Titans of History

BERIA

1899–1953

Let me have one night with him and I’ll have him confessing he is the King of England.

Lavrenti Beria

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was a sinister Soviet secret policeman, psychopathic rapist and enthusiastic sadist who ordered the deaths of many and took a personal delight in the torture of his victims. The personification of the criminal monstrosity of the Soviet state, he was a coarse, cynical intriguer, a vindictive cut-throat, a deft courtier and a perverted thug. Yet he was also a highly intelligent, enormously competent and indefatigable administrator with the vision ultimately to reject Marxism and propose the sort of liberal program that Mikhail Gorbachev brought to fruition years later.

Beria was born in Georgia in 1899 to a very religious mother but of uncertain paternity—he was probably the illegitimate son of an Abkhazian nobleman. In Baku during the Russian Civil War he worked as a double agent, serving both the anti-Bolshevik regime and the Bolsheviks. Once Baku was retaken by the Bolsheviks, he proved a shrewd politician, and in 1921 he joined the new secret police, the Cheka, rising quickly to become head of the Georgian branch. He first met Stalin, a fellow Georgian, in 1926, and always behaved toward him not like a Bolshevik comrade (as was then the fashion) but like a medieval liege to his king. Stalin decided to use him against the old Georgians who ran the Caucasus, promoting him against their protests to first secretary of Georgia, and then of the entire Caucasus. When Stalin made his courtiers garden with him, Beria used an ax and told Stalin he would use it to tear out any weeds that he was ordered to extract. Beria understood Stalin’s vanity and produced a book on the history of the communists in the Caucasus that inflated Stalin’s importance before the Revolution.

Stalin’s local ally in the Caucasus was Abkhazian boss Nestor Lakoba, who had helped to promote Beria. But now Lakoba and Beria clashed, and in 1936 Stalin allowed Beria to destroy his old friend which he did by poisoning Lakoba after an evening at the opera in Tiflis. Then, in what was to become a typical pattern, Beria set about destroying the entire Lakoba family, killing his brothers, young children and friends. When the Great Terror really started, Beria killed and tortured his way through the Caucasus, murdering far more victims than his quota.

In late 1938 Stalin brought Beria to Moscow and promoted him to “assist Yezhov,” the head of the NKVD, the secret police. Beria had been friendly with Yezhov, but now his role was to destroy him. On November 25 he was made boss of the NKVD in Yezhov’s place, and set about restoring order to the frenzied chaos of Yezhov’s killing machine. The Terror was officially over—but it never ended, it simply became secret, as Beria set about purging more Soviet leaders and generals. He liked to torture them himself, and beat one victim so hard that he knocked out one of his eyes. Stalin and Beria enjoyed coming up with imaginatively lurid ways of destroying their enemies. When Beria found out that Lakoba’s wife feared snakes above anything else, he drove her to insanity by placing snakes in her cell. He kidnapped and murdered his comrades’ wives and killed other comrades in faked car crashes.

After Stalin signed the Nonaggression Pact with Hitler in 1939, allowing him to annex eastern Poland, the Baltic States and Moldavia, Beria supervised the brutal killing and deportation of hundreds of thousands of innocent people suspected of anti-Soviet tendencies. In 1940 Beria, on Stalin’s orders, presided over the execution of 28,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. Following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Beria became ever more powerful. Promoted to commissar-general of security and made a marshal of the Soviet Union, he was one of the key administrators on the new state defense committee through which Stalin ran the war. Running the vast Gulag camp system as well as much of the country’s industrial production, Beria continued to run the secret police and terrorize the generals on Stalin’s behalf. In 1941 Beria proposed the deportation of the Volga Germans, and later, in 1944, the deportation of the Chechens, Karachai, Kalmyks, Balkars and Crimean Tartars. Hundreds of thousands were killed or perished en route. In 1945 Beria accompanied Stalin to Yalta, where President Roosevelt, spotting Beria at a dinner, asked his identity: “That’s Beria,” replied Stalin. “My Himmler.”

Beria’s wife Nina was pretty and elegant, and his son Sergo was his pride and joy. He loved his family, but spent nearly all his time in the office, day and night, and the rest of his energy was devoted to a priapic addiction to sex. He always had mistresses—his last one was a fourteen-year-old beauty—and he was also addicted to rape.

The stories of his degeneracy circulated by his enemies after his fall are true. He would send out his bodyguards to kidnap and deliver young girls whom he had spotted from his cruising limousine, invite them to dinner, propose a toast to Stalin, and slip sleeping pills into their wine. He would then force himself on them. Afterward, his chauffeur would take them home, and present them with a bouquet of flowers. Even during the Second World War, when he was virtually running the country, and afterward when he was in charge of the nuclear project, Beria still found time for these squalid escapades, and caught venereal diseases several times. When Berias’s crimes were reported to Stalin, the dictator tolerated him—commenting that Beria was a busy man under great stress.

During the Potsdam Conference, President Truman informed Stalin about America’s new nuclear weapons. Stalin immediately placed Beria in charge of over 400,000 workers, including many brilliant scientists, tasked with developing a Soviet atom bomb. In 1946 Beria became a full member of the Politburo. But Stalin had started to distrust him, sensing his cynicism about Marxism itself and his increasing dislike of his master. Stalin removed him from the ministry of internal affairs in 1946, purged his protégés and promoted Abakumov, another ruthless thug, to be minister of state security, independent of Beria. Yet Beria still managed to wield considerable influence. In 1949, to Stalin’s delight, Beria delivered the Soviet atom bomb. In the same year, Beria managed to turn Stalin against two of his chosen heirs, and both were shot in the Leningrad Case.

By the early 1950s Stalin was in decline, forgetful, more and more paranoid, and never more dangerous. He now loathed “Snake-eyes” Beria, who, in turn, hated Stalin and his system, even though he himself was one of its monsters. When Stalin died in March 1953, Beria emerged from the deathbed as the strongman of the new regime. Although his title was first deputy premier, he dominated the nominal premier, the weak Malenkov, and took charge of the ministry of internal affairs. He disdained the coarse, clumsy but shrewd Khrushchev, whom he fatally underestimated. Freed of the hated Stalin, Beria overconfidently proposed the freeing of millions of prisoners, liberalization of the economy and the loosening of Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe and the ethnic republics. Yet at the same time he was still arresting his personal enemies and intimidating his rivals. No one trusted him everyone feared him. Three months after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev orchestrated a palace coup backed by Marshal Zhukov and the Soviet military. Beria was arrested, and secretly confined in a military bunker. Here he begged for his life, writing pathetic letters to his ex-comrades, but to no avail: at his trial he was sentenced to death. On the day he was due to die, he cried and collapsed until his executioner, a Soviet general, stuffed a towel in his mouth and shot him through the forehead.

Short, squat, bald and increasingly fat, Beria had a flat face with large fleshy lips, greeny-gray skin, and, behind his glinting pince-nez, gray, colorless eyes. At the same time, he was energetic, witty, quick, curious and an avid reader of history. “He was enormously clever with inhuman energy,” said Stalin’s deputy Molotov. “He could work for a week with one night’s sleep.” According to one of his henchmen, “Beria would think nothing of killing his best friend.” Several of his colleagues observed that if he had been born in America, he would have been head of General Motors. Yet—with his love of intrigue, poison, torture and killing—he would also have flourished at the court of the Borgias.