Beria, Lavrenti P.

Beria, Lavrenti P. (1899–1953),a Georgian by birth who was, after Stalin, the most feared man in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. He had joined the Bolsheviks in the revolutionary period and became a member of the secret police at the end of the Russian civil war. Having risen through the police ranks, he was transferred to the highest party offices in Georgia in 1931 and in the Transcaucasus as a whole in 1932. Stalin brought him to Moscow to head the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (or NKVD) from 1938; he was consequently in charge of the country's security apparatus. It is true that, under his auspices and at Stalin's command, the Great Terror did not rage in full spate. But Beria was no ‘moderate’ nor was his tenure of office marked by moderation in the techniques of keeping law and order. The labour camps (see GUlag) retained their millions of starved slave-labourers; and citizens who had their freedom learned to walk in fear of the NKVD.

Beria was responsible for the incursion of security troops into the areas incorporated into the USSR in 1939–40: eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, southern Finland. In all instances there were hundreds of thousands of arrests. Beria's functionaries were instructed to regard the administrative, cultural, and military élites with extreme suspicion. The arrest and summary mass execution of Polish army officers in Katyń forest was but one among many examples of his grisly handiwork. In his private life, too, he was a moral reprobate. He is said to have married his wife only after forcibly abducting her, and to have ordered his associates to kidnap very young women off the street for his sexual gratification. He also interrogated and beat prominent purge victims in person. Among the generals in the 1940s the shorthand for being arrested and beaten up was ‘having coffee with Beria’.

His position as Stalin's confederate was enhanced with the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA). Beria was appointed to the State Committee of Defence at its formation in June 1941. Oversight of security remained his main function. The deportations of nationalities thought suspect by Stalin—Chechens, Kalmucks, Crimean Tatars, and Volga Germans—were handled by him. His men also intimidated the High Command with sporadic arrests. It was in the Second World War, moreover, that Beria assumed a role outside the NKVD. In particular, he was charged by Stalin with making the abortive overture via the Bulgarian envoy to Hitler in quest of a separate peace with Germany in July 1941.

As the Red Army's successes mounted in 1943–4, Beria not only tightened the regime's grip on the armed forces but also redeployed the instrumentalities of the purges in the reincorporated regions of the USSR. After the campaign crossed into non-Soviet territory he recruited and trained communist-dominated bodies which, when communist regimes were established, were turned into local security apparatuses subject to his direction in Moscow. He was moved by Stalin at the end of the war from direct control of the secret police, but his influence with it endured since his protégé Viktor Abakumov was appointed in his place. Beria, while ingratiating himself with Stalin, became ever friendlier with Georgy Malenkov (1902–88), who was widely regarded as Stalin's favourite to succeed him; and Stalin showed much hostility to Beria in 1951–2.

Only Stalin's death removed the threat to Beria. But Beria's own lunge at power was thwarted, and he paid for the hatred he had incurred for so keenly purging military commanders in wartime, when his arrest was effected with the help of the high command in June 1953. He was executed in December.

Robert Service

Bibliography

Knight, A. Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (Princeton, 1994)