Beria

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Beria DegenerateIntroduction 4The Abkhazian Candidate

Chapter One 7Fathers, Daughters & Sons

Chapter Two 10The Company Man

Chapter Three 13The Heart of a Chekist

Chapter Four 17The Servant & the Cult

Chapter Five 21The Graveyard of Utopia

Chapter Six 26His Master’s Voice

Chapter Seven 31Going for Coffee with Beria

Chapter Eight 36The Kremlin Complexion

Chapter Nine 44Masters & Slaves

Chapter Ten 48The Kremlin’s Civil War

Chapter Eleven 55The Trial of the Henchman

Postscript 59Evil, Trash & History

Beria Degenerate The Abkhazian Candidate4

S AN OLD BOLSHEVIK, Nestor Lakoba couldn’t have expected any-thing else. Like other Communist Party leaders in the Soviet Unionbut especially in the Caucasus, Lakoba rolled the dice with his futureand his life every day. Until now, he had won every time. Lakobasided with Lenin against his Party enemies and reaped the rewards.He threw his weight behind Stalin in his battle with the leftists andthe rightists and climbed over the bodies of the Party’s enemies—real

and imagined—to ever higher posts and accolades. Nestor Lakoba knew the rules by whichthe game was played. As an intelligent man, he also must have known that to keep playingthe game would increase the odds that he would someday lose.

This was Stalin’s universe at the close of 1936—the prelude to the Great Purge. The rev-olution had devoured its enemies and turned its ravaged appetite to its children. Like somany of his comrades, Lakoba would have no objection to shoveling his friends into theyawning maw of the Stalinist death machine. Unfortunately for Lakoba, his friends got tohim first.

Nestor Lakoba was the Communist Party chief of Abkhazia, an autonomous enclavewithin Georgia that hugs the Black Sea. With more than 15 years at his post, he was firm-ly ensconced in the popular mind as one of the “Old Bolsheviks,” the pre-war Party mem-bers who had robbed, bombed, and bled for the victory of the Socialist Revolution. Heknew Stalin well—well enough to call him “Koba,” his nom de guerre as an undergroundrevolutionary, without any trace of pretension. In fact, most of the Party leaders were hisfriends. His resumé would ensure job security and a gold watch upon his pensioning age innormal countries, in normal times.

As it was, his loyalty, camaraderie and tenure made him an ideal candidate for theGreat Purge.

Lakoba did have one black mark on his record, though it didn’t harm his case in the

The AbkhazianCandidate

INTRODUCTION :


least. Nestor Lakoba was fated to die: nothing would have changed that. But Lakoba hadfound occasion to gossip with his old friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a senior Bolshevik leaderfrom Georgia and a powerful member of Stalin’s inner-circle, about an upstart young manknown to both of them. Lakoba told his friend that the Party chief for Georgia and theCaucasus, Lavrenti Beria, had been badmouthing Ordzhonikidze.

Ordzhonikidze was furious. Beria was enraged. The young veteran of the secret police,who relied upon Ordzhonikidze as his patron and protector in Moscow, had to fire off aseries of ingratiating letters to get back into his master’s good graces. Their relationshipwould never be the same.

Nestor Lakoba’s death wouldn’t be enoughto pay for his impertinence. In true Stalinist fash-ion, his family would owe the balance.

As far as one can tell through the distortionsof time and a state-controlled press, NestorLakoba was genuinely popular in Abkhazia.Though he carried out the centralization policiesdictated from Moscow, Lakoba was seen as“one of us” by a people who had long been ruledby outsiders.

Making a rare accounting for public senti-ment, the Party resorted to more subtle methodsthan the three-ingredient recipe of the GreatPurge—the denunciation, the show trial andthen summary execution. Instead, Lakoba wascalled in for a meeting with Beria at Party head-quarters in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. Less than aweek later, newspapers announced he had diedof a sudden heart attack. How and by whatinstrument Lakoba was felled, no one knows. Alarge, almost operatic funeral was staged, withthousands of Abkhaz queued up to pay theirrespects to their fallen chief.

To take account for Lakoba’s local popular-ity, the ordinary process of the Great Purge wasreversed. Now dead, the denunciation began (atrial, of course, would no longer be necessary).Months after he was lain to rest, the Partyaccused Lakoba of fomenting an insurrection and organizing a counter-revolutionary plotto kill Beria as well as Stalin himself. In October 1937, Nestor’s brother Mikhail was foundguilty at a show trial of participating in his late brother’s wacky conspiracy. As was the casewhen the public was allowed to view the proceedings, all defendants had already confessedtheir guilt in the dungeons of the political police.

Mikhail had also been a party official in Abkhazia. The murder of the Lakoba broth-

The most familiar “photograph” of Beria,dating from approximately 1948. TheSoviet artists who touched up this andother pictures of top Kremlin leaderstook to using stills from motion picturesas they were easier to work from thanphotographic film.


ers was thus a matter of state policy. Now it was time to settle scores.Nestor Lakoba’s wife was the first victim. Beria ordered her arrest and “special treat-

ment” to coerce her confession for imaginary crimes. Beria’s NKVD—the latest in a dizzyarray of acronyms for the secret police—would rouse the young woman every morning,beat her senseless, and drag her limp body back to her cell at sundown. When she refusedto sign a document stating that Lakoba had told her of a plan to “sell” Abkhazia to “impe-rialist Turkey,” Beria ordered that her 14 year old son, Rauf, be brought to the jail as well.After threatening to kill him, NKVD agents contented themselves with beating Rauf bloodyin front of his powerless mother. Irritated by her continuing resistance, the NKVD pushedher too far during one session and killed her.

Rauf Lakoba was shunted off to a labour camp set up specifically for children whoseparents had been convicted of political crimes. According to Russian historian RoyMedvedev, Rauf later wrote a letter to Beria personally, asking if he and two of his friendsat the camp might be allowed to return home to continue their education.

After reading the letter, Beria had the three boys sent for. Instead of being permitted toreturn to school, however, they were taken into the courtyard of an NKVD jail in Tbilisiand shot.

Nearly the entire Lakoba family had been annihilated, thrown through the familiartransit of prison to the wall and to their death. Yet not even in death were they safe fromsacrilege. According to Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, Beria ordered Lakoba’s body disin-terred and burned, the ashes scattered across a land turned over in preparation for stillmore mass graves. In destroying his enemies, Beria was literally pursuing them beyond thethreshold of death.

Two years after Lakoba’s death, Beria had proven himself. He not only survived thepurges, but prospered, largely because his enemies were never permitted the opportunity toavenge their injuries. The young provincial Party chief with an eye for detail had pleasedhis boss enough that he was finally called up to the big leagues.

Beria had graduated. He moved on to Moscow.

Beria Degenerate Fathers, Daughters & Sons7

HE WINNERS WRITE HISTORY, but failures still have dutiful sons.Even before the Soviet Union’s merciful collapse, Russians andWesterners packed the bleachers to watch a tawdry spectacle as scionsof three of the Soviet Union’s bloody titans battled one another to vin-dicate their family names.

Their skirmish of anecdotes and tell-all memoirs was merely a con-tinuation of a war frozen in place more than fifty years ago, taken up

by their children with the gentler means of a new era—gentler than the bullet, the trun-cheon or the concentration camp, at least.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s prodigal daughter, struck the first blow against her adver-saries, although she was once offered in marriage to one of them. In 1967—after the bat-tle of the Red Czars was long decided—Harper & Row in New York published her mem-oir, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Alliluyeva could be frank and disarming when it came toher father’s well-earned reputation; after all, she’d be hard put to erase twenty milliondeaths as some kind of inexplicable accident. But she stressed that her father was often ill,and that his lackeys and toadies—Nikita Khrushchev for one, but especially his fearedsecret police chief, Lavrenti Beria—had manipulated and brought out the worst in him.

Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s unlikely successor, had a chance to warp history with hisbare hands when his own memoir was smuggled out of Russia to the United States on theeve of his death. It was a terribly one-sided account—the literary equivalent of the paper-shredding party in the Soviet archives held after Khrushchev strengthened his grip onpower. His son, Sergei Khrushchev (now an American citizen) was himself quite frankabout his father’s shortcomings, though he essentially confirmed his father’s account of theKremlin’s bitter civil war.

Fathers, Daughtersand Sons

CHAPTER ONE :

He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of theParty’s purity. All subsequent crimes against theParty, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, devi-ations, sprang directly out of his teaching.


Alliluyeva and Khrushchev had many bad things to say about each other’s belovedancestors, but on one matter they agreed. Lavrenti Beria, they said, was one of the mostevil men who had ever lived, a towering monster loathed by their parents and all right-thinking men. But with the collapse of the Communist system in Europe, a new knight gal-loped over the hill to avenge the slanders of history: Sergo Beria, the son of the henchmanStalin once introduced as “my Himmler.”

Only a handful of Beria’s close collaborators survived his downfall by Khrushchev’shand after Stalin’s death, and his wife, Nina (or, in her native Georgian, Nino) Gegechkorigave only a single interview after she was “rediscovered” in 1990 before she passed away.Sergo Beria therefore took the limping industry of Kremlinology by storm, bowdlerizing

scholars with his amazing version of alter-native history.

At issue weren’t just Beria’s vocifer-ous claims that his father had beengrotesquely maligned by his colleagues,his collaborators and thus by history.Sergo presented a sequence of possibili-ties—many of them, he claimed, eyewit-ness accounts—which diverged radicallyfrom what historians believed aboutStalin and his circle. The secrets for theatomic bomb, Sergo stated, had beenleaked to his father by physicist RobertOppenheimer during a secret visit toBeria’s dacha in 1939. His father had cat-egorically refused to participate in themassacre of captured Polish officers in theSummer of 1940—an atrocity soappalling that like Hiroshima andAuschwitz it’s recalled by a single name:Katyn. Furthermore, the commonlyaccepted account of his father’s captivity

and trial six months after his arrest in June 1953 was false. Lavrenti Beria had been exe-cuted immediately, Sergo said. He’d even seen a stretcher carrying a body from his home.

Sergo’s dutiful efforts would have been touching, had his father not been justly consid-ered one of the most evil men in history. It reached a new apex of absurdity when he pur-sued an appeal to the Russian Supreme Court in 2000 seeking to rehabilitate his father—as a “victim of Communism.”

In Sergo’s view, his father was merely Stalin’s underling, carrying out his orders fromfear. Lavrenti Beria—Stalinism’s jack-of-all-trades, but who specialized in the refined,bureaucratic dispensation of pain—was in this sense as much a victim of Stalinism as any-one else. Or so he would have us believe.

Toward the end of his life (he died a few months after the Supreme Court rejected his

The next most familiar photograph of Beria: atStalin’s dacha near the Black Sea, with an imp-ish Svetlana Alliluyeva perched unhappily on hislap. Stalin is in the rear in a white tunic, assidu-ously doing evil; the man rocking out with theheadphones has never been identified.


appeal with a biting commentary), Sergo Beria told reporters that he looked forward to theday when the Russian state archives would be opened. He believed that they would vindi-cate his father and unmask Stalin, Khrushchev, and the other Party leaders as the real vil-lains. Yet the opposite has been true. Nearly every testimony from any individual who cameinto contact with Beria painted a grotesquely unflattering portrait of “Stalin’s Himmler,”and the trickle of documents from the state archives have confirmed what people had longbelieved. There is no evidence that Oppenheimer visited Beria’s dacha with the secrets ofatomic energy in 1939. Beria took a starring role in the mass murder of imprisoned Polishofficers at Katyn and other locations. And Beria was not only cooped up and tried after asix month imprisonment, but even wrote pitiful letters begging for his jailers to spare hislife and apologizing for his boorish behavior.

It might be wise to be cautious when all the information points to one conclusion. Beriathe Henchman, Beria the Murderer, Beria the Pedophile and Rapist have become acceptedto the point of caricature. A re-evaluation of Beria’s role in some of history’s worst crimeshas been underway for more than a decade, but to no avail. In the case of Beria, the com-mon knowledge turned out to be true.

Beria Degenerate The Company Man10

PPROPRIATELY FOR THE STALINIST par excellence, little isknown for certain of Lavrenti Beria’s early life. He was born in 1899(twenty years younger than Stalin) in Merkheuli, the Sukhumi Districtof Georgia. His parents were peasants. His mother had probably mar-ried twice, Beria being a product of the second marriage to a mannamed Pavel, who died when he was in middle school. In a Partyquestionnaire he filled out in 1923, Beria claimed to have a sister, who

was born a deafmute and about whom nothing else is known.Beria was born a Mingrelian and not, as dim-witted but persistent neo-Nazis would

later howl based on photographs and dog-eared copies of the local Klan Kronicle, a Jew.As of 1992, at least, before many Mingrelians were driven out of Abkhazia during the civilwar there, a number of Beria’s kinsmen survived and testified as their clan’s ethnic back-ground. There were, in any case, only a handful of Jews in what was an extremely impov-erished farming area.

Mingrelians have long been looked down upon as the most backward peoples ofGeorgia—a distinction they shared with the Abkhaz, though little else ever was. Yet allGeorgians and many Mingrelians will insist they are the best Georgians of all. About theonly time distinctions are made, in fact, is when pointing out that the second most famousGeorgian in history was a son of Mingrelia.

It’s a fairly common practice for latter-day participants in successful revolutionarymovements to be a bit loose when dating when their own commitment to the strugglebegan. In Fascist Italy, it was a running joke for Mussolini’s youthful disciples to claimprior membership in party cells when they were all of five years old. Beria had no roman-ticism for the revolutionary tradition in Czarist Georgia, and was actually the greatest fal-

The CompanyMan

CHAPTER TWO :

“There is a Party slogan dealing with the control ofthe past. Repeat it, if you please.”“Who controls the past controls the future: who con-trols the present controls the past.”


sifier of the socialist movement in Georgian history. His age precluded him from havingtaken part “secretly” in the movement during the first decade of the 20th century, thoughthe same limitation would not apply to Stalin.

Nevertheless, it’s plausible that Beria participated in several Marxist student cells at sec-ondary schools in Sukhumi in 1915, as his official biography once stated. He was not yeta member of any party; a lucky stroke, since if he had he almost certainly would havejoined the wrong one.

Georgia’s social democrats representedthe first legal and genuinely popular social-ist party in Imperial Russia. A number ofsocialist politicians won office as mayorsand members of city councils. But Georgiawas the stronghold of the Mensheviks, theother side in the Bolshevik split engineeredwhen Vladimir Lenin, in exile, fracturedthe Social Democratic Labour Party. In1904, Mensheviks led a tremendously suc-cessful general strike in Georgia. Alarmedby his adversaries’ growing strength, in thatyear Bolshevik missionaries arrived withorders from Lenin to increase agitation andsharpen the sometimes petty differencesbetween the two factions.

Never one to be accused of politicalbrinkmanship, Beria joined the Bolshevikwing of the Social Democrats only inMarch of 1917. He was then studyingarchitecture in Baku, Azerbaijan, aBolshevik island in a Menshevik sea. InJune 1917 he was conscripted and sent tothe front in Romania where, he laterclaimed, he spread Bolshevik propagandain the ranks.

Beria returned to Baku in 1918, and ayear later received a degree in architecture.The three great states of the Transcaucasushad in the meantime taken advantage ofthe disintegration of the Czarist régime todeclare independence. Georgia was led by Noe Zhordania, once a colleague of Lenin’sbefore his heresy of aligning with the hated Mensheviks.

