…The rest of the story is
by no means predictable. When a fairly undistinguished youngster is thus entrusted
with an explosive assignment, like this one, it can mean only one thing: if he
fails, he was expendable; if he succeeds, he will be worth more dead than
alive.
Mikoyan’s only chance of
survival now depended on a combination of his personal skillfulness and sheer
luck in two equally perilous stages of his game: the assignment, and its
aftermath.
In the assignment part,
he would have to rely very heavily on his close associate Beria, who had
established himself in Baku virtually openly, as a British collaborator.
Providing the British authorities with Mikoyan’s secret information about the
identities of the Soviet leaders in Baku, preparing to board a ship to flee
Baku, would be Beria’s windfall. (It was by no means his downfall, though,
although the main formal accusation against Beria in 1953 was indeed that he
had been a British agent, and specifically, his betrayal of the twenty-six Commissars
of Baku.) Mikoyan of course would have to be arrested with the others, or otherwise
the suspicion that he had been the informer would have fallen on him right
away. Whether his arranged release from jail would succeed or not, was by no
means a foregone conclusion, and Comrade Mikoyan must have experienced some
truly nerve-racking moments in that British captivity. But, having made all the
necessary plans through Beria, Mikoyan could at least expect that he would not
be double-crossed by Lenin, because Beria was Mikoyan’s personal operative, not
sanctioned by his unreliable Moscow boss.
To make a long story
short, having received his memorable assignment, Mikoyan resurfaced in the oily
city of Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea and soon---what do you
know!----Lenin's dream was coming true. There are several conflicting versions
of this murky historic event, but the bottom line has always been the same: the
twenty-six top leaders of the Soviet organization in Transcaucasia were all
apprehended, promptly tried, and shot. Mikoyan was also arrested with them, but
unlike the others, he was not shot, and fairly soon, under obscure
circumstances, he found himself at liberty. After which, he successfully
reached Moscow, via the Civil War-torn South, unmolested and unscathed.
Having survived Stage
One, Mikoyan was facing the no less formidable jeopardy of having become a man
who knew too much. His task was now to find for himself a second lease on
usefulness. In a bold stroke of genius, Mikoyan approached Comrade Stalin,
spilled all the beans, rolled over, and offered the Wonderful Georgian his
soft underbelly: do with me whatever you want. It goes without saying that in
the process of this extraordinary confession, Mikoyan delivered to Stalin his
priceless inside information on the roles of Lenin and Beria in this
incredible, but hardly inscrutable affair.
Stalin, of course,
appreciated people who recognized him as their boss, and who offered him
wholehearted commitment of personal loyalty: no games, no negotiations, no
second thoughts. (Even more so he appreciated such loyalists, like Mikoyan now,
who pledged their allegiance to him by exposing the softest portions of their
soft underbellies, thus burning all their bridges behind them.) There was no
doubt that, after all said and done, Lenin would have much preferred Mikoyan completely
out of the picture. But Mikoyan was now a member of the legendary Stalin Brigade,
and under Stalin’s personal protection. If the gray hair of his old age, and
the post of President of the USSR, in later years can speak for him retrospectively,
throwing his lot with Stalin, back in 1919, Mikoyan had made the right choice.
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