The Bill for Stalinism
By RICHARD CHANCELLOR been sent away to the East, where their burning patriotism, particularly that of the Latvians, is known to inspire respect among their Russian gaolers. Even so, there are national forces left behind in these countries which have necessitated drastic changes in local party leadership, and it is only in Esthonia, close under the shadow of Leningrad, that it has been found possible to fill the party secretariat with natives of the country concerned.
The Georgians have never forgotten the special relation >hip of their country to Soviet, as to Imperial Russia, and Moscow's disquiet at the strength of Georgian nationalism can be seen in the decision taken in 1952 to subdivide the country administratively for the purpose of closer political control from the centre. The execution of this decree was entrusted to the Georgian Deputy Prime Minister of the USSR, Lavrenti Beria, who had already once purged Tiflis of ' hostile elements.' Since then, the political leadership has been purged four times, but the witch-hunt since the death of Beria has been concen• trated less on Georgian nationalism as such than on the personal adherents of Beria himself, the man who had threatened the sacred principle of collective leadership' in the capital of the USSR. The seriousness of this problem has required the personal attention of Shatalin, one of Malenkov'S closest collaborators, who can ill be spared from Moscow in these troubled times. Between the Georgians and the central government there lie the lands of the Caucasian mountaineers, the Cherkcssi, the Ossetini and the North Caucasians, whose record of resistance both to the Imperial and to the Soviet authority is long and formidable, and whose independent high- land spirit is still untamed.
The four frontier provinces of Armenia, Azerbaidzhan, Latvia and Moldavia have, like Georgia, been subjected to administrative sub-division, and in at least three of these republics there has been a purge of the leadership on familiar lines. Azerbaidzhan has required the attention of another Russian key-communist from the centre, Pospelov, to replace the disgraced Azerbaidzhani, Bagirov, And now, in Kazakh- stan, whose economic importance is second only to that of Ukraine, the appalling state of affairs which is revealed has required two more key-communists, Ponomarenko and Brezhnev, to save the situation. Supplies of the faithful may be running a little short, for Brezhnev was himself removed from Moldavia last summer in disgrace.. Few men get a second chance in Soviet Russia.
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