Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (Georgian: ლავრენტი ბერია, Lavrenti Pavles dze Beria; Russian: Лаврентий Павлович Берия; 29 March, 1899 – 23 December, 1953) was a Soviet politician and chief of the Soviet security and police apparatus.

Beria is now remembered chiefly as the executor of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, even though he actually presided only over the closing stages of the purge. He was in charge of the Katyn executions, where over 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia were murdered.

Beria was most influential during and after World War II and immediately after Stalin's death, when he carried out a brief campaign of liberalization as First Deputy Prime Minister. However, in June 1953 he was arrested and then charged with various crimes. In December 1953 he was tried, sentenced to death and executed.

Beria, an ethnic Mingrelian, was born the son of Pavel Khukhaevich Beria, a peasant, in Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in the Abkhazian region of Georgia, which was then part of Imperial Russia. He was educated at a technical school in Sukhumi and joined the bolsheviks in March 1917 while an engineering student in Baku.

In 1919 Beria worked in the security service of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.

In 1920 or 1921 (accounts vary) Beria joined the Cheka - the original secret police force of the Bolsheviks. At that time, a Bolshevik revolt took place in the Menshevik-controlled Democratic Republic of Georgia and the Red Army subsequently invaded. The Cheka was heavily involved in the conflict, which resulted in the defeat of the Mensheviks and the formation of the Georgian SSR. By 1922, Beria was deputy head of the Georgian branch of Cheka's successor, the OGPU.

In 1924, he led the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising, after which up to 10,000 people were executed. For this display of "Bolshevik ruthlessness" Beria was appointed head of the "secret-political division" of the Transcaucasian OGPU and was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

In 1926, Beria became head of the Georgian OGPU and was introduced to fellow Georgian Joseph Stalin, becoming an ally in Stalin's rise to power within the Communist party and the Soviet regime. Some historians, however, claim that he was more henchman than ally, working to further his own cause by wooing Stalin in order to gain access to the inner circles of the Soviet regime.

Beria was appointed secretary of the Communist party in Georgia in 1931, and for the whole Transcaucasian region in 1932. He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1934. During this time he began to attack fellow members of the Georgian Communist party, particularly Gaioz Devdariani, who was the Minister of Education of the Georgian SSR; Beria ordered the killing of both of Devdariani's brothers - George and Shalva - who held important positions in the Cheka and the Communist party respectively. Eventually, Gaioz Devdariani was charged with violating Article 58 for alleged counter-revolutionary activities and was executed in 1938 by the orders of the NKVD troika. Even after moving on from Georgia, Beria continued to effectively control the republic's Communist party until it was purged in July, 1953.

By 1935, Beria was one of Stalin's most trusted subordinates. He cemented his place in Stalin's entourage with a lengthy oration titled, "On the History of the Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia" (later published as a book), which rewrote the history of Transcaucasian Bolshevism, emphasizing Stalin's role in it. When Stalin's purge of the Communist party and government began in 1934, after the assassination of Sergey Kirov, Beria ran the purges in Transcaucasia, using the opportunity to settle many old scores in the politically turbulent Transcaucasian republics. In June, 1937, he said in a speech, "Let our enemies know that anyone who attempts to raise a hand against the will of our people, against the will of the party of Lenin and Stalin, will be mercilessly crushed and destroyed".

In August, 1938, Stalin brought Beria to Moscow as deputy head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the ministry which oversaw the state security and police forces. Under Nikolai Yezhov, the NKVD embarked on the Great Purge - the large scale oppression and persecution of millions of people throughout the Soviet Union who were perceived to be "enemies of the people". By 1938, however, the oppression had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure, economy and even the armed forces of the Soviet state, prompting Stalin to wind the purge down. In September, Beria was appointed head of the Main Administration of State Security (GUGB) of the NKVD, and in November he succeeded Yezhov as NKVD head (Yezhov himself was executed in 1940). The NKVD itself was then purged, with half its personnel replaced by Beria loyalists, many of them from the Caucasus.

