Nestor Lakoba, Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria, and Aghasi Khanjian during the opening of the Moscow Metro in 1936. The same year Lakoba and Khanjian were killed by Beria.
Beria with Stalin (in the background), Stalin's daughter Svetlana, and Nestor Lakoba (obscured)
May 28, 1953
Beria with his family.
Beria and Stalin
(Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899 - 1953) was a Georgian So...)
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899 - 1953) was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years (1946–1953). Beria was the longest lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II.
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Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was born on March 29, 1899 (March 17 old style), in Merkheuli, Kutaisi Governorate (now known as the Republic of Georgia), Russia. His father was a farmer, and his mother, who was seven years older than her husband, was descended from noble lineage. In his autobiography, Lavrentiy Beria mentioned only his sister and his niece, implying that his brother was (or any other siblings were) dead or had no relationship with Beria after he left Merkheuli.
Beria attended a technical school in Sukhumi, and joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student in the Baku Polytechnicum (subsequently known as the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy). As a student, Beria distinguished himself in mathematics and the sciences. The Polytechnicum's curriculum concentrated on the petroleum industry.
After joining the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in March 1917, he participated in the Russian Revolution as an underground soldier and counterintelligence agent in the Caucasus. Beria's career with the Soviet secret police began in early 1921 when the ruling Bolsheviks assigned him to the notorious Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Fighting Revolution and Sabotage) in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. As a deputy to the ruthless Cheka chief in that republic, Mir Dzhafar Bagirov, Beria engaged in bloody reprisals against the opponents of Bolshevik rule, even drawing criticism from some Caucasian Bolshevik leaders for the violent methods he used. By late 1922, with the anti-Bolshevik rebels in Azerbaijan subdued, Beria was transferred to Georgia, where there were still serious challenges to the Soviet regime. He assumed the post of deputy chairman of the Georgian Cheka, throwing himself into the job of fighting political dissent among his fellow Georgians. Beria's influence grew as the political police played an increasing role in Georgian politics. His career was successful because he helped to engineer the defeat of the national communists, who wanted Georgia to retain some form of independence from Moscow, and the consequent victory of those who favored strong centralized control by the Bolsheviks.
By 1926 Beria had risen to the post of chairman of the Georgian GPU (State Political Administration, the successor organization to the Cheka). Beria was the consummate Soviet politician. His political fortunes were furthered not only by his effectiveness in using the secret police to enforce Soviet rule but also by his ability to win favor with Soviet party leader Josef Stalin, a Georgian by nationality, by playing on Stalin's suspicions of the native Georgian party leadership. Having extended his influence into the party apparatus, Beria was elected in 1931 to the post of the first secretary of the Georgian party apparatus, a remarkable achievement for a man of only thirty-two years. Henceforth Beria would continue to ingratiate himself with Stalin by furthering Stalin's personality cult in Georgia. In 1935 Beria published a lengthy treatise, On the History of Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia, which greatly exaggerated Stalin's role in the revolutionary movement in the Caucasus before 1917. The book was serialized in the major party newspaper, Pravda, and made Beria a figure of national stature.
When Stalin embarked on his policy of terrorizing the party and the country through his bloody purges of the Communist Party apparatus from 1936 through 1938, Beria was a willing accomplice. In Georgia alone, thousands perished at the hands of the secret police, and thousands more were condemned to prisons and labor camps, as part of a nationwide Stalinist vendetta against the Soviet people. Although many party leaders perished in the purges, Beria emerged unscathed, and in 1938 Stalin rewarded him with the post of head of the NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, as the secret police was then called) in Moscow. After carrying out a full-scale purge of the NKVD leadership, Beria brought in his associates from the party and police in Georgia to fill the top NKVD posts, thereby creating an extensive power base in the NKVD and increasing his political influence in the Kremlin.
