Background

Sergo Beria was born on November 24, 1924, in the Republic of Georgia, to Lavrenti and Nina Beria.

In 1938, together with his parents, Lavrentiy and Nino Beria, Sergo moved to Moscow. As a child, Sergo Beria was fond of music and actively studied foreign languages - in addition to German and English, he studied Dutch, Japanese, and French, and subsequently, many of them he spoke fluently. Sergo spent his childhood and juvenility surrounded by the most powerful men of the Soviet Union. Sergo Beria was even recruited by Stalin to spy on President Roosevelt.

Education

In 1938 Sergo Beria moved to Moscow with his family. There he attended Primary and Secondary General school N 175.

Beria educated at the Budyonny Military Academy of the Signal Corps from 1942 to 1947, where he earned a Candidate of Sciences in 1948 and a Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics in 1952.

But after his father's (Lavrentiy Beria) arrest and execution in 1953, Sergo Beria was deprived of all ranks, awards, and academic degrees.

Career

At the very beginning of World War II, Sergo Beria took a three-month course at the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) Radio Engineering Laboratory and joined the army with the rank of a lieutenant technician.

Then Sergo went as a volunteer to the school of the spies, learned German and spoke it fluently, he could speak dialects and Hochdeutsch too. But in 1941 he was sent on secret special operations to Iran. In 1942 Beria served in the North Caucasus Group of Forces, and later, on a special assignment, he attended the Tehran and Yalta conferences among the heads of the anti-Hitler coalition.

For responsible service, Beria was awarded the Order of the Red Star and the Medal "For the Defence of the Caucasus."

At the end of 1942, Beria went to the Military Academy. After the war, Sergo graduated from the Leningrad Military Academy of Communications. In 1947 he was appointed as a Deputy Chief Designer of the Special Bureau N1 (later Design and Construction Engineering Bureau, later Almaz-Antey). While working on his diploma, Beria designed the first Soviet air-to-sea KS-1 Kometa-class cruise missile and became one of the country’s top military engineers. His Master’s and Doctor's dissertations were based on his projects, for which he also received the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize.

But everything changed dramatically after the arrest and execution of his father in 1953. Sergo Beria was placed in solitary confinement for a year in Lefortovo Prison and Butyrka prison, he was charged with organizing a counter-revolutionary conspiracy and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR (the CPSU Central Committee) took the decision to deprive of all ranks, awards, and academic degrees. A Supreme Attestation Commission found Beria guilty of plagiarism, his dissertations were deemed to be reworkings of studies by other researchers and engineers.

In November 1954, together with his mother, he was sent into “administrative exile” in the Urals, where he was nevertheless given a three-room apartment and the right to work on his rocket designs under the close supervision of the investigating authorities. Sergo and his mother were also forced to change their surname to Gegechkori, convinced that “with the surname, Beria people would tear them apart.”

“Gegechkori was his mother’s maiden name. He always used it when introducing himself. Sergo never mentioned that his father was Lavrentiy Beria,” - said his colleague Rel Matafonov in the 1950s. Sergo began his career from scratch, as an ordinary engineer, rising to prominence once again over the years at the Research Institute in Sverdlovsk.

In 1964 he requested a transfer to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he continued to climb the career ladder at Scientific Production Association (SPA) “Kvant” till 1988. Later, the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine invited him to the post of Chief Design Engineer in the Department of New Physical Problems. From 1990 to 1999, Sergo worked as a Chief Designer at the Kyiv Research Institute “Kometa” until his retirement.

Later in life, Sergo Beria ceased hiding the fact that he was the son of Lavrentiy Beria, and even wrote his memoirs in which he desperately tried to rehabilitate his father, whom he loved dearly.

Achievements

• Sergo Beria is the creator of the first Soviet air-to-sea KS-1 Kometa-class cruise missile.
  
  He is the recipient of the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize.
  
  Beria participated as an officer in World War II.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Beria - My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin

    (For nearly twenty years, two men from Georgia dominated t...)

    2001
  • My Father, Lavrentiy Beria 1994
  • My Father Beria: In the Corridors of the Stalinist Authorities 2002

Politics

Sergo Beria firmly believed that Lavrentiy Beria had been scapegoated for the crimes of the party elite and that all his father’s actions had been in the interests of the state.

It was his father's reputation as a mass murderer and rapist that disturbed him the most. In an attempt to clear his father's name, he wrote Beria, My Father: Life inside Stalin's Kremlin, published in English in 2001.

In 2000, Sergo Beria went to the Moscow courts, seeking a judgment that would wipe away, as Service put it, "the blot of shame from the official records." The case was given due consideration, but in the end, the plea made by Sergo was rejected."

Views

Beria was lots of times offered to leave the country, but he never took advantage of any opportunity, considering it as a betrayal of his father’s memory. In addition, Sergo preferred to serve his native country, and he never associated himself with the ruling elite.

Membership

• 

  All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol) , USSR

• 

  Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) , USSR

Interests

• Music

Connections

Sergo Beria was married to Darya Peshkova. They have two daughters and a son. Later they divorced because of Sergo's new girlfriend in the 1960s.

Father:

Lavrentiy Beria

Mother:

Nino Gegechkori (Beria)

ex-wife:

Darya (Marfa) Peshkova

Daughter:

Nina Peshkova

Son:

Sergei Peshkov

Daughter:

Nadejda Peshkova