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• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-01194A000100740001-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 5, 1998
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: April 9, 1974
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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FEATURES
4 Guest Editorial: A New Look
at Welfare
by George C. McGhee
5 Editorial-Review of The Uneasy
Chair by Wallace Stegner,
a biography of Bernard DeVoto
by Norman Cousins
8 Letters From Readers
10 World Progress Report
34 Curmudgeon-at-Large
35 World Environment Newsletter
37 Diversions
by Leo Rosten
8 Light Refractions
by Thomas H. Middleton
NATO: Trouble at Twenty-Five
by Richard C. Longworth
The alliance needs major
streamlining to avoid collapse
from the weight of political
pique and shirked duties.
6 The Kremlin Cracks Down
on a Maverick
by Christopher Ogden
Long a law unto itself, the
Republic of Georgia is now
being chastened for its
political shortcomings.
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Trade Winds
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Call for Reform
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38 A Rousseau in the West Indies
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ART
44 Guide for the Guileless Bidder
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 CPYRGHTA ._._.._.._.J C_.. A nnn,nn,nn . nr'1n7n nA A n A A nnnA nn7 AnnnA A
The en.lil
Cracks Dow
Maverick
Bed up .with Georgia'sn
freewheeling' brand
of socialism, the politburo
is reining in itsbalky
Black Sea republic.
by Christopher Ogden ,
Tbilisi, USSR
For nineteen years after the death of
Josef V. Stalin, the Kremlin put up
with legendary excesses of corruption in
his home state-the fiercely individual-
istic and freewheeling Republic of Geor-
gia, on the Turkish border. In mid-1972
Moscow's Marxists ran out of patience.
They moved the head of the Georgian
police department up to run the party ap-
paratus and gave him free rein to So-
vietize the maverick republic fully. Near-
ly two years later he's still trying. So are
those who want to make certain, some-
times with guns and bombs, that he
doesn't succeed.
* *
When Eduard Shevardnadze took
over as first secretary of the Georgian
Communist party in the summer of 1972,
he ended his first cabinet meeting by ask-
ing all his ministers to vote with their
left hands on a procedural issue. "Keep
them up a minute," he said, pushing back
his chair. He slowly circled the polished
conference table, peering at wrists. Rolex,
Seiko, Jaeger-le Coultre, Omega-every-
one except Shevardnadze, who wore a
Russian-made Slava, had on a foreign
wristwatch.
"For a start," he said, "let's turn all
these over to charity."
Charity has always begun at home in
Georgia, known through the centuries
for its hospitality to its friends (who,
mom,mts before, may have been stran-
gers) and for its attention to the good
life: food, drink, songs, fine clothes, and,
more recently, fancy cars. Today in
Tbilisi, the women's coats are trimmer,
the skirts and blouses brighter, and the
men's suits more fashionable than in
Moscow. Billboards, which in Moscow
read Our Goal-Communism, push a
different line in the Georgian capital: Put
Your Money in a Savings Bank. Keep it
Safe. Earn More. Georgians love flaunt-
ing that kind of refinement at Muscovites.
"There's no class in Moscow," they say.
"No traditions, no real culture."
Beyond such tree-lined boulevards as
Rustaveli Avenue, where Georgians
stroll interminably, Tbilisi is a treasure
house of ancient churches, a palace, and
fortress ruins. Twisting cobblestone al-
leys in the old city wind below enclosed
balconies jutting out from second and
third stories and past the only active
Hebrew school in the Soviet Union.
Grottolike courtyards with outside stair-
cases that climb nearly to pink-tile roofs
remind visitors of North Africa. Tene-
ments balance on the sheer cliffs slicing
down to the mud-colored Kura River,
which splits the town in two. Across the
Kura, Vakhtang Gorgasali sits in stone
on horseback and watches the city he
founded in 458 A.D. He stares at a moun-
tainside statue of Mother Georgia, who
carries a sword in one hand for meeting
enemies, a wine goblet in the other for
greeting friends. (The symbolism is par-
ticularly apt. Anyone ever met by a Geor-
gian with a wineglass-and this is how
the Georgians meet almost everyone-
usually wakes up feeling the entire
militia of the republic has goose-stepped
over him.)