Although Beria's name is closely identified with the Great Purge due to his activities while deputy head of the NKVD, his leadership of the organisation marked an easing of the repression. Over 100,000 people were released from the labour camps and it was officially admitted that there had been some injustice and "excesses" during the purges, which were blamed on Yezhov. Nevertheless this liberalisation was only relative: arrests and executions continued and in 1940, as war approached, the pace of the purges again accelerated. During this period Beria supervised the deportations of people from Poland and the Baltic states following the occupation of those regions by Soviet forces.

In March, 1939, Beria became a candidate member of the Communist party's Politburo. Although he did not become a full member until 1946, he was already one of the senior leaders of the Soviet state. In 1941 Beria was made a Commissar General of State Security, the highest quasi-military rank within the Soviet police system of that time.

In February, 1941, he became Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, and in June, following Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, he became a member of the State Defence Committee (GKO). During World War II he took on major domestic responsibilities, using the millions of people imprisoned in NKVD labour camps for wartime production. He took control of production of armaments and (with Georgy Malenkov) aircraft and aircraft engines. This was the beginning of Beria's alliance with Malenkov, which later became of central importance.

In 1944, as the Germans were driven from Soviet soil, Beria was in charge of dealing with the various ethnic minorities accused of collaboration with the invaders, including the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans. All these were deported to Soviet Central Asia. (See "Population transfer in the Soviet Union".)

In December, 1944, Beria's NKVD was assigned to supervise the Soviet atomic bomb project. In this capacity he ran the successful Soviet espionage campaign against the atomic weapons programme of the United States, which enabled the Soviet Union to obtain the technology required to build and test a bomb in 1949. However his most important contribution was to provide the necessary workforce for this project, which was extremely labour-intensive. The Gulag system provided tens of thousands of people for work in uranium mines and the construction and operation of uranium processing plants, as well as the construction of test facilities such as those at Semipalatinsk and on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago. The NKVD also ensured the necessary security and secrecy of the project.

In July, 1945, as Soviet police ranks were converted to a uniform military system, Beria's rank was converted to that of Marshal of the Soviet Union. Although he had never held a military command, Beria, through his organisation of wartime production, made a significant contribution to the Soviet Union's victory in World War II.

With Stalin nearing 70, the postwar years were dominated by a concealed struggle for the succession among his lieutenants. At the end of the war the most likely successor seemed to be Andrei Zhdanov, party leader in Leningrad during the war, then in charge of all cultural matters in 1946. Even during the war Beria and Zhdanov had been rivals, but after 1946 Beria formed an alliance with Malenkov to block Zhdanov's rise.

In January 1946 Beria left the post of the head of the NKVD, while retaining general control over national security matters from his post of Deputy Prime Minister, under Stalin. The new head, Sergei Kruglov, was not Beria's protégé. In addition, by the Summer of 1946, Beria's loyalist Vsevolod Merkulov was replaced by Viktor Abakumov as head of the MGB. Kruglov and Abakumov then moved expeditiously to replace the security apparatus leadership with new people outside of Beria's inner circle, such that very soon Deputy Minister of MVD Stepan Mamulov represented the only remnant of it outside foreign intelligence, on which Beria kept a grip. In the following months, Abakumov started carrying out important operations without consulting Beria, often working in tandem with Zhdanov, and sometimes on Stalin's direct orders. Some observers argue that these operations were aimed---initially tangentially, but with time more directly---at Beria.

One of the first such moves was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair that commenced in October of 1946 and eventually led to the murder of Solomon Mikhoels and the arrest of many other members. The reason this campaign had negatively reflected on Beria was that not only did he champion creation of the committee in 1942, but his own entourage included a substantial number of Jews.

Zhdanov died suddenly in August 1948, and Beria and Malenkov then moved to consolidate their power with a purge of Zhdanov's associates known as the "Leningrad Affair". Among the more than 2,000 people executed were Zhdanov's deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov, the economic chief Nikolai Voznesensky, the Leningrad Party head Pyotr Popkov and the Prime Minister of the Russian Republic, Mikhail Rodionov. It was only after Zhdanov's death that Nikita Khrushchev began to be considered as a possible alternative to the Beria-Malenkov axis.

