--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote: I wrote:
(*CD--actually Beria was a Mingrelian, which is an ethnic minority in Georgia that speaks a different language, but that's nationalities arcana.)
---
I add:
Actually it is meaningful in a couple of ways, because 1) supposedly Stalin held Beria's Mingrelian ethnicity against him and 2) it was because of all the forced agglomeration of such peoples into Georgia (not the Mingrelians themselves as far as I know, but the Abkhaz and the Ossetians), that Andrei Sakharov called Georgia a "mini-Empire" that should be broken up, as in fact it has been.
Really it's amazing, for a regime that liked to play the Russian Nationalism card, how swarming with ethnic minorities the Stalin Kremlin was -- Georgians, Abkhaz, Jews, Cossacks, Armenians.
BTW, Stas Namin, the grandson of (the Armenian) Anastas Mikoyan, has done very well for himself: he was a rock star in the Soviet era (head of Tsvety, the so-called Soviet Beatles) and now Culture God. One of his instruments is on the wall of Moscow's Hard Rock Cafe. Note the family resemblance:
http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,1101570916,00.html
http://www.stasnamin.ru/index1_eng.html
===== Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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