The city between the two statues
sports a twenty-one-story hotel furnished
in Finnish modern, a new subway, and
more automobiles per capita than in
any other Soviet region, including Mos-
cow. "We Georgians know how to ac-
quire things," one mustachioed fellow
said, leaning out the window of his 1962
Chevrolet Bel-Air.
The 4 million Georgians, only 20 per-
cent of whom speak Russian fluently,
have long been a law unto themselves.
The republic, less than twenty-seven
thousand square miles and about half
the size of the American state of Geor-
gia, was conquered by Romans, Mace-
donians, Persians, Mongols, Arabs, and
Turks before it was incorporated into
Imperial Russia in 1801. So many de-
feats have made the Georgians a philo-
sophical lot who prefer to name their
streets for poets rather than politicians
and tend to thumb their ample noses at
any ruler.
The Georgians have worked at pre-
serving their culture and language
(there are Georgian translations of most
Shakespearean plays). They also have
become Byzantine-style entrepreneurs
who even today can be counted on to
produce-for the right price-anything
from a mid-field seat for a national
championship soccer match to a basket
of peaches in February.
Favored by Stalin, who was born in
1879 in Gori, about thirty miles from
Tbilisi, and by Lavrenti Beria, his secret-
police chief and fellow Georgian, the re-
public went its merry way throughout
the dictator's thirty-year rule. It could
ignore Kremlin directives that sucked
away the autonomy of other republics,
because it was "Soso's [Joe's] special
case." Stalin's death in 1953 intensified,
rather than changed, the local attitude,
especially when the de-Stalinization
campaign of his successor, Nikita S.
Khrushchev, began chopping at its un-
derpinnings three years later.
From Brest to Khabarovsk, statues of
Stalin came tumbling down. Streets,
town squares, whole cities, were re-
named. But not in Georgia, where news
of the demotion and Khrushchev's crit-
icisms sparked bloody riots. In Geor-
gia the Kremlin backed down. The atti-
tude was, Let things cool a bit-there
are other things to do; we'll come back
to this. Moscow did not really come
back until 1972. The interim was a busy
time-opening the virgin lands, indus-
trializing after the war cleanup, the anti-
China campaign, the test-ban treaty,
the Khrushchev overthrow, and the sub-
sequent consolidation of the Brezhnev,
Podgorny, Kosygin troika.
During those years Vasily P. Mzhava-
nadze ran the republic as first secretary
of the Georgian Communist party. Ap-
pointed by Stalin just before he died,
Mzhavanadze ran Georgia-from the
beach resorts along the Black Sea, across
the fruit orchards and melon patches,
to the chalk-soil wine vineyards and
Caucasus peaks and valleys-like a
Tammany boss. Georgia's primary occu-
pation-dealing-thrived. For the Geor-
gians, at least. If the Soviets weren't
getting their cut, well, that was their
problem. Georgians by the hundreds
flew daily to Moscow, Leningrad, Mur-
mansk, and farther, their suitcases bulg-
ing with fresh-cut carnations, citrus
fruits, almonds, and tomatoes that they
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would hawk for three rubles ($4.00) a
pound in the farmers' markets of those
less-fortunate cities. They'd fly back to
Tbilisi, sometimes the same day. This
time the suitcases would be stuffed with
either rubles or city goods-books, rec-
ords, Italian shoes-that they could sell
for another profit in Georgia.
The process itself is semilegal. Soviet
farmers are allowed in their limited mar-
ket economy to sell privately what they
have left over after first selling the bulk
of their produce to the state. In Georgia,
where farmers in 1972 earned $400 mil-
lion from p.-ivate plots, the priorities
were reversed. What was left after the
private sales, if anything, went to the
state. That kind of planning put Georgia,
one of the richest republics in terms of
physical resources and climate, in fif-
teenth and last place when it came to
state production statistics.