The Bolsheviks in Baku were besieged by an advancing Turkish army before being over-thrown by a bizarre coalition of ethnic Armenians and a Marxist sect known as the SocialRevolutionaries. The British occupied Baku for a time, but withdrew just in time to watch

“Dear Sergo, I have raised the question of mydeparture with you more than once. This is nota caprice, or something of that sort, but a seri-ous necessity… [I]f it is not possible for me tostudy, then at least transfer me to other work.After all, I can’t argue with everyone for myentire lifetime—it will ruin my nerves. Allowme the possibility to work in another area, ifonly in the area of industry (where the basis ofall our construction lies!) and I will prove thatI can not only uncover hostile crimes andcriminals, but also carry out creative work. Ibeg you, please help me somehow, for I feel Icannot go on much longer.”

Lavrenti Beria to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, 1929


the advancing Turkish army massacre the city’s Armenian population.By 1918, the Musavat had taken control of Baku and Azerbaijan. Formed in 1911-12

by Marxist dissidents, the Musavat evolved into a nationalist party dominated by thehomegrown Azeri bourgeoisie. Beria had evidently kept in touch with his old Party col-leagues, because in the Autumn of 1919 he was given his first intelligence mission that weknow of. The Bolshevik underground in Baku ordered Beria to penetrate the ranks of theMusavat.

This was a fateful decision. Over the decades to follow, his Party enemies would dis-cover and rediscover this little nugget of info and spread rumours to the effect that Beria—the great persecutor of heretics—had actually joined one of the counter-revolutionaryorganizations which so obsessed him. As early as the 1920s, he was called before one ofLenin’s commissions of inquiry to answer for his membership in the Musavat, and thecharge lived on to grace the pages of his official indictment more than thirty years later.

It’s not known what if any information Beria gained from his espionage against theMusavat, but he was apparently successful enough to be dispatched on follow-up missionsto his native Georgia. He was twice arrested for espionage in Georgia (once when workingas a “secretary” for the Russian embassy) and deported back to Baku in May 1920.

It was only a matter of time before the Red Army, spurred on by Stalin and his factionof the Communist Party, overwhelmed the weak and feeble states of the Transcaucasus.From all indications, Beria didn’t immediately bank on his good deeds in espionage for asinecure in the new government. He actually tried to leave state service altogether.

Like George Costanza, it seems that young Lavrenti Beria’s heart was set aflutter by thepursuit of architecture. Often over the next ten years or so, when riding the murderouswaves of denunciation that would become such a charming feature of Stalinism, Beriawould react to trouble by begging his superiors to let him leave the Party to pursue thebuilding of socialism with concrete rather than the truncheon. His protests, however, werea pose. Beria, in spite of his area of specialization, consistently pursued the dirtiest jobs theParty could offer.

Accordingly, after his expulsion from Georgia and his enrollment in the BakuPolytechnic to further his studies, he continued to work for the Azeri Central Committee,and then for the fabulously named “Extraordinary Commission for the Expropriation fromthe Bourgeoisie and Improving the Welfare of the Workers.” And when this body was dis-solved in February 1921 (to the thrill of typesetters everywhere), after a brief stint back atthe university, he plunged himself into the filthiest line of work of all as a footsoldier forthe Azeri branch of the Soviet secret police: the Cheka.

Beria Degenerate The Heart of a Chekist13

HERE WERE NO EVILS done by the NKVD, the MVD or the KGBthat were not invented by their predecessor among Soviet “internalsecurity” organs, the Cheka. Formed by Felix Dzerzhinsky inDecember 1917, the Cheka was Communism’s boot in the face toaristocrats, democrats, priests and reticent peasants. In places wherethe new order was on life support, the Cheka was the seismic forcethat leveled the earth so the commissars could move in unmolested to

build human happiness. Chekists were charged with smashing largely imaginary conspiracies and making exam-

ples of notorious criminals who tried to cheat on the massive appropriations of grain thenew government was taking from their stores. They were permitted to conduct summaryjudgment on most people who were unlucky enough to fall into their hands, with onenotable exception: they were not to molest any member of the Communist Party.

The Caucasus, with the exception of a few pockets of Bolshevik sentiment here andthere, were uniformly hostile to the new order, and it was here that the Cheka was drivento its most bloody excesses. The Cheka was abolished across the Soviet Union in 1922 bya new security force—with the exception of the Caucasus, where it remained in existenceuntil July 1926.

Lavrenti Beria, from all accounts, excelled at this type of work. He propelled himselfthrough the ranks with unfathomable speed, leaping over his superiors on the ladder ofpromotion. In 1921, he became chief of the Secret Operative Department of the AzeriCheka and deputy leader of the whole bloody enterprise in the republic. He was only 22years old.

The Heart of a Chekist

CHAPTER THREE :

“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does notestablish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revo-lution; one makes the revolution in order to establishthe dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecu-tion. The object of torture is torture. The object ofpower is power.”


Considering his youth, his inexperience in the Party (having been a member for, atmost, four years) and his lack of knowledge of anything more complex than the funda-mentals of Marxism, Beria’s advancement through the Cheka is at first glance puzzling. Yetthis was precisely the profile of the average Chekist and the “child soldiers” preferred bythe Politburo in Moscow (the only body the Cheka answered to). They were zealous intheir outlook and uncorrupted in their personal lives, unattached to either the Czaristrégime or by lingering ties of friendship to the Mensheviks. They viewed the Party as thegreatest hope of mankind, and their own role as midwives of Utopia. What were decrees,books, agitation in the factories? Out in the fields, in the prison courtyards where thou-sands were marched, their wrists bound behind their backs—here’s where Socialism’s vic-tories were being won.

The Chekist was, in a sense, a kind of priest. He held the powers of life and death inhis hands. Humiliation and redemption were at his command. Party leaders talked. TheChekist, cradling his rifle in his hands, purified society.

N NOVEMBER 1922, BERIA was transferred to the GeorgianCheka, holding approximately the same post and rank as he held inAzerbaijan. Always a social climber, the previous year he had marriedNina Gegechkori, niece of one of the “Old Bolsheviks” from the pre-vious generation, and his transfer had probably been by his ownrequest.The Cheka was if anything still more powerful in Georgia than in

Azerbaijan. After Lenin’s death, a seemingly minor policy dispute in Moscow had turnedthe Communist Party into a battleground between two factions. The first was led byTrotsky, and was characterized, broadly, as “moderate” on the issue of centralization. Theybelieved power in all of its forms should be devolved to the local republics and their Partyleadership. The second was led by the increasingly powerful Iosif (in Georgian, Soso)Djugashvili, alias Stalin, the Man of Steel. Together with his allies, he held the line forabsolute centralization and the concentration of power in Moscow. Holding sway over theParty in Moscow, he began to implement his ideas of direct rule and massive industrializa-tion while Trotsky’s faction was driven to write obscure treatises and essays on how theirown ideas were the truly Leninist ones. The Cheka was Stalin’s weapon of choice to beatthe Caucasus into a shape of his desire.

Beria cultivated ties with Stalin’s faction—particularly with the man who wouldbecome his patron, the Georgian Sergo Ordzhonikidze. As he hurdled his more enfeebledcolleagues through the ranks of the secret police, Beria took to writing long, sometimespathetic letters to Sergo, filled with chatty gossip, shameless self-aggrandizement and analmost nauseating obsequiousness. In time, these letters would be given more weight thanhis official reports. It was probably through his letters to Ordzhonikidze that Beria madeindirect contact with Stalin, who still took a languid interest in affairs back in his home-


land. Soon Beria developed an avuncular interest in the welfare of Stalin’s mother, verymuch alive in Georgia though her prodigal son paid her less and less attention until he evenfailed to show at her funeral. Beria, naturally, stood in for him.

Beria also managed to ingratiate himself with both his patron in Moscow and his bossin Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, through a living arrangement common in the early days of theSoviet Union. He lived in a communal apartment with his superior in the Georgian Cheka,and never passed up an opportunity to use this backdoor for his own self-aggrandizement.Ordzhonikidze’s brother lived in the same building.

By the Summer of 1923, Beria knew he had backedthe right horse: Stalin’s faction in the CentralCommittee had triumphed. As a practical ramifica-tion, full-scale retribution against former Mensheviksbegan in Georgia. Mensheviks who had elected toremain in Georgia rather than going into exile hadsometimes been protected by bonds of friendship withOld Bolsheviks from the days of the united SocialDemocratic Party. Now, the Chekists in Georgia werepitiless, carrying out retribution beyond individualsand factions down to the arrest and execution ofMensheviks’ wives and families.

The repression led to an ill-starred uprising byMensheviks several months later—an uprising whichappeared to have been encouraged by the Cheka toprovide a pretext for an even wider terror campaign.The repression actually became so harsh that, in afarce which would become a trademark of Stalinism, acommission led by one of those who had in factencouraged the violence (in this case, Ordzhonikidze)was dispatched to correct “errors” in the work of thesecret police. Beria escaped censure, however, and itmay be out of gratitude or simply good politics that afew months later he named his and Nina’s only sonafter his patrón—Sergo Ordzhonikidze.

From 1923 onward, Beria took a leading role, atfirst locally, regionally and finally nationally, in everyone of Stalin’s demented strategies to transform theSoviet Union from a one-party into a one-man state. In1928, it was the campaign against the kulaks, or sup-posedly “wealthy” peasants, which was carried outafter the fashion among their wives and children aswell. In the late 1920s, it was forced collectivization.In 1930 and 1931, it was Stalin’s purge of officials for the “errors” of the forced collec-tivization campaign he had himself conceived. In 1932, it was the campaign against Stalin’s

The young Sergo Ordzhonikidze, aparticipant in the 1917 revolutionand one of Stalin’s confidants. Heplayed a conspicuous role in thelatter’s early purges of both the“left opposition” around Trotskyand the “right opposition” aroundNikolai Bukharin. Ordzhonikidzeattempted to use Beria to build hisown powerbase independent ofthe Kremlin in the Caucasus, butsoon found himself under attackby his boss—and his protégé.


former comrades—the “Old Bolsheviks”—murdered for the sake of Stalin’s personalitycult. In 1936, it was the purge of anyone by everyone. Every step of the way, even whenseparated by a great physical distance, Beria was there alongside Stalin, condemningStalin’s enemies (Marxists who were rotting in the Czar’s prisons when Beria wore short-pants) and taking advantage of the chaos of the purges to rid himself of his rivals.

With so many of his superiors on the outs, Beria continued his rapid advancement. In1926, when the Chekas of the Caucasus were finally dissolved, he became chief of theGeorgian branch of its successor, the GPU (State Political Administration). In 1927, he wasnamed to the Georgian Central Committee. In 1930, he became a member of the GeorgianPolitburo.

Stalin, the least sentimental of men, even promoted Beria alongside and finally over thehead of his own family. As a more literal manifestation of his centralization drive, in 1922the republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were grouped together in theTranscaucasus Republic—an unwieldy structure which simply imposed another layer ofParty, police and state on top of the republic branches. Stalin’s brother-in-law, StanislavRedens, was the head of the Transcaucasian GPU, and together with Beria was called to theKremlin for a special meeting with the Vozhd (“Leader”) on March 2, 1930. Stalin had justpublished his famous article, “Dizzy with Success,” which called for a halt in forced col-lectivization due to more of those “errors” in the execution of his own orders. Redens andBeria seconded one another in blaming local Party officials for the hitches in grouping peas-ants together on collective farms, arguing, understandably enough for two Chekists, forstill greater repression.

A year later, Redens became obscenely drunk after a late-night party at Beria’s house inTbilisi and caused some sort of scene, the details of which are unknown. Beria was obvi-ously on somewhat familiar terms with Stalin by this point, for he took the initiative todescribe the incident to his master in one of his gossipy letters. In response, Stalin trans-ferred Redens to Belarus. Beria took over his job as head of the Transcaucasus GPU, keep-ing his old post in Georgia simultaneously.

Six months later, in September of 1931, Stalin called the Caucasus Party leadership toMoscow for consultations and proposed Beria as the deputy secretary of the TranscaucasusCommunist Party. A number of the officials managed to screw up their courage to chal-lenge Stalin, calling Beria a “charlatan.” Stalin gave them a kick in the ass and sent themon their way. The officials took an appeal to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, to no avail.

As the Georgians had feared, within a year, Beria had squeezed out his rivals andbecame the First Secretary of the Transcaucasus Republic’s Communist Party as well as theFirst Secretary of Georgia’s. He was only 32 years old.

Beria Degenerate The Servant & the Cult17

AVRENTI BERIA HAD COME to power with orders from Stalinand his mentor, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, to reverse the “errors” in col-lectivization and the deadly spread of “bourgeois nationalism” in theCaucasus. Beria, of course, had little experience on the farm except inturning fields into mass graves. His true mission, to judge by whatwas done rather than what was said, was to direct an all-out assaultagainst the Communist Party apparatus in his neck of the woods. In

this, he would excel.On December 1, 1934, one of the most powerful members of the Communist Party,

Sergei Kirov, was assassinated. Kirov, the Party chief of Leningrad, was very popular with-in the ranks—so popular that Stalin had to rely upon assassination, rather than judicialmurder, to eliminate him.

Kirov’s death is generally regarded as the Soviet Union’s “Reichstag Fire”—a pretextfor Stalin to unleash his unprecedented assault on his colleagues, their families, and perfectstrangers suspected of unorthodoxy. In fact, Kirov’s death may have had a deeper signifi-cance for our story, in that it could have been the first bond of murder personally sharedbetween Stalin and the man who would become his most obedient servant. SergoOrdzhonikidze, Beria’s patron in Moscow, was Kirov’s best friend, and the days had notyet arrived when Stalin’s closest collaborators would say nothing while their boss arrestedtheir wives, brothers and friends. A month before Kirov’s murder, Ordzhonikidze was din-ing with Beria and Beria’s underling in Azerbaijan, Mir Jafar Bagirov, when he was strick-en by violent stomach pains. He was hospitalized with internal bleeding and bedridden for

The Servant andthe Cult

CHAPTER FOUR :

In the end the nagging voices broke him down morecompletely than the boots and fists of the guards. Hebecame simply a mouth that uttered, a hand thatsigned, whatever was demanded of him. His sole con-cern was to find out what they wanted him to con-fess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullyingstarted anew.


a month, unable to leave the Caucasus until Kirov was already dead. His malady was nevermedically explained.

The search for Kirov’s assassins wasabout as substantial as OJ Simpson’ssearch for the real killers of his wife, butthe special law on detention and the use oftorture (which he had coincidentallysigned just prior to Kirov’s murder) gaveStalin a pretext to round up his enemieswithin the Party. A further baby steptoward the mammoth purge that Stalinwas planning was undertaken a fewmonths later, when the CentralCommittee announced an audit of theParty rolls to weed out any spies or impe-rialist lackeys who had managed to slip inover the years. Thousands were expelled,usually unjustly, leaving them legallydefenseless from the terror that was tocome.

Extraordinary characters—those whohad been lauded by press and Party, andwho appeared in numerous photographsand articles alongside Stalin and evenLenin himself—were to be handled withspecial care. Georgia, where Stalin hadlaboured for years in obscurity, suffered tosome degree not a greater tragedy but amore bitter one than the rest of the SovietUnion. After the substantial nobility waswiped out, the clergy drawn and quarteredand the kulaks exiled or sent to concentration camps in Siberia, after the Mensheviks werebrutally crushed and scattered to the four winds, it was now the turn of those who hadbeen unfortunate enough to have been among Stalin’s acquaintances.

The purge of Stalin’s former confidants—the “Old Bolsheviks” of Georgia—began,inevitably, over a minor quibble of Bolshevik dogma. Stalin had written a letter to a localperiodical to criticize the generally sloppy stature of the history texts drawing upon thelegacy of the Bolshevik faction in pre-revolutionary Georgia. Of course, not a few leadershave railed against those writers and professors Benito Mussolini called “worthless chat-terers,” but few had the power, or the inclination, to take history as a personal insult.

