Kote Tsintsadze

Who was Kote Tsintsadze?

Kote Tsintsadze was a Georgian Bolshevik involved in the Russian revolutions and the Sovietization of Georgia. He was purged under Joseph Stalin as a member of the Left Opposition within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Tsintsadze joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1904, and sided with its Bolshevik faction. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, he was closely associated with the famous revolutionary fighter Kamo and served as head of the Bolshevik armed detachments that engaged in expropriation and robbery organised in the Manganese mine of Chiatura. He organised a group of female student-revolutionaries to rob banks.

In 1906 he took part in the execution of traitors after the Bolshevik battle squads were driven out of the cities. On February 16 1906, Tsintsadze took part in the assassination of Commander in chief of the Caucasus, General Fyodor Griiazanov. Joseph Stalin commissioned the hitmen who pretended to be painting a nearby gate. They threw grenades at his carriage and blew him to pieces. Then Stalin commissioned him to set up the Druzhina or Bolshevik expropriator's club for robbing banks. He robbed the Tiflis pawn shop, the Georgian Bank of Agriculture, a train at Kars, a stagecoach in Borzhomi, stole 20,000 rubles from the Kadzhorskoe stagecoach and ambushed a gold train at Chiatura carrying 21,000 roubles of miners' wages. He was at Stalin's wedding supper in 1906. In 1907 he was arrested by the Okhrana, then joined Stalin's 'Mauserists' in Baku. On August 15 1912 he helped spring Kamo from Tiflis prison. On September 24 the two of them ambushed a mail coach with 18 gunmen three miles from Tiflis. They were beaten back though seven Cossacks died. After this, the Druzhina was destroyed.