Mzhavanadze didn't mind. Under
only occasional pressure then from Mos-
cow, he responded by dutifully making
speeches denouncing extortion, nepo-
tism, and corruption. His real concern
-and his wife's, whose strong will and
expensive tastes seemed to dominate
most of the party boss's activity-was his
seven dachas. So that he could keep them,
he tried to insure that the system suf-
fered no Kremlin body blows.
The first real hint of trouble, that
Moscow was ready to "come back" to
the Georgia problem, appeared in an ar-
ticle in the national trade-union news-
paper TRUD in March 1972. In a de-
tailed and surprisingly candid public
washing of dirty linen, TRUD described
an illegal Georgian operation that cost
the highly centralized Soviet economy
more than ,two million dollars. The
brains behind the scheme was an eco-
nomics student, a university dropout
turned taxi driver, named Otari Lazish-
vili. TRUD called him "an underground
millionaire who laid on thousand-ruble
[$1300] banquets in Moscow, Kiev, and
Alma-Ata when his favorite soccer team
won, who had two dachas with swim-
ming pools, one near Tbilisi and another
on the Black Sea coast in Abkhazia."
As a front, Lazishvili ran a laboratory
in which new synthetic materials were
tested. Using stolen government mate-
rials, he turned out hard-to-get plastic
raincoats, turtleneck sweaters, scarves,
and gaily colored nylon shopping bags,
which buyers quickly grabbed up--the
farmers' market routine slightly refined.
given her. She fled to the Ukraine, where
she now reportedly lives with her sister,
the wife of deposed Ukrainian party
boss Pyotr Shelest.)
With the tap administered by Leonid
1. Brezhnev, general secretary of the
Soviet Communist party, Shevardnadze
moved up again, this time to take over
as party first secretary. At forty-four, he
became the youngest leader of a Soviet
republic. 'He has a lot of class," said
a retired soccer player who knew
Shevardnadze because the Ministry of
the Interior sponsors Tbilisi Dynamo,
the local professional team. "Whenever
he came down to the dressing room, he
always wore a clean shirt and a tie and
a nice suit. Nothing flashy. But impres-
sive." Impressive for things besides
clothes. "He's tough," another Georgian
said when his appointment was an-
nounced. "He's the kind of guy who
asks, 'How can you work so little and
still have a dacha?' He's also the kind of
guy that when he says do this or do
that, you do it. He's not the kind to for-
give if you don't."
Despite the toughness, the dominant
feeling in Georgia when Shevardnadze
took. over was that he would initially
come on strong and break up some of
the naleva (literally, "on the left," or
"on the side") operations, but then the
pace would ease and gradually every-
thing would return to "normal."
"He's not going to change human na-
ture," a Tbilisi waiter said with a half-
smile. "Not here, anyway."
Shevardnadze called a joint party and
government plenum in November 1972,
and the extent of the problem he was
facing was so bad that the full proceed-
ings were not published until February.
They revealed that, "Serious mistakes
have been made in economic manage-
ment from which the republic's economy
has suffered great losses serious short-
comings in agriculture... .The republic is
far behind in capital construction. . . .
Communications, particularly telephones,
are far behind modern requirements."
The report also homed in on agricul-
tural officials who blamed winter snow,
spring rains, summer heat, sometimes
all and more, for crop failures-anything
except mismanagement and anything
rather than raise the possibility that a1-
though there were enough crops, they
were all being sold naleva. "Now, when
winter and rains are in the past, the num-
ber of lagging enterprises continues to
tioning about allegedly smuggling dia- grow," snorted party
monds that the jailed Lazishvili had Partaridze.