The “worthless chatterers” then writing Georgia’s Bolshevik history were not exactlyscholars in the traditional sense, either. The most notable was Avel Enukidze, a prominent“Old Bolshevik” and, at one point, a member of the Soviet Central Committee in Moscow.

Stalin acts as a pallbearer at the funeral forSergei Kirov; a poster of the “guest of honour”is on the face of the building at right. Kirov wasconsidered Stalin’s chief protégé and his likelysuccessor before his death. It was rumouredlater that Stalin had asked Kirov to write the his-tory text upon which his cult of personality wasbased but, having declined to do so, this chorefell to Lavrenti Beria instead.


Enukidze was also a notorious sexual predator with a fondness for teenage ballerinas andBolshoi dancers that rivaled only the grotesque appetites of Beria himself. But it wasn’t hissexual aggression that brought him down, but Stalin’s almost insatiable thirst for acclama-tion.

Enukidze had written a book—hailed as a “masterpiece” by the press (which, of course,Beria controlled)—on the history of a famous Bolshevik printing press in the Caucasus

which had bombarded Russia with Lenin’scommandments during the Czarist period.Enukidze was accused by the media of hav-ing deliberately diminished Stalin’s contri-butions to the printing press and toBolshevism in general, though Stalin in facthad almost nothing to do with it. In July1935, Enukidze was called to accountbefore a Central Committee plenum inMoscow, where the head of the secretpolice, Nikolai Yezhov, took the floor anddemanded he be held accountable for hisunpardonable crimes against the Leader.Beria (who had continued his unstoppableadvance by becoming a member of theCentral Committee of the USSR the previ-ous year, though he was still based in theCaucasus) leapt to his feet repeatedly dur-ing the denunciation of Enukidze, shoutinginsults and demanding harsher punishmentthan the next. Enukidze was expelled fromthe Party immediately, and three yearslater, arrested, tried and shot.

The smell of blood was in the air, andBeria, as he had before, anticipated thenext tune with a musician’s intuition. Itwas his first and most notorious contribu-tion to the body of world literature and hismost overt contribution to Stalin’s cult ofpersonality—outside of all of the corpseshe created, that is. It was called On theHistory of Bolshevik Organizations inTranscaucasia.

As the title would suggest, Beria’s book ain’t exactly summer reading. Beria’s book,however, wasn’t even written by Beria. While no one would dare to call him anything buta leading theoretician of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism while he was still breathing, after hisdeath Beria’s closest collaborators and henchmen doubted he had the vaguest idea of

“To our shame, it must be admitted that evennow we do not have a single scholarly and aca-demically sound history of our party and therevolutionary movement in Georgia. The his-tory of our party, of the whole revolutionarystruggle in Georgia and the Transcaucasusfrom the very first days of its awakening areinseparably linked with the work and name ofComrade Stalin. It is not possible to refer to asingle significant fact from the history of thestruggle for Lenin’s position which was notpermeated by the ideas of Stalin.”

Lavrenti Beria, speech before the 9th Party Congress of the Georgian Communist Party, January 11, 1934


advanced Marxist thought. Such claims were of course self-serving for those who saidthem, but they were most likely true.

As a result of Beria’s incompetence in ideological matters, Bolshevik Organizations inTranscaucasia was written by a committee of “approved” historians in Georgia under thelead of a professor named Bedia, though no one other than Beria was credited. The “unap-proved” historians were the target of their wrath. The book’s only purpose, aside from lay-ing the groundwork for Stalin’s most delicate move after the assassination of Kirov, was theaggrandizement of the Leader in the face of all common sense.

Beria’s book makes Stalin a Bolshevik before such a thing existed. The young IosifDjugashvili becomes a leader when he was still a wet-behind-the-ears teenager, and omitsthe dozens of contemporaries who were actually responsible for underground political agi-tation. A number of the deleted Bolsheviks, as a matter of fact, had already been purged asTrotskyists or some other primal enemy of the people. As the years went by, Beria’s bookwould go through periodic revisions to delete more personalities later accused of treasonto Party, State or Leader.

Beria sent a copy of the manuscript to Stalin, who “corrected” still more “errors”before giving it his seal of approval. A copious scribbler Marxist prose himself (though, hewould later admit, “Ilych” edited his best works), Stalin apparently prided himself on beingeasy to edit. How else can one explain that the Vozhd failed to “correct” quotes from hisown mouth which had been doctored to eliminate the young Bolshevik’s praise of his eld-ers and self-denigration for his own significant but far from indispensable role in theCommunist Revolution?

In any case, Beria’s book served a practical purpose which Stalin no doubt had in mind(and there’s evidence that the whole thing was his idea all along). Every single historian butfor one—and many of them were also influential Party officials—who was criticized forhaving failed to recognize Stalin’s pre-eminent role in pre-revolutionary Georgia was shot.The all-out assault on the “Old Bolsheviks” in the Caucasus and elsewhere received a newstimulus, and Stalin’s cult grew in such magnitude that, for the first time, there were whis-pered jokes about “history being brought up to date.” And for Beria, it meant still moreacknowledgment from the Leader, which led naturally to his own promotion.

As for the anonymous Professor Bedia, the true editor and main author of the book?According to documents released after his downfall, Beria had the historian arrested andshot in 1937. Beria’s thugs apparently had Bedia confess to membership in an anti-Sovietorganization and repudiate his participation in the book project, but Bedia recanted whenhe was brought face to face with his former literary collaborator. As with Beria’s rival inAbkhazia, Nestor Lakoba, Bedia would have died anyway. His intransigence merely madeit more painful.

Beria Degenerate The Graveyard of Utopia21

O LAVRENTI BERIA AND his growing circle of henchmen (most ofwhom would follow in his wake to higher positions until his down-fall), the 1930s were fraught with danger. One false step—one signoverlooked, or hint misunderstood, or simple bad luck dooming yourcase—and you would join the ranks marching silently to death in thedungeons of the secret police. If everything was played correctly, onecould still die on Stalin’s whim, the avarice or jealousy of a neighbour,

the sadism of perfect strangers. There was no template for surviving a purge; one simplytried to remain above it, to ride the wave and hope that it left you on your feet when youlanded.

There was, sometimes, a greater logic to the various phases of the purges. Aside fromtaking out “Old Bolsheviks,” Stalin was clearing the Party ranks and suborning those whosurvived to the only element in the USSR with a proven record of efficiency, howevermacabre: the political police. The strategy had begun with Beria’s own appointment to thehighest regional Party leadership positions despite his ideological ignorance, but now wholewings of the security services streamed into senior Party positions.

There’s no consensus among historians over when the Great Purge began, and no eventwhich marked its conclusion. For most, the murder of Kirov in late 1934 marks the onset,though the machinery of mass murder didn’t kick into overdrive until Nikolai Yezhov wasnamed as head of the NKVD (a new acronym for the secret police, standing for the“People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs”) in 1936. In fact, repression meted out by thesecurity services had always been a tool for the authorities, with the few winds growing in

The Graveyardof Utopia

CHAPTER FIVE :

One question at any rate was answered. Never, forany reason on earth, could you wish for an increaseof pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: thatit should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad asphysical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes,no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed onthe floor.


velocity into a cyclone of violence. Yezhov was a perfect protagonist for the Purge: a manof dwarfish height, hysterical, cruel, and usually described by contemporaries as asociopath.

In December 1936, Yezhov denouncedNikolai Bukharin, one of Lenin’s inti-mates and at one time Lenin’s chief ofagitprop. Beria, who was present at themeeting, is described in the transcript asjumping up numerous times, screamingfor the “swine” and “scoundrel” to bearrested on the spot.

Bukharin went to his death after hav-ing exacted a promise from Stalin that afinal letter would be delivered to his wife.In fact, the letter remained in the secretpolice archives for 55 years before it washanded to her in 1992.

Sergo Ordzhonikidze too soon felt theclaustrophobia of death closing in on him.Several of his deputies in theCommissariat of Heavy Industry, whichhe headed, were arrested as the tempo ofthe purge increased. His 50th birthdayparty was interrupted by news that hisbrother, Papulia, had been arrested in Georgia.

Sergo intervened with Beria, who had by now developed a direct line with Stalin andother members of his inner-circle and was his old patron’s equal. Beria responded to Sergoin a cold manner, saying that he had looked into the case and had Papulia released. Sergowas furious by the betrayal of his former disciple, though it soon dawned on him that theimpetus for Papulia’s arrest had come from Stalin.

One month after the denunciation of Bukharin, Ordzhonikidze’s deputy in theCommissariat of Heavy Industry was arrested and executed. He had become despondent.On February 18, 1937, Sergo had a bitter argument with Stalin by telephone. After hang-ing up the receiver, Sergo drew his revolver from his desk and shot himself in the head.

Suicide by someone of Sergo Ordzhonikidze’s stature was of course forbidden. It hadhappened, but it did not happen as far as the authorities were concerned. Instead, the storyhanded to the press was that Sergo had died of a (especially grisly) heart attack.

Many of Sergo’s friends, however, persisted in the belief that suicide too was an alibi,and thought Beria had something to do with it. After his death was announced, Beria vis-ited his widow, Zinaida, to pay his respects. According to witnesses, she tried to attack himand had to be restrained. Beria later had Papulia Ordzhonikidze arrested again and hand-delivered his “confession” that he wanted to kill Stalin to the fortunate man who had beensaved from this devious conspiracy.

Nikolai Yezhov salutes, far left, at the “height”of his power in November 1937. To his right isAnastas Mikoyan, followed by Lazar Kagan-ovich and Vyacheslav Molotov. Yezhov wouldsoon concentrate his attack on Mikoyan andKaganovich, who were joined by the Caucasusoverlord Beria in plotting for his downfall.


N FEBRUARY 23, 1937, Stalin spoke at a Party plenum, screechingthat the Soviet Union was crawling with imperialist and fascist spies.The Great Purge kicked into high gear with a wave of denunciations.Headlines one day praised a Party official for breaking up a nest ofenemy agents, and next day condemned the same official for being anenemy agent himself.

The frenzy was dizzying, but would be hastened further still. OnJuly 2, 1937, Stalin released another resolution on enemy infiltration and Yezhov crackeddown. Across the Soviet Union, NKVD chiefs announced the discovery of plots and con-spiracies, including within their own ranks. Within a week of Stalin’s resolution, Beria hadannounced the execution of 17 members of the Georgian NKVD for conspiracy, and thearrest of several Old Bolsheviks (including his predecessors as Georgia’s Communist Partyboss) for trying to kill him in separate murder plots. Over the next four months, the NKVDacross the USSR would arrest more than a quarter of a million individuals. Of these, some75,000 were shot immediately. To judge by one statistic, the purge conducted by Beria inGeorgia was even more ghastly. Of the 644 delegates to a May 1937 Party meeting inTbilisi, 425 had been murdered by the end of the year.

That Beria and his underlings (for the most part) survived the Great Purge is a testa-ment to his political acumen, his powerful grip on the local NKVD and his unreservedappetite for groveling. To men of the older generation such as Bukharin, Stalin was less adeity to tremble before than a comrade to crack a dirty joke with. Their casual attitudesealed their fate. A decade later, Milovan Djilas—the only outsider to provide an in-depthtestimony of the notorious late night dinners of the Kremlin’s chieftains at Stalin’s dacha—noted that while Stalin played practical jokes on people, and other Soviet leaders mockedone another with a touch of sadism, Stalin himself was never the butt of a joke. As Djilasexplained, “Divinity remains divinity only if it behaves like divinity.”

Beria never forgot this lesson in theology. He would show remarkable skill in manipu-lating Stalin, but he feared his anger and fed his craving for acclamation as if his lifedepended on it (and it did). He was destined to go down in history as Stalin’s henchman,but a better aide no ruthless dictator would have.

Y JANUARY OF 1938, the Great Purge was beginning to wind down,at least as far as Party personnel were concerned. In his customarymanner, on January 14 Stalin blamed the leaders of the Sovietrepublics for having gone too far—they were once more “dizzy withsuccess.” Still, NKVD headquarters in Moscow ordered their con-stituent units to clean up the job, with 57,000 more arrests; eachrepublic was even given a numerical quota of prisoners to apprehend.

Yezhov for his part was not entirely pleased with the way the purge had gone down inthe Caucasus, as Beria’s clients were virtually untouched. With the Party a smoldering ruin


and the Red Army now under attack, Beria had actually come out as the big winner. Of hisfaction, only two notable officials had been purged, and both had been replaced fromBeria’s bottomless well of disciples.

If Yezhov and Beria were to co-exist, some under-standing would have to be established between them.Such a modus vivendi was, of course, anathema inStalinism. The USSR had broken down into a dozenor more spheres of influence, feudal fiefs, politicalclans bound to their leader as he was bound to Stalin.Historians of the USSR once listed each of Stalin’schief deputies by their titles, though these were almostmeaningless. True power in the Soviet Union wascarved up between the competing clans, jostling oneanother to reap greater rewards at the right hand ofthe man who was power personified.

The clans were bound to come into conflict, notonly as a matter of course but because Stalin remainedatop the pyramid by setting them against one another.He would often give two men of two separate gov-ernment or Party departments the same task, with theunderstanding that they would denounce one anotherand the stronger would prevail (in theory, at least.More often, the one who best stroked Stalin’s vanitywould come out on top.) New figures, not bound byties of loyalty to any existing clan, were brought infrom the provinces to strike at political clans whichwere growing too powerful. This refined form of“state terrorism” would bring about paralysis at thebottom sectors of the state and the Communist Partybut a vicious civil war at the top.

So it was perhaps Stalin’s nimble footwork which brought about the most titanic (butat the time, unacknowledged) power struggle in the USSR during the purge. Yezhov andBeria eyed each other warily, and then moved to strike. The ranting dwarf never had achance.

Yezhov had made no inroads in undermining Beria’s clan, which totally dominated theCaucasus. After a few feeble attempts, he appears to have lost his nerve, and ordered thearrest of Beria himself.

It was a tactless move. Rather than hosing the blood off the wall for a new victim, thehead of the Georgian NKVD, Sergei Goglidze, merely passed the matter onto the intendedvictim. Goglidze was Beria’s man.

Beria raced to Moscow and appealed to Stalin, who countermanded the order. Theprovincial from the Caucasus found an anti-Yezhov movement already in full-swing in theKremlin. The NKVD chief had spread himself thin and left a number of hardened political

The young Nikolai Yezhov, aka theRanting Dwarf. Having replacedthe purged Genrikh Yagoda,Yezhov’s assault on the powerfulpolitical clans would ensure heshared the same fate.


warriors wounded but not slain. Among Beria’s eager collaborators was Lazar Kaganovich,a bestial relic who had survived primarily because he possessed the same qualities whichset Beria apart: utter ruthlessness, boundless cruelty and an almost scholarly efficiency.

With Kaganovich and Beria dropping dark hints, the two were able to prompt Stalinagainst his chief executioner. He created a special commission to look into NKVD “abus-es.” Like all such commissions, of course, its verdict was well-known in advance. Amongthe presiding members were Beria and Andrei Vyshinsky, the USSR’s chief prosecutor andinquisitor at the show trials of Bukharin and other leading Old Bolsheviks.

Even before the commission delivered its verdict, Yezhov experienced the dread ofwatching his deputies arrested one after another. Beria named his own men in their place,and moved permanently to Moscow. Becoming a deputy leader of the national NKVD wasat best a demotion from his unrivaled power in the Caucasus, though he must have knownhis subordinate position wouldn’t last long.

