Lavrentiy Beria

• 1. Introduction

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  Lavrentiy Beria stood over Stalin's paralysed body on the 2nd of March 1953, dismissed the frantic aide who pleaded for a doctor, and walked out of the dacha at Kuntsevo ordering everyone not to panic. Twelve hours would pass before anyone called a physician. When Stalin finally died on the 5th of March, Beria was reportedly the first to dart forward and kiss the lifeless form. His voice echoed through the hall as he shouted for his driver, what Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva described as carrying 'the ring of triumph unconcealed'. Mikoyan muttered to Khrushchev, 'He's off to take power'. A frantic dash for limousines followed.

  Who was this man that his own colleagues feared him more than they mourned Stalin? How did a boy from the village of Merkheuli, near Sukhumi in the Caucasus, rise to command the most feared police apparatus in Soviet history? And why did the architect of mass terror spend his final hundred days attempting, of all things, to dismantle it?

• 2. Origins and Ascent

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  Merkheuli, near Sukhumi in the Kutais Governorate, was where Beria was born into a Georgian Orthodox family. His mother, Marta Jaqeli, born in 1868, was deeply religious and descended from a noble Georgian family from the Guria region. His father, Pavle Beria, born in 1872, was a Mingrelian landowner.

  Beria attended a technical school in Sukhumi and later claimed to have joined the Bolsheviks in March 1917 while a student at the Baku Polytechnicum. His actual loyalties in those early years were more complicated. Before the Red Army took Baku on the 28th of April 1920, he had worked for the anti-Bolshevik Mussavatists. He narrowly escaped execution after the city fell, reportedly saved in part because there was simply not enough time to arrange his shooting.

  In 1919, at twenty years old, he began his career in state security working for the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic while still a student. The following year, Mir Jafar Baghirov enlisted him into the Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police. By December 1926, he had been appointed Chairman of the Georgian OGPU. In 1924, he led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising, after which up to 10,000 people were executed.

  While in prison he met Nina Gegechkori, his cellmate's niece. They eloped on a train. That relationship, with Nina born in 1905, would last the rest of his life even as the full horror of his private conduct became public after his death.

• 3. The Art of the Courtier

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  Beria and Stalin first met in the summer of 1931, when Stalin took a six-week rest in Tsqaltubo and Beria took personal charge of his security. Writing to Lazar Kaganovich in August 1932, Stalin called Beria 'a good organizer, an efficient, capable functionary'. Stalin's daughter Svetlana later described him as 'a magnificent specimen of the artful courtier, the embodiment of Oriental perfidy, flattery and hypocrisy who had succeeded in confounding even my father, a man whom it was ordinarily difficult to deceive'.

  Not everyone was charmed. When Stalin proposed appointing Beria to the Georgian Communist Party in October 1931, the First Secretary Lavrenty Kartvelishvili exclaimed: 'I refuse to work with that charlatan!' Ordzhonikidze also objected. Kartvelishvili was replaced. By the 9th of October 1932, Beria was party leader for the entire Transcaucasian region.

  In 1935, Beria delivered a lengthy oration titled 'On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia', later published as a book, which emphasised Stalin's role by quoting what purported to be early police documents identifying Stalin as the leader of the Social Democrats in Georgia and Azerbaijan. The historian Bertram Wolfe observed drily that the language of those documents 'sounds uncommonly like Beria's own'. The flattery worked. Beria became a member of the Communist Party Central Committee in February 1934.

• 4. Murder in the Purge Years

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  On the 26th of December 1936, Beria summoned Nestor Lakoba, the head of the communist party of Abkhazia, to Party headquarters in Tbilisi. The following evening, Lakoba was a dinner guest at Beria's table, served fried trout, a favourite of his, and a glass of poisoned wine. They attended the opera together afterwards, watching Mzetchabuki, meaning 'Sun-boy' in Georgian. During the performance, Lakoba showed the first signs of poisoning. He returned to his hotel and died early the next morning.

