After learning more about the Soviet Union and its secret police I wanted to find out more about its chief, Lavrentiy Beria.
Lavrentiy Beria was born on March 29, 1899, and joined the Communist Party at around the age of 17. He initially participated in revolutionary activity before being drawn into intelligence and counterintelligence activities and appointed as head of the secret police in Georgia. While there, he led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising, resulting in up to 10,000 executions.
In 1938, he was brought to Moscow as the deputy to Nikolay Yezhov, head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the Soviet secret police). Yezhov was shot (apparently on Stalin's orders) and Beria became head of the secret police. As head, he supervised a purge of the police bureaucracy and pushed the expansion of forced labor camps, setting up more than 500 "Gulags." It's rumored that they once contained as many as five million prisoners. According to historian and former prisoner Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, "Human life had no value for [Beria]."
In 1941, he became a deputy prime minister of the USSR and during WWII, controlled the Soviet Union's internal security system and was also a major player in raw-materials production (because they used the slave labor available in the camps). In addition, after Russia invaded Poland, Beria orchestrated the Katyn Massacre, a mass execution of Polish prisoners of war. He had sent a memo to Stalin suggesting that the prisoners were a threat to the Soviet regime in Poland and should, therefore, be executed.
Later, he became part of the executive policy-making committee and after Stalin's death, became one of four deputy prime ministers and head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (which combined secret political and regular police functions). Beria attempted to use his position as chief of the secret police to succeed Stalin as sole dictator. But, he was defeated by an anti-Beria coalition in 1953. He was arrested, deprived of his government and party posts, and publicly accused of being an "imperialist agent" and of conducting "criminal antiparty and antistate activities." He was convicted of these charges and was executed.
In addition to being a violent and ruthless man, he was also a sex criminal who would, according to many accounts, cruise the streets of Moscow and pick out pretty women to rape. The true extent of Beria's crimes and violence remain unknown, locked away in classified files.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lavrenty-Beria
https://www.history.co.uk/article/historys-forgotten-people-lavrentiy-beria
This is a very well thought out post. It was interesting to see just how cruel Stalin's secret police was. I find it particularly interesting on how he Beria became the chief of the secret police considering that his predecessor was shot and that's how he assumed the role. Was there more to the story and was there more corruption involved in this action? I was quite horrified when I read that he would actively seek out women to rape. My question about that was what are the views on rape/sexual assault? Is it normal in Russia? What's the punishment?
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