Yezhov began to drink heavily, which hardly stabilized his already demented personal-ity. On November 17, 1938, the commission delivered its verdict. The NKVD, it said, withas straight a face as a packet of unread pages can hold, had been infiltrated by “enemies ofthe people.” The commission recommended that the NKVD be forbidden from conductingmass arrests and prohibited from exiling Soviet citizens to Siberia. Six days later, Yezhovsubmitted his resignation.

Beria took over the leadership of the NKVD and called for his family from Tbilisi tomove permanently to Moscow. It was probably what Stalin intended all along. The Vozhdaside, Beria was now the most powerful man in the country.

Beria Degenerate His Master’s Voice26

S HARD AS IT IS to reconcile with our view in retrospect, theappointment of Lavrenti Beria as chief of the NKVD in late 1938 wasactually greeted with some optimism. His predecessor, NikolaiYezhov, had the charm of a rabid hound forcefed a diet of gunpow-der and raw meat. Beria, by contrast, appeared to be rational, per-haps cold but certainly not ranting and hysterical. His appointment,coming at a time when the effects of the purges on the general popu-

lation began to ease, and with the biting verdict of the “special committee” charged withinvestigating NKVD abuses fresh in everyone’s mind, appeared to auger a less bleak if notless oppressive era.

Unfortunately, Beria’s accession to the head of the secret police meant nothing in theway of moderation. While the Great Purge was officially dubbed the yezhovshchina, or“Yezhov’s Thing” to distance the new leadership from his policies, Beria’s NKVD contin-ued to carry out and tidy up the cases that remained on its ledger. Moreover, he appearedto do so with enthusiasm—even relish.

Some of the cases involved settling old scores. Stanislav Redens, Beria’s old boss in theCaucasus and Stalin’s brother-in-law, had been shunted off to the NKVD in Kazakstan dur-ing the Great Purge. Like most people with a bond of kinship with the Leader, he soonfound himself arrested and facing the firing squad. His wife appealed to Stalin directly, buthe brushed her off on Beria, who advised her in the strongest possible terms to forget abouthim.

Probably close to 40,000 officers from the Red Army were purged under Yezhov. Likeall good Soviet functionaries, Beria had a deep mistrust of the military and made few

His Master’sVoice

CHAPTER SIX :

“Always there will be the intoxication of power, con-stantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill ofvictory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy whois helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imag-ine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”


friends among them. Marshal Vasili Blucher, arrested in October 1938, was been beaten soseverely he had lost an eye. Though Beria had nothing to do with his arrest, the high officeBlucher held led Beria to conduct the interrogation—and the beating—personally. Blucher’swife, too, had been arrested and tortured by Beria—out of “sadistic curiosity,” she said.

Unlike some Nazi chieftains or the “sawdust caesar” in Italy, Beria had always taken ahands-on approach to matters of torture. He directed and even participated in brutal inter-rogations his whole career, though obviously not as frequently as he once did as a Chekistin the Caucasus. Sometimes it was because he had reason to fear the victim might implicatehim in one of the fantastic confessions NKVD interrogations routinely produced, but onother occasions there appears to be no other reason than, as Marshal Blucher’s wife calledit, sadistic curiosity.

His more earthy passions were also given free reign once Beria moved to Moscow. Hebecame a tireless, even legendary sexual predator and the terror of young ballerinas at theBolshoi, from among whom he had his pick. There were few long-lasting affairs but manyanonymous encounters in his limousine with girls who caught his momentary fancy andwere raped on the spot. Upon his arrest, a list was found on one of Beria’s bodyguards con-taining the names of 39 Moscow women, along with their phone numbers and addresses.However, when the full 47 volumes of the criminal case against him were shown onRussian television on January 23, 2003, a list with literally hundreds of women’s namesand telephone numbers was produced. In 1993, construction on the plot of land whichonce held his home turned up several corpses buried in the courtyard. Speculation had itthat these were the remains of other rape victims who died during the attack or causedtrouble by going to the authorities afterward.

HE UNSTABLE YEZHOV DEPOSED, Stalin now permitted a muchmore capable and ambitious man to expand the dominion of theNKVD into foreign affairs. Maxim Litvinov, the long-standing andgenerally respected Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was replaced by ahumourless and mechanical mannequin named Vyacheslav Molotov.As in other high-profile cases, Beria oversaw and sometimes partici-pated in the interrogation of Litvinov’s arrested deputies personally.

Soviet embassies had always been dens of espionage—Beria himself had been employedas a “secretary” carrying out espionage at the Soviet embassy in Tbilisi prior to theBolshevik takeover of Georgia. Now, just as NKVD officers had flooded into the Party hier-archy before and during the purges, ranking members of the security services began to fillthe ranks of the foreign ministry. A number of members of Beria’s political clan, which hadnow spread beyond the Caucasus to Moscow, Belarus and beyond, took over as accredit-ed ambassadors. Vladimir Dekanozov, a former pre-med student who became one ofBeria’s most trusted deputies, became Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs and, beginningin 1940, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Germany.


The latter was an especially sensitive position. From all indications, Beria was an enthu-siastic proponent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, initialed on August 23, 1939, whichbound Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to a treaty of non-aggression while carving upEastern Europe between them. The “secret annex” dealing with the Soviet Union’s west-ward expansion soon gave Beria’s NKVD more work to do. As Stalin put it wryly to theGerman Ambassador in Moscow, “Comrade Beria will handle the accommodations for ournew Baltic guests.”

“Sovietization” of the new territo-ries—one half of Poland, and the Balticstates of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia—took precedence over all other securityconcerns. In the Baltics, the NKVD wasordered to carry out a mass deportation(so much for the commission’s recommen-dations) of the entire intelligentsia andupper class as well as much of the bour-geoisie. To Soviet leaders, the brief taste ofindependence these states had enjoyed inthe lull between the two world warscouldn’t be beaten out of them, as it hadbeen with the Georgians, Armenians andAzeris. Any memory of freedom had to beannihilated.

About 140,000 Latvians, Lithuaniansand Estonians were exiled to labourcamps in Siberia, collectively known as thegulag (originally an acronym for the“Main Administration of CorrectiveLabour Colonies”). A similar campaignwas carried out in Soviet-occupied Poland,where 400,000 Poles were sent to thegulag. The latter number would have beenhigher, but Beria had already cut down thenumber of Polish prisoners by severalthousand, in the woods near Katyn.

It was a member of Beria’s politicalclan, Lavrenti Tsanava, who probably first brought the thousands of Polish POWs to offi-cial notice. As the NKVD chief of Belarus, many of the prisoners were in his “care.”Tsanava passed word of this problem up the chain of command to Beria, who in turn pre-sented his novel solution before his Kremlin colleagues.

In October 1996, producers for Ted Turner’s grandiose ego trip, the CNN documen-tary Cold War, sat down with Beria’s son Sergo and listened to him lie through his teethabout his father’s role in the massacre he himself proposed to his Kremlin colleagues. “My

Vyacheslav Molotov, left, stands alongsideStalin as German Foreign Minister Joachimvon Ribbentrop initials the Non-AggressionPact on the eve of World War II. Once the pactwas signed, Beria was given responsibility forsuborning the Soviet Union’s new territories tocentral control. The methods he used were, ina word, genocide.


father refused to take part in this action… Stalin agreed to allow my father not to take partin this action. Later on, my father tried to explain his position: he said that it was notbecause he loved people very much and he was altruistic, but he said that this was on theeve of the war, and that’s why we must save all these people and make them fight againstthe Germans.”

Sergo really may have believed what he was saying—after all, his father could certain-ly never be accused of being “altruistic” or of loving people very much—but the above

statement should be highlighted by awarning that just about everything SergoBeria has said in recent years has beenproven to be untrue.

In this case, the top secret executionorder, dated March 5, 1940 and addressed“to Comrade Stalin” and signed “People’sCommissar for Internal Affairs of theUSSR, L. Beria,” spoke of “14,736 formerofficers, government officials, landown-ers, policemen, gendarmes, prison guards,settlers in the border regions and intelli-gence officers,” all of whom were “swornenemies of Soviet authority [and] full ofhatred for the Soviet system.” They couldbe dealt with by “apply[ing] to them thesupreme penalty: shooting.” Stalin,Commissar of Defense KlimentVoroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, nominalSoviet President Kalinin and LazarKaganovich all signed off on the measure.No other punishment is suggested, and it’sexactly what they received.

According to this document, the han-dling of the operation was entrusted tothree agents, two of whom (VsevolodMerkulov and Bogdan Kobulov) werelong-time soldiers in Beria’s clan and nowhigh-ranking members of the securityservices. Merkulov committed a gaffethree years later when Polish officersrequested the release of several officers in

Soviet custody to fight the Germans. “They’re gone,” Merkulov told them. “We allowed atremendous error to take place with them.”

The evidence on Katyn was clear—especially because Merkulov and Co. had careless-ly left all personal effects on the prisoners before executing them, allowing the Nazis, who

The first page of Beria’s execution order on the“problem” of Polish prisoners of war, which ledto Katyn. “The military and police officers in thecamps are attempting to continue their count-er-revolutionary activities and are carrying outanti-Soviet agitation. Each of them is waitingonly for his release in order to start activitystruggling against Soviet authority. The organsof the NKVD in the western provinces ofUkraine and Belarus have uncovered a numberof counter-revolutionary rebel organizations.”


discovered a mass grave of 4,000 officers in 1943, to identify them. The evidence regard-ing Beria’s involvement is also unequivocal. The Soviet government denied the truth untilits dissolution; Sergo Beria, likewise, swore his father’s innocence until he went to his grave.

Including the 400,000 Polish prisoners, between 1.6 and 3.5 million people were in thegulag at its height, scattered between dozens of camps and invariably living and dying inutterly horrid conditions. Sometimes they were used as a massive slave labour force, par-ticularly in the munitions industry during the war. Other times they were used as cannonfodder, or lumberjacks, or an ad hoc construction force. Prisoners with some sort of spe-cialty—scientists, for instance—continued their trade in special NKVD labs under the aegisof the Special Technical Bureau. Among them were AN Tupolev, the famous aircraft design-er, and a number of physicists who would take part in the USSR’s first steps in the devel-opment of atomic energy.

Oversight of this massive body was a huge task, requiring thousands of bureaucraticpersonnel and still more guards, yet it was but one part of the NKVD’s increasing area ofresponsibility under Beria, who in early 1941 had become deputy chair of the Council ofPeople’s Commissars (another of Stalin’s ephemeral state bodies) as a manifestation of hisclan’s growing importance in both Party and state. The NKVD was in charge of all prisonsin the Soviet Union, including those for ordinary criminals. The NKVD also had a hand inrailway and road security, ordinary policing, fire prevention, border controls, specialInterior Ministry troops as well as their own heavily-armed militia. It was perhaps becauseof overextension—but more likely a matter of Stalin’s periodic undercutting of his vassals—that foreign intelligence and counter-espionage duties were temporarily walled-off from theNKVD in the form of a new agency, the NKID. The division was only partial, however, notleast of all because Beria continued to exert a strong influence on espionage in the newagency. More pressing matters would lead to the NKID being absorbed back into its moth-er organization in short order.

Beria Degenerate Going for Coffee with Beria31

HE NKID AND NKVD together produced a prodigious stream ofinformation about Germany’s war preparations. Much of it camefrom simple observation—German reconnaissance planes had beenflying deep into Soviet territory, marking the airbases which would bewiped out in the first hours of the offensive. German spies were alsospotted mapping Soviet ground fortifications which were under con-struction. As it was, Beria, in charge of border security, had ordered

that the old fortifications be stripped down and their materials used to build new ones atthe USSR’s new western frontier after the absorption of Poland and the Baltic States, withdisastrous consequences.

According to the German military intelligence chief on the Eastern Front (and laterhead of West Germany’s spy agency) Reinhard Gehlen, Beria had a spy in the highest lev-els of the German government—the chief of the Nazi party apparatus, Martin Bormann.After Rudolf Hess’s bizarre landing in Scotland in 1941, Bormann took over the organiza-tion and (according to Gehlen at least) tied Hitler’s command capability in knots. Gehlenwas an inveterate braggart, however, and there has been no conclusive evidence thatBormann escaped Hitler’s bunker in the last days of the war and spent his remaining yearsas an advisor to the Soviet government, as Gehlen suggested.

Gehlen’s embroidered fantasies were quite unnecessary anyway, since the Soviet spyorgans were also recording the incredible candor of German officials who thought Hitler’splan of conquest—codenamed Operation Barbarosa—a work of madness and tipped offtheir would-be enemies.

Going for Coffeewith Beria

CHAPTER SEVEN :

“Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Sincethe beginning of your life, since the beginning of theParty, since the beginning of history, the war has con-tinued without a break, always the same war.”


Whatever confidence Beria had in his trusted lieutenant in Germany, VladimirDekanozov, was mooted when Stalin pronounced his almost religious belief that Germanywould not attack. Beria not surprisingly cowered before questioning the divine oracle in hisKremlin office, instead adopting his attitude of smug infallibility. When Dekanozov wastipped off about war preparations by a German diplomat, Stalin quipped “We shall con-sider that disinformation has now reached thelevel of ambassadors.” Dekanozov later sent anurgent cable on June 21st warning that Hitlerwould attack the next day. Beria showed his con-cern by cracking that Dekanozov should berecalled.

In fairness, even Germany’s allies were incred-ulous when they received reports of Hitler’s warplans. Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister, also wondered aboutthe competence of his ambassador in Germanywho had been tipped off about Hitler’s plan toinvade Poland in 1939. Italy had based everythingon Hitler pursuing a “peaceful policy” whichwould strengthen Germany at the expense of herweak neighbours without risking a widerEuropean war.

But never did Italy receive such high-levelintelligence about Hitler’s war plans. The rare dis-play of initiative by Soviet officials was met withblunt rebuffs and crude mockery. VsevolodMerkulov once forwarded a report based oninformation from a German air force officer onbehalf of an official who dared not risk Stalin’sire. Merkulov paid for his impertinence withabuse. “Comrade Merkulov,” Stalin replied, “youcan send your ‘source’ from the staff of theGerman air force to his fucking mother. This isnot a source but disinformation.”

The head of military intelligence, which wasproducing most of the hard evidence ofGermany’s imminent attack, was denounced as a fraud and a liar by Beria on June 21,1941, who assured Stalin, “My people and I, Iosif Vissarionovich, firmly remember yourwise prediction: Hitler will not attack us in 1941!”

So it was written. Beria, who might have been able to wrap his mind around double-think but certainly wasn’t crazy, must have suspected Stalin was wrong. But he wasn’tgoing to be the one to say it. Had they known of Stalin’s prophecy, neither wouldDekanozov or Merkulov. Thus, the flames kicked up around Moscow and the Red Czars

Vsevolod Merkulov, a member ofBeria’s clan from the early days of theCheka, in an undated “photograph”(the uniform has been touched up,probably to account for a promotion inrank). Merkulov was an ethnicArmenian, one of three prominentArmenians in Beria’s clan. There were,anti-Semites would be surprised toknow, a total of only two prominentJews.


fiddled the night away.

S DEKANOZOV AND MERKULOV had warned, on June 22nd theWerhmacht punched through the Soviet Union’s western frontier.Border defenses, with their incomplete fortifications, were totallyoverwhelmed, and the Luftwaffe destroyed nearly the entirety of theSoviet airforce west of Moscow. It was left to Molotov, whose name was burned forever in human

memory due his master’s plan to reach a concord with Germany, toannounce the beginning of the war to the Soviet citizens who weren’t already in the midstof it. Despite his well-earned reputation as a human zero, Molotov gave a rousing speech.Stalin wasn’t heard from until July 3rd, which led to speculation that he had either sufferedsome sort of physical collapse or even a power struggle for leadership within the Kremlin.