After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Beria, as a deputy Soviet premier, over-saw the enormous job of evacuating defense industries from western regions and converting peacetime industry to war production. He drew upon the NKVD's vast forced labor empire, under the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Colonies, or gulag, to produce weapons and ammunition for the Red Army, as well as to mine coal and metals and construct railway lines. The NKVD was also responsible for internal security, foreign intelligence, and counterintelligence, and its thousands of border and internal troops performed rear security functions. Under Beria's direct supervision, NKVD troops deported to Siberia hundreds of thousands of non-Russian nationals within the Soviet Union who were suspected of disloyalty to the regime.
By the war's end, Beria had earned a reputation as a ruthless but highly effective administrator. Stalin made him a full member of the party's ruling Politburo in 1946 and placed him in charge of developing the Soviet atomic bomb in 1945. Although Beria relinquished his post as head of the NKVD in early 1946, his protégés were still in charge, and he continued to oversee the police and intelligence apparatus as a deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. Beria threw himself into work on the bomb, enlisting top Soviet scientists, ensuring the availability of raw materials like uranium, and using secret intelligence on atomic bomb production in the West. As a result of his efforts, the Soviets surprised the West by successfully producing and testing their first atomic bomb (plutonium) in August 1949.
Although Beria was one of Stalin's closest advisors, he nonetheless fell victim to Stalin's intense paranoia in the early 1950s and suffered a series of attacks on his fiefdom in Georgia and in the secret police. Had it not been for Stalin's sudden death in March 1953, Beria might have been removed from power altogether. Instead Beria formed an alliance with Georgy Malenkov, who became party first secretary, and took direct control of the police and intelligence apparatus (known at this time as the MVD). He also embarked on a series of liberal initiatives aimed at reversing many of Stalin's policies. The changes he introduced were so bold and far-reaching that they alarmed his colleagues, in particular Nikita Khrushchev, who aspired to become the Soviet leader. A bitter power struggle ensued,
And Beria was outmaneuvered by Khrushchev, who managed to have Beria arrested in June 1953. Charged with high treason, Beria was executed in December 1953, along with six others. Although Beria was best known for being a ruthless police administrator and a loyal follower of Stalin, archival materials released in 1990s have made it clear that Beria's role went far beyond this and that he was one of the most influential politicians of the Soviet period.
Beria was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II.
Beria is the central character in Good Night, Uncle Joe by Canadian playwright David Elendune. The play is a fictionalized account of the events leading up to Stalin's death.
Georgian film director Tengiz Abuladze based the character of dictator Varlam Aravidze on Beria in his 1984 film Repentance. Although banned in the Soviet Union for its semi-allegorical critique of Stalinism, it premiered at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, winning the FIPRESCI Prize, Grand Prize of the Jury, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.
British actor Bob Hoskins played Beria in the 1991 film Inner Circle.
He was portrayed by Roshan Seth in the 1992 film Stalin and, with an Irish accent, by David Suchet in Red Monarch.
Simon Russell Beale played Beria in the 2017 satirical film The Death of Stalin.
In the 1958 CBS production of "The Plot to Kill Stalin" for Playhouse 90, Beria was portrayed by E. G. Marshall.
He was also an important character in the 2013 Russian mini-series Kill Stalin, produced by Star Media.
Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate describes brainwashed Raymond Shaw, the "perfectly prefabricated assassin," as "this dream by Lavrenti Beria."
In the 1964 science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Hard to Be a God, Beria is personified in the character Don Reba who serves as the king's minister of defense.
(Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899 - 1953) was a Georgian So...)
He was from the Mingrelian ethnic group and grew up in a Georgian Orthodox family.
Beria's mother, Marta Jaqeli (1868–1955), was deeply religious and church-going (she spent much time in church and died in a church building).
In August 1938, Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD carried out the Great Purge: the imprisonment or execution of millions of people throughout the Soviet Union as alleged "enemies of the people." 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. Stalin had voted to appoint Georgy Malenkov as head of the NKVD, but he was overruled. In September, Beria was appointed the head of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he succeeded Yezhov as NKVD head. Yezhov was executed in 1940 and one account says he was personally strangled by Beria. The NKVD was purged next, with half of its personnel replaced by Beria loyalists, many of them from the Caucasus.
