February 1945. The Western Allies have already liberated all of France and Belgium and are
fighting on the western border of Germany. In the east, Soviet forces are about 40 miles from
Berlin, having already pushed back the Germans from Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. There is
no longer a question regarding German defeat. The issue is the new shape of postwar Europe.
Between the 4th and 11th of February 1945 the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom
and the Soviet Union meet near Yalta in Soviet Crimea to discuss the postwar order in Europe.
Also present is a man who is the head of the notorious Russian secret service NKVD. At the
conference, Stalin playfully describes him as “our Heinrich Himmler”. His name is Lavrentiy Beria.
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, a son of deeply religious Orthodox parents, was born on the
29th of March 1899 in the Georgian village of Merkheuli then part of the Russian Empire.
Young Beria attended a technical school and distinguished himself
in mathematics and the sciences. In March 1917 while a student
in the Azerbaijan Baku technical university, Beria joined the Bolsheviks.
In the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which led to the collapse of the
Russian Empire and allowed territories formerly under Saint Petersburg's rule
to assert independence, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was created in 1918.
One year later, while he was still a student, Beria started his career in
state security when the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic hired him.
In 1920 or 1921 he joined the Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police.
At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Democratic Republic of Georgia,
and the Red Army subsequently invaded the country. The Cheka became heavily involved in the conflict,
which resulted in the formation of the Georgian Soviet Socialistic Republic. Beria led the
repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising in 1924, after which about
10,000 people were executed. In 1926, he was introduced
to his fellow-Georgian Joseph Stalin and became an ally in Stalin's rise to power.
In 1931 Beria was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia which was the
leading position in the Georgian Communist Party during the Soviet era and in 1934 he
became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union which
was the executive leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union directing all party
and governmental activities. By 1935, Beria had become one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates.
In August 1938, Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as a deputy head of the People's
Commissariat for Internal Affairs – the infamous NKVD - the ministry which oversaw the state
security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, the organization
carried out the Great Purge which was the imprisonment or execution of a huge number,
possibly over a million, of citizens throughout the Soviet Union as alleged "enemies of the
people” between August 1936 and March 1938. Upon Stalin’s rise to power, some members of
the former Bolshevik party began to question his authority. An investigation that revealed
a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of Stalin's
rivals. By the mid-1930s, Stalin believed anyone with ties to the Bolsheviks or Lenin’s government
was a threat to his leadership and needed to go. The Great Purge started with the arrests of party
members, Bolsheviks, and members of the Red Army and then grew to include Soviet peasants,
members of the intelligentsia, and members of certain nationalities.
During its mass operations, the NKVD widely utilized imprisonment, torture,
violent interrogation, and arbitrary executions to solidify control over civilians through fear.
By 1938, however, the oppression had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure,
economy and even the armed forces of the Soviet state, prompting Stalin to wind the purge down. In
November 1938 Beria succeeded Yezhov as NKVD head easing of the repression that begun under Yezhov.
The government officially admitted that there had been some injustice and "excesses" during the
purges, which were blamed entirely on Yezhov and over 100,000 people were released from the labour
camps. But the liberalization was only relative as arrests, torture and executions continued.
Many of the NKVD officers Beria promoted were brutal torturers. The theatre director
Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was interrogated by Lev Shvartzman, described being beaten on the spine
and soles of his feet until "the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was
being poured on these sensitive areas." Robert Eikhe, a former high ranking party
official, was sadistically beaten and had an eye gouged out by Boris Rodos,
in Beria's office, while Beria watched. Beria not only permitted and encouraged
the beating of prisoners, but in some case carried it out in person.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Poland found itself fighting a two front war when it was invaded by the Soviet Union from the east
on the 17th of September. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on the 28th of
September and one day later in accordance with the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact,
Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland. In 1940 the pace of the purges accelerated again.
On the 16th of January 1940, Beria sent Stalin a list of 457 "enemies of the people" of whom 346
were marked to be shot. They included Beria’s predecessor Yezhov and his brother and nephews
as well as one of the key figures in the purge Yefim Yevdokimov and his wife and teenage son.
During this period, Beria supervised deportations of people identified as "political enemies"
from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia after Soviet occupation of those countries.
On the 5th of March 1940, after the Gestapo–NKVD Third Conference was held
in Polish Zakopane, Beria sent a note to Stalin in which he stated that the Polish prisoners of
war kept at camps and prisons in western Belarus and Ukraine were enemies of the Soviet Union,
and recommended their execution. Most of them were military officers, but there were also
intelligentsia, doctors, priests, and others in a total of 22,000 people. With Stalin's approval,
Beria's NKVD executed them in what became known as the Katyn massacre. This series of mass executions
was carried out between April and May 1940. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers
imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers,
and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents
and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials".
The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest
in April 1943. The Soviet Union claimed the Nazis had killed the victims, and it continued to deny
responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned
the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.
Following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941,
Beria became a member of the State Defense Committee which consisted of 5 members. This
small group held total control over all the political and economic life in the country.
During the Second World War, he took on major domestic responsibilities and mobilized the
millions of people imprisoned in NKVD Gulag camps into wartime production. He took control of the
manufacture of armaments, and with Georgy Malenkov aircraft and aircraft engines.