"In reality, it was a private concern
called Lazishvili and Company," TRUD
said. "At the time of the investigation,
police found more than one hundred
thousand rubles' [$133,000] worth of
jackets, sweaters, knitwear, and other
goods, none of which were registered in
government documents."
The money brought powerful friends,
including Mzhavanadze, to the Lazish-
vili dachas (no nouveau riche snobbery
here!). The businessman became a Geor-
gian capo di capos. His opinion was
sought when it came time to fill govern-
ment and party posts throughout the re-
public. A man of foresight, Lazishvili
had the judiciary salted as well. At his
trial the public prosecutor asked that he
get the death penalty, a not uncommon
sentence for far less serious economic
crimes against the state. Instead, the
Georgian Supreme Court, which sen-
tenced nearly one hundred persons in
connection with the case, gave him a
light fifteen years.
Lazishvili, of course, was only the
tip of the Georgian iceberg. A week after
the first mention of him in the press, the
party's Central Committee in Moscow
widened its attack to include the entire
state of affairs in the republic. In a decree
splashed across the front pages of the
national papers, it criticized the Geor-
gian leadership for "struggling weakly
against such phenomena, alien to our
society, as embezzlement of state prop-
erty, profiteering, bribery, and idling."
It criticized Tbilisi party leaders for
shoddy consumer goods, poor city sani-
tation, falling behind in apartment con-
struction, giving high-ranking jobs to
unqualified people, and allowing Geor-
gian nationalism to flourish instead of
incorporating it into the general Soviet
fabric.
The Kremlin then summoned to Mos-
cow Otari Lolashvili, the party chief in
Tbilisi, to report on the situation in the
city. The report was rejected, Lolashvili
was fired, and, in August 1972, he was
replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze, until
then the republic's minister of the in-
terior and, as such, chief of police. A
month later the seventy-year-old Mzhav-
anadze was awarded the Order of the
October Revolution, one of the state's
highest citations for service, and he re-
tired on pension "at his own request."
(He also retired to live by himself.
Shortly after taking over, Shevardnadze
called in Mzhavanadze's wife for ques-
secretary Z. A.
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nevar na ze ne to explain what he
had discovered so far: Georgian factor-
ies were operating at only 70 percent of
capacity (in 1972 two Tbilisi factories
alone paid fines totaling nearly two mil-
lion rubles [$2.7 million] for substan-
dard goods). Unsold, unwanted mer-
chandise worth eight million rubles ($11
million) was found stacked up in ten
factories around the city.
While the growth-rate target for 1972
as set by the national plan was 6 percent,
Georgia managed to reach only 2.2 per-
cent. The factories met their production
quotas, but only by unilaterally reduc-
ing the goals. In 1972, in fact, Georgia
announced it had exceeded its production
goals by 30 million rubles ($41.4 mil-
lion). It wasn't until Shevardnadze
started going through the books that he
learned 102 million rubles ($141 mil-
lion) had been cut along the way from
the original target. He also found that al-
though output was up by 216 percent
over that of the past decade, profits over-
all were down because production costs
were up 222 percent.
Housing, a perennial Soviet problem,
was a nightmare here. The money allo-
cated for 21,500 apartments was simply
missing. (What was constructed was
clearly not great. Today's visitor to Tbilisi
can see obviously crooked walls, already
laced with broad cracks, on high-rise
after high-rise.) The dependability of
workers was another troublesome issue.
Nearly a third of Tbilisi's 900,000 resi-
dents "migrate" each year, many of them
the fruit sellers who pile into Tbilisi air-
port and tip stewardesses ten rubles for
a seat on an oversold plane headed to
market.
"We have one of the worst records in
the country on this," Shevardnadze said.
"The reasons why people change jobs
so often should be studied scientifically."
Hardly. Fast ruble was written all over
the operation, as the party boss well
knew. Ile wasted little time in reinstitut-
ing the lapsed propusk ("pass") system
as one means of stabilizing movement
and, therefore, the economy. Nobody left
Georgia without an official propusk.