Although Beria's name is closely identified with the Great Purge because of his activities while deputy head of the NKVD, his leadership of the organization marked an easing of the repression begun under Yezhov. Over 100,000 people were released from the labor camps. The government officially admitted that there had been some injustice and "excesses" during the purges, which were blamed entirely on Yezhov. The liberalization was only relative: arrests and executions continued, and in 1940, as war approached, the pace of the purges again accelerated. During this period, Beria supervised deportations of people identified as political enemies from Poland and the Baltic states after Soviet occupation of those regions.
In March 1939, Beria became a candidate member of the Communist Party's Politburo. Although he did not become a full member until 1946, he was already one of the senior leaders of the Soviet state. In 1941, Beria was made a Commissar General of State Security, the highest quasi-military rank within the Soviet police system of that time, effectively comparable to a Marshal of the Soviet Union.
On 5 March 1940, after the Gestapo–NKVD Third Conference was held in Zakopane, Beria sent a note (no. 794/B) 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 more than 22,000 people. With Stalin's approval, Beria's NKVD executed them in what became known as the Katyn massacre.
From October 1940 to February 1942, the NKVD under Beria carried out a new purge of the Red Army and related industries. In February 1941, Beria became Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and in June, following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, he became a member of the State Defense Committee (GKO). During World War II, 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. This was the beginning of Beria's alliance with Malenkov, which later became of central importance.
In December 1944, Beria's NKVD was assigned to supervise the Soviet atomic bomb project ("Task No. 1"), which built and tested a bomb by 29 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, such as those at Semipalatinsk and in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. The NKVD also ensured the necessary security for the project.
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, Beria made a significant contribution to the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II through his organization of wartime production and his use of partisans. Stalin personally never thought much of it, and neither commented publicly on his performance nor awarded him recognition (i.e. Order of Victory), as he did for most other Soviet Marshals.
Abroad, Beria had met with Kim Il-sung, the future leader of North Korea, several times when the Soviet troops had declared war on Japan and occupied the northern half of Korea from August 1945. Beria recommended that Stalin install a communist leader in the occupied territories.
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. However, the new NKVD chief, Sergei Kruglov, was not a Beria man. Also, by the summer of 1946, Beria's man Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov was replaced as head of the Ministry for State Security (MGB) by Viktor Abakumov. Abakumov had headed SMERSH from 1943 to 1946; his relationship with Beria involved close collaboration (since Abakumov owed his rise to Beria's support and esteem), but also rivalry. Stalin had begun to encourage Abakumov to form his own network inside the MGB to counter Beria's dominance of the power ministries. Kruglov and Abakumov moved expeditiously to replace Beria's men in the security apparatus leadership with new people. Very soon, Deputy Minister Stepan Mamulov of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs was the only close Beria ally left outside foreign intelligence, on which Beria kept a grip. In the following months, Abakumov started carrying out important operations without consulting Beria, often working in tandem with Zhdanov, and on Stalin's direct orders. These operations were aimed by Stalin—initially tangentially, but with time more directly–at Beria.
One of the first such moves involved the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair, which commenced in October 1946 and eventually led to the murder of Solomon Mikhoels and the arrest of many other members. This affair damaged Beria; not only had he championed the creation of the committee in 1942, but his own entourage included a substantial number of Jews.
After Zhdanov died suddenly in August 1948, Beria and Malenkov consolidated their power by means of a purge of Zhdanov's associates in the so-called "Leningrad Affair". Those executed included Zhdanov's deputy, Alexey Kuznetsov; the economic chief, Nikolai Voznesensky; the Party head in Leningrad, Pyotr Popkov; and the Prime Minister of the Russian Republic, Mikhail Rodionov.
During the postwar years, Beria supervised installation of Communist regimes in the countries of Eastern Europe and hand-picked the Soviet-backed leaders. Starting in 1948, Abakumov initiated several investigations against these leaders, which culminated with the arrest in November 1951 of Rudolf Slánský, Bedřich Geminder, 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, 14 Czechoslovak Communist leaders, 11 of them Jewish, were tried, convicted, and executed. Similar investigations in Poland and other Soviet satellite countries occurred at the same time.