  Officially, Lakoba died of a heart attack. His body was returned to Sukhumi, but all the internal organs had been removed. In 1961, KGB head Alexander Shelepin confirmed he had been murdered by Beria.

  What followed for Lakoba's family was systematic. His two brothers were arrested on the 9th of April 1937. His mother Sariya was arrested on the 23rd of August. A trial of thirteen family members ran from the 30th of October to the 3rd of November 1937 in Sukhumi. Nine defendants, including both brothers, were shot on the night of the 4th of November. Lakoba's fifteen-year-old son Rauf tried to speak to Beria during the trial and was promptly arrested. Sariya was taken to Tbilisi and tortured to extract a statement implicating her son; she refused even when Rauf was tortured in front of her. She died in prison on the 16th of May 1939. Rauf was eventually shot in a Sukhumi prison on the 28th of July 1941.

  In June 1937, Beria told a public audience: 'Anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed.' On the 20th of July he wrote to Stalin reporting that he had already had 200 people shot and was preparing a list of 350 more.

• 5. The NKVD and War

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  Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the NKVD in August 1938. The Great Purge under Yezhov had by then possibly imprisoned or executed over a million citizens as alleged enemies of the people. By 1938 the scale of repression was damaging the Soviet economy and armed forces, and Stalin began to wind it down. In November 1938, Beria succeeded Yezhov as NKVD head. Yezhov was executed in 1940.

  Over 100,000 people were released from labour camps. The government officially blamed excesses on Yezhov alone. The relief was selective. On the 16th of January 1940, Beria sent Stalin a list of 457 'enemies of the people', of whom 346 were marked for shooting, including the renowned writer Isaac Babel and journalist Mikhail Koltsov.

  On the 5th of March 1940, following the Gestapo-NKVD Third Conference in Zakopane, Beria sent note No. 794/B to Stalin recommending the execution of Polish prisoners of war as enemies of the Soviet Union. Most were military officers, but the 22,000 included intelligentsia, doctors, and priests. With Stalin's approval, the NKVD carried out what became known as the Katyn massacre.

  After Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Beria joined the State Defense Committee. He mobilised millions of Gulag prisoners into wartime production and took control of armaments manufacture, working with Malenkov on aircraft production. In 1944, he oversaw the mass deportation of the Balkars, Karachays, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Pontic Greeks, and Volga Germans to Soviet Central Asia, actions described by many scholars as ethnic cleansing or genocide.

  From December 1944, Beria supervised 'Task No. 1', the Soviet atomic bomb project. At least 330,000 people, including 10,000 technicians, were involved. The Gulag system provided tens of thousands for uranium mines and processing plants. Test facilities were constructed at Semipalatinsk and in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. The first nuclear device was completed by the 29th of August 1949. In July 1945, Beria was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union.

• 6. Predator

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  At Beria's trial in 1953, testimony revealed a pattern of sexual predation stretching across his years as NKVD chief. Two of his bodyguards, Colonel Semyonovich Sarkisov and Colonel Sardion Nikolaevich Nadaraia, described how on warm nights during the war Beria was driven around Moscow in his limousine. He would point out young women to be taken to his dacha, where wine and a feast awaited. After dining, he would take them into his soundproofed office and rape them.

  Bodyguards handed each victim a flower bouquet as she left. Accepting it implied consent; refusal meant arrest. Sarkisov once mistakenly handed flowers to a woman who had fled Beria's office. The enraged Beria declared: 'Now, it is not a bouquet, it is a wreath! May it rot on your grave!' The NKVD arrested the woman the next day.

  Tatiana Okunevskaya, a well-known Soviet actress, was taken to Beria's dacha on the pretence of performing for the Politburo. He offered to free her father and grandmother from prison if she submitted, then raped her, telling her, 'Scream or not, it doesn't matter'. In fact, Beria knew her relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, which she survived.

