In February 1945, the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union met near Yalta in the Soviet Crimea to discuss the post-war order in Europe. The Western Allies had already liberated France and Belgium and were fighting on Germany's western border. Soviet forces were about 40 miles from Berlin, having pushed the Germans back from Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. German defeat was no longer in question; the issue was the new shape of post-war Europe.
Among those present at the conference was the head of the notorious Soviet secret service, the NKVD. Stalin playfully described him as "our Heinrich Himmler." His name was Lavrentiy Beria.
Beria was born on March 29, 1899, in the Georgian village of Merkheuli, then part of the Russian Empire. He was the son of deeply religious Orthodox parents. As a young man, he attended a technical school and distinguished himself in mathematics and the sciences.
In March 1917, while a student at the Baku Technical University in Azerbaijan, Beria joined the Bolsheviks in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The revolution led to the collapse of the Russian Empire and allowed territories formerly under Saint Petersburg's rule to gain a certain independence. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was created in 1918.
One year later, while still a student, Beria started his career in state security when the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic hired him. In 1920 or 1921, he joined the Cheka, the original Bolshevik secret police.
At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Democratic Republic of Georgia, and the Red Army subsequently invaded the country. The Cheka became heavily involved in the conflict, which resulted in the formation of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Beria led the repression of the Georgian nationalist uprising in 1924, after which about 10,000 people were executed.
In 1926, he was introduced to his fellow Georgian Joseph Stalin and became an ally in Stalin's rise to power. In 1931, Beria was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia, the leading position in the Georgian Communist Party during the Soviet era. In 1934, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the executive leadership that directed all party and governmental activities. By 1935, Beria had become one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates.
In August 1938, Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the infamous NKVD, the ministry that oversaw state security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, the organization carried out the Great Purge — the imprisonment or execution of a huge number of citizens, possibly over a million, throughout the Soviet Union as alleged enemies of the people between August 1936 and March 1938.
After Stalin's rise to power, some members of the former Bolshevik party began to question his authority. An investigation revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin, including several of his rivals. By the mid-1930s, Stalin believed anyone with ties to the Bolsheviks or Lenin's government was a threat to his leadership and needed to go.
The Great Purge started with arrests of party members, Bolsheviks, and members of the Red Army, then grew to include Soviet peasants, members of the intelligentsia, and members of certain nationalities. During its mass operations, the NKVD widely utilized imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and arbitrary executions to solidify control over civilians through fear.
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. In November 1938, Beria succeeded Yezhov as head of the NKVD, easing off the repression that had begun under Yezhov.
The government officially admitted that there had been some injustice and excesses during the purges, which were blamed entirely on Yezhov, and over 100,000 people were released from labor camps. But the liberalization was only relative, as arrests, torture, and executions continued.
Many of the NKVD officers Beria promoted were brutal torturers. The theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was interrogated by Lev Schwartzmann, described being beaten on the spine and the soles of his feet until the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water were being poured on those sensitive areas. Robert Eikhe, a former high-ranking party official, was sadistically beaten and had an eye gouged out by Boris Rodos in Beria's office while Beria watched. Beria not only permitted and encouraged the beating of prisoners but in some cases carried it out in person.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Poland found itself fighting a two-front war when it was invaded by the Soviet Union from the east on September 17. Warsaw officially surrendered to the Germans on September 28, and one day later, in accordance with the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland.
In 1940, the pace of the purges accelerated again. On January 16, 1940, Beria and Stalin signed a list of 457 "enemies of the people," of whom 346 were marked to be shot. They included Beria's predecessor Yezhov and his brother and nephews, as well as one of the key figures in the purge and his wife and teenage son.
During this period, Beria supervised deportations of people identified as political enemies from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia after the Soviet occupation of those countries. On March 5, 1940, after a Gestapo-NKVD conference was held in Zakopane, Beria sent a note to Stalin stating that the Polish prisoners of war kept at camps and prisons in Western Belarus and Ukraine were enemies of the Soviet Union and recommending their execution. Most were military officers, but there were also intelligentsia, doctors, priests, and others — a total of 22,000 people.
With Stalin's approval, Beria's NKVD executed them in what became known as the Katyn Massacre. The mass executions were carried out between April and May 1940. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners, and officials.
The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn forest in April 1943. The Soviet Union claimed the Nazis had killed the victims and continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings by the NKVD as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.
Following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Beria became a member of the State Defense Committee, which consisted of five members. This small group held total control over all political and economic life in the country during the Second World War.
