| Name | Lavrentiy Beria |
|---|---|
| Imagesize | 250px |
| Citizenship | Soviet |
| Nationality | Georgian |
| Office | First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union |
| Term start | 5 March 1953 |
| Term end | 26 June 1953 |
| Premier | Georgy Malenkov |
| Predecessor | Vyacheslav Molotov |
| Successor | Lazar Kaganovich |
| Office2 | Minister of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union |
| Term start3 | 25 November 1938 |
| Term end3 | 29 December 1945 |
| Predecessor3 | Nikolai Yezhov |
| Successor3 | Sergei Kruglov |
| Term start2 | 5 March 1953 |
| Term end2 | 26 June 1953 |
| Predecessor2 | Sergei Kruglov |
| Successor2 | Sergei Kruglov |
| Office4 | First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia |
| Term start5 | 14 November 1931 |
| Term end5 | 18 October 1932 |
| Predecessor5 | Lavrenty Kartvelishvili |
| Successor5 | Petre Agniashvili |
| Term start4 | 15 January 1934 |
| Term end4 | 31 August 1938 |
| Predecessor4 | Petre Agniashvili |
| Successor4 | Candide Charkviani |
| Birth date | March 29, 1899 |
| Birth place | Merkheuli, Kutaisi Governorate, Russian Empire |
| Death date | December 23, 1953 |
| Death place | Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Party | Communist Party of the Soviet Union |
| Signature | Lavrentiy Beria Signature.svg |
| Religion | Atheism |
Beria was the longest lived and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and shortly after World War II, when he simultaneously administrated vast sections of the Soviet state and served as defacto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of the dreaded NKVD field units, responsible for anti-partisan reprisal operations on both friendly and enemy civilian populations and the apprehension and summary execution of thousands of "turncoats, deserters, cowards and suspected malingerers". Beria administrated the vast expansion of the Gulag slave labor camps, and was primarily responsible for the Katyn massacre. He attended the Yalta Conference with Stalin, who introduced him to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "our Himmler". Beria's uncompromising ruthlessness in his duties and skill at producing results by intimidating his subordinates culminated in his success in overseeing the Soviet atomic bomb project, which was given absolute priority by Stalin and completed in record time despite the purge of leading physicists in the late 1930s. Forming an alliance with Georgy Malenkov, Beria's singular personal control of the NKVD and violent nature made him feared and notorious even among the other Politburo members, whose wives, family members and friends were often arrested by Beria's NKVD in retaliation for opposing his political maneuvers.
Beria was widely seen as the most dangerous and ambitious of Stalin's inner circle during his final years. As he had promised, after Stalin's death in 1953 Beria elevated himself to First Deputy Prime Minister, where he carried out a brief campaign of liberalization; the economic realities of the Soviet alliance with the West during World War II as well as Stalin's especially irrational hatred in his final years had ideologically disillusioned Beria, who spoke of "de-Bolshevization" and craved the renewed wealth and resources a lucrative strategic peace with the US would provide. He was briefly a part of the ruling "troika" with Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov. However, Beria's overconfidence in his position after Stalin's death led him to underestimate the real feelings of his associates, many of whom still had relatives in his prisons. In addition, his proposals to free East Germany and normalize relations with the United States alarmed other Politburo members, especially in the wake of the 1953 East German uprising, which was only put down after an invasion by Soviet troops. Led by Nikita Krushchev and assisted by the military forces of the immensely influential Marshal Zhukov, they formed an alliance to remove and liquidate him. In that same year he was arrested on trumped-up charges of treason by Zhukov's soldiers during a meeting where the full Politburo condemned him; the non-opposition of the NKVD was ensured by Zhukov's troops, and after interrogation by his own NKVD torturers, Beria was taken to the basement of the Lubyanka and shot by General Pavel Batitsky.
In June 1937, he said in a speech, "Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed".
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 organisation marked an easing of the repression begun under Yezhov. Over 100,000 people were released from the labour camps and it was officially admitted that there had been some injustice and "excesses" during the purges, which were blamed entirely on Yezhov. Nevertheless, this liberalisation 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 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 Marshal of the Soviet Union.