In 1951, Abakumov was replaced by Semyon Ignatyev, who further intensified the anti-Semitic campaign. On 13 January 1953, the biggest anti-semitic affair in the Soviet Union started with an article in Pravda – it began what became known as the Doctors' plot, in which a number of the country's prominent Jewish physicians were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently, the Soviet press began an anti-semitic propaganda campaign, euphemistically termed the "struggle against rootless cosmopolitanism". Initially, 37 men were arrested, but the number quickly grew into hundreds. Scores of Soviet Jews were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, sent to the Gulag, or executed. The "Doctors' plot" was presumably invented by Stalin as an excuse to dismiss Beria and replace him with Ignatiev or some other MGB functionary. A few days after Stalin's death on 5 March 1953, Beria freed all the arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, and arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved.
At Beria's trial in 1953, it became known that he had committed numerous rapes during the years he was NKVD chief. Simon Sebag-Montefiore, a biographer of Stalin, concluded the information "reveals a sexual predator who used his power to indulge himself in obsessive depravity."
His case files in the Soviet archives contained the official testimony from Colonel Rafael Semyonovich Sarkisov and Colonel Sardion Nikolaevich Nadaraia, two of Beria's most senior NKVD bodyguards. They stated that, on warm nights during the war years, Beria was often driven slowly through the streets of Moscow in his armored Packard limousine. He would point out young women to be detained and escorted to his mansion, where wine and a feast awaited them. After dining, Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them. Beria's bodyguards reported that their duties included handing each victim a flower bouquet as she left Beria's house. Accepting it implied that the sex had been consensual; refusal would mean arrest. In one incident, his chief bodyguard, Sarkisov, reported that a woman who had been brought to Beria rejected his advances and ran out of his office; Sarkisov mistakenly handed her the flowers anyway, prompting the enraged Beria to declare, "Now it's not a bouquet, it's a wreath! May it rot on your grave!" The NKVD arrested the woman the next day.
Women also submitted to Beria's sexual advances in exchange for the promise of freeing their relatives from the Gulag. In one case, Beria picked up Tatiana Okunevskaya, a well-known Soviet actress, under the pretence of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead he took her to his dacha, where he offered to free her father and grandmother from NKVD prison if she submitted. He then raped her, telling her: "Scream or not, it doesn't matter." Beria, however, already knew that her relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, which she survived.
Beria's sexually predatory nature was well known to the Politburo, and though Stalin took an indulgent viewpoint (considering Beria's wartime importance), he said, "I don't trust Beria." In one instance, when Stalin learned his daughter was alone with Beria at his house, he telephoned her and told her to leave immediately. When Beria complimented Alexander Poskrebyshev's daughter on her beauty, Poskrebyshev quickly pulled her aside and instructed her, "Don't ever accept a lift from Beria." After taking an interest in Marshal Kliment Voroshilov's daughter-in-law during a party at their summer dacha, Beria shadowed their car closely all the way back to the Kremlin, terrifying Voroshilov's wife.
Prior to and during the war, Beria directed Sarkisov to keep a running list of the names and phone numbers of his sexual encounters. Eventually, he ordered Sarkisov to destroy the list as a security risk, but the colonel retained a secret handwritten copy. When Beria's fall from power began, Sarkisov passed the list to Viktor Abakumov, the former wartime head of SMERSH and now chief of the MGB – the successor to the NKVD. Abakumov was already aggressively building a case against Beria. Stalin, who was also seeking to undermine Beria, was thrilled by the detailed records kept by Sarkisov, demanding: "Send me everything this asshole writes down!" Sarkisov reported that Beria's sexual appetite had led to him contracting syphilis during the war, for which he was secretly treated without the knowledge of Stalin or the Politburo (a fact Beria later admitted during his interrogation).
Although the Russian government acknowledged Sarkisov's handwritten list of Beria's victims on 17 January 2003, the victims' names will not be released until 2028.
He was a member of Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in March 1917.
He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1934.
In 1946 he became a full member of the Politburo, the highest-ranking echelon of the Bolshevik party.
