Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971) was First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers from 1958 to 1964. This excerpt is from Nikita Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Commissar, 1918-1945, Volume 1, edited by Sergei Khrushchev (University Park:  Pennsylvania State University, 2004).

In 1934 I was on vacation in Sochi. As my vacation time was running out, [Lavrentii] Beria invited me to return to Moscow by way of Tiflis. At that time the Russian name Tiflis was still used for the capital of Georgia, which was, properly speaking, called Tbilisi. I traveled to Batumi by steamer, and from Batumi to Tiflis by rail, and spent a whole day there...

In Tiflis I became acquainted with the Georgian comrades. Georgia made a good impression on me. I remembered the past, 1921, during the Civil War, when I had been with some Soviet military units in Georgia. Our unit had been stationed in Adzhameti [Ajameti], near Kutais, and our headquarters was in Kutais. Sometimes in the line of duty I rode into Kutais on horseback, most often from Adzhameti, fording the Rioni River. I still had good memories of that time, and it was pleasant to see Georgia again, to recall the past and the year 1921. 

Stalin jokingly called me an "occupier" when I told him my impressions of how negative the Georgians, especially the Georgian intellectuals, had been toward the Red Army. Sometimes I had to make a trip to the political department of the Eleventh Army, whose headquarters were in Tiflis. It happened that I was sitting in a railroad car together with some Georgians of my age. We were still young. I addressed them in Russian, but they wouldn't answer me. They acted as though they couldn't understand Russian, although I could see that they were former officers of the tsarist army and must have had a good command of Russian. 

The Georgian common people behaved differently. The peasants always greeted us very hospitably and invariably treated us to food and drink. If a family celebration was going on, they would arrange an extravagant feast in typical Georgian style. Any Red Army men who happened to arrive at their homes at such times would be literally dragged inside the houses, given something to drink, then be accompanied back to their military unit. But there was never a single case of violence against Red Army soldiers, although such possibilities existed. There were high growths of corn, bushes, and woods all around. 

When I told Stalin about this, he seemed to object: "Why are you taking offense against the Georgians? You should understand that you were an occupier. You had overthrown the Georgian Menshevik government." 

I answered: "That's true. I understand, and I do not feel offended. Im simply telling what the situation was like."