Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria

After the fall of the Baku Commune in September 1918, Beria worked in the Baku Bolshevik underground, and by his own account served in Azerbaijani (ADRP) counterintelligence in 1919-1920, passing information to the Red Army. The truth of that service is not settled, and in 1953 it became one of the accusations against him. Entering the Cheka in 1920, he became deputy chairman of the Azerbaijan Cheka in July 1921 (other sources say May 1921) and briefly headed it in 1922; in November 1922 he was transferred to Tiflis as deputy chairman of the Georgian Cheka/GPU. In 1924 he took part in suppressing the Menshevik uprising in Georgia, after which up to 10,000 people were executed; he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. On 2 December 1926 he became chairman of the Georgian GPU (to 3 December 1931), simultaneously a senior OGPU plenipotentiary in the Transcaucasian SFSR and, from April 1927 to December 1930, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Georgian SSR. On 14 November 1931 he became First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party (to 31 August 1938), and on 17 October 1932 First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Committee, the unchallenged party boss of the region. Before that he repeatedly sought a meeting with the vacationing Stalin and obtained it in late September 1931 through Nestor Lakoba. By 1932 Stalin considered him 'a good organizer, an efficient, capable functionary,' while First Secretary Kartvelishvili refused to work with him.

In 1935 he consolidated his place in Stalin's entourage with the oration and book 'On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia,' which magnified Stalin's early role; historians have questioned the authenticity of the police documents it quoted. On 9 July 1936 the First Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party, Aghasi Khanjian, was found dead of a bullet wound; officially deemed suicide, but in 1961 KGB chief Shelepin reported he had been murdered by Beria. That December Beria's rival Nestor Lakoba, head of Soviet Abkhazia, died of poisoning after dining with Beria, and Lakoba's family was destroyed: his two brothers were shot on the night of 4 November 1937, his mother Sariya died in prison, and his 15-year-old son Rauf was eventually shot.

He was considered ruthless enough to purge his own region without outside interference. His 1937 reports to Stalin catalogued alleged 'Trotskyist-spy-wrecking' centers (Mdivani, Okudzhava, Kavtaradze and others), and the evidence against them later proved to be false confessions extracted under torture. His secret report to Stalin of 30 October 1937 recorded 12,000 arrests in Soviet Georgia that year, with 7,374 convicted by end-October (5,236 by the Troika); he requested and received expanded local execution and imprisonment powers. At the 10th Congress of the Georgian Communist Party on 17 May 1937 and in a 28 October 1937 plenum report he singled out Georgian writers and artists, delivering a 'final warning': the poet Paolo Iashvili was driven to suicide, and writers Mikheil Javakhishvili, Nikolo Mitsishvili and Dimitri Shevardnadze were shot.

His 'modernization' record in the region is documented alongside the terror: under his leadership the Transcaucasian economy grew, he promoted the region's oil industry and large industrial projects such as the Zemo-Avchala hydroelectric station, Georgia became an all-Union resort zone, and its subtropical produce made the Georgian peasantry comparatively well-off. That record should be weighed with, not against, his repression record. The 1938 move to Moscow followed directly from this Transcaucasian record: his ruthless handling of the purge there convinced Stalin of his readiness, and in August 1938 Beria was brought to Moscow as deputy head of the NKVD.

When the State Defense Committee (GKO) was created on 30 June 1941, Beria was one of its five founding members alongside Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov and Malenkov. From February 1942 he oversaw the production of aircraft, aero-engines, small arms and mortars as well as air force operations; in August–September 1942 he was sent to the Caucasus as GKO plenipotentiary to organize its defense. In December 1942 he joined the GKO Operations Bureau, adding coal and the railways to his portfolio, and in May 1944 he rose to deputy chairman of the GKO and chairman of the Operations Bureau, supervising virtually the entire war economy: defense industry, transport, metallurgy, fuel and power. In September 1943 he was made Hero of Socialist Labour 'for special services in expanding the production of armaments and ammunition under the difficult conditions of wartime.' Yet the same hand signed the order of 18 October 1941 to shoot 25 prisoners without trial, including generals Shtern, Smushkevich and Rychagov, and the 1944 mass deportations of whole peoples were run under his command. In July 1945 he received the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union without ever having commanded troops in battle: a marshal without a front: that was the place the war gave Beria.