Zhdanov's death did not, however, stop the anti-Semitic campaign. During the postwar years Beria supervised the establishment of Soviet-style systems of secret police, and hand-picked the leaders, in the countries of the Eastern Europe. A substantial number of these leaders were Jews. Starting in 1948, Abakumov initiated several investigations against these leaders, which culminated with the arrest in November of 1951 of Rudolf Slánský, Bedřich Geminder, and others in Prague, who were generally accused of Zionism and cosmopolitanism, but, more specifically, of using Czechoslovakia to funnel weapons to Israel. From Beria's standpoint, this charge was extremely explosive, because massive help to Israel was provided on his direct orders. Altogether, 14 leaders of Czechoslovakia, 11 of them Jewish, were tried, convicted, and executed in Prague (see Prague Trials). (Similar investigations have concurrently proceeded in Poland and other Soviet satellite countries.)

Around that time, Abakumov was replaced by Semyon Ignatiev, who further intensified the anti-Semitic campaign. On January 13, 1953, the widest anti-semitic affair in the Soviet Union—that later came to be known as Doctors' plot—was initiated with an article in Pravda. A number of the country's prominent Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning top Soviet leaders and arrested. Concurrently, an hysterical anti-Semitic propaganda campaign sprang in the mass-media. Altogether, 37 doctors (17 of them were Jewish) were arrested, and MGB, on Stalin's orders, started to prepare for the deportation, or worse, of the entire Jewish population to Russia's far east.

Days after Stalin's death, Beria freed all the arrested doctors, announced that the entire matter was fabricated, and indeed arrested the MGB functionaries directly involved. The anticipated deportation of Jews never took place.

Early in the 1950s, Stalin's growing mistrust of Beria echoed in the Mingrelian Affair in which many of Beria's protégés were purged in the Georgian SSR, resulting in the decline of Beria's power in his native republic.

Stalin died on March 5 1953, four days after collapsing during the night following a dinner with Beria and other Soviet leaders. The political memoirs of Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, published in 1993, claim that Beria boasted to Molotov that he had poisoned Stalin. The story about murder of Stalin by Beria associates was elaborated by Russian writer Edvard Radzinsky in his book Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents From Russia's Secret Archives, based on interviews of a former Stalin's body guard, published memories, and other data. There is also evidence that for many hours after Stalin was found unconscious, he was denied medical help. It is possible that all the Soviet leaders agreed to allow Stalin, whom they all feared, to die.

After Stalin's death Beria was appointed First Deputy Prime Minister and reappointed head of the MVD, which he merged with the MGB. His close ally Malenkov was the new Prime Minister and initially the most powerful man in the post-Stalin leadership. Beria was the second most powerful leader and, given Malenkov's lack of real leadership qualities, was in a position to become the power behind the throne and ultimately leader himself. Khrushchev became Party Secretary, which was seen as a less important post than the Prime Ministership.

Beria was at the forefront of liberalization after Stalin's death. Beria publicly denounced the Doctors' plot as a "fraud," investigated and solved the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, and effectuated an amnesty that freed over a million non-political prisoners from forced labour camps. In April he signed a decree banning the use of torture in Soviet prisons.

He also signalled a more liberal policy towards the non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union. He persuaded the Presidium (as the Politburo had been renamed) and the Council of Ministers to urge the Communist regime in East Germany to allow liberal economic and political reforms. Beria maneuvered to marginalize the role of the party apparatus in the decision-making process in policy and economic matters.

Some writers have held that Beria's liberal policies after Stalin's death were a tactic to maneuver himself into power. Even if he was sincere, they argue, Beria's past made it impossible for him to lead a liberalizing regime in the Soviet Union, a role which later fell to Khrushchev. The essential task of Soviet reformers was to bring the secret police under party control, and Beria could not do this since the police were the basis of his own power. Curbing Stalin's gross and often irrational excesses was, after all, only common sense.

Others have argued that he had represented a truly reformist agenda, and that his eventual removal from power delayed a radical political and economic reform in the Soviet Union by almost forty years.

Given his record, it is not surprising that the other party leaders were suspicious of Beria's motives in all this. Khrushchev opposed the alliance between Beria and Malenkov, but he was initially unable to challenge the Beria-Malenkov axis. Khrushchev's opportunity came in June 1953 when demonstrations against the East German Communist regime broke out in East Berlin (see Workers Uprising of 1953 in East Germany). There was a suspicion that the practical Beria was willing to trade the reunification of Germany and the end of the cold war for massive aid from the United States such as had been received in World War II. The East German demonstrations convinced Molotov, Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin that Beria's policies were dangerous and destabilising to Soviet power. Within days of the events in Germany, Khrushchev persuaded the other leaders to support a party coup against Beria; even Beria's principal ally Malenkov abandoned him.

