The "second Lavrentiy", who supervised the Mikhoels killing
On the night of 12 January 1948, Mikhoels and Golubov were lured to Tsanava's dacha on the outskirts of Minsk. The moment they stepped out of the car, a truck crushed them to death; the bodies were dumped on a deserted street.
A close ally of Beria, he dominated Belorussian state security from 1938 to 1951, directing the sovietization of annexed western Belarus and the mass deportations that followed. During the war he headed Special Departments at the front while serving as deputy chief of the Partisan Movement's Central Staff. He remains most notorious for the January 1948 murder of the actor Solomon Mikhoels, carried out on Stalin's orders at Tsanava's own Minsk dacha. Promoted to USSR deputy MGB minister in 1951, he was purged the next year, then arrested by Beria in 1953 and died in Butyrka prison without trial.
Career Timeline
- 1938–1941People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Belorussian SSR
- 1941People's Commissar of State Security, Belorussian SSR
- 1941–1943NKVD of the Belorussian SSR; head of Special Departments of the Western and Central Fronts
- 1942–1943Deputy head of the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement
- 1943–1951People's Commissar, then Minister, of State Security, Belorussian SSR
- 1951–1952Deputy Minister of State Security of the USSR; head of the 2nd Main Directorate
- 1953–1955Arrested; died in custody without trial
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionHead of the Telavi Cheka Politburo
- 1937–1938The Great PurgePeople's Commissar for Internal Affairs of Byelorussian NKVD
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarDeputy head of the Central Staff of the Partisan MovementAs head of Belorussian state security he ran the Special Departments of the Western Front, and from 1942 served as deputy head of the Central Staff of the Partisan Movement.
- 1953The Fall of BeriaDied in custody, never triedHe was arrested in April 1953 by Beria's own MVD as it reopened the Mikhoels case, and the case against him continued after Beria fell, but he died in Butyrka prison in October 1955 without ever coming to trial.
The Bride Kidnapping and Beria's Rescue
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.