He took on major domestic responsibilities and mobilized the millions of people imprisoned in the NKVD gulag camps into wartime production. He took control over the manufacture of armaments, while Georgy Malenkov handled aircraft and aircraft engines. The gulags, the infamous forced labor camps, existed before Beria, but he was the one who built them on a mass scale and industrialized the gulag system. Human life had no value for him; he once boasted, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
In December 1944, the NKVD was put in charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project, which built and tested a bomb on August 29, 1949. The project was extremely labor-intensive: at least 330,000 people, including 10,000 technicians, were involved. The gulag system provided tens of thousands of people for work in the uranium mines and for the construction and operation of uranium processing plants. They also constructed test sites.
Joseph Stalin himself had an amused understanding of Beria's cold and amoral nature. During the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Stalin, facing American President Franklin D. Roosevelt, called Beria "our Heinrich Himmler." In July 1945, as Soviet police ranks were converted to a military uniform system, Beria's rank was officially converted to that of a Marshal of the Soviet Union, although he had never held a traditional military command.
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. The same year, he joined the Politburo. During the post-war years, Beria supervised the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and chose their Soviet-backed leaders.
Starting in 1948, however, Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov initiated several investigations against those leaders, which culminated with the arrest in November 1952 of Rudolf Slánský 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.
On the night of March 2, 1953, Beria was among the first to see Stalin's condition when he was found unconscious. Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had immediately after Stalin's stroke gone about spewing hatred against Stalin and mocking him. When Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria dropped to his knees and lovingly kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria's face shone with delight, and he immediately stood up and spat.
Stalin died on March 5, 1953. According to Molotov's memoirs, shortly after Stalin's death, Beria announced triumphantly to the Politburo that he had "done Stalin in" and saved them all, asserting that Stalin was poisoned by Beria's associates.
After Stalin's death, Beria was appointed First Deputy Premier, and his close ally Malenkov became the new premier. The two became the most powerful men in the post-Stalin leadership. Khrushchev opposed the alliance between Beria and Malenkov but was initially unable to challenge them.
Khrushchev's opportunity came in June 1953, when a spontaneous uprising against the East German communist regime broke out in East Berlin. Based on Beria's statements, other leaders suspected that in the wake of the uprising he would consider trading the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War for massive aid from the United States, as had been received in the Second World War. Within days, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a coup d'état against Beria.
Accounts of his downfall vary considerably. The historical consensus is that Khrushchev prepared an elaborate ambush, convening a meeting of the Presidium on June 26, where he suddenly launched a scathing attack on Beria, accusing him of being a traitor and spy in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise and asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas in my trousers?"
When Beria finally realized what was happening and plaintively appealed to his old friend Malenkov to speak for him, Malenkov silently hung his head and pressed a button on his desk. It was an arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room, who burst in and arrested Beria.
Beria was tried by a special session of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union on December 23, 1953, with no defense counsel and no right of appeal. Marshal Ivan Konyev was the chairman of the court. During the one-day trial, it became known that Beria was a sexual predator and had committed numerous rapes during the years he was NKVD chief.
His bodyguards testified that when Beria was driven around Moscow in his limousine, he would point out young women he wanted taken to his dacha, where wine was served and he would feast. After dining, Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them. If the women resisted, they were arrested and sent to the gulag.
Such was the case of a well-known Soviet actress whom Beria took to his dacha, where he offered to free her father and grandmother from prison if she submitted. He then raped her, telling her, "Scream or not, it doesn't matter." Beria was also a serial killer; some of the women who resisted his sexual advances were strangled to death. The remains of five young women buried naked were found in 1993 by construction workers installing street lights in the garden of what used to be Beria's Moscow villa. In the basement of his villa, he also had a torture chamber.
Even Stalin came to distrust Beria. In one instance, when Stalin learned that his then-teenage daughter Svetlana was alone at Beria's house, he telephoned her and told her to leave immediately. Before and during the war, Beria directed his bodyguard Sarkisov to keep a list of the names and phone numbers of the women he had had sex with. The list contained hundreds of names.
Beria was 54 years old when, on December 23, 1953, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union found him guilty of treason, terrorism, and counter-revolutionary activity and sentenced him to death. While the other six defendants were sentenced to death and shot immediately after the trial ended, Beria was executed separately and shot through the forehead by General Pavel Batitsky. As with his predecessor Nikolai Yezhov, Beria begged for his life before his execution.
Beria's personal archive, said to have included compromising material on his former colleagues, was destroyed on Khrushchev's orders. There were no tears shed for Lavrentiy Beria.