country a week or two
before. They were, he said, entirely due to Bolshevist propaganda from Mosco
w. The Bolshevists, after their defeats at Kursk and Orel, wanted to estab
lish a new front in Denikin’s rear, and decided to attempt to capture Georgia
for the Bolshevist cause.”11

The Russians had invested some 87 million roubles in the coup attempt, the
money mainly intended to produce pro-Bolshevik propaganda.

According to Bechhofer’s account, Ramishvili told how the Georgian government
learned about the planned uprising and stopped it, but added:


As for the outbreak that had actually taken place, it had been manned almost
entirely by criminals and deserters, led by Russian and Chinese Bolshevists;
the peasants took no part in the rising whatever.The trouble had now been
satisfactorily liquidated; the Constituent Assembly had permitted the
institution of courts- martial, and some thirty of the leaders of the rising
had already








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been shot. Altogether during the past year several hundred Bolshevists and
their supporters had been executed; and there was no longer any possibility
of a renewed outbreak.12


Bechhofer was a Russophile and not particularly sympathetic to the Georgian
Social Democrats. He did not at all approve of the new nation’s parliament
speaking Georgian. He believed that Ramishvili was convinced that the ex
ecutions of Bolsheviks “would go down well with English papers.
Curiously enough,
Mr Ramsay Macdonald, passing through Georgia about ten months later, has
stated (of course, on information received from the Georgian Government)
that no ‘reprisals’ have been resorted to against the Bolshevists.”
Bechhofer neglected to point out that by the time MacDonald visited Georgia,
the Communist Party had been legalised, its prisoners all freed from the
jails, and was operating above-ground. Bechhofer added that lists of the
“Bolsheviks” (he put the word in quotation marks) who were executed appeared
in Tiflis newspapers and “there were no Chinamen among them.”13

Reading Bechhofer’s account of his conversation with Ram- ishvili today, wha
t stands out is not that the blood-thirsty and hypocritical Mensheviks
abandoned their pledge to be humane democrats, but that what they approved w
as “the institution of *cou**r**ts-ma**r**tial*.” In other words, the men wh
o were arrested and faced a death sentence were serving soldiers in the Geor
gian army. Whatever one thinks of the decision to enforce the death penalty
in this case, it was not unusual for a government to treat an armed mutiny b
y its own soldiers in this way, and the Georgians had re-introduced the deat
h penalty for treason back

in June 1918.








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Writing decades later, historian Vera Broido in her book *Lenin and* *the*
*Mensheviks*, challenged Bechhofer’s account. “The new country was beset on
all sides by hostile forces, but its worst enemy proved to be within: Georg
ian Bolsheviks recognised only one fatherland and one government and that w
as Lenin’s Russia,” she wrote. “These Bolsheviks fomented discontent
and rebellion
among disbanded soldiers and other unstable elements. In Nov- ember 1919 the
y staged an abortive coup, after which almost a thousand of them were impr
isoned by the Georgian government. Like their Russian counterparts, the Geor
gian Mensheviks had scruples about using violence against their opponents.”
14

We don’t have to rely simply on Broido’s account – the Georgian Menshevik
leaders, Zhordania first and foremost, denied Bechhofer’s account of his co
nversation with Ramishvili, as I will make clear later. Bechhofer’s bias
against the Georgian Mensheviks is very apparent. His account of the conver
sation, which is the only source for the figure of thirty Bolsheviks being e
xecuted, cannot be accepted without question.

The charge that the Georgian Social Democratic government was treating
the local
Communists brutally was taken up by Trotsky following the Russian invasion
of Georgia in 1921. The Red Army leader blasted Kautsky for his assertion r
egarding the “complete liberty of action” for the Georgian Bolsheviks. “It w
ould have been sufficient had he said that it had some liberty,” Trotsky wr
ote.“But, as we already know, if he speaks of neutrality, then it is the str
ictest, if of liberty, it is the fullest; he does not speak merely of good r
elations, but ‘the very best possible.’”