On 5 March 1940, after Gestapo–NKVD Third Conference held in Zakopane, Beria sent a note (no. 794/B) to Stalin in which he stated that the Polish prisoners of war (mostly military officers but also intelligentsia: doctors, priests; total of over 22,000) kept at camps and prisons in western Belarus and Ukraine were enemies of the Soviet Union, and recommended their execution, which (after Stalin's approval) culminated in the Katyn massacre, conducted by Beria's NKVD.
In October 1940 – 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, using the millions of people imprisoned in NKVD labour camps for wartime production. He took control of production 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 1944, as the Germans were driven from Soviet soil, Beria was in charge of dealing with the various ethnic minorities accused of collaboration with the invaders, including the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans. All these were deported to Soviet Central Asia. (See "Population transfer in the Soviet Union".)
In December 1944, Beria's NKVD was assigned to supervise the Soviet atomic bomb project, which built and tested a bomb by 1949. In this capacity he ran the successful Soviet espionage campaign against the atomic weapons program of the United States, which obtained much of the technology required. However his most important contribution was to provide the necessary workforce for this project, which was extremely labor-intensive. The Gulag system provided tens of thousands of people for work in uranium mines and the construction and operation of uranium processing plants, as well as the construction of test facilities such as those at Semipalatinsk and in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. The NKVD also ensured the necessary security of 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, through his organization of wartime production, made a significant contribution to the Soviet Union's victory in World War II.
With Stalin nearing 70, the postwar years were dominated by a concealed struggle for succession. At the end of the war the most likely successor seemed to be Andrei Zhdanov, party leader in Leningrad during the war, by 1946 in charge of all cultural matters. After 1946 Beria formed an alliance with Malenkov to counter Zhdanov's rise.
In January 1946, Beria resigned as chief of the NKVD, while retaining general control over national security matters from his post of Deputy Prime Minister, under Stalin. But the new 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 MGB with Viktor Abakumov. Kruglov and Abakumov then moved expeditiously to replace Beria's men in the security apparatus leadership with new people. Very soon MVD Deputy Minister Stepan Mamulov was the only Beria-ist 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 sometimes on Stalin's direct orders. Some observers argue that these operations were aimed – initially tangentially, but with time more directly – at Beria.
One of the first such moves was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair that commenced in October 1946 and eventually led to the murder of Solomon Mikhoels and the arrest of many other members. This affair damaged Beria because not only had he championed creation of the committee in 1942, but his own entourage included a substantial number of Jews.
Zhdanov died suddenly in August 1948, and Beria and Malenkov then moved to consolidate their power with a purge of Zhdanov's associates known as the "Leningrad Affair". Among the executed were Zhdanov's deputy, Aleksei Kuznetsov, the economic chief, Nikolai Voznesensky, the Party head in Leningrad, Pyotr Popkov, and the Prime Minister of the Russian Republic, Mikhail Rodionov. It was only after Zhdanov's death that Nikita Khrushchev began to be considered as a possible alternative to the Beria-Malenkov axis.
Zhdanov's death did not, however, stop the anti-Semitic campaign. During the postwar years Beria supervised the establishment of Communist regimes in the countries of Eastern Europe, and hand-picked the leaders. A substantial number of these leaders were Jews. 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 generally accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism, but, more specifically, of providing weapons to Israel. From Beria's standpoint, this charge was extremely explosive, because large amounts of Czech arms had been sold to Israel on his direct orders. Altogether, 14 Czechoslovakian Communist leaders, 11 of them Jewish, were tried, convicted, and executed (see Slánský trial). Similar investigations in Poland and other Soviet satellite countries occurred at the same time.
Around that time, 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 was initiated with an article in Pravda: the Doctors' plot. A number of the country's prominent Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently, a hysterical anti-semitic propaganda campaign, euphemistically called the struggle against rootless cosmopolitans, occurred in the Soviet press. Initially, thirty-seven were arrested, but the number quickly grew into hundreds. Scores of Soviet Jews were promptly dismissed from their jobs, arrested, sent to a gulag or executed. It is alleged that at this time on Stalin's orders the MGB started to prepare to deport all Soviet Jews to Russian Far East or even massacre them. However, this issue is quite disputed (see discussion in Doctors' plot article), and many claim that no such deportation was planned at all or that at least not nearly as much progress was made with the preparations for it as is claimed by the proponents of this theory.
