Filipp Yeseyevich Makharadze

After Soviet power entered Georgia through the Red Army's February-March 1921 military campaign, a line conflict broke out among Georgian Bolsheviks over how the new republic was to be transformed along socialist lines. On one side stood the moderates, for whom Lenin's conciliatory approach was a workable way to secure for Soviet power a broad base of support. Makharadze was the leading figure of this group. They advocated tolerance toward the Menshevik opposition, greater democracy within the party, gradual land reform and, above all, respect for national sensitivities and Georgia's sovereignty from Moscow. On the other side stood the hard-liners led by Stalin and the Georgian-born Grigol Ordzhonikidze, who sought to eliminate political opposition and centralize party control over the newly Sovietized republics.

In July 1921 Stalin, arriving in Tbilisi, delivered a speech outlining a program aimed at the elimination of local nationalism, was booed by the crowd, and within days removed the Revolutionary Committee chief Makharadze for inadequate firmness, replacing him with Polikarp Mdivani and ordering local leaders to "crush the hydra of nationalism". Makharadze's supporters, including the Georgian Cheka chief Kote Tsintsadze, were also sacked and replaced by more ruthless officers, among them Lavrentiy Beria.

Within less than a year, however, Stalin was in open conflict with Mdivani as well. The chief point at issue was Georgia's status within the projected union of Soviet republics. At the end of 1921 Ordzhonikidze set in motion a union of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia and insisted it join the Soviet Union as one federative republic, while the Georgian leadership demanded full-member status for their own republic. In 1922 Makharadze spoke for maintaining Georgia's autonomy within the Soviet Union, and resentment at Moscow's methods had been accumulating since the agreement concluded with the Menshevik government of Georgia, which the Russian SFSR reached without any consultation with the Georgian communists.

Makharadze was one axis of this conflict, and in the same documents he is also named as a leader of the 1922 "Georgian affair" and as a representative of the hard line. Which designation better reflects the actual balance of forces inside Georgia cannot be settled from these documents alone. What is documented is that the quarrel immediately became a struggle for power within the party and ended in defeat for the Georgian leaders who sought Lenin's support. Unaware of the full picture, Lenin dispatched the VeCheka chief Dzerzhinsky to Tiflis in late November 1922 to investigate; Dzerzhinsky sided with Stalin and Ordzhonikidze and gave Lenin a significantly smoothened report. In late December 1922 Lenin accepted that both Ordzhonikidze and Stalin were guilty of imposing Great Russian nationalism on non-Russian nationalities, but the Politburo decision of January 25, 1923 removed Mdivani and his associates from their posts and marked a conclusive victory for the hard line. On March 6, 1923 a telegram signed by Lenin reached Mdivani and Makharadze offering strong support against the "conniving" of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, though the authorship and authenticity of that and related documents are disputed among historians.

The consequences reached beyond Georgia. An armed rebellion broke out and the repression that followed took several thousand lives. The careers of the Georgian Old Bolsheviks were also blunted: attacks on them began in the late 1920s, and most of them, Mdivani included, were executed during the Great Purge of the 1930s. Makharadze escaped that fate; even after being pushed out by Stalin he served as chairman of the Transcaucasian SFSR Gosplan from 1924, chairman of the Georgian Council of People's Commissars in 1929-1930, chairman of the Georgian Central Executive Committee in 1931-1938, and in 1938 became chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian SSR.