Shalva Otarovich Tsereteli

Tsereteli first met Lavrenti Beria in 1920 in Kutaisi prison. Tsereteli, who had served as a staff captain in the Georgian Menshevik army, was jailed on a murder charge; Beria was imprisoned for Bolshevik underground activity. The two men forged a bond in that prison cell that would last a lifetime.

After Soviet power was established in Georgia in 1921, Tsereteli was arrested again, this time for killing a militiaman, and sentenced to five years, yet for unknown reasons never served the term. In a remarkable twist, by 1924 he was placed in charge of the personal security detail of Leon Trotsky, who was convalescing in Abkhazia, and remained in that post until 1927. That a former anti-Soviet officer and convict should guard the revolution's paramount leader is one of the strangest episodes in Tsereteli's career.

As Beria climbed the ladder of power, Tsereteli climbed with him. When Beria was appointed People's Commissar of Internal Affairs and moved to Moscow in 1938, Tsereteli was among the trusted men he brought along. During this period Tsereteli held no official title in the central apparatus; he took orders exclusively from Beria and specialized in organizing and executing arrests, reporting to no one else. Despite internal assessments describing him as 'nearly illiterate and ignorant,' Tsereteli became Beria's most trusted covert operative. Colleagues called him 'Beria's chain dog.' Beria recommended him for the Soviet delegation's security detail at the Tehran Conference in 1943 and, in 1946, installed him as Deputy Minister of State Security of Georgia despite a formal finding of unfitness for leadership. In late June 1953, just before his own arrest, Beria summoned Tsereteli urgently to Moscow: the purpose of the summons remains unknown.

In the last days of June 1953, shortly before Beria's own arrest, army general Ivan Maslennikov telephoned Tsereteli in Tbilisi on Beria's instruction to say he should fly to Moscow on the first plane. The purpose of the summons is not documented. When Tsereteli arrived, Maslennikov refused to receive him, and the next day Moscow was openly talking of Beria's arrest. Tsereteli then asked the new MVD minister Kruglov to retire and returned to Tbilisi. This account of the summons rests on Stoliarov's narrative and is not a documentary record.

After Beria's arrest, and his execution in December 1953, Tsereteli, by then retired, was also arrested. One authored account dates the order shown to him to 13 August 1953, followed by his transfer to Moscow.

At the Moscow interrogations Tsereteli himself gave brief, direct answers. Asked how an illiterate man could hold leading posts in the VChK, the OGPU and the NKVD, he answered that he was a literate Chekist. The details of the special operations were first heard not from him but from other arrested men. The former Georgian NKVD chief A. N. Rapava testified that Beria ordered the arrest and transfer of Bovkun-Luganets and his wife to Moscow, that Kobulov transmitted the detailed plan, and that Rapava himself was to stage the car accident and publish the press notice.

At the open Tbilisi session of 7 to 19 September 1955, the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court heard the case of A. N. Rapava, N. M. Rukhadze, Sh. O. Tsereteli and others, with R. A. Rudenko as public prosecutor. According to one authored account, Tsereteli was condemned to capital punishment for treason and membership of a counter-revolutionary organization, and said in his last word that he had joined the Communist Party in 1919 and served it for 34 years. That statement conflicts both with the record of his arrest in 1919 on suspicion of sympathizing with the Bolsheviks and with his entry into the militia in 1921 and the GPU in 1922.

On 19 September 1955 the Military Collegium sentenced him to capital punishment; he was shot on 15 November 1955 and has not been rehabilitated. A co-defendant in the same case, Rapava, was also shot on 15 November 1955, while Vlodzimirsky, a third figure in the killing, was shot together with Beria on 23 December 1953. The Georgian punitive apparatus Tsereteli served in included the special troika created by NKVD order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937, which could pass capital sentences. The 1955 trial was part of the reckoning that followed Beria's fall, and the documentary record of its proceedings comes from a participant secretary's published account. That the trial turned on treason and membership of a counter-revolutionary organization, rather than on the 1939 killing, indicates the political character of the sentence.