ABSTRACT
Writers in the USSR were no longer individuals after 1932: they were collective state property, as much as the peasants’ horses and pigs. They underwent a comparable slaughter and their fates make no sense unless seen as part of a process of prophylactic killing initiated by Stalin and, in Georgia, carried out with exceptional verve by Lavrenti Beria. We can find some clues which may help us understand how Beria rose to power, how he maintained that power so long, and, above all, how he both exploited and formed the subjects of his satrapy, in particular the Georgian intellectuals. Memoirs of those who worked under Beria in his last phase, when he supervised the building of the Soviet atomic bomb, tend to portray him as an ignoramus who bullied and threatened engineers and scientists and only with great difficulty was persuaded to accept that universal elementary laws of physics applied to Soviet enterprises as well. Certainly Beria was an ill-trained hydraulic engineer, and, once he had risen to be the first secretary of the Georgian and Transcaucasian parties and the chairman of the commissars, much of his work involved supervising projects of which he had only a shadowy grasp. His method was to invite bidding and choose the middle way. One of the princes Machabeli (unlike Orjonikidze, Beria had no particular grudge against the aristocracy) recalls Beria summoning his highway engineers and addressing them: ‘Tiflis is the heart of Georgia, Rustaveli Prospect is the heart of Tiflis: I want it asphalted. How long will it take?’ ‘Ten days,’ replies an enthusiastic novice. ‘Boasting,’ snarls Beria. ‘Twenty days,’ says the cautious chief engineer. ‘Perestrakhovka (playing safe)!’ shouts Beria, who then orders the job to be done in fifteen.