Watermelons and chrysanthemums dis-
appeared from Moscow.
"The plan is law," Shevardnadze said.
"It is necessary to be fulfilled without any
changes. The party will hold people
strictly responsible for every underful-
fillment of the plan. It cannot be other-
wise."
A Georgian himself, he knew there
would be foot-dragging. Similarly, he
wanted to make certain everyone knew
that he would not tolerate it. "We will
have to rid ourselves of anything that
keeps us from normal work. We will pro-
claim a real, party-oriented, and princi-
pled fight against all negative phenomena
in this area. That is the only way, because
some comrades hold that everything will
run its course and nothing is going to
change.
"Those comrades are profoundly mis-
taken."
Once the housecleaning started, the
government-controlled Russian language
daily newspaper in Tbilisi, Zarya Vos-
toka ("Dawn of the East"), kept the ex-
poses coming almost every day.
One of them detailed how Georgian
officials took control of land reserved for
garden plots for factory workers, threw
up high walls, and behind them built pala-
tial private dachas-"not small cottages,
but huge mansions of fantastic dimen-
sions ... out of a Georgian fairy tale."
Another tracked down the missing
money for the 21,500 apartments. The
money had never left the State Commit-
tee on Home Repair and Housing Con-
struction, which had used it to build
hunters' lodges for committee officials.
None of this log-cabin-on-a-duck-pond
kind of thing, though. It seems several
were made of marble. One, with a forty-
five-square-yard billiards room, cost
130,000 rubles ($173,000). A second,
designed to house only two couples at a
time, cost more than 500,000 rubles
($665,000) to build and decorate.
According to another expose, Shevard-
nadze fired Trade Minister Vahktang
Tokhadze for "had management of trade,
tolerance of shortcomings, the most fla-
grant violations of personnel policy
[meaning that most of the Tokhadze fam-
ily worked for the Trade Ministry], and
for showing private property tendencies
[another dacha owner]."
Following Tokhadze out the door were
his first deputy, who had a criminal rec-
ord, the ministry's party secretary, the
head of the quality-inspection depart-
ment, and the director of Thilisi's main
department store. An investigation linked
70 percent of all the trade organizations
in the ministry with cases of overcharg-
ing, bribery, and embezzlement. Tok-
hadze had the plum. He kept himself re-
sponsible for the sales of private cars, the
single most precious commodity for a
Soviet. Ignoring normal retail channels,
he let the cars go to the highest bidder.
The trade purge, however, had an un-
expected side effect and brought about
Shevardnadze's first real problems with
the local citizenry. The shake-up knocked
out so many key officials responsible for
supplying Tbilisi with food that residents
used to food surpluses found themselves
waiting in line in shelf-stripped stores
only to be told this and that product had
not arrived. The Georgians, whose con-
cern for their stomachs runs high, took
to the streets in protest. It was not until
the army had been called out that the
street battling was broken up. The action
only served to intensify the government's
new campaign:
? A party secretary, a district attor-
ney, and a police chief were fired in the
Mestiski region of the republic for cov-
ering up the rape of an assault victim by
her would-he rescuer. "The level' of
crime is very high, and the level of solv-
ing dangerous crimes is very low," the
government said.
? A campaign to curb drug abuse
(rarely mentioned anywhere in the Soviet
Union) was initiated, with compulsory
treatment ordered for addicts and alco-
holics.
? Shevardnadze tried to get Mzhava-
I&n
U`) S S R
} Ci/gNSSR
KURq R
: Tbilisi
BLACK
SEA
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nadze's wife back from the Ukraine to
try her for the alleged diamond smug-
gling. So far he's been stymied by the
requirement that Moscow has to approve
inter-republic extraditions. The Kremlin
apparently prefers that the wife of a
former candidate member of the polit-
buro not go on trial.
? Two members of the Central Com-
mittee of the Georgian Communist party
were expelled for undisclosed "criminal
activities."