Referring to the various socialist leaders who visited Georgia

in 1920,Trotsky added that








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It is amazing, above all, that neither Kautsky nor Vandervelde, nor Mrs. Sno
wden herself, nor the foreign diplomats, nor the journalists of the
bourgeois press, nor the faithful guardians of liberty ‒ *The* *Times*, nor
the most upright Temps, in a word, none of those who bestowed their
benedictions upon the democracy of Georgia ever noticed there the presence
of … the Special Detachments.Yet such did exist.15


Trotsky wasn’t upset that there was a kind of political police (the special
detachments) operating in the country. Instead, he compared it to the Bolshe
viks’ own secret police, the Cheka.“The Special Detachments, if you please,
is the Menshevik Cheka,” he wrote.“The Special Detachment seized and impr
isoned and shot all those that were active against the Menshevik democracy.”
Trotsky boasted that the Bolsheviks themselves did exactly the same thing
with the Cheka.

“The Special Detachment in its methods of terror in no way differed from the
Extraordinary Commission of Soviet Russia,” he wrote. “Where it did differ w
as in aim. The Extraordinary Commission protected the Socialist dictatorship
against the agents of capital; the Special Detachment protected the bourgeois
regime against the Bolshevik “anarchy.” But it was for this very reason that
the respectable people who cursed the Cheka, did not notice the Georgian
Special Detachment.”16

Trotsky believed that creating a secret police force and executing one’s
opponents was perfectly alright. What he objected to was the assertion that
the Georgian Social Democrats were somehow better than this.

Zhordania rejected Trotsky’s comparison entirely.“To compare them [the
special detachments] with the Soviet ‘Tchekas’ who

have the right of life or death over the inhabitants, who are not








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bound by any laws and are responsible to no one, is possible only by an enti
re disregard of the truth.”17 He insisted that these detachments were unable
to launch an enquiry or legal proceedings, and were not independent in any
way.

There can be little doubt that the Georgian Social Democrats used force to
put down Bolshevik coup attempts, just as they did when dealing with
separatist ethnic groups such as the South Ossetians. The question is
whether they had any choice and if their response to violent attacks was pr
oportionate.

The Georgian Bolsheviks operated as a conspiratorial organ- isation
dedicated to supporting Russian attempts to bring the country back into the
Russian fold. They were not simply a group of dissidents, a political party
with a different view of how Georgia should be run, even if many of the par
ty’s adherents joined for perfectly good reasons and had no particular loyalty
to Soviet Russia. The party was very much an arm of the Soviet state, and pa
rticularly of the Red Army, as became clear in 1921 when they helped inv
ading Russian troops into their country.

As a group with utter contempt for democratic norms, the Bolsheviks could not
be treated the way the Georgian Social Democrats treated all the other
opposition parties, which oper- ated quite freely and whose leaders were not
jailed.The Georgian Mensheviks were deeply affected by the failure of the Pr
ovisional Government in Petrograd to defend itself in 1917 when the Bolshe
viks seized power with relative ease, and were grappling with issues that w
ould come up again within a decade in Weimar Germany, where once again
Social Democrats found themselves employing repressive measures against the
Nazis and Communists

‒ though again without sufficient force.








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The Georgian Social Democrats were dealing with something that had not been
anticipated by the founding fathers of the modern socialist movement. T
otalitarian political parties were a new phenomenon, conspiratorial in natur
e, committed to the violent overthrow of elected democratic governments.
Demo- cracies needed to find ways to defend themselves against this threat.

The debacle of the November 1919 coup attempt put a damper on further effor
ts by the Bolsheviks. But the dream of overthrowing the Social Democrats by
force, backed up by the Russian Red Army, remained. And it took less than
six months for the Bolsheviks to try again.

The Komsomol sent out an appeal to anyone in Russia who would listen –
including the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the Council of People
’s Commissars, the Comintern, the Red Army, and the Central Committee of the
Russian Young Communist League ‒ asking for help against “the oppressive gov
ernments of the Mensheviks and the Dashnaks.”