  Sarkisov kept a secret copy of a list of names and phone numbers of Beria's victims, despite orders to destroy it. When Beria's fall began, Sarkisov passed the list to Viktor Abakumov of the MGB. Stalin was said to have demanded: 'Send me everything this asshole writes down.' In 2003, the Russian government acknowledged Sarkisov's handwritten list, which reportedly contains hundreds of names. The names were released to the public that same year.

  In 1993, construction workers installing streetlights unearthed human remains near Beria's former Moscow villa, now the Tunisian embassy. In 1998, skeletal remains of five young women were found during work on the villa's garden water pipes. In 2011, a common grave was uncovered in Moscow city centre near the same residence, containing human bones including two children's skulls covered with lime.

• 7. A Hundred Days of Reform

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  After Stalin's death on the 5th of March 1953, the man who had run the machinery of Soviet terror for fifteen years moved with unexpected speed to dismantle parts of it. As head of the merged MVD and MGB, Beria by April 4th had already freed the surviving victims of the Doctors' Plot and announced the entire matter had been fabricated.

  He promulgated an amnesty releasing nearly half the Gulag's inmates: 1,200,000 people out of 2,750,000, mostly petty offenders serving terms of less than five years. The Gulag system was returned to the Ministry of Justice. Costly construction projects, including the Salekhard-Igarka Railway, were scrapped. He pushed the Politburo to vote to remove portraits of leaders from parades and demonstrations.

  As a Georgian, Beria challenged the policy of Russification and encouraged non-Russian nationalities to assert their own identities. He moved to fill Georgia's key posts with Georgians and advocated more autonomy for the Ukrainian SSR, alarming Khrushchev, for whom Ukraine was a power base. Khrushchev warned Malenkov: 'Beria is sharpening his knives'.

  On the wider international stage, Beria's response to the East German uprising of 1953 alarmed his colleagues further. He reportedly considered trading the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War for American support, and may have considered granting the Baltic SSRs serious prospects of national autonomy. Of East Germany he said bluntly: 'It is not even a real state but one kept in being only by Soviet troops'. Molotov, Malenkov and Bulganin concluded that his policies were dangerous.

  On the 21st of June 1953, MVD Chief Timofei Strokach warned Khrushchev that Beria was preparing a coup, claiming Beria intended to deploy special MVD divisions in Moscow to seize power. Within days, Khrushchev had assembled enough support to move against him.

• 8. Arrest and Execution

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  On the 26th of June 1953, Khrushchev convened a meeting of the Presidium and launched a sudden attack on Beria, accusing him of being a traitor and spy working for British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, 'What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas in my trousers?' When he appealed to Malenkov to speak for him, Malenkov silently pressed a button on his desk. Marshal Georgy Zhukov and armed officers in a nearby room burst in and arrested him.

  Beria was smuggled out of the Kremlin in the trunk of a car at nightfall and taken to the bunker of the Moscow Military District headquarters. Defence Minister Bulganin ordered the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division and Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division into Moscow to prevent a rescue by forces loyal to Beria.

  After a review of nuclear project documentation that summer, it emerged that Beria had begun thermonuclear weapons development without Central Committee approval, having scratched out Malenkov's signature block and signed the documents himself. The Central Committee was shocked.

  Beria and his co-defendants were tried on the 23rd of December 1953 by a special session of the Supreme Court, with no defence counsel and no right of appeal. Marshal Ivan Konev chaired the court. Beria was found guilty of treason, terrorism, and counter-revolutionary activity. All defendants were sentenced to death the same day. The six co-defendants, including Merkulov, Kobulov, and Dekanozov, were shot immediately after the trial. Beria was shot separately through the forehead by General Pavel Batitsky. His body was cremated and buried in Communal Grave No. 3 at Donskoye Cemetery in Moscow. Khrushchev ordered the destruction of Beria's personal archive, said to have contained compromising material on his former colleagues.