Days after Stalin's death on 5 March, Beria freed all the arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, and indeed arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved. Antisemitic campaign in the mass media was brought to end and no further persecution of Jews occurred.
However, early in the 1950s, Stalin's growing mistrust of Beria had already manifested in the Mingrelian Affair (Beria was of Mingrelian subethnicity), in which many of Beria's protégés in Georgia were purged, diminishing Beria's power. And also in Stalin's accumulation of sexual indiscretion, it was seen he was actively seeking to dispose of Beria, as he had done with Beria's predecessors, Nikolai Yezhov, and Genrikh Yagoda.
Stalin's aide Vasili Lozgachev reported that Beria and Malenkov were the first members of the Politburo to investigate Stalin's condition after his stroke, coming to his dacha at Kuntsevo at 3am on March 2 after being called by Khrushchev and Bulganin (who evidently did not want to risk Stalin's wrath by checking themselves). While Lozgachev tried ineffectively to explain to Beria that the then-unconscious Stalin (still in his soiled clothing) was "sick and needed medical attention", Beria angrily dismissed his claims as panic-mongering and quickly left, ordering him "Don't bother us, don't cause a panic and don't disturb Comrade Stalin!" This decision to defer calling a doctor for a full 12 hours after Stalin was rendered paralyzed, incontinent and unable to speak is noted as "extraordinary" by Sebag-Montefiore, but also in keeping with the standard Stalinist policy of deferring all decision-making (no matter how necessary or obvious) without official orders from higher authority. Beria's decision not to immediately involve doctors was silently supported (or at least not opposed) by the rest of the Politburo, which was both initially rudderless without Stalin's iron-fisted micromanagement and paralyzed by a legitimate fear he would suddenly recover and wreak violent reprisal on anyone who had dared to act without his orders. Stalin's malignant suspicion of doctors in the wake of the Doctors' Plot was well known; at the time of his stroke, his private physician was already being tortured in the basement of the Lubyanka merely for suggesting he required more bed rest.). While the rest of Stalin's inner circle (even Molotov, saved from certain liquidation) stood sobbing unashamedly over the body, Beria reportedly appeared "radiant", "regenerated", and "glistening with ill-concealed relish."
Beria was taken first to the Moscow guardhouse ("gauptvakhta") and then to the bunker of the headquarters of Moscow Military District. Defence Minister Nikolai Bulganin ordered the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division and Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division to move into Moscow to prevent security forces loyal to Beria from rescuing him. Many of Beria's subordinates, proteges and associates were also arrested, among them Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, Sergey Golgidze, Vladimir Dekanozov, Pavel Meshik, and Lev Vlodzimirskiy. Pravda announced Beria's arrest only on 10 July, crediting it to Malenkov and referring to Beria's "criminal activities against the Party and the State." In December it was announced that Beria and the six accomplices mentioned, "in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies," had been "conspiring for many years to seize power in the Soviet Union and restore capitalism."
Beria and the others were tried by a special session ("Spetsialnoye Sudebnoye Prisutstvie") of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union with no defense counsel and no right of appeal. Marshal Ivan Konev was the chairman of the court. Beria was found guilty of:
#Treason. It was alleged, without any proof, that "up to the moment of his arrest Beria maintained and developed his secret connections with foreign intelligence services". In particular, attempts to initiate peace talks with Hitler in 1941 through the ambassador of Bulgaria were classified as treason; it was not mentioned that Beria was acting on the orders of Stalin and Molotov. It was also alleged that Beria, who in 1942 helped organize the defense of the North Caucasus, tried to let the Germans occupy the Caucasus. There were also allegations that "planning to seize power, Beria tried to obtain the support of imperialist states at the price of violation of territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and transfer of parts of USSR's territory to capitalist states." These allegations were due to Beria's suggestion to his assistants that in order to improve foreign relations it was reasonable to transfer the Kaliningrad Oblast to Germany, part of Karelia to Finland, the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Romania and the Kuril Islands to Japan. #Terrorism. Beria's order to execute 25 political prisoners in October 1941 without trial was classified as an act of terrorism. #Counterrevolutionary activity during Russian Civil War. In 1919 Beria worked in the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Beria maintained that he was assigned to that work by the Hummet party which subsequently merged with the Adalat Party, the Ahrar Party, and the Baku Bolsheviks to establish the Azerbaijan Communist Party.