It wasn’t until the publication of Nikita Khrushchev’s memoir, if we can believe it, thatwe were able to get some glimpse of Stalin’s condition during the first days of the war. Asper Khrushchev, Stalin was a wreck, inconsolable. “We’ve lost,” he told Beria. “I give up.Lenin left us a proletarian state but we’ve been caught with our pants down and the wholething has gone to shit.”

It’s hard to imagine Stalin saying these words, but it’s also difficult to imagine him kiss-ing his daughter, having an orgasm or enjoying a strong bowel movement, and we’re pret-ty sure he did those things, too. Whatever the case (and Khrushchev did admit hearing itsecond-hand from Beria), Stalin quickly recovered his senses. The day after the attack, hecreated the General Headquarters of the Soviet High Command, or the Stavka; and a weekafter, the State Defense Committee. Beria had a high position in both bodies, which werethe supreme organs of state, military and party during the war years. The State DefenseCommittee consisted of only five members: Stalin, Beria, Molotov, Marshal KlimentVoroshilov, and Central Committee Secretary Georgi Malenkov.

Stalin’s first order of business, of course, was repression. Beria was only too eager tofind scapegoats, particularly in light of the way the Germans had sliced and diced his bor-der defenses. On July 16, political commissars were re-introduced into the army. Duringthe civil war, these could idealistically be said to be in charge of “educating” the soldiers inCommunism. Now, however, they were little more than snitches. On July 25th, about1,000 deserters were shot—most of them, it seems, were not deserters at all but men whohad been encircled by the rapid German advance and fought their way back from behindenemy lines. Two days later, Beria had his pound of flesh: nine high-level officers were sen-tenced to death, among them the commander of the forces on the German border.

Beria had missed his chance to conduct the brunt of the Red Army purge, which hadbeen undertaken (literally) by Yezhov. The mass executions of July however were just thebeginning. Throughout the war, and with Stalin’s consent he unleashed the NKVD on theRed Army, arresting and torturing officers and building evidence against some of the


USSR’s most talented soldiers. He arrested Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s chief of staff on theSoviet Union’s Western Front and throughout the war kept tabs on the hero of the Battlesof Moscow and Berlin with an eye toward his eventual prosecution. NKVD arrests of offi-cers were common enough for the practice to become a euphemism: “Going to have coffee

with Beria,” they called it.In light of the persecution of an army

fighting desperately for its life, it’s remark-able that none of Beria’s fanciful “armyplots” ever became a reality.

The story of Nikolai Pisarev, a Sovietprisoner of war, is perhaps extraordinaryin its details but illustrative in its gravity.Pisarev had been captured by the Germansand sent to Auschwitz, where 600 SovietPOWs and 250 Polish political prisonerswere the first to be gassed. Pisarev hadbeen dispatched to work on the railroad intown under the strict watch of theAuschwitz guards. After being warned oftheir eventual fate, Pisarev and otherinmates attacked their guards and ran fora nearby wood. A fugitive hundreds ofmiles behind enemy lines, Pisarev waseventually recaptured in Krakow, though amember of the Polish underground in hiscell managed to cover his Auschwitz camptattoo with another.

Pisarev was assigned to a Germanforced labour brigade for the duration ofthe war. Together with some 350,000

other POWs, he was repatriated in 1944. One out of every ten of these men, includingPisarev, were immediately arrested by the secret police—a unit staffed heavily by Beria’scronies and called, with a touch of the absurd, SMERSH, or “death to spies.”

Pisarev was tortured for more than month by SMERSH before he was eventuallyreleased. He was prevented from obtaining any sort of job which might provide an ade-quate living long after the war and the downfall of Beria. Despite being technically aninvalid, he was also refused a disability pension.

Keeping an eye on the Red Army: Stalin andMarshal Budyonny having a chat; next in linebehind them are Georgi Malenkov, Secretary ofthe Central Committee, and Lavrenti Beria,oddly wearing an ordinary suit and tie ratherthan his uniform.


HE PURGATORIAL SUFFERING IN the gulag was further intensi-fied during the war. The prison complex in Siberia became anunwieldy munitions complex, though at a horrific cost. An estimated620,000 prisoners died during the war—which was almost equal tothe number of agents and troops the revamped NKVD had in itsranks to deal with counter-intelligence, rear-guard combat and, ofcourse, torturing their own military heroes. When the danger of a

German victory passed, this shadow army was put to work fighting their traditional enemy:the Soviet peoples themselves.

On February 20, 1944, Beria arrived in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, with his long-time deputies Ivan Serov, Bogdan Kobulov and Stepan Mamulov. Over the next two weeks,supported by some 19,000 security troops and 100,000 NKVD soldiers, they deported theentire Ingush and Chechen population to Kazakstan. The mass round-ups had hardlybegun when Beria fired off a letter to Stalin with the helpful suggestion that another ethnicgroup in the Caucasus, the Balkars, should be deported too. March 8th and 9th, about300,000 Balkars joined the 500,000 Chechens and Ingush, 68,000 Karachai, 93,000Kalmyks already in freight cars heading west to Central Asia.

On May 10th, Beria suggested that the 180,000 Crimean Tatars should be deported aswell. It was done. The Volga German Autonomous Republic was abolished and hundredsof thousands of ethnic Germans were sent west. Solomon Milshtein, one of Beria’s oldcronies, wrote Kobulov to brag that he had discovered an ingenious way to save the pro-letariat time and money during the deportations: by cramming 45 Chechens and Ingushinto every cattle car, rather than the proscribed allotment of 40. He had taken this decisionhimself, he said, when he noticed that many of the deportees were children and thus didn’trequire as much breathing room as adults.

Beria Degenerate The Kremlin Complexion36

HE NKVD WAS SPLIT after the Germans began their retreat fromSoviet territory, with the chastened Comrade Merkulov placed incharge of the NKGB, or People’s Commissariat of State Security. In1946 the security organs were reorganized once again, with theNKVD becoming the MVD, the NKGB the MGB. If the printer’soffice and telephone operators became disconcerted, Stalin was obvi-ously pleased with himself.

Merkulov was Beria’s creature, so the blow of Stalin’s latest ukase against a too-pow-erful subordinate was not as great as it may have seemed. Beria also presided over theCouncil of Ministers (which, in a similar fashion, had replaced the Council of People’sCommissars, with the ex-commissars receiving ministerial titles after the western fashion)and a full member of the Politburo. Perhaps to mark their importance, both Beria and theCommissar/Minister of Defense, Nikolai Bulganin, were designated with the rank of mar-shal (neither had served in the military since conscription), while officers in the securityorgans received an equivalent military rank. Stalin himself took the rank of generalissimoto keep one up on the Joneses. But to even mention Beria’s various offices—of which therewere many more than those listed—is to give pretense more attention than it deserves.Offices and titles were only manifestations of the true power of the patrón and his clan.

Nowhere was the informal power hierarchy of Stalin’s henchman better representedthan at the infamous, late-night dinners that would take place at the Kremlin or at Stalin’sdacha. Two notable individuals left accounts of these soireés with Stalin’s inner-circle.Churchill gave a rather colourful account of them in his memoirs, but the dinner was rather

The KremlinComplexion

CHAPTER EIGHT :

Later he was to realize that all that then happenedwas merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation towhich nearly all prisoners were subjected. There wasa long range of crimes—espionage, sabotage, and thelike—to which everyone had to confess as a matter ofcourse. The confession was a formality, though thetorture was real.


improvised. Furthermore, Stalin’s lackeys showed some tact in dealing with his allies in out-ward appearances, dropping the use of “comrade” for “mister” in conversations andrestricting discussion accordingly.

This was not true of the second Boswell, Milovan Djilas. As a member of the YugoslavPolitburo, Djilas was given an insider’s view; the Soviet leaders let their hair down andspoke freely, with broad jokes about Roosevelt and Churchill and how the Yugoslav

Communists, then fighting a guerrillawar, could best “trick” the West intorecognizing them as the legitimate gov-ernment.According to Djilas, these dinners at

which the fate of nations and menwere decided began around 10:00 pmand lasted from four to six hours.There was a lot of “rambling conver-sation,” jokes and even the odd philo-sophical discussion. But “in actual facta significant part of Soviet policy wasshaped at these dinners… [T]he des-tiny of the vast Russian land, of thenewly acquired territories, and, to aconsiderable degree, of the human racewas decided.” Djilas noticed that thelate hour and inebriated state in whichmost of Stalin’s inner-circle departedwas the reason few of the SovietUnion’s most prominent leaders—andthus some of the most important menin the world—arrived at their officesbefore noon.Food was served on silver plates.

Stalin, Beria, Molotov and the othershad of course extensive householdstaffs (the German tutor of Beria’s sonSergo had been saved from deporta-tion by his wife Nina), but here allwould serve themselves—“real exist-ing egalitarianism,” one might call it.Stalin never sat at the head of the

table, as one might expect, but always in the first chair to the left of the head. Seatingarrangements for the others were improvised.

Stalin drank red wine and vodka during Djilas’ first visit in 1944, “moderately” andnever to grotesque excess, “whereas I could not say the same for Molotov, and especially

“Every crime was possible to Stalin, for there wasnot one he had not committed… I was more inter-ested, and am more interested, in how such a dark,cunning, and cruel individual could ever have ledone of the greatest and most powerful states, notjust for a day or a year, but for thirty years! Until pre-cisely this is explained by Stalin’s present critics—Imean his successors—they will only confirm thatin good part they are only continuing his work andthat they contain in their own make-up those sameelements—the same ideas, patterns, and methodsthat propelled him.”

Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin


not for Beria, who was practically a drunkard.” Stalin goaded his subordinates to toastmore, drink more, and, when blitzed on the sauce, played practical jokes on them orencouraged others to do so.

“The dinner began with someone—itseems to me that it was Stalin himself—proposing that everyone guess how manydegrees below zero it was,” Djilasrecalled, “and that everyone be punishedby being made to drink as many glasses ofvodka as the number of degrees he guessedwrong. Luckily, while still at the hotel, Ihad looked at the thermometer, and Iadded to the number to allow for the tem-perature drop during the night, so that Imissed by only one degree. I rememberthat Beria missed by three, remarking thathe had done so on purpose so that hemight drink more glasses of vodka.”

Djilas, who had naïvely romanticizedthe “motherland of Socialism,” wasappalled by the “vacuity of such a life.”An American, of course, would note thesimilarities of these drinking games to col-legiate contests like “Quarters” or “HiBob”—the pointless diversions of amateurdrunks to pass the time while imbibingstill more booze. But the men around Stalin, without the slightest check to their behavior,collectively followed the Leader into the foggy twilight of senility and the childishness thatcomes with old age. “These men shut up in a narrow circle,” Djilas wrote, “were capableof inventing even more senseless reasons for drinking vodka—the length of the dining roomin feet or of the table in inches. And who knows, maybe that’s what they do! At any rate,this apportioning of the number of vodka glasses according to the temperature reading sud-denly brought to my mind the confinement, the inanity and senselessness of the life of theseSoviet leaders gathered about their superannuated chief even as they played a role that wasdecisive for the human race.”

Foreign or domestic, most who have left some personal recollection of their encounterswith Beria have described a loathsome troglodyte. Brigadier George Hill, a representativefrom British intelligence in Moscow to consult on matters of partisan warfare, said that“the more I saw of him, the less I liked him; an evil, sinister creature.” Andrei Sakharov,recruited in 1948 by Beria to take part in the atomic bomb project, recalled the dread ofrealizing he was “face-to-face with a terrifying monster.” Djilas—who was close friendswith the future head of the Yugoslav secret police, Aleksandar Rankovic, and elsewherestated that he would have taken the odious job himself if he had been so summoned—had

At his master’s elbow, Lavrenti Beria showsStalin the special vodka-dispensing controlpanel on his yacht. Beria, who prospered for hisabilities to satisfy Stalin like a petulant child,easily adjusted to the Vozhd’s growing senility—even after Stalin’s temper tantrums wereincreasingly aimed at his own political clan.


much the same impression.“Beria was a rather short man,” Djilas wrote, noting Stalin rarely kept around

Politburo members who were taller than himself. Beria “was somewhat plump, greenishpale, and with soft damp hands. With his square-cut mouth and bulging eyes behind hispince-nez, he suddenly reminded me of Vujkovic, one of the chiefs of the Belgrade RoyalPolice who specialized in torturing Communists. It took an effort to dispel the unpleasantcomparison, which was all the more nagging because the similarity extended even to hisexpression—that of a certain self-satisfaction and irony mingled with a clerk’s obsequious-ness and solicitude.”

At his last dinner at Stalin’s dacha, Beria pushed a glass of peretsovka, or pepper vodka,on Djilas. “Sniggering, Beria explained that this liquor had a bad effect on the sex glands,and he used the most vulgar expressions in so doing.” Stalin was on the verge of burstinginto laughter, but held out when he noted Djilas’ “sour” expression. Later, Stalin played agag record where an opera singer’s voice was replaced by the howling of a dog. It’s the kindof thing that an adolescent weaned off the Teletubbies would find uproarious, but sinceStalin roared with laughter, so did everyone else. Djilas however didn’t understand, andStalin took the needle off the record. “Well, still it’s clever, devilishly clever,” he said, almostapologetically.

URING THEIR RETURN TRIP to Belgrade, Djilas and the Yugoslavdelegation stopped over in Ukraine, then ruled by the clan and per-son of one Nikita Khrushchev. Compared to the leaders in Moscow,infected by a malady that officials there called the “KremlinComplexion”—pale with red, ruddy cheeks from their nocturnalcrawls—the comically roly-poly Khrushchev appeared as “a man ofthe people who had unexpectedly struck it rich.”

According to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, her father had come to dread Beriaand the power he had amassed. There is an element of truth in this, in that Stalin was para-noid of the power of everyone. But the game he was playing—would continue playing untilthe end of his life—was one perfected during the Great Purges, before Beria had come toMoscow, and which enabled his rise to begin with.

When Khrushchev was brought to Moscow in December 1949—he had been a highofficial for some years, but never part of Stalin’s inner-circle before then—Beria took littlemeasure of him. Privately, he called Khrushchev a “moon-faced idiot.” Stalin didn’t thinkmuch better. He once tapped Khrushchev’s bald pate with his pipe, cracking “It’s empty!Empty!” And as if to illustrate Khrushchev’s worth, he dumped his ashes atop that emptyvessel.

Beria had much more to fear for now in the rise of a certain Viktor Abakumov. LikeBeria in 1938, Abakumov’s chief asset was his total lack of connection to any of the clansin Moscow. Beria had survived the rise of another of Stalin’s pet rottweilers, Andrei


Zhdanov, just after the war and must have felt vulnerable to a new onslaught. Zhdanovand the Central Committee Secretary, Georgi Malenkov, had gone to war, with Beria tak-ing Malenkov’s side and Stalin probably spurring them both on. Malenkov was temporar-ily exiled to Central Asia, then recalled when Zhdanov became ill with heart disease.Zhdanov died in August 1948. His precipitous rise and fall left his own clan, coalescedmostly in Leningrad where he had been Party chief, at the mercies of his rivals. In what waseuphemistically called “the Leningrad Case,” about 500 of Zhdanov’s cronies were dis-missed or arrested for spying or ideological deviation.