On 23 February 1944, Beria personally directed NKVD troops to round up roughly half a million Chechens and Ingush in a single day, loading them onto cattle trains. Tens of thousands died en route to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Beria personally planned, executed, and reported on the operation, informing Stalin of its 'completion' himself. Other forced deportations, Crimean Tatars, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, were also carried out under his command that year. For Chechens and Ingush today, the name Beria remains a symbol of collective trauma.

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. Stalin responded immediately. On August 20, the State Defense Committee created a 'Special Committee' chaired by Lavrentiy Beria. Every piece of the Soviet atomic enterprise, research, industrial facilities, intelligence, was now concentrated in the hands of one man: the secret-police chief, the master of the Gulag, and now the absolute manager of the bomb project.

Beria ran the project the only way he knew. Through the NKVD's foreign intelligence network, he secured classified material from the Manhattan Project: Klaus Fuchs and others fed Soviet spies key data. Tens of thousands of Gulag prisoners were thrown into uranium mines, reactor construction, and the foundations of secret cities like Chelyabinsk-40. Scientists worked under total surveillance; failure was not an option.

The result was a shock. U.S. intelligence had predicted a Soviet bomb no earlier than 1953. On August 29, 1949, 'First Lightning' detonated at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, barely four years after Hiroshima. Beria received the Stalin Prize, First Class, and the Soviet Union became a nuclear peer of the United States.

Scientists feared Beria and yet conceded his effectiveness. The physicist Yuli Khariton later recalled: 'This man personified evil in the country's modern history and possessed at the same time tremendous vigor and efficiency. It was impossible not to admit his intellect, willpower, and purposefulness.' One man, it turned out, could be both terror and progress.

On 5 March 1953, Stalin died. The most dangerous successor was Lavrenti Beria, fifteen-year chief of the secret police, architect of the Gulag, overseer of the Soviet atomic bomb. Yet in the hundred days after Stalin's death, Beria did things that shocked everyone.

He drove the amnesty that freed over a million non-political prisoners, banned torture in interrogations, and returned the Gulag to the Ministry of Justice. On East Germany, he proposed neutral unification, not socialist unification. He advocated ethnic cadre preference in the minority republics.

Was Beria genuinely becoming a reformer, or was this a power play by a man who sensed danger? The answer never came. Malenkov and Khrushchev allied against him, ambushed him, and he was executed for treason in December 1953. His last words are unrecorded. But in the brief spring after Stalin, the man who best revealed the Soviet system's rigidity was, ironically, its worst enforcer.

At the Soviet–Hungarian leadership talks held in Stalin's former office on 13 June 1953, Beria was the speaker with the most figures. He opened with data on abandoned farmland and argued that developing agriculture was not enough: heavy industry had to be curbed and more consumer goods made. But his real speciality was home affairs. "Is it acceptable in Hungary, with its population of 9,500,000, to have instituted proceedings against 1,500,000 people?" he asked, and concluding that the interior and justice authorities and the ÁVH had worked very badly, he demanded that the Interior Ministry and the ÁVH be merged.

Beria denounced Rákosi for personally directing state security, intervening in specific investigations and even ordering physical violence, a professional error that could lead to innocent people being condemned. Twice he condemned similar behaviour by Stalin. He demanded that Rákosi give up the premiership because "it would be more fitting for the president of the Council of Ministers to be Hungarian," and was the first to name Imre Nagy: he called Nagy's removal in 1949 incorrect and proposed that, with Nagy as prime minister, the experienced Rákosi remain at the head of the party.

On 16 June he objected that the Hungarian draft resolution was too short and had no figures, and had chapters added on the agricultural situation, the figures of mass repression and Rákosi's personal responsibility for directing the ÁVH. He accepted Nagy's insistence on abolishing the kulak list, and said that if Rákosi did not help he would ruin himself, a remark participants remembered as "we will break his spine." Finally he pressed for the case of Gábor Péter, arrested earlier that year, to be reviewed.

Ten days later Beria was arrested. In early July Khrushchev told Rákosi, Nagy and Gerő in Moscow that Beria's conduct in the Hungarian discussion had contributed much to his exposure. Rákosi afterwards spread the idea that Nagy was "Beria's man," and János Kádár repeated it as late as 1985, to Gorbachev. Rainer finds no documentary evidence for this at all: Beria was notably enthusiastic in criticizing Rákosi, but his outlook did not differ from his colleagues'. He and Malenkov were, however, the most intent on cutting the number of leaders of Jewish origin in Hungary. In September 1956 Nagy told the editors of a new journal that he understood Beria had put forward the "most radical" alternatives after Stalin's death, including making the satellite countries neutral.