Lavrentiy Fomich Tsanava

Tsanava was born Lavrentiy Dzhandzhgava into a poor peasant family in the village of Nakhunavo, Kutaisi province. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1920 and, after organizing an armed uprising in his home village in February 1921 while Georgia was still under Menshevik rule, entered the Georgian Cheka. In August 1922, while serving as head of the Cheka political bureau for Telavi district, he kidnapped a girl at gunpoint. A special commission under the All-Georgian Central Executive Committee sentenced him to five years in a strict-isolation forced labor camp. Dzhandzhgava was briefly detained but soon escaped, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in November 1922. Lavrentiy Beria intervened: in June 1923 the presidium of the Georgian Cheka overturned the conviction, and by 1924 his party membership was restored. The episode prefigured the pattern of Tsanava's career: violence shielded by Beria's patronage. When Beria took control of the NKVD in Moscow in 1938, Tsanava was promptly installed as People's Commissar of Internal Affairs for Belorussia that December.

On the evening of 27 December 1947 Stalin met Abakumov and Ogoltsov in secret, and per their later testimony ordered the murder of Mikhoels and a staged car accident; on 6 January 1948 he confirmed the order by telephone. Before the Moscow group left for Minsk, Abakumov briefed the participants and telephoned Tsanava to tell him that the Belorussian MGB would have to carry out an important government decision and Stalin's personal instruction. The Moscow group, avoiding the republican MGB building, lodged at Tsanava's dacha, which became both the operation's safe house and its base. On the evening of 12 January 1948 Mikhoels and Golubov left their hotel for a fictitious celebration, were driven to Tsanava's dacha at Stepyanka, and around 22:00 Shubnyakov reported their arrival to Ogoltsov, who called Abakumov, who called Stalin; the sanction to liquidate them was received. Accounts of how they were killed conflict: the investigation testimony describes them being taken from the car and crushed by a truck in the dacha's yard, while Shubnyakov's later account says they were forced to drink vodka to look drunk and then beaten to death with clubs. Tsanava's own note of 13 January recorded that no alcohol was found in Mikhoels's stomach and only a faint smell on Golubov. Around midnight the bodies were driven into Minsk and dumped on a quiet street, and at 7:10 the next morning they were found on a road beside the tram line under construction from Sverdlov Street to Garbarnaya Street. The cover-up almost unravelled: when MVD officers found that the vehicle which had crushed the two men was in an MGB garage, the Belorussian interior minister Belchenko tried to give the case a course and Tsanava warned him off, a direct intervention to protect the operation. The operation did not protect him for long. After Stalin's death, on 2 April 1953 Beria wrote to the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee proposing the arrest and criminal prosecution of Ogoltsov and Tsanava and the annulment of the awards given to the participants in the killings. Tsanava was arrested two days later, on 4 April 1953, by Beria's order and charged, among other things, with complicity in the murder of Mikhoels; he was held in cell No. 310 of Butyrka prison. After his arrest his own statements became contradictory and self-serving: in July 1953, not knowing that Beria himself had been arrested, he wrote to Beria praising him and promising not to spare himself in carrying out Beria's orders, and in August he wrote from the Butyrka prison hospital pleading for release and claiming he had been victimised in revenge by 'enemy of people Beria and his inner circle'. The official record released afterwards tells a different story. On 12 October 1955 he died in Butyrka prison during the investigation; the report states that the case against him was closed by reason of the accused's death and that death resulted from insufficient cardiac activity on the basis of pronounced sclerosis of the coronary arteries and chronic cardiac aneurysm, a long-standing and irreversible condition. He died in custody without trial, not by execution.