Abakumov, now chief of the MGB (for the first time in a decade, led by someone otherthan Beria or his underlings), busied himself with the purge of Zhdanov’s clan but he stillhad time to spare to take on the living as well as the dead. From all appearances, Beria wasone of his targets. Abakumov began thetypical Soviet “noisy investigation” of asupposed “Mingrelian NationalistConspiracy.” This was not a subtle moveagainst Beria, a Mingrelian who carried adisproportionate number of his fellowMingrelians in his orbit.

Unlike Nikolai Yezhov’s hamhandedattempt to arrest Beria in 1938,Abakumov was advancing slowly anddeliberately. At the last moment, however,Stalin hesitated. One can only guess as towhy—perhaps he lost heart, or fell victimto Beria’s aggressive obsequiousness.Quite abruptly, in June 1951, Abakumovwas arrested. He wrote pitiful letters toBeria, complaining of being tortured byhis former MGB subordinates. Beriaignored them.

It’s likely that just about all of Stalin’sinner-circle but the man himself hadworked in unison, in some sort of confed-eracy of scoundrels, to undermine the newkid on the block and preserve the statusquo. They had temporarily united behindAbakumov when the latter, presumablyon Stalin’s orders, went on the offensive against the popular Marshal Zhukov, who wasthen presiding over the Soviet military administration in East Germany. Beria had gotten amember of his clan, Ivan Serov, appointed as the chief of the civilian administration inGermany. Serov was of course a Chekist, seasoned by the mass deportation of the Chechensas well as the persecution of “counter-revolutionaries” in occupied Eastern Europe, and didlittle other than continue to build a case against his nominal superior. After several of

Stalin and Marshal Georgi Zhukov during hap-pier times, paying their respects to Lenin’s pick-led corpse. Milovan Djilas noted a rumour cir-culating to the effect that Zhukov had lootedjewels in Berlin, observing that “when they wantto get rid of someone in the Soviet Union butlack convincing reasons for this, they usuallyspread some infamy about him through agentsof the Secret Police.” But Zhukov would live toget his revenge.


Zhukov’s deputies were arrested, the Marshal was called to Moscow where Stalin, Beriaand Lazar Kaganovich accused him of conspiracy. Zhukov was stripped of all the Partypositions he had acquired during the war and shunted off to exile as head of a minorUkrainian military district.

While Zhukov (and thus the military) was clearly demoted, it wasn’t like Stalin to leavehim alive. Whether he was making a rare concession to popular opinion or not, Abakumovwas blamed for failing to produce (i.e., to manufacture) clear evidence of Zhukov’s involve-

ment in nefarious plots against the leader-ship.

Another enemy lived on inYugoslavia. Tensions between the SovietUnion and what was dubbed “SatelliteNumber One” in the American press hadbeen simmering following the very publicexchange of notes between the Yugoslavand Soviet leadership, criticizing eachother in convoluted prose over minor devi-ations from Leninism. Following the fullrupture of relations between the two coun-tries, most observers believed that Stalinisthardliners would overwhelm and bringdown Marshal Tito and the Yugoslav“deviationists.” Instead, the handful ofmembers of the Yugoslav CentralCommittee that dissented from the major-ity announced their sentiments publiclyand were quickly arrested and probablymurdered in jail. The former chief-of-staffof the Yugoslav People’s Army, ArsoJovanovic, sided with Moscow but ratherthan organize a putsch stole for the fron-

tier with Romania, where he was shot by border guards.The Soviets had recruited a number of technicians from Yugoslavia, as well as other

members of the Party, but aggressive counter-espionage measures appear to have staved offany real danger of risk to the leadership. The failure to overthrow Tito certainly wasn’t forlack of trying. According to the the Medvedev brothers’ Unknown Stalin, a handful of let-ters were found on Stalin’s desk after his death. One was from Lenin—a celebrated lettercomplaining of Stalin’s brusque and rude treatment of Lenin’s wife as well as other Partycomrades, written during one of Vladimir Ilych’s moments of lucidity during his illness. Asecond was from Nikolai Bukharin, addressing the recipient by his nom de guerre, Koba,and asking why he needed Bukharin to die.

The third letter was from Tito, and might be some indication of Stalin’s displeasurewith Abakumov. The letter, had it been written or received by anyone but fellow dictators,

Josip Broz-Tito, well into middle age, enjoyinga laugh with UN Secretary General U Thant ina forest of bland suits. After Yugoslavia’s expul-sion from the Communist Bloc (then gatheredin a new and typically ephemeral constructioncalled the Cominform), Tito brokered a seriesof agreements with the West which perma-nently fractured the monolithic Communistmovement.


probably would have resulted in a phone call to the police. Tito demanded that Stalin “stopsending assassins to murder me,” and if he did not, threatened that “I will send one manto Moscow. There will be no need to send another.” It’s safe to say that no other man hadspoken to Stalin in this way in his life and lived to tell about it.

Abakumov’s place wasn’t taken by Merkulov, Tsanava or one of Beria’s other cronies,however. Instead, comrades of Nikita Khrushchev, brought with him from Ukraine andcoalesced in Moscow as his own clan, began to staff senior jobs in the security services andthe Party apparatus. Beria did not especially mind. He regarded Khrushchev as a light-weight, one of the useful idiots who could be slapped down easily if he overstepped theboundaries of propriety. Put another way, as Stalin told Milovan Djilas on some abstrusepoint of foreign policy, “Once kings, when they could not agree over the booty, used to givedisputed territories to their weakest vassal so they could snatch them from him later atsome opportune moment.”

ERIA’S CHIEF DUTY—ONE among many—in the immediate post-war years was his role at the head of the atomic bomb project. From his deputies in the NKVD, Beria knew that the other major

powers were working on developing atomic power (so indeed didnon-nuclear aspirants, such as Japan, which had determined that itwould simply be beyond their capabilities). Molotov, the SovietForeign Minister, had originally been given the task of coordinating

atomic development with Soviet scientists, but a month before the holocaust at Hiroshima,Beria took over.

It’s been known for many years that the Soviets were passed sensitive informationabout the atomic experiments at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos by scientist Klaus Fuchs.More recently, Beria’s son Sergo claimed that Robert Oppenheimer had visited his dachabefore the war and would later leak details of the American initiative, codenamed theManhattan Project, to Soviet agents. In the early 1990s, a member of Beria’s clan, PavelSudoplatov, also wrote a memoir in which he claimed Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi andNiels Bohr passed along information as well. None of this has ever been proven.

Nevertheless, the stream of information gathered by Soviet intelligence agents in theWest (as well as from scientists captured in Germany) greatly aided the Soviet effort. A yearand a half after Beria took the reins of the project, the USSR’s first atomic reactor wentonline. Aside from acquiring know-how, Beria was tasked with locating and obtaining theraw materials necessary for atomic research and development from within the USSR andthe newly conquered territories of Eastern and Central Europe. But Soviet initiative andinventiveness also played a great, even decisive role in the discovery of atomic power.

On August 29, 1949—well ahead of Western intelligence estimates—the Soviets suc-cessfully detonated their first plutonium bomb. Beria was present for this crowningachievement, and rushed to phone Stalin with the news. He should have known better.


Stalin delighted in using even a device as neutral as a telephone to get the better of people.After a friend of Russian writer Boris Pasternak was sent to the gulag, Stalin allegedly tele-phoned him to say that “We Old Bolsheviks never deny our friends.” Pasternak had no ideawhat this meant but was absolutely mortified by the possibilities.

Getting Stalin’s direct line from Central Asia, Beria began an excited and garrulousreport. He was immensely proud of the accomplishment, which in the long run guaranteeda sense of parity with the United States despite the inferiority of the Soviet economy. Stalin,however, interrupted Beria’s chatter, cut him off by saying he had already heard about it,and hung up.

Beria Degenerate Masters & Slaves44

ESPITE THE TIMELY DEATH Of Zhdanov and the arrest ofAbakumov, the campaign against Beria did not let up. In fact most,and possibly all, of the chieftains in Moscow were then under assault.Several were easily cast aside. In March 1949, Molotov—regarded inprotocol as Stalin’s first deputy—was sacked as Foreign Minister. TheMinister of Foreign Trade, Anastas Mikoyan, was also sacked and hiswife (who was Jewish) arrested in 1948.

Neither Molotov nor Mikoyan were as weighty as Beria, nor could they claim, as Beriadid, to have a wide support network in the security services, to say nothing of a territorialfief consisting of the whole of the Caucasus, where loyal deputies continued to serve at hisbehest. The latter was his stronghold, but it was also his greatest vulnerability. Without theservices an Abakumov or Zhdanov, Stalin took aim at it himself.

On November 5, 1951, the internal boundaries of Georgia were altered, essentiallysplitting the republic and watering down the power of established officials—all of whomwere part of Beria’s clan. Four days later, without informing the Politburo, Stalin publisheda new decree on the “Mingrelian Nationalist Conspiracy.” The plot—which sounds likeone of the ludicrous conspiracies a young Beria might have come up with—clearly hadn’tbeen abolished with the unfortunate Abakumov. Three high-ranking Georgian officials, allBeria men, were arrested, and a full-scale purge of the Georgian party apparatus began.

According to most of those around him, Stalin had gone through a precipitous mentaldecline after the war, possibly on account of a stroke during its later years. Stalin hadalways been paranoid—it was an essential part of his character—but now, it was said, hehad become demented, obsessed with spies. They pointed to the so-called “Doctor’s Plot,”

Masters andSlaves

CHAPTER NINE :

Always the eyes watching you and the voice envelop-ing you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoorsor out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape.Nothing was your own except the few cubic centime-tres inside your skull.


where a circle of Jewish physicians were accused of conspiring to poison senior Soviet lead-ers, including the Vozhd. Medical treatment was sabotaged, with Zhdanov’s corpsedragged out as an example of what the capitalist powers and their agents armed withstethoscopes had done.

Yet there was absolutely nothing about the Doctor’s Plot which doesn’t correspond toearlier purges, when Stalin was presumably as sane as he ever was. Zhdanov, at least, haddied of a real illness—and like Sergei Kirov, killed by Stalin’s assassins, his corpse used asa pretext to whip up hysteria against potential enemies. Moreover, as we have seen, ene-mies (and friends) had often been accused of attempting to personally murder Stalin in thepast, such as Mikhail Lakoba and Papulia Ordzhonikidze. The Doctor’s Plot was itself acarbon copy of the “useful calamity” which in the hands of the master could be used for asudden, dramatic leveling within the Party.

Stalin may have gone nuts, but if so, it was only a more intense version of his everyday,default-level dementia. The Doctor’s Plot came in tandem with other traces of anti-Semitism—particularly the show trial of Czech party chief Rudolf Slansky and his deputiesin Prague, who were accused of being “apprentices of Zionism” and executed for espionageand treason. But Stalin had been an anti-Semite for years. In January 1948 he bragged toMilovan Djilas “On our Central Committee there are no Jews!” then tried to goad Djilasinto making anti-Semitic comments himself. (The claim was not strictly true: Beria wasfond of referring to Lazar Kaganovich behind his back as “Lazar the Israelite.”)

There is ample evidence that the targets for this and other conspiracies were the menwho had been a part of Stalin’s inner-circle for the previous decade—including Beria. InOctober 1952, Stalin dissolved the Politburo and replaced it with the larger “Presidium”—a repeat of his old game of renaming, abolishing or re-vamping existing structures simplyto throw everyone off-balance. A second resolution on the “Mingrelian NationalistConspiracy” was passed in March, and by the time the Presidium came into being, thepurges of Beria’s clan in Georgia had been ongoing for almost a year, with the practicaleffect that his support network back home had been almost totally wiped out. Only a hand-ful of Beria’s deputies remained in office. The effect had been to destroy the highest levelof the Georgian Party, replacing Beria’s old cronies with younger, hungry and largely non-affiliated officials from below.

PPROPRIATELY, THERE IS NO definitive narrative for the mostmomentous event in the history of the Soviet Union. Several of thepeople involved—and one who was not involved, but knew thecadaver as well as any of them—left their own accounts, which areoften at odds with one another. Moreover, in the last 14 years a num-ber of the minor figures and eyewitnesses—usually soldiers, whowere regarded as hardly more than furniture by the gathered prelates

of the Party—have come forward with interesting, if uncorroborated, details.


On February 28, 1953, Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev and the other court jesters hadgathered at the Kremlin, moving on to Stalin’s dacha for dinner and a movie and the usualdrunken orgy. Khrushchev remembered leaving early the next morning, with Stalin (andprobably all of the others) having imbibed massive quantities of alcohol. The next night,worried by their master’s failure to appear, Stalin’s guards (in alternate versions, his maid)entered and found the Man of Steel lying on the floor, his trousers wet from having pissedhimself.

What happened next is a contentiousissue. Stalin’s daughter, SvetlanaAlliluyeva, claimed that Beria,Khrushchev and the others who had beensummoned by the guards refused to call adoctor until 10 or 12 hours had passedfrom the time of the Vozhd’s discovery insuch an un-divine state. She says thatStalin’s household help and his guardsdemanded a surgeon be called, but Beriabrushed them off by saying that “nothinghas happened. He is sleeping. Look!” Itseems highly unlikely that anyone woulddemand anything from Beria, though thespectacle of the incapacitated Leader mayhave trumped his sinister reputation.

The most interesting—and oft-repeat-ed—account of Beria in Stalin’s last hoursowes its currency to Nikita Khrushchev.Beria, he said, kneeled before the pronebody of his fallen master, alternately curs-ing Stalin to the devil when he began to fade and swearing eternal loyalty and kissing hishand when he perked up. This comical picture of Beria is almost too profane, too pene-trating to the soul of Beria to be true, but Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote something about it aswell. Beria, she claimed, was “trying so hard at this moment of crisis to strike exactly theright balance, to be cunning, yet not too cunning… He went up to the bed and spent a longtime gazing into the dying man’s face. From time to time my father opened his eyes but wasapparently unconscious or in a state of semiconsciousness. Beria stared fixedly at thoseclouded eyes, anxious even now to convince my father he was the most loyal and devotedof them all.”

Alliluyeva accused Beria (as well as Khrushchev) of complicity in her father’s death bytheir failure to deliver timely medical care. While this is likely, it probably had less to dowith their malevolence than the fact that, given the recent developments in the “Doctor’sPlot,” Stalin’s return to health would probably be fatal to everyone around him. Beria inparticular was going to be purged had Stalin hung on for much longer, so he wasn’t likelyto have broken a nail to save Stalin’s life. But one of the problems with establishing motive

The “moon-faced idiot” slides in for a photo-opwith Stalin (with a strategically placed fedora toprevent any jokes at his expense). Of all therogues gathered in Stalin’s inner-circle, NikitaKhrushchev had the most to fear from Stalin’ssudden death, and Beria the most to gain.Hardly was the Vozhd’s body cold before the twobegan to prepare for war.


in the last hours of Stalin’s life is the bizarre climate in which the comrade-in-chief lived.To help or to bring harm—both could be rewarded with the same punishment. With morethan a hundred million people across the Soviet Bloc swearing devotion in catechism, notone of their “best and most capable representatives” was willing to stake their life on a def-inite course. In the end, apathy reigned.

The last living participant in the soap opera of Stalin’s death was Vyacheslav Molotov,shunted off to a series of increasingly meaningless jobs and excluded from Stalin’s inner-circle. Owing no doubt to his low vitality and failure to hold a single conviction after theyear 1917, Molotov outlived all of his contemporaries and was by some considerations thelast living major protagonist in the Russian Revolution. In interviews published shortlyafter his death (which are, characteristically, about as exciting as watching the advance ofgangrene), Molotov coughed up a bone which not even Alliluyeva or Khrushchev hadgnawed on. Beria poisoned Stalin, Molotov said, and this, not apathy, explained his reluc-tance to call the doctors. The source for Molotov’s extraordinary claim is Beria himself:after the dear Leader was dead and gone, Beria reportedly blurted out, “I did it! I saved allof you!”