? The minister of justice and chief
judge of the Adzharistan region of Geor-
gia were fired for "lax prosecution of the
law," a euphemism for taking bribes.
The crackdown hit the streets as hard
as it did the ministers.
One morning a sudden warning went
out to Tbilisi's taxi and bus garages to
keep all public vehicles off the streets.
Within the hour, police swooped down
on several private cars painted to look
like taxis and on one bogus bus. "You
can't throw a cigarette butt on the side-
walk anymore," one fruit seller said.
"You spend 200 rubles [$2661 for a
good evening out in a restaurant with
fifteen bottles of wine-that's not a lot,
you know-and the police come by and
ask, `Where did you get that. money? You
only earn 180 rubles [$2401 a month.' "
For some Georgians, particularly the
intelligentsia, the crackdown is a chance
for the republic to regain some respect.
"We have been embarrassed for a Ion-,
time now," a professor at Tbilisi State
University said. "It has all happened in
the past twenty years, all this corruption.
Before that it was the Armenians who
were the shrewd businessmen. We were
mostly drinkers and not very hard work-
ers."
But the intelligentsia, a tiny minority
where it exists at all in Georgia, is hardly
the most representative body of thought
on the Shevardnadze regime. Among the
working class at least, indications are
clear that the changes have been less
than popular. With the firings, arrests,
and limitations placed on private enter-
prise has come a stepped-up Sovietization
campaign, strongly laced with heavy-
handed Marxist-Leninist propaganda and
the continued official cold-shouldering of
local hero Josef Stalin. It has all ran-
kled, and some apparently are getting
tired of waiting for things to "get back
to normal."
Georgians say there have been at least
two assassination attempts aimed at
tile c .
off. In the second, gunmen attacked his
car and shot Shevardnadze's chauffeur in
the shoulder but missed the party secre-
tary.
General anti-Soviet sentiment led re-
cently to the dynamiting of a statue com-
memorating the "liberation" of Georgia
by Russian Bolsheviks, who in 1921 over-
threw the independent republic (the
bombers chose to ignore the fact that it
was their own comrade Stalin who had
led the Bolshevik takeover). The Georgia
Supreme Soviet responded to the attack
by publishing a decree promising long
prison terms to anyone involved in "the
destruction or damaging of cultural mon-
urnents."
Shevardnadze chaired his second party
plenum in late October 1973 and said
widespread corruption continued to in-
volve some of his top officials, "including
highly responsible officials of party or-
ganizations.... It cannot go on like this.
The Central Committee ... intends cate-
gorically to establish a Bolshevist order
in every region and city of the republic.
There will be no mercy to anyone-re-
gardless of age, rank, or former merits-
who will dare to ignore the instructions,
demands, and the statements of the
party."
So the crackdown will continue until
something gives, even if it turns out to be
Shevardnadze himself. He is undoubtedly
certain of his own role in Georgia, but
less clear is his place in the overall
scheme of Soviet politics. He still (toes
not have a seat on the ruling politburo,
on which Mzhavanadze held a candidate,
or non-voting, place from 1957 until his
"retirement."
Among the local heirs of Stalin, specu-
lation varies as to why, for the first time,
they are no longer represented on the
twenty-man body (including candi-
dates) that guides the foreign and do-
mestic political fortunes of the Soviet
Union.
The dominant street-level theory is that
Georgia simply is being punished for ob-
vious practical and political shortcom-
ings. Another is that the cautious polit-
buro is clearly aware of Shevardnadze's
talent-and ambition---and is waiting to
see what kind of job he does at home be-
fore he is allowed as a regular into the
clubby corridors of the Kremlin. A third
theory, gaining more credence all the
time, is that the Kremlin does not want to
elevate to national rank and prominence
the man implementing its first sustained
attempt at Sovietizing Georgia, until it is
Approved For Release 1999/09/02 : CIA-RDP79-01194AO00100740001-4