Accounts of Beria's fall vary considerably. According to the most recent accounts Khrushchev convened a meeting of the Praesidium on June 26, where he launched an attack on Beria, accusing him of being in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas in my trousers?" Molotov and others then also spoke against Beria, and Khrushchev put a motion for his instant dismissal. Malenkov then pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They immediately burst in and arrested Beria.

Beria was taken first to the Moscow guardhouse ("gauptvakhta") and then to the bunker of the headquarters of Moscow Military District.

Defence minister Nikolai Bulganin ordered Kantemirovskaya Tank Division and Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division to move into Moscow in order to prevent any possible attempts of Internal Troops loyal to Beria to rescue him.

Beria's henchmen such as Vsevolod Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, Sergey Golgidze, Vladimir Dekanozov, Pavel Meshik, Lev Vlodzimirskiy were also arrested.

Pravda announced Beria's arrest only on July 10, crediting it to Malenkov and referring to Beria's "criminal activities against the Party and the State." In December it was announced that Beria and six accomplices, "in the pay of foreign intelligence agencies," had been "conspiring for many years to seize power in the Soviet Union and restore capitalism."

Beria and his henchmen were tried by a special session ("Spetsialnoye Sudebnoye Prisutstvie") of the Supreme Court of the USSR with no defense counsel and no right of appeal. Marshal Ivan Konev was the chairman of the court.

Beria was found guilty of:

1) treason; It was alleged, without any proof, that "up to the moment of his arrest Beria maintained and developed his secret connections with foreign intelligence services". In particular, attempts to initiate peace talks with Hitler in 1941 through the ambassador of Bulgaria were classified as treason, it was not mentioned that Beria was fulfilling the orders of Stalin and Molotov in this respect. It was also alleged that Beria, who in 1942 was involved in the organisation of the defence of the North Caucasus, tried to let the Germans occupy the Caucasus. There were also allegations that "planning to seize power, Beria tried to obtain the support of imperialist states at the price of violation of territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and transfer of parts of USSR's territory to capitalist states". These allegations were due to Beria's suggestion to his assistants that in order to improve foreign relations it is reasonable to transfer Kaliningrad Oblast to Germany, part of Karelia to Finland and Kuril Islands to Japan.

2) terrorism; Beria's order to execute 25 political prisoners in October 1941 without trial was classified as an act of terrorism.

3) counterrevolutionary activity during Russian Civil War; In 1919 Beria worked in the security service of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, he maintained that Hummet party which subsequently merged with the Adalat Party, the Ahrar Party and Baku Bolsheviks to establish the Azerbaijan Communist Party gave him such an assignment.

4) rape; Beria was found guilty in the rape of a 16-year old girl in 1949.

Beria and all the other defendants were sentenced to death. When the death sentence was passed, according to Moskalenko's later account, Beria begged on his knees for mercy, but he and his subordinates were immediately executed on 23 December 1953. (See Citizen Kurchatov documentary for more details on his death). Apparently his body was cremated.

However, according to other accounts including his son's, Beria's house was assaulted on 26 June 1953, by military units and Beria himself was killed on the spot. A member of the court which tried Beria, Nikolay Shvernik, has subsequently allegedly told Beria's son that he had never seen Beria alive.

Beria's wife and son were sent to exile to Sverdlovsk. They were released in 1964; his wife Nina died in 1991 in exile in Ukraine, his son Sergo died in October 2000 still defending his father's reputation. After Beria's death the MGB was separated from the MVD and reduced from the status of a Ministry to a Committee (known as the KGB), and no Soviet police chief ever again held the kind of power Beria had wielded.

In May 2000 the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused an application by members of Beria's family to overturn his 1953 conviction. The application was based on a Russian law that provided for rehabilitation of victims of false political accusations. The court ruled, however, that "Beria was the organizer of repression against his own people, and therefore could not be considered a victim". However, the Supreme Court found Vladimir Dekanozov, Pavel Meshik and Lev Vlodzimirskiy guilty of abuse of authority, instead of crimes against the state, and the sentence for them was posthumously changed from death to 25 year imprisonment.