Beria and all the other defendants were sentenced to death. When the death sentence was passed, according to Moskalenko's later account, Beria begged on his knees for mercy, but he and the other six defendants were immediately executed by firing squad on 23 December 1953, and his body was cremated and buried around Moscow's forest.
During the war, Beria was commonly seen on warm nights slowly driving in his armored Packard limousine through the streets of Moscow. According to the testimony of his NKVD bodyguards—Colonels Sarkisov and Nadaraia—Beria 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 orders included handing each girl a flower bouquet as she left Beria's house, with the implication being that to accept his parting gift made her his consensual mistress; those who refused risked being arrested. In one incident reported by Colonel Sarkisov, a woman who had been brought to Beria refused 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 woman was arrested by the NKVD the next day. In reality, Beria knew her relatives had already been executed months before. She was arrested shortly afterward 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 himself once became panicked after finding out his daughter Svetlana was alone with Beria at his house, declaring "I don't trust Beria" and calling her to demand she 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." Once, after taking an interest in Marshal Kliment Voroshilov's daughter-in-law during a party at their summer dacha, he shadowed their car closely all the way back to the Kremlin, terrifying Voroshilov's wife. Prior to and during the war, Beria directed his chief bodyguard, Colonel Sarkisov, to keep a running list of the names and phone numbers of his sexual conquests. Later realizing the security risk, Beria ordered Sarkisov to destroy the list, but the Colonel retained a secret handwritten copy; as Beria's fall from power began, Sarkisov sent the list to the new NKVD chief (and former wartime head of SMERSH), Viktor Abakumov, who was already aggressively building a case against Beria. Stalin, actively seeking to undermine Beria, was thrilled by Sarkisov's detailed records, demanding "Send me everything this asshole writes down!" The existence of Sarkisov's handwritten list of Beria's victims was acknowledged publicly by the Russian government only on 17 January 2003, and the actual names will not be released for another 25 years.
In addition to the official reports from his Soviet archive, historian Amy Knight notes that Beria's sexual predation was partially independently corroborated by an American diplomat, Edward Ellis Smith, who served in the U.S. embassy in Moscow after the war: "Smith noted that Beria's escapades were common knowledge among embassy personnel because his house was on the same street as residence for Americans, and those who lived there saw girls brought to Beria's house late at night in a limousine."
The sexual abuse and rape charges against Beria were disputed by some of the people close to him, including his wife Nina and his son Sergo, and former Soviet foreign intelligence chief Pavel Sudoplatov, as politically motivated smears. In a 1990 interview Beria's wife Nina said: "Lavrentii was busy working day and night. When did he have time for love with this legion of women?"
Category:1899 births Category:1953 deaths Category:People from Sukhumi District Category:People from Gulripsh District Category:Mingrelians Category:Bolsheviks Category:Cheka Category:Deaths by firearm in Russia Category:Directors of intelligence agencies Category:Executed Georgian people Category:Executed politicians Category:Executed Soviet people Category:Georgian atheists Category:Georgian people of World War II Category:Heroes of Socialist Labour Category:History of Soviet Georgia Category:Marshals of the Soviet Union Category:NKVD officers Category:People executed by firing squad Category:People executed for treason against the Soviet Union Category:People executed by the Soviet Union Category:Members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union executed by the Soviet Union Category:Political repression in the Soviet Union Category:Nuclear weapons program of the Soviet Union Category:Soviet politicians Category:Spymasters Category:Great Purge perpetrators Category:First Secretaries of the Georgian Communist Party Category:Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union members Category:Georgian Communist Party politicians Category:People's Commissars and Ministers of the Soviet Union
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