The Gulags, the infamous forced labor camps, existed before Beria,
but he was the one who built them on a mass scale and industrialized the Gulag system.
Human life had no value for him. Once he boasted: “ “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”.
In December 1944, the NKVD supervised the Soviet atomic bomb project which built and tested a bomb
on the 29th of August 1949. The project was extremely labour-intensive. At least 330,000
people, including 10,000 technicians, were involved. The Gulag system provided
tens of thousands of people for work in uranium mines and for the construction and
operation of uranium processing plants. They also constructed test facilities.
Joseph Stalin himself had an amused understanding of Beria’s
cold and amoral nature. During the Yalta Conference held in February 1945 Stalin,
facing American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, called Beria “our Heinrich Himmler”.
In July 1945, as Soviet police ranks were converted to a military uniform system,
Beria's rank was officially converted to that of Marshal of the Soviet Union
although he had never held a traditional military command.
In January 1946, Beria resigned as chief of the NKVD while retaining general control
over national security matters as Deputy Prime Minister and Curator of the Organs
of State Security under Stalin. The same year he joined the Russian Politburo.
During the postwar years, Beria supervised the establishment of communist regimes in
Eastern Europe and chose their Soviet-backed leaders. However, starting in 1948, minister
of state security Viktor Abakumov initiated several investigations against these leaders,
which culminated with the arrest in November 1952 of Rudolf Slánský and
others in Czechoslovakia. These men were frequently accused of Zionism,
"rootless cosmopolitanism", and providing weapons to Israel. Such charges deeply disturbed Beria,
as he had directly ordered the sale of large amounts of Czech arms to Israel. Altogether,
fourteen Czechoslovak communist leaders, eleven of them Jewish, were tried, convicted and executed.
On the night of the 2nd of March 1953, Beria was among first to see Stalin's condition when he was
found unconscious. Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after
Stalin's stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against Stalin and mocking him". When Stalin
showed signs of consciousness, Beria dropped to his knees and lovingly kissed his hand. When
Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria's face shone with delight and he immediately stood up and spat.
Stalin's died on the 5th of March 1953. According to Molotov's memoirs,
shortly after Stalin's death, Beria announced triumphantly to the Politburo that he had "done
[Stalin] in" and "saved [them] all", asserting that Stalin was poisoned by Beria's associates.
After Stalin's death, Beria was appointed First Deputy Premier and his close ally
Malenkov was the new Premier. The two became the most powerful men in the post-Stalin leadership.
Khrushchev opposed the alliance between Beria and Malenkov, but he was initially unable to
challenge them. Khrushchev's opportunity came in June 1953 when a spontaneous uprising against the
East German communist regime broke out in East Berlin. Based on Beria's statements,
other leaders suspected that in the wake of the uprising,
he would consider trading the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War for
massive aid from the United States, as had been received in the Second World War.
Within days, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a coup d'etat against Beria.
Accounts of his downfall vary considerably. The historical consensus is that Khrushchev
prepared an elaborate ambush, convening a meeting of the Presidium on the 26th of June,
where he suddenly launched a scathing attack on Beria, accusing him of being a traitor and
spy in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise and asked,
"What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas in my trousers?"
When Beria finally realized what was happening and plaintively appealed to
his old friend Malenkov to speak for him, Malenkov silently hung his head
and pressed a button on his desk. This was an arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and
a group of armed officers in a nearby room, who burst in and arrested Beria.
Beria and his 6 men were tried by a "special session" of the
Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on 23 December 1953 with no defense counsel
and no right of appeal. Marshal Ivan Konev was the chairman of the court.
During the 1 day trial, it became known that Beria was a sexual deviant and had
committed numerous rapes during the years he was NKVD chief. His bodyguards testified that
when Beria was driven around Moscow in his limousine, he would point out young women
that he wanted to be taken to his dacha, where wine and a feast awaited them. After dining,
Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them. If the women resisted,
they were arrested and send to Gulag. Such was a case of Tatiana Okunevskaya, a well-known Soviet
actress whom Beria took her to his dacha, where he offered to free her father and grandmother
from prison if she submitted. He then raped her, telling her, "Scream or not, it doesn't matter".
Beria was also a serial killer. Some of the women who resisted his sexual advances,
were strangled to death. The remains of 5 young women buried naked were found in
1993 by construction workers installing streetlights in the garden of what used
to be Beria's Moscow villa. In the basement of his villa he also had a torture chamber.
Even Stalin came to distrust Beria. In one instance, when Stalin learned that
his then-teenage daughter, Svetlana, was alone with Beria at his house,
he telephoned her and told her to leave immediately.
Before and during the war, Beria directed his bodyguard Sarkisov to keep a list of the names
and phone numbers of the women that he had sex with. The list contained hundreds of names.
Beria was 54 years old when on the 23rd of December 1953 Supreme Court
of the Soviet Union found him guilty of treason,
terrorism and counter-revolutionary activity and sentenced him to death.
While the other 6 defendants were sentenced to death and shot immediately after the trial ended,
Beria was executed separately and shot through the forehead by General Pavel Batitsky. As
with his predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov, Beria begged for his life before his execution.
Beria's personal archive said to have included "compromising"
material on his former colleagues was destroyed on Khrushchev's orders.
There were no tears shed for Lavrentiy Beria.
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