The Georgian Komsomol forced its youngest members into something called the
“Young Communist Guard.” On 17 April

1920, this group issued “Order No. 3” which said: “Those who have been
mobilized should immediately be organized into fighting groups of ten men
each. These groups should be of two types: first, those who know how to use
weapons; second, reserve groups.”18 The Komsomol began to buy and store arms,
to prepare for yet another attempt to seize power.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Azerbaijan, the Bolsheviks were taking steps to
put an end to the country’s existence as an inde- pendent state. At noon on
27 April 1920, the local Communists presented an ultimatum to the
Azerbaijani government demanding

that it hand over power within twelve hours.The ultimatum was








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a ploy as it had already been decided that the Red Army would invade. For pr
opaganda purposes, however, the Russians wanted it to appear as if there had
been a local uprising.

While the Azerbaijani parliament debated how to respond to the ultimatum,
and long before the twelve hours were up, Red Army forces crossed the border
and seized a couple of railway stations. They began their advance on Baku,
meeting hardly any resistance along the way. Most Azerbaijani soldiers were
too busy fighting the Armenians for control of Karabagh, a disputed region
(then and now), to have mounted a real defence of the capital. Seeing no
alternative, the parliamentarians voted to dissolve their government and
hand over power to the Bolsheviks.

Telegrams were then sent to Moscow by the Azerbaijani Communists asking for
the assistance of the Red Army in support of their “revolution” ‒ as if that
army hadn’t already invaded. As Kazemzadeh summed it up,“it was the might of
a resurrected Russia which destroyed the Musavatist Government of Azerbaijan
.”19

There was no international outcry when Azerbaijan lost its independence and
was absorbed into the Russian Soviet system. The time therefore seemed ripe
to stage a similar coup and invasion in Georgia.

Three days after the fall of Baku, on the morning of 1 May

1920, Communist demonstrators marched toward the centre of Tiflis. According to
one young Communist eyewitness, “Our trucks were thundered by big crowds,
calls for an uprising and the thunder of applause were heard. Hundreds of
thousands of leaflets were distributed.”20 Workers loyal to the Social
Democrats chose to fight back, together with the police, and the demonstration
was broken up. Many arrests were made.








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The coup was scheduled for the following day, 2 May 1920. Soviet historians
would later question why the Bolsheviks didn’t make their bid for power a da
y earlier, on International Workers’ Day, when Communists were leading their
supporters in the streets. As a result of the provocative character of the
Bolshevik demon- strators on May Day that year (they were, after all, aware
that they were only hours away from a planned armed insurrection) the Menshe
vik government arrested a number of Communist leaders.

The Bolshevik plan this time was to arrest the entire leadership of the
Menshevik party, who would be attending a meeting of the Tiflis soviet on
the night of 2 May. Presumably, the Bolsheviks had intelligence that the
Mensheviks would not be protecting themselves, and would be vulnerable to a
bold strike, just as the Provisional Government had been in Petrograd in 191
7.

As it turned out, the Mensheviks had little to fear. The Georgian Bolshe
viks, emulating their Russian heroes, decided on a plan that would begin
with a cannon shot fired from the Tiflis arsenal. In this, they were
attempting the recreate the shots fired by the cruiser *A**uro**r**a* in Pet
rograd which signalled that the Bolshevik revolt there had begun in November
1917. The would-be Georgian Lenins, however, were unable to re-enact the
successful seizure of power in Petrograd.They had given the task of repor
ting on when the Mensheviks had begun their meeting to a group of Young Comm
unist girls.The girls, however, arrived late.The Mensheviks had held their
meeting and gone home.The cannon did not fire.The revolt had to be
cancelled.21

As in November 1919, a small part of the Communist Party didn’t get the news
and went ahead with the revolt ‒ a single detachment of the *Komsomol*. It
turned out to be no match

for the People’s Guard or the police. Some of the Communist








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rebels were killed while others fled. An attempted revolt in South Ossetia
which was supposed to take place at the same time also collapsed.

