Polikarp Mdivani

[1] Mdivani joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1903 and engaged in revolutionary activities in Tbilisi, Baku, Batumi, and other industrial centers of the Caucasus.

Early in 1921, Mdivani, along with Stalin and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, played an important role in engineering the Red Army invasion of Georgia which toppled down the local Menshevik-dominated government in favor of the Bolshevik regime.

[1] He protested against a series of territorial rearrangements in Transcaucasia that dispossessed Georgia of several of its former districts and advocated more tolerance towards political opposition to ensure the survival of the highly unpopular Bolshevik government.

This dispute known as the Georgian Affair peaked in 1922, when Mdivani and his comrades – Makharadze, Mikhail Okudzhava [ka], Sergey Kavtaradze, and Shalva Eliava – were denounced by Stalin as "national deviationists".

Although this was not immediately successful, over the course of 1922 and 1923, Lenin grew more supportive of the Georgian group and repeatedly denounced Great Russian chauvinism, criticizing the "imperialist attitude" among his colleagues.

The "deviationists"’ failure to prevent the Georgian SSR from being amalgamated with the Armenian and Azerbaijan republics into the Transcaucasian SFSR resulted in the final victory of the Stalin-Ordzhonikidze line and the removal of Mdivani from his post in January 1923.

It was me who brought the 11th Army here [in Tbilisi]; I betrayed my people and helped Stalin and Beria, these degenerates, enslave Georgia and bring Lenin’s party to its knees.

"[5] On 11 July 1937 the Soviet newspaper Zaria Vostoka, with the headline of "Death to Enemies of the People", announced that the Georgian Supreme Court found Mdivani, Okudzhava and several of their colleagues guilty of treason and other counterrevolutionary crimes all categorized under Article 58 of the Criminal Code.