Yenukei, on the other hand, was never married and naturally could not talk about having children, although nature gave him the whole character of an exemplary parent. He had to pour all his warmth into the people around him, into the children of his close friends, even going so far as to buy expensive gifts for these children. In the eyes of Stalin’s children, the closest and dearest person was obviously not their perpetually grim-faced father, but “Uncle Avir”, who could swim, loved sledding, had a belly full of stories about the gods of the Svanet Mountains and endless Caucasian folklore.
Averil Yenukey was not only the most admired person by Stalin’s children, but also the best friend of Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Aliluyeva. He was the closest comrade of her father. It is no exaggeration to say that she grew up under the watchful eye of Yenukidze. So, whenever Aliluyeva had a quarrel with Stalin, Yenukidze had to act as a mediator.
On the face of it, Yenukidze was the most secure of all Stalin’s close associates. That is why his sudden loss of favor at the beginning of 1935 stunned the officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and gave rise to many strange and bizarre rumors. In fact, if one pays attention to his article published in Pravda in January 1935, one should realize that Yenukidze was already not so optimistic about his future. In that article, Yenukidze pointed out uneasily that the past memories of the Bolshevik underground struggle in Transcaucasia contained a number of errors and distortions that had to be corrected. As an example, he also bravely admits to a mistake he made – overstating his personal role in leading the underground struggle of the Baku Bolsheviks, despite the fact that this “mistake” was already written in the Soviet Encyclopedia.
Of course, his article, which deliberately belittled himself and gave Stalin the primary credit for leading the underground struggle in Transcaucasia, was not enough to prove that he had fallen out of favor, because at that Time Moscow was intensifying the work of falsifying the history of the party with the aim of highlighting Stalin’s historical status and glorifying him as the primary leader and hero of the Bolshevik Party during the underground struggle. Therefore, many people thought that Yenukidze wrote this article only to set an example for other old Bolsheviks and remind them that they should re-evaluate and rewrite the memoirs published in the past. You know, in those memoirs, some of the old party members did not mention Stalin at all, and some did but did not give him “due status”, a practice that is now apparently no longer allowed.
The people around Stalin were quite sensitive to which officials were in power and which were out of favor. But this time, they did not immediately notice that Stalin had changed his attitude toward Yenukidze. This is mainly because Stalin himself had tried to conceal the contradictions between him and Yenukidze, apparently, he still expects that the other side will one day compromise with him. Even such an important event as the “removal” of Yenukidze from the Kremlin did not raise any suspicion that he had lost power. This happened in February 1935. In the middle of February, Stalin ordered Lavrentiy Beria, secretary of the Transcaucasian Party Central Committee, to apply to Moscow for the Central Committee to release Yenukidze to the Transcaucasus as chairman of the Central Executive Committee.
A few days later a notice appeared in Pravda that the Central Executive Committee of the USSR had agreed to meet the request of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Republic, so that comrade Yenukidze would go to work in Tbilisi. Those who did not know the truth could think that Yenukidze went to the Transcaucasus as Stalin’s plenipotentiary to strengthen his work, but it was clear to individual people in the Kremlin that Yenukidze did not go to the Transcaucasus with any honorable mission, but was kicked out of Moscow by Stalin. However, it is still a mystery to this other person why Stalin parted ways with his only close friend.
The train journey from Moscow to Tbilisi took three days and three nights, which was enough time for Yenukidze to reassess his situation and future. I think that Stalin must have expected that Yenukidze would send him a letter of repentance for reconciliation when he arrived in Tbilisi. In that case, Stalin would have recalled him to Moscow, and of course, he might have had to stay in Transcaucasia for a while, but that was only to save his own face. Anyway, the party will never know that there was a quarrel between these two close friends, let alone the reason for this quarrel.
However, Yenukidze did not write any letter of repentance to Stalin. He obviously thought that his Life as the number one man in Transcaucasia could not be worse than in Moscow. Besides, the Caucasus was the homeland where he was born and raised, and the best years of his youth were associated with it.
Stalin waited for several weeks and finally became convinced that Yenukidze had no intention of surrendering to him. So, in order to force him to his knees, Stalin played an extremely despicable trick: he ordered Beria not to hold “elections”, that is, not to let Yenukidze become the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of Transcaucasia, but to suggest him to take up an idle position as the director of the Georgian sanatorium. This change. A man was informed in advance to become a bank manager, but when he arrived at the bank, he was told that his position was that of a mail collector.
Yenukidze simply could not imagine what blow could be more damaging to his reputation than such a practice. After the announcement of the insulting proposal, many party members realized that there was some kind of irreconcilable conflict between Yenukidze and Stalin. High-ranking Georgian officials who had welcomed Yenukidze at the Tbilisi station did not even greet him, but were now strangers to him.
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