Whatever the truth of this—an autopsy was supposedly performed on Stalin’s body,and presumably no trace of poisoning was detected—Beria left Stalin’s dacha with a scarce-ly-concealed arrogance. Stalin had died, and with him all of the intrigues against him werehalted.

If Beria had kept his wits about him, though, he probably wouldn’t have felt victorious.Though Beria didn’t know it, he had entered the hour of his greatest danger now that hismaster and tormentor had passed on. Stalin undoubtedly would have killed him if he hadlived just a few months longer. Stalin, however, had found him useful. He may have cometo despise Beria, but he didn’t fear him, and no one else could have taken Beria out with-out Stalin’s blessing. Now, however, he was surrounded by men who both feared anddespised him, and were in a race for their lives to get the rejuvenated spy chief before hegot them.

Beria Degenerate The Kremlin’s Civil War48

TALIN HAD IMPRINTED HIS features on the very face of the SovietUnion. The state, the Communist Party and the greater society was aferocious machine, and though the pilot was passed out drunk in apool of his own urine, the engine continued to hum.

At some point during Stalin’s death throes, Lavrenti Beria andGeorgi Malenkov, who had been driven together against Zhdanovafter the war, worked out a rough alliance to seize power and pre-

empt any potential challengers. Perhaps they even shared a few words within Stalin’s deathchamber, since as Beria well knew it was likely the only room in the entire country whichone could be sure was not bugged.

On March 6, per their agreement, Beria “spontaneously” nominated Malenkov aschairman of the Council of Ministers. Malenkov in turn nominated Beria his deputy. Hisfirst order of business was to solder together the state security bodies back into a unitedMVD, with Beria as its chief. Molotov was recalled from obscurity to serve as the weak pil-lar of a triumvirate, possibly to present some further continuity from Stalin’s glory days.

There were other pretenders to Stalin’s gleaming throne of bones, but they went alongwith the putsch. Nikita Khrushchev was the exception. Stalin’s passing and the assumptionof his earthly mantle by the triumvirate was accompanied by Khrushchev losing his posi-tion at the head of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party—a potent source ofpower—though he remained on as secretary of the Party’s Central Committee. It was awound, but not a fatal one.

Recent research into the days following Stalin’s death has promoted the seemingly

The Kremlin’s Civil War

CHAPTER TEN :

A thousand times better he knew what the world wasreally like, in what degradation the mass of humanbeings lived and by what lies and barbarities theParty kept them there. He had understood it all,weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was jus-tified by the ultimate purpose.


absurd theory that Beria actually represented a sort of proto-Khrushchev, standing at theforefront of de-Stalinization. There’s something to this theory, though given that Beria wasdirectly responsible for more than two decades of repression, it’s hard to swallow it. Theypoint to several issues—a softening of Moscow’s position on Korea, Yugoslavia, and EastGermany, amnesties, and most of all, the revelation of the hoax behind the Doctor’s Plot.

Almost immediately after taking over the MVD, the major adherents of the plot foundthemselves arrested or sacked, and Soviet state media denounced the case as a fraud. Beriahad several motives for coming out against the Doctor’s Plot, and a secret identity as a lib-eral in a Chekist’s trenchcoat is the least plausible. The plot had in fact been one of many

tools Stalin was using to destroy Beria’sclan. At the same time Pravda was ridi-culing the hoax which it had so breath-lessly promoted, Beria was carrying out a“counter-purge” in Georgia, arresting anddemoting the figures Stalin had recentlypromoted and bringing his old associatesback, in some cases from the jail cellstraight to the central committee. The“Mingrelian Nationalist Conspiracy”—the most blatant attack on Beria—wasalso denounced. Two of his most trustedhenchmen, Vladimir Dekanozov andStepan Mamulov, took seats on theGeorgian Party Central Committee toensure resumed loyalty to their patron inMoscow and to help reverse the tide.

In fact, the revelation of the Doctor’sPlot was simply an exercise in crudeStalinist statecraft: the old tried and trueformula of discrediting yesterday’s pretextfor the purge in order to carry out anoth-er one.

The intensity of Beria’s “counter-purge” across the USSR varied, with some state andParty bodies suffering much higher turnover than others. The MVD, of course, was hisbaby, and recent appointments from Khrushchev’s clan were demoted or sent into profes-sional exile. Hundreds of MVD agents abroad were recalled, some never to be heard fromagain. It appears another possible excuse to purge was being cooked up when Beria cameout against the practice of appointing ethnic Russians to Party leadership positions in non-Russian areas (the best example at hand, of course, being Khrushchev during the war inUkraine).

Beria also passed a substantial amnesty for prisoners in the gulag. Beria knew betterthan anyone what an enormous drain the gulag was on state resources, even when slavelabour on a starvation diet was taken into consideration. He had ruthlessly exploited the

“No, he’s just resting.” It may sound like amacabre joke, but Stalin, like Kim Il-Sung ofNorth Korea, never really died. According to theofficial release sent out of the Kremlin’s pressoffice, the heart of the “comrade-in-arms” ofLenin, the “wise leader and teacher,” had“ceased to beat.”


gulag as his own empire during the war years, though the quality of production in suchconditions left much to be desired. He had also decreed a postponed but definite death sen-tence on thousands of prisoners that he had sent to mine uranium for the atomic bombproject, and ordinary civilians who lived in the testing areas in Central Asia. His decisionto dramatically reduce the gulag population had little to do with liberalism or a reformingspirit. Stalin, after all, had prized Beria in equal measures for his ruthlessness and efficien-cy. His ruthlessness had left millions to die on his watch; his aptitude for practical mattersled him to decide that so much blood spent for so little was counter-productive.

Detecting a faint trace of liberalism in these and other policies, a number of historianshave compared Beria’s role after Stalin’s death favourably with Yuri Andropov, anotherChekist who as General Secretary supposedly eased off on the repression of the Brezhnevyears and paved the way for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. But if Beria’s course after hismaster’s passing smacks of liberalism, it stands out all the more because his chief enemieswere then advancing the opposite position. The dying tribe of Sovietologists in the Westmay amuse themselves with the notion that Beria’s reforms, if successful, could have led toglasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev’s main reform programs, twenty years earlier. Butthere is no indication that his position could be taken in good faith; that, having crushedhis enemies in the Party on the basis of their reactionary beliefs, he would not have reversedcourse himself. He had, after all, learned such a technique at the knee of the master him-self.

TILL, THERE WAS A muted sense of surprise in Western capitals atthe trickle of information coming from the opposite side of the IronCurtain. Some considered the whole shift in course the result ofMalenkov’s leadership, though he was never more than a malleablepuppet in more cunning hands. In a matter of two months, Beria—who most in the West regarded as much as creature of Stalin’s cre-ation as Yezhov and Abakumov—had cemented power behind the

scenes. And just as he appeared to triumph, the ground was being mined beneath his feet.Beria had clearly underestimated Khrushchev from the time Stalin had summoned him

to his inner-circle. Beria once would have crushed such a rival for the thrill of it, but henever grasped the danger the comical peasant/commissar presented. Unlike Beria, who hadonly visited the frontlines twice during the war and was regarded with a sense of dread bythe Red Army, Khrushchev had expanded his clan to include several military officers he hadworked with as a political commissar in the army during the war. Moreover, he had a softtouch with the people in the way that none of his colleagues in the Party hierarchy ever did.While he might embarrass elderly diplomats with his crude jokes and folk epigrams aboutanimals screwing and men dropping their trousers, his manner of earthiness had the appeal,as Milovan Djilas had noted, of the man of the people suddenly come into riches.

More importantly, Khrushchev had only the usual personal enemies in Moscow. Beria


was regarded as a sinister figure by whole sectors of the country. Though he had oncebegged Stalin to participate in a troika and exterminate several thousand “class enemies”and “traitors,” Khrushchev also had a relatively “pure” record in the Party apparatus, per-mitting him to play the liberal or the hardcase depending on political expediency.

Throughout the Spring of 1953, after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev had been making quietovertures to the Party elite—careful, no doubt, since his adversary was more than capableof eavesdropping on his conversations. Afew were won over immediately:Khrushchev’s clan, of course, but alsoNikolai Bulganin, who Beria had oncetried to fire from his post as DefenseMinister. Only a handful conspiratorswere really required. Khrushchev knewthat career commissars like LazarKaganovich, eager to protect their clansbut without any delusions of taking thetop job themselves, would go over towhichever side came out on top.

One of those crucial collaborators wasthe new Vozhd himself, Georgi Malenkov.Dimwitted, plodding, and with the man-ners and appearance of a trade union bossgrown fat off of union dues, Malenkovwas hesitant to get involved. He also hadties with Beria going back to the 1940s.They had survived in the trenches ofKremlin warfare among Stalin’s under-lings for more than a decade, and it wasprobably Beria who impressed upon Stalinthe need to bring Malenkov back fromexile after Zhdanov’s demise.

With all of this in mind, it would benatural for Khrushchev to summon a bitof tact when broaching the subject of aParty coup d’etat. Khrushchev, however, was born with a debilitating lack of tact, and theatmosphere of Kremlin politics had been so warped that internecine conspiracies wereprobably regarded as blasé. “Look, Comrade,” Khrushchev said he told Malenkov, “don’tyou see where this is leading? We’re heading for disaster. Beria is sharpening his knives.”

Malenkov could have sealed Khrushchev’s fate immediately by reporting this conversa-tion back to Beria. Though he was not prepared to sign off on the pudgy commissar’s plan,he kept this foreknowledge of it to himself. For all of his faults, he, too, was a seasonedStalinist, and in this world there were no absolutes, merely possibilities.

The eternally flatulent Georgi Malenkov, daringto draw attention to the inch or so he had onStalin in height. Malenkov and Beria stoodtogether as Stalin’s lead pallbearers, and evenpromoted a short-lived cult of personalityaround the pudgy commissar. The Westernpress and governments eagerly promoted themyth that Malenkov was calling the shots as thenew Communist bogeyman, paying scant atten-tion to the true titans duking it out for Stalin’smantle.


ONE COULD QUESTION HIS mastery of the Soviet Union, but itwould be Beria’s blind interference in international affairs that wouldspur Khrushchev’s conspiracy into action. After the war, Stalin had insisted upon the transfer of massive

wealth from Soviet-occupied East Germany as a form of reparations.Whole factories had been dismantled and dragged to the Soviet Unionto rebuild its devastated economy, as well as to aid in the develop-

ment of atomic power. Furthermore, the city of Koenigsburg and the territory around it hadbeen annexed and renamed Kaliningrad (after the blind, senile president of the USSR), andthe borders of Germany and Poland shifted.

On June 2, 1953, East German leader Walter Ulbricht came to Moscow for a series ofmeetings about the “German problem.” Ulbricht himself was a hardline Stalinist and hadlittle concern about the widespread discontent in his country. But five days earlier, Beriahad promoted several members of his clanto high positions in East Germany.Someone of Beria’s stature was freechoose his own device in a duel, and lib-eralism was again his weapon of choice.

At meetings with Ulbricht over thenext two days, Beria took the offensive,accusing the East German leadership ofthose ubiquitous “errors” and urgingUlbricht to make concessions in the inter-est of easing the workers’ plight.Thousands of Germans had fled to theWest, and it was creating bad publicity forthe architects of heaven on earth. Fromlater accounts, it appears that the meetingbecame quite heated, with Ulbricht deny-ing that anything was seriously wrong andBeria shouting at him.

Exactly two weeks later, on June 16,protests broke out in East Berlin. In a mat-ter of hours they had spread throughoutEast Germany. The following day—inwhat would become a familiar scene overthe years, in Budapest in 1956 and Praguein 1968—the Red Army blitzed through the country, and crushed the uprising by bruteforce. It was the stimulus for still more dramatic events in Moscow—another componentof the same pattern, to be repeated through the years when someone in the Kremlin need-ed a scapegoat.

Nikita Khrushchev, for his part, was at least as “outraged” by the uprising in Germany

Lavrenti Beria looks down solemnly at the holein the ground where Khrushchev is preparing tobury him. His wife Nina, in white, is to the left.She and their son Sergo (named after thepatron he had crawled over to reach the knee ofStalin) would share in his downfall in theStalinist fashion, though not to the extent thatBeria’s own victims did.


as he was three years later, when he ordered tanks into Hungary. Insurrection was the toolof the oppressed worker; in anyone else’s hand, it was brought about by “class enemies,”“traitors,” “bandits.” Moscow’s control in Germany had been reestablished almost imme-diately, but someone would have to take the fall for it. Given Beria’s untimely interventioninto the realm of foreign affairs, the unrest provided an excellent pretext for whatKhrushchev had been planning.

KREMLIN MEETING OF THE Presidium (Stalin’s misfit creationlived on) was planned for June 26, 1953, nine days after the army putdown the uprising in East Germany. Beria arrived as per usual with adozen or so bodyguards and assistants. Even aside from this person-al escort, he had reason to feel safe in Moscow, if he had any inklingof what was being planned against him. The guards in the Kremlinitself were MVD personnel, and two divisions were stationed perma-

nently in Moscow.Malenkov chaired the meeting, and immediately gave the floor to Nikita Khrushchev.

The latter began without a prepared text, speaking of Beria’s imperious manner, his“errors,” and so on. Beria expressed total surprise—the man who had denounced millions,and probably hundreds personally, was, horror of horrors, being denounced. He interrupt-ed Khrushchev. “What’s going on Nikita? What’s this you’re mumbling about?”

Like all Communist Party meetings, the topic of “discussion” before the Presidium hadbeen decided well in advance, at least by some of the members. Khrushchev had won overMalenkov at long last, as well as Molotov. These two diehard Stalinists had probably beenmoved by the recent events in East Germany and Beria’s conspicuous role in it, thoughKhrushchev feared the fumbling Malenkov might back out at the final moment. Molotovclaimed that Beria had called him before the meeting to win him over to “his group,” whichseems to suggest that Beria expected some kind of a conflict in the Presidium, though prob-ably not the one that actually happened. The only other member of the Presidium who hadwith certainty joined Nikita’s crusade was Bulganin.

The execution of the plot left something to be desired. Anastas Mikoyan was aware ofKhrushchev’s scheming, but not sensing the gravity of what was happening, began todefend Beria when it was his turn to speak. Malenkov was sent into a panic, either becauseof this lone voice of dissent or out of general nervousness. After Khrushchev demanded thatBeria should be stripped of all of his posts, he jumped the gun and pressed a button beneathhis desk which signaled Beria’s captors to enter the room.

Beria’s bowels must have made the molecular transformation from solid to liquid assoon as he glimpsed the man at the head of the security detail. It was Marshal Zhukov. Ifone can believe Khrushchev, he had merely stumbled across Zhukov in the Kremlin,informed him of the undertaking and obtained his participation and loyalty in this mostsensitive aspect of the coup d’etat. It just might be true, however; apparently the plot to


topple Beria came together in such haste that his captors only had a single gun betweenthem. One can only imagine Beria’s face as the Marshal, who Beria had once gored withthe ferocity of a drunken animal, ordered his tormentor to spread ’em and began to pat himdown. From the corner of his eye, Zhukov spotted a piece of paper on which Beria hadrepeatedly scribbled the single word ALARM, hoping to pass it off his bodyguards for hisrescue. They had already been diverted, however, and were kept preoccupied while Beriawas taken to a secret Red Army bunker in Moscow.