While the coup attempt in Tiflis failed because the Komsomol girls showed up
late, it was probably doomed from the start. As Kazemzadeh summed it up,
“the Georgian Bolsheviks were far too weak to overthrow a well-established G
overnment enjoying popular support.The May revolt was a useless adventure.”
22

The Georgian Bolsheviks were very upset that the Red Army did not come to
their assistance, especially given just days earlier the Soviets had
occupied Baku. But a bigger shock was to follow when, five days after
the failed
coup, on 7 May 1920, Soviet Russia and Georgia signed a peace treaty in
which the Russian Bolshevik government formally recognised independent Georgia.
In a *quid* *pro* *quo*, the Georgian government made the Communist Party
fully legal and agreed to release all the jailed Communists.

The Georgian Bolsheviks and their comrades in Armenia and Azerbaijan were fu
rious. “We, the toiling masses of all Trans- caucasian peoples, proclaim …
before the international proletariat that we despise the slogan of
‘independence’ announced by a minority of the Caucasian population through our
oppressors and ravishers, the ‘governments’ of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ar
menia,” they declared.

As Kazemzadeh wrote, “But what was the use of denouncing independence when
it was solemnly and ‘unequivocally’ recog- nized by the Soviet Government in
Moscow? For a brief moment the Georgian Communists felt deserted. The Party,
which was small and weak to start with, yet capable of waging battles by the
sheer power of its enthusiasm, lost its heart.”23 It was this legal,

though weakened, Communist Party that Kautsky, MacDonald








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and the other visiting socialists encountered during their trip to

Georgia four months later.

The two failed revolts in November 1919 and again in May

1920 were evidence that the Georgian Bolsheviks had no inten- tion of being
a genuine opposition political party. They also proved that the party had
little if any public support and armed insurrection was not on the cards.
The only way the Georgian Bolsheviks would ever come to power would be if
the Red Army could be persuaded to invade the country.

Legalisation proved to be a mixed blessing for the local Bolsh- eviks. “The
only purpose which animated the Party was, as one of its leaders said, the
organization of armed uprisings for the overthrow of the Government,” wrote
Kazemzadeh.24 A decision was taken to maintain the underground party as well
as the newly legal and above-board version. Armed robberies which had been
used to fund the party were stopped, but weapons and other equipment were to
be kept well hidden.

Following legalisation, the local Bolsheviks needed to re-name their party.
They were now the Communist Party of Georgia, but they still referred to
themselves as the “forward detachment of the Russian Communist Party.” They
and the newly formed Communist Parties of Armenia and Azerbaijan continued
to see themselves as part and parcel of the Russian Communist Party. They
took advantage of their new-found freedom by organising a new, provisional
Central Committee and launched two legal party newspapers ‒ *ko**m**unisti*
in Georgian, and *Kom**m**unist* *Gruzii *in Russian.

In addition to legalising the Communist Party, the Georgians had agreed to r
elease any jailed Bolsheviks, which, according to

Trotsky, amounted to 900 Communists. As Zhordania pointed








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out, many of these may have been Russian agents who crossed the border into
the country, with their illegal weapons and sacks of cash. And while 900 Com
munists may seem like a large number, it pales in comparison to the size of
the Menshevik Party, which had 80,000 members in Georgia. Nevertheless, it
does indicate that some support for the Bolsheviks did exist in the country.

The Russians took advantage of the new relations with Georgia to send an
ambassador to Tiflis, Sergei Kirov, who would go on to become a very pr
ominent figure in the Bolshevik Party, eventually becoming party leader in
Leningrad. His assassination in 1934 marked the beginning of Stalin’s Great
Purge. (It is today widely believed that Stalin orchestrated the
assassination himself.) Kirov’s job was not only to represent Russian inter
ests in dealings with the Georgian state, but also to personally direct the
Georgian Communist Party in its ongoing efforts to seize political power. Fo
r this purpose, he had access to a very considerable amount of money, and an
embassy staff in Tiflis with hundreds of employees. They were often picked u
p by Georgian police for their subversive activities but quickly released du
e to their diplomatic immunity.

The signing of the peace deal did not prevent the Russian Bolsheviks from tr
ying to spark local insurrections in various parts of Georgia, as they had
done in the past. In July 1920, for example, a Bolshevik conspiracy was unc
overed in Abkhazia. Local Communists had been in touch with both the Russian
Military Command and officials employed by Kirov’s Russian diplomatic
mission in Tiflis.

