From running the terror in Georgia to overlord of the Far East
Summoned to Marshal Sokolovsky's office in East Germany, Goglidze was arrested as two officers stepped in behind him with drawn revolvers. 'His eyes darted about,' a witness recorded — the moment the Beria circle began to fall.
A Georgian border-guard political officer who caught Beria's eye in the Caucasus, Goglidze became NKVD chief of Georgia and chaired its troika, running the Great Terror in the republic. Under Beria's patronage he purged Yezhov's men from Leningrad NKVD, then in 1941 supervised the deportation of over 30,000 from newly annexed Bessarabia. He spent the next decade as security overlord of the Soviet Far East. Recalled to Moscow in 1951, he served as first deputy MGB minister, head of military counter-intelligence, and supervisor of the Doctors' Plot investigation. Arrested in East Germany in July 1953, he was tried with Beria that December and shot. Never rehabilitated.
Career Timeline
- 1934–1938People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Georgian SSR; chairman of the NKVD troika for Georgia
- 1938–1941Head of the NKVD Directorate for Leningrad Region
- 1941NKVD plenipotentiary for the Moldavian SSR
- 1941–1951Head of NKVD and MGB for Khabarovsk Territory; MGB plenipotentiary for the Far East
- 1951–1952First Deputy Minister of State Security
- 1951–1952Minister of State Security, Uzbek SSR
- 1952–1953Head of the 3rd Main Directorate (military counter-intelligence), MGB; again First Deputy Minister of State Security
- 1953Detained, tried and executed
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationPeople's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Georgia
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeChairman of the Georgian troikaPeople's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Georgia from 1934, he chaired the republic's NKVD troika and was the operational manager of the terror in Georgia, then moved to Leningrad in late 1938 to clear out Yezhov's men.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarFar Eastern MGB chief, responsible for strategic security and counterintelligence
- 1952–1953The Doctors’ PlotHe supervised the investigationBrought back to the centre as first deputy MGB minister in August 1951, he took over supervision of the Doctors' Plot investigation after Ryumin's removal in November 1952.
- 1953The Fall of BeriaShot with Beria, December 1953Detained in East Germany on 3 July 1953, he was tried in camera with Beria by the Special Judicial Presence and shot on 23 December, the day of the verdict.
The Great Terror in Georgia and the NKVD Troika
On 30 July 1937, NKVD Order No. 00447 activated the 'troika' system across the USSR. Each troika consisted of three members, the republic's NKVD commissar, the party secretary, and the prosecutor, and could sentence defendants to death or 8–10 years in the camps on paperwork alone, without the accused present and without defence counsel or prosecution. In Georgia, the troika chairman was Goglidze.
The initial Moscow-assigned quota for Georgia under 'Category 1' (execution) was 1,419. Goglidze requested additional limits and received them; according to Khronos, the total execution quota Moscow set for Georgia was 1,500. He routinely employed beatings during interrogations. Davlet Kandalya, driver and bodyguard of Nestor Lakoba, later testified about being interrogated by Goglidze after Lakoba's mysterious death in late 1936: 'How many times did I drive him home drunk. He shoved a pistol barrel into my mouth, knocked out a front tooth, and screamed: "Talk. Who did the enemy of the people Lakoba meet with?"' When Kandalya shot back, 'Didn't you eat from the same plate as him?', Goglidze reportedly turned green.
Compared with other republics, however, the scale of the terror in Georgia was relatively restrained. Beria concentrated his fire on party and literary-artistic circles, using the purges to eliminate political rivals; the Georgian Orthodox Church was spared. On the 'Stalin lists' signed by Stalin and Molotov, 3,485 Georgians were marked for execution, the third-highest total after the Russian SFSR and Ukrainian SSR. The full tally of cases processed by the troika Goglidze chaired has never been precisely reckoned, but it reached deep into the Georgian, Abkhaz, and Ossetian peasantry as well as former officials, ex-Mensheviks, and the remnants of old princely families.