Charges of sexual assault and sexual sadism against Beria were first made in the speech by a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikolay Shatalin, at the Plenary Meeting of the committee on July 10, 1953, two weeks after Beria's arrest. Shatalin said that Beria had had sexual relations with numerous women and that he had contracted syphilis as a result of his sex with prostitutes. Shatalin referred to a list (supposedly kept by Beria's bodyguard) of over 25 women with whom Beria had sex. Over time, however, the charges became more dramatic. Khrushchev in his posthumously published memoirs wrote: "We were given a list of more than 100 names of women. They were dragged to Beria by his people. And he had the same trick for them all: all who got to his house for the first time, Beria would invite for a dinner and would propose to drink for the health of Stalin. And in wine, he would mix in some sleeping pills..." Afterwards he would drop off his charge and the chaffuer would give them a boquet of flowers. One pregnant victim, having refused his advances, was accidentally given the flowers. On noticing Beria shouted "it's not a boquet, it's a wreath. May they rot on your grave" She was later arrested.

By the 1980s, the sexual assault stories about Beria included the rape of teenage girls. The author Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, who wrote a biography of Beria, mentions in an interview a specific sexual game Beria is said to have forced upon young girls before picking one of them to be raped. This alleged practice got the name "Beria's Flower Game". Numerous stories have circulated over the years involving Beria personally beating, torturing and killing his victims. Since the 1970s, Muscovites have been retelling stories of bones found in either the back yard, cellars, or hidden inside the walls of Beria's former residence, currently the Tunisian Embassy. Such stories continue to re-appear in the news media. The London Daily Telegraph reported in December 2003: "The latest grisly find—a large thigh bone and some smaller leg bones—was only two years ago when a kitchen was re-tiled. In the basement, Anil, an Indian who has worked at the embassy for 17 years, showed a plastic bag of human bones he had found in the cellars." Such reports are denied by the people close to Beria, such as his son Sergo Beria and former Soviet foreign intelligence chief Pavel Sudoplatov.

*History of the Soviet Union *List of Georgians

* Antonov-Ovseenko, Anton, Beria, Moscow, 1999 (in Russian) * Avtorkhanov, Abdurahman, The Mystery of Stalin's Death, Novyi Mir, #5, 1991, pp. 194-233 (in Russian) * Beria, Sergo, Beria: My Father, London, 2001 * Knight, Amy, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant, Princeton University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-691-03257-2 * Khruschev, Nikita, Khruschev Remembers: Last Testament, Random House, 1977, ISBN 0-517-17547-9 * Rhodes, Richard, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb<I>, Simon and Schuster, 1996 ISBN 0-684-82414-0 * Stove, R. J., <i>The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims, Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2003). ISBN 1-893554-66-X * Sudoplatov, Pavel, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness - A Soviet Spymaster, Little Brown & Co, 1994, ISBN 0-316-77352-2 * Sukhomlinov, Andrei, "Kto Vy, Lavrentiy Beria?", Moscow, 2003 (in Russian), ISBN 5-89935-060-1 * Wittlin, Thaddeus. Commissar: The Life and Death of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, The Macmillan Co., New York, 1972. * Yakovlev, A.N., Naumov, V., and Sigachev, Y. (eds), Lavrenty Beria, 1953. Stenographic Report of July's Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Other Documents, International Democracy Foundation, Moscow, 1999 (in Russian). ISBN 5-89511-006-1

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* Benjamin B. Fischer, <a class="externalLink" href="https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/winter99-00/art6.html">"The Katyn Controversy - Stalin's Killing Field"</a> *Photocopy of Beria's letter to Stalin to execute Katyn officers prisoners *Official site of the Memorial to Katyn *Interview with Sergo Beria *An outline of the Russian Supreme Court decision of [[29 May] 2000] *Annotated bibliography for Lavrenty Beria from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues * Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Current Intelligence. The Reversal of the Doctors' Plot and Its Immediate Aftermath, 17 July 1953. * Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Current Intelligence. Purge of L.P. Beria, 17 April 1954. * Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Current Intelligence. Summarization of Reports Preceding Beria Purge, 17 August 1954.