Also, according to a report in a British newspaper, in August

1920 a former minister in the Azerbaijani government, Hassan

Agayeff, was murdered by Bolshevik agents in Tiflis. “Attempts








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on the lives of Georgian Menshevist politicians are also reported,”

it added.25

Meanwhile, Armenia was coming under increasing threat of a Soviet invasion.
Though its local Communists proved to be even less popular than those in
Georgia, the Dashnak government foolishly embroiled the country in a war
with Turkey which it could not win.The Turks easily defeated the Armenians
and by 18

November 1920 an armistice was proclaimed which formalised the Armenian
defeat. This was followed just ten days later by the arrival of Communist tr
oops crossing over from Azerbaijan.

As they had done when conquering Azerbaijan, the Russian Red Army again tr
ied to paint this as a revolt by the “toiling masses of Armenia.” The
Dashnak government decided not to resist, having no army left after the
defeat at the hands of Turkey. Their capitulation was an odd one, cloaked in
an effort to create an alliance between the Dashnaks and the Communists while
welcoming the Russian troops. That “coalition” lasted only a few days before
the Bolsheviks established a firm grip on power. Communist rule with its rep
ression, its failure to feed the local population, and its inability to push
back against the Turks, made the regime deeply unpopular from the outset.

In Georgia, despite the Bolshevik Party’s best efforts over several years,
the working class ‒ especially the urban proletariat

‒ proved resistant to the Communists’ allure. In Petrograd in 1917, the
Russian Bolsheviks had managed to win over a considerable number of urban w
orkers, and possibly a majority, to their cause. But their Georgian comrades
remained a small sect on the fringes of Georgian politics.

Karl Kautsky was an eyewitness to this. “The Communists

boasted, from time to time, that they were recruiting their ranks








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from the Georgian proletariat. But, whenever an opportunity arose it rev
ealed their insignificance,” he wrote.


Thus they commenced a great agitation among the railwaymen. A brilliant r
esult was to be achieved. Just as I was departing, a Congress of Railwaymen
was held in Tiflis which was going to demonstrate that the confidence of the
railway workers in the Government had been completely shattered.The Communists
expected to dominate the conference. Behold, when the delegates were
counted, one single Communist was found among them. All the others, and ther
e were over eighty, were Social-Democrats.26


Kautsky said that the same experience repeated itself at other union
meetings.

The Communist Party, now legal and funded with vast sums by the Russians,
did not thrive. Some members were lulled into a false sense of security and
revealed their membership, allowing the Georgian police to more accurately
gather intelligence on the party.The moment the party tried any subversive
activity, the government reacted forcefully, jailing and exiling some leaders.
In an honest appraisal of the state of the party, an internal report
admitted that most Georgian workers were “contaminated with the poison
of Russophobia”
and followed the Mensheviks.27

Even so, they persisted in their plans to overthrow the Georgian government,
and on 20 September 1920 the Georgian Communist leaders met in the safety of
Soviet-occupied Baku. There, they decided to strengthen their party, to imb
ue it with a new sense of discipline, knowing that an uprising would ev
entually come.

The Menshevik government,meanwhile,fought the Bolsheviks with every means at
their disposal. Trotsky’s account reads like an indictment, claiming that fr
om the beginning the Georgian

Menshevik leaders








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made “the ruthless suppression of Bolshevism” an essential plank of their pr
ogramme. … Communist newspapers were suppressed, meetings dispersed by gunfi
re, revolutionary villages led by Bolsheviks were burnt down.The
Special Detachment
conducted wholesale shootings of leaders.The Mskhet [prison] was crowded
with imprisoned Communists, Bolshevik refugees were handed back into the pow
er of Denikin. During one month, October,