Bulganin’s participation in the coup, along with the revivified Marshal Zhukov’s pres-tige and Khrushchev’s contacts, mobilized the Red Army on the side of the conspirators.Before Beria’s deputies at the MVD could have known what was happening, armouredcolumns poured into Moscow, though there was no need for an ostentatious display. AfterBeria’s arrest, every member of the Presidium came out on the side of the conspirators, justas Khrushchev had predicted. Several of the most loyal members of Beria’s clan in theMVD, including Ivan Serov, also betrayed their patrón.

With the situation apparently under control, Khrushchev was spotted the very next day,watching with delight a production of the Bolshoi Theatre. The subject of that evening’sperformance? A coup d’etat in the making.

Beria Degenerate The Trial of the Henchman55

MONG THE STARTLING “REVELATIONS” made by Sergo Beriaafter Communism’s fall (characterized by historian Vladislav M.Zubok as “this mishmash of absurdities”) was that his father hadbeen murdered immediately after his arrest, and the trial which wasannounced by the press and the 47 volumes which made up the pros-ecutor’s case nothing but an elaborate fabrication. He claimed to haveseen a stretcher bearing a corpse being carried from his father’s home.

At the time he had little opportunity to protest, since he and his mother were also arrestedjust after his father’s downfall.

In direct refutation of Sergo Beria’s claims, Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1994 publishedthree letters written by his father after his arrest which had been found in the Sovietarchives. The letters appear to be authentic, putting to rest still another claim by the hench-man’s devoted son.

In one letter to Malenkov, Beria begins by apologizing for his “particularly grave andinexcusable” behavior toward his former friend (or whatever one chooses to call such amiserly relationship). “I am the guilty party, one hundred percent.” He also admitted his“inadmissable rudeness and insolence” toward Khrushchev and Bulganin during the ses-sion at which he was arrested. He further characterized his behavior at various times as idi-otic and “overly familiar.” He recalled Khrushchev at the Presidium meeting swearing atBeria “strongly and furiously, which I wholeheartedly accept,” denied trying to haveBulganin fired, and concluded with a plea to Malenkov to save his life (without doing sodirectly) and give him any job, anywhere, no matter how lowly.

The Trial of theHenchman

CHAPTER ELEVEN :

He confessed to the assassination of eminent Partymembers, the distribution of seditious pamphlets,embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets,sabotage of every kind… He confessed that he hadmurdered his wife, although he knew, and his ques-tioners must have known, that his wife was still alive.


Such letters had little effect, and were probably not even read. It may be alluring toimagine Beria being tortured—certainly some of his victims were not beyond wishing fortheir revenge—but there’s no evidence thathe was. A confession from the man whohad beaten so many out broken men in hisday was not necessary for what they hadin mind.

The conspirators kept Beria underheavy guard in preparation for a trial.Before the trial could commence, however,the Presidum presented their case to theParty. Beria may have been the most hatedman in the Soviet Union by some esti-mates, but he was still a man who hadhovered at the periphery of supremepower for fifteen years, subject of his ownpersonality cult in the Caucasus, withstreets, schools and other edifices blessedwith his name.

Each of the conspirators took turnsdenouncing Beria at the July plenum,before passing the microphone on to morerecent converts. Mikoyan, the only mem-ber at the session of the Presidium todefend Beria, joined in the hate fest. So toodid the man who must have loved Beriabest of all of his colleagues, Azeri Partychief Mir Jafar Bagirov, who had workedby his side as his loyal deputy for morethan 30 years.

With the Party won over, the purgebegan in earnest. Georgia, as one mightexpect, was heavily purged (for the thirdtime in half a dozen years). The officialsthat Beria recalled from jail to the centralcommittee returned behind bars, with theknowledge that their verdict this time wasfinal. While the methods employed inGeorgia and the Caucasus were not pleasant, arrest and execution was the exception ratherthan the rule. Of some three thousand officials in Georgia purged after Beria’s downfall,most were subject only to losing their Party membership cards—a virtual guarantee ofpoverty, but a rather lenient reprisal by Stalinist standards, or Beria’s.

On December 17, 1953, Beria’s trial was announced in the press, to begin the next day.

“Dear Georgi, I am seeking your understand-ing, since you know me better than the others…Of course, after what has happened, I shouldbe called strongly to account, put in my place,and dressed down so that I would remember ituntil the end of my life… Send me wherever youwish, to any kind of work, one most insignifi-cant [sic]. See me out, I will be able to work tenmore years and I will work with all my soul andcomplete energy. I am saying this from the bot-tom of my heart, it is not true that since I helda prominent post I would not be able to per-form a small one… Comrades, please excusethat I write somewhat disjointed and badly as aresult of my disposition and because of thepoor light and the absence of my pince-nez.”

Lavrenti Beria to Georgi Malenkov, July 1, 1953


He was standing in the dock with six accomplices, making it a virtual trial of Beria’s clanrather than the man personally (the others were Vladimir Dekanozov; Bogdan Kobulov;Sergei Goglidze, the official who had protected Beria when Yezhov tried to arrest him;Pavel Meshik; Lev Vlodzimirsky; and Vsevolod Merkulov, who had written a lengthy “con-fession” in late July, this one doubt pulled out of him under torture).

Aside from not dealing at all with Beria’s true crimes—which Khrushchev, Molotov,Malenkov and the others had taken part in—the body which heard the case was probablyillegal under the Soviet constitution. Beria was judged by a special military tribunal; he andothers from the spy services had been granted military ranks during the war but had neverserved under their jurisdiction. Presiding over the trial was a panel led by Marshal IvanKonev. This was hardly fair, given the seething hatred the military had for Beria, but Partymeetings were not the only proceedings in the Soviet Union whose verdicts were decided inadvance.

Under the law, neither Beria nor any counsel were supposed to be present during thetrial, though they were. It’s not clear why the conspirators, eager to do away with Beria asquickly as possible, permitted this. However, a military tribunal’s verdict was final, and notsubject to appeal. This, of course, was followed to the letter.

Some of the charges against Beria were that he had used the MVD to seize power (withthe intention of “restoring capitalism,” of all things); that he had spied for both theMusavat government in Azerbaijan as well as the Mensheviks in Georgia; that he had per-secuted Sergo Ordzhonikidze and other “Old Bolsheviks,” and so on. The trial lasted fromDecember 18th through the 23rd, with the predictable sentence handed down and carriedout on the final day.

Among the interesting, if uncorroborated, stories to surface in the years after the SovietUnion’s demise was the account of one Hizhnyak Gurevich, who claims to have been oneof Beria’s guards as well as his executioners. Interviewed by Mark Franchetti for the Times(UK) in 1998, Gurevich stated that Beria was sent to the secret military bunker in Moscowas the official reports had it, where he was housed for six months (which is also in concordwith the official story). He said Beria had at first behaved petulantly, hurling food againstthe wall and such, but eventually mellowed and adjusted to life interrupted. Gurevichclaimed that his commanding officer had issued orders to the effect Beria was to be shotimmediately if the bunker were attacked, a sign that the conspirators were not overconfi-dent about the unlikelihood of a counter-coup.

A bit of a sentimentalist, Gurevich said he had written three times to Sergo Beria toinform him of his father’s last days, but Sergo never responded. Gurevich claimed that Beriawas set before a firing squad. Major General Pavel Batitsky, chief of staff of the Soviet airforce, shot first, followed by the others. Gurevich was charged with taking Beria’s remainsto the Donskoy Crematorium, and scattered the ashes into a fan.

It was a fitting end—the body obliterated, not a trace remaining—for the man who per-secuted Nestor Lakoba beyond the grave.


ONE OF THE SIX accomplices at his trial survived Lavrenti Beria’sdeath. While the sickeningly vicious purges of Stalin’s epoch mayhave ended, there was no mercy to be shown to his lieutenants asBeria’s clan was torn to pieces.Beria himself had bagged the first corpse of his clan when he arrest-

ed Lavrenti Tsanava, one of his old Mingrelian cronies. Tsanava,whose complaints about the mass of Polish POWs had led to the mas-

sacres in and around Katyn, was universally reviled as a sociopath in service of the state;he may have somehow betrayed Beria during the opening salvos of the Doctor’s Plot. Beriasent him to prison shortly after Stalin’s death, though no one knows why. Khrushchev’sgroup seems to have forgotten about him, since his name was rarely mentioned in most ofthe printed denunciations of the “Beria clique.” He allegedly committed suicide in prisonon October 12, 1955.

Avksentii Rapava and Nikolai Rukhadze were shot in 1955, officially charged with thepersecution of the “Old Bolsheviks” in Georgia.

Mir Bagirov had been sacked as the godfather of Azerbaijan, after probably settingsome kind of endurance record as the head of a republic in the Soviet Union. After a seriesof obscure assignments he was arrested and tried in April 1956, and executed immediate-ly thereafter. His name resurfaced at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961 when Khrushchevaccused Malenkov, Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich of protecting Bagirov as a pretext forKhrushchev to purge his fellow conspirators from the Party.

Nina Beria served a year in prison for no other crime than being married to a monster.After her and Sergo Beria’s release, they were forcibly prevented from returning toMoscow. They settled in Ukraine, where Nino died on July 7, 1991. Sergo died in October2000, four months after his motion to vindicate his father as a “victim of Communism”was quashed by the Russian Supreme Court.

Beria Degenerate Evil, Trash & History59

AVRENTI BERIA IS THE ultimate posterboy for “trash history.” Hislife, by any culture’s moral or any objective standard, was totallywithout meaning. He accomplished absolutely nothing save destruc-tion, including his contribution to the project to develop the mostdestructive weapon in the history of mankind. Several generationslater, whole segments of the population in Kazakstan—those unfor-tunate enough to live in what Beria callously considered a “low-pop-

ulation area”—continue to suffer from the effects of the atomic blasts in the area. In asense, and aside from the shadows of men who emerged from the gulag in shattered frag-ments, Beria continues to kill more than fifty-one years after his own demise.

One does not want to draw caricatures in place of real men—but what to do when acartoon of a scheming, bloody spook is the most accurate portrait? Even the “real” pho-tographs of Beria were touched up by artists trained in this most perverse form of “SocialistRealism” before they were released. A handful of men who encountered Beria were able toadmire his efficiency and officious manner over his brutality and appetite for cruelty,though no one ever praised his humanity.

It’s not incorrect to say that Beria was a creature of Stalinism. But Stalinism in its usualmanifestation promoted the desk murderer and the ruthless overseer above more “colour-ful” figures. When Beria gathered for the usual Roman brunch with Stalin’s inner-circle, hewas surrounded by other men who had snuffed out thousands of lives by a stroke of thepen. Stalin ensured such complicity was spread among his cohorts, as in the case of Katyn.But Beria was the only one present who could write a scholarly thesis distinguishing the dif-ferent types of screams people make when subjected to different kinds of torture. There is

Evil, Trash, andHistory

POSTSCRIPT :

Beria Degenerate Evil, Trash & History60

ample evidence that he not only ordered mass murder from the confines of his comfy chair,but took part in the process, personally, for his own amusement. That he was inflictingunbearable pain on men far more accomplished and talented than himself was a perversepleasure; to bring down the mighty to one’s own level was, after all, one of Communism’sbest selling points to the masses.

For the last sixty years, intellectuals have attempted to “explain” evil, to look for themoment when a Hitler or a Beria experienced the intense internal rupture which permittedthe conscienceless crimes which followed. Beria is a special case. Unlike most Nazi andCommunist true believers, he was totally ignorant of the Party’s esoteric tomes, much lessthe ideological justification for specific “amendments” made by Lenin and Stalin. Faith hadlittle to do with his transgressions of humanity. Right-wing moralists and other cheappoliticians might linger over the Soviet Union’s disavowal of God and attribute Beria’s pro-fane existence to the logical result of a nation adrift without some sort of Mosaic moralcompass. But that doesn’t seem satisfying either.

Amateur psychiatrists have speculated that Stalin, Hitler, and others among of the 20thCentury’s greatest mass-murderers were clinically insane. Toward the end of their respec-tive lives, that rings true enough. Perhaps the detachment from reality that comes frombeing a president-for-life with a controlled press and subordinates licking your boots is anoccupational hazard of dictatorship. But if Stalin was mad, Beria was not. He, and the restof the commissars that duked it out after their leader’s death were merely servants ofStalin’s madness.

And for the mass murder of millions of men, there were thousands, perhaps hundredsof thousands of individual killers. It seems a debasement of every human instinct to suggestthat the murderer of one is less culpable than the murderer of millions, but few, if any, paida price for the crimes of the Stalin era (or those which came before and after). As the maincog in the Stalinist death machine, Beria bore an awesome responsibility for what hap-pened. It’s impossible to feel sorry for him, even if it’s lamentable that the entirety of theSoviet hierarchy wasn’t issued a handgun and two bullets. One they could use on theirgreatest enemy, for one last bit of personal satisfaction. The other they could use on them-selves.

Beria Degenerate Suggestions for Further Reading61

There is only one biography of Lavrenti Beria in English—Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant,by Amy Knight. The book suffers in large part (through no fault of the author) as SergoBeria’s fantastic claims were circulating but not yet discarded at the time of its publicationin 1993. Knight’s narrative is often confusing however, with discursive detours from Beria’sown life which appear neither illuminating nor especially interesting. She also has the some-what annoying habit of referring to important personages only by their initials, such as “M.Bagirov” or “L. Vlodzimirsky.”

Four primary sources however are very useful, if they all require some caution.Khrushchev Remembers is the title of the future First Secretary’s memoir, translated by,oddly enough, the future Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration,Strobe Talbott. His time in office, coupled with that of Condoleeza Rice, should result inKremlinologists being forever prohibited from ever making the jump to political officeagain. Khrushchev’s The Last Testament serves as a supplement to the first volume.Svetlana Alliluyeva’s Twenty Letters to a Friend appears to be out of print (so much forrespect for yesterday’s idols). Milovan Djilas’ Conversations with Stalin was published inthe West in 1962, for which its author was sentenced to a jail term by his former comrades-in-arms in Yugoslavia. Djilas edited many passages of Conversations with Stalin for use inhis final book, The Fall of the New Class. Where there was a substantial divergencebetween the two (most of his changes were for style rather than content), I’ve quoted fromthe latter.

Of recent works, Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread is an entertaining read, though noth-ing said there had not been said before. Roy Medvedev’s work, on the other hand, isextraordinary: his Unknown Stalin is among the best books ever written about Stalin andhis inner circle. The Court of the Red Czar, by Simon Montefiore, is also worth reading.

I am deeply indebted to Mark Irkali for providing me with translations from his copi-ous archive of Georgian books and articles, and would have named him co-author of thispiece if modesty hadn’t prevented him from accepting. Of particular use were articles fromLiteraturuli Sakartvelo from 1988 to 1992, particularly the interview with Molotov pub-

Suggestions for Further Reading

Beria Degenerate Suggestions for Further Reading62

lished on October 27, 1989.Numerous books which mention Beria or the purges were published from the 1940s

onward, and range from vapid to incisive. Terror and Communist Politics, edited byJonathan Adelman, is certainly useful. Less so is Robert Conquest’s Inside Stalin’s SecretPolice, which though published in 1985 and filled with interesting information is poisonedby the author’s utter inability to write a page of coherent and provocative prose. ReinhardGehlen’s “unmasking” of Bormann as a Soviet spy is in The Service, which is probablyshelved forever on account of Gehlen’s notorious translator, David Irving.

The quotes preceding each chapter are of course from 1984. While Orwell’s novel hasnothing in particular to do with Lavrenti Beria, the time spent by the reader in the dystopiaof Oceania is probably the closest those who never lived under a totalitarian system willcome to experiencing life contorted into tragic absurdity.

Cali RuchalaOctober 2004

Beria

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