Whodunit, Party Style

Among the few people close enough to the late Dictator Stalin to address him by his nickname "Koba" was a fellow Georgian, Sergo Ordzhonikidze (rhymes roughly with poor-Johnny-kids-me), an oldtime Bolshevik who had risen to be top commissar of heavy industry. One day in 1936, during what Russians now call the Ezhovshchina (the purge which carried off some 7,000,000 Russians to Siberian prison camps and mass graves), Ordzhonikidze learned that his precious engineers were being arrested. Victor (1 Chose Freedom) Kravchenko, a minor executive of the Commissariat, later told of Ordzhoni-kidze's telephone call to Stalin:

"Koba," he yelled, "why do you let the NKVD arrest my men without informing me?"

Then, as Stalin tried to reply, Ordzhonikidze cut him short: "I demand that this authoritarianism cease! I'm still a member of the Politburo! I'm going to raise hell, Koba, if it's the last thing I do before I die!"

No one knows whether impetuous Sergo Ordzhonikidze got a chance to raise hell in the Politburo, but he died shortly thereafter. In February 1937 he was buried with great pomp in the Kremlin wall, his flower-decked bier borne by Stalin. Molotov, Voroshilov and other top commissars. It was cautiously given out that he had died of heart failure, but rumor has consistently said since that he was murdered. In Russia his name became symbolic of the wreckage done to Soviet economy by Stalin and his gang in their struggle for power. Last week the Soviet government (run by Stalin's heirs) confirmed that Commissar Ordzhonikidze had indeed been murdered.

A broadcast from Tiflis, Georgia reported the execution of six former NKVD interrogators, the imprisonment of two others, for having made "false charges and employed criminal prosecution methods strictly forbidden by Soviet law" against "honest cadres who were loyal to the Communist Party and the Soviet government." Among the victims named: Sergo Ordzhonikidze. "The accused took part in collecting incriminating evidence against Ordzhonikidze . . . Later, terrorist acts of violence were committed against members of [his] family and nearest friends." Motive for the murders: "The accused helped Beria hide his criminal past and his odious deception of party and government, and [destroyed] those persons who Beria feared could expose him."

In the cruel ritual of Soviet propaganda executions, it did not matter that Lavrenty Beria, a party official in Georgia at the time Ordzhonikidze was commissar, probably had nothing to do with his murder. The logic, so far as Russia's present rulers were concerned, was the need to keep Beria's name before the people as the man responsible for the reckless Ezhovshchina. The West could only guess what pressures inside the Soviet Union made this still necessary, 18 years later, unless it was the identity of the real murderer.

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