1919, in Georgia, according to a statement by the then Minister for

the Interior, over 30 Communists were shot.28


These are serious allegations,and the Menshevik leaders rejected them. For
example, Zhordania, writing in a 1922 manuscript entitled “Imperialism
Behind the Mask of Revolution,” insists that Trotsky’s mention of the ex
ecution of thirty Communists in October 1919 “is sheer invention.” What surp
rised the Georgian president, he wrote, “is that Mr. Trotsky put forward so
modest a figure as 30 men; he might with equal truth say that we shot 300 or
3000 Bolsheviks.”29

Zhordania also rejected Trotsky’s insistence that the Bolshevik Party in
Georgia was illegal from 1918 to 1920. “This is not true,” he wrote. “The pa
rty existed openly, but its party organs which called on the people to rev
olt and attacked the idea of the independence of Georgia were, it is true, v
ery often suppressed by us, and its agents were arrested and exiled to
Russia for having prepared plots.”30

Zhordania also addressed the issue of arrests of large numbers of Georgian
Communists. He said that following the May 1920 peace treaty with
Soviet Russia,
the Georgian Communist Party was not only made fully legal, but was even
offered a building for its use by the Menshevik government. However, the
Georgian leaders were well aware of the Communists’ ongoing

subversive activities. The country, he wrote, was “inundated by








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agents from Soviet Russia.They crossed our frontier daily, by the score, br
inging with them arms and sacks of paper money (for propaganda). We often
succeeded in laying our hands on many of them.” To Trotsky’s assertion that
Georgia imprisoned large numbers of Communists, Zhordania answered: “I would
ask Mr. Trotsky one thing: what would happen if one of the neighbouring
states of Soviet Russia sent agents into its territory to prepare plots, rev
olts, etc., and if these agents were caught by the Soviet authorities? I ask
whether their lives would be spared, and their freedom restored.”31

Zhordania’s rebuttal of Trotsky is, I think, an effective one. While the
Georgian Mensheviks did not offer complete free- dom of operation to the
Bolsheviks, as they did for all other opposition parties, it was because the
Bolsheviks (unlike all the other parties) served as agents of a powerful for
eign country, and worked constantly to violently overthrow Georgia’s elected
government. And even under those circumstances, the Georgian state’s repr
ession of the Communist Party was infinitely more humane and less brutal
than the Soviet Communist treatment of opposition groups in Russia,
including the Russian Mensheviks.

Even in its new-found role as a legal (and extremely well- financed) party,
old habits died hard. By early January 1921, according to a report in a
London newspaper which may not be entirely reliable,


the Russian Bolshevists are in a position to overwhelm the country at any
moment, but are holding their hand for some reasons unknown.The Georgian Gov
ernment, taking advantage of this circumstance, have dealt in a drastic f
ashion with the extensive Communist organization which has sprung up during
the last

few months.Thousands of Communists have been arrested and








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imprisoned, expelled from the country, or sent into exile.The *Kutais*, a
Communist paper published in Tiflis, has been suppressed. Thus for the time
being, at least, the interior menace has been staved off, but the external
danger is still imminent.The Georgians are resolved to keep out the Bolshe
vists if possible.32


In hindsight, with a Russian invasion only months away, it was probably
foolish of the Georgian government to give the local Communists freedom of
operation, but that was the price for Soviet recognition of Georgian
independence. Of course that recognition soon turned out to have been worth
very little, though the Georgians did not know that at the time.

From the moment the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in November 1917, the
Georgian Mensheviks grappled with the question of how to deal with the local
Leninists. Tiny in number, with little influence over workers or peasants b
ut with some support in the army, the Bolsheviks represented a security thr
eat of considerable magnitude from the very beginning.Their willingness to
use violence to achieve their goals, and their subservience to the Russian
state, meant that they were like no other opposition group the Mensheviks
had to deal with.

In the long run, it didn’t really matter whether the Georgian
government treated
the local Bolsheviks with velvet gloves or an iron fist. The fate of the
country was not decided by the amateurish attempts by local Communists
to re-enact
the conditions of Petrograd in November 1917. Georgia faced a far

greater threat from across its northern borders.





-- 

*~~~*
*Renato Corsetti, 117 Dukes Avenue, London N10 2QD, UK/Britujo tel.
+393286315655, +447399273515 [email protected]
<[email protected]> <[email protected]>*