Lavrentiy Beria: Stalin's 'Right Hand Man', Serial Murderer, Prolific Rapist, Absolute Monster.

In the tumultuous tapestry of 20th-century Soviet history, few figures cast as sinister a shadow as Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. Born on March 29, 1899, in Merkheuli, Beria's ascent through the ranks of Stalin's regime was marked by Machiavellian actions and unspeakable atrocities.

Like Stalin, Beria was Georgian and was fondly referred to by Stalin as ‘my Himmler’. His involvement in revolutionary activities commenced during his adolescence, with a swift ascent to power culminating in his leadership of the secret police in Georgia by his twenties. It was here that he oversaw the ruthless purges of the 1930s, earning a reputation for his unyielding brutality.

In 1938, Beria's trajectory propelled him to Moscow, where he assumed the role of deputy to Nikolai Yezhov, colloquially known as 'the blood-thirsty dwarf,' who headed the Soviet secret police. Following Yezhov's demise, orchestrated at Stalin's behest and purportedly at Beria's instigation, Beria ascended to the pinnacle of power within the secret police apparatus.

Beria's tenure at the helm of the Soviet network of slave-labor camps was marred by his notoriety for sadistic acts of torture and his depraved predilection for rape and violence against women and young girls. Bald and bespectacled, by the time of Stalin's demise in 1953, Beria had become one of the most reviled figures in the nation.

Beria was a bad person, in almost every conceivable way. As one of Stalin's chief enforcers, he played a pivotal role in orchestrating some of the most heinous atrocities of that era. Yet, he exhibited no hint of remorse or shame regarding his zealous pursuit of his mission. “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,” he once promised.

Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.

- Lavrentiy Beria

For an extensive period, Beria occupied the position of chief within the NKVD, Stalin's infamous secret police force. Under his command, the NKVD spearheaded the harrowing purges of the 1930s, consigning countless politicians, writers, scientists, peasants, and everyday citizens to the grim confines of jail cells, torture chambers, and untimely death. Nikita Khrushchev looked back in his memoirs, “Everyone lived in fear in those days. Everyone expected that at any moment there would be a knock on the door in the middle of the night and that knock on the door would prove fatal.” In June 1937 Beria delivered a speech which certainly supports Khrushchev’s analysis of the time.

"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.”

- Lavrentiy Beria

Even preceding the early 1920s, Beria spearheaded the repression of a Georgian nationalist uprising, resulting in the execution of up to 10,000 individuals, exemplifying what would later be acknowledged as "Bolshevik ruthlessness." He served as the driving force behind the expansion of the extensive network of over 500 forced labour camps famously known as the "Gulags."

One former prisoner Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko summed it up perfectly, “The Gulags existed before Beria, but he was the one who built them on a mass scale. He industrialised the Gulag system. Human life had no value for him.”

Stalin possessed a grim understanding of Beria's cold and amoral disposition. During a significant World War Two conference with Allied leaders, the dictator introduced Beria to President Roosevelt as "our Himmler," a reference that bore chilling resonance given Beria's sanguinary track record and proficiency in lethal logistics.

Throughout the war, Beria remained an active participant in enforcing Stalin's iron-fisted rule over the populace. It also witnessed his involvement in one of the most egregious atrocities amidst a conflict rife with them. It is often overlooked that in September 1939, it was not solely Hitler who invaded Poland. Stalin, emboldened by a non-aggression pact with Germany, similarly launched an invasion just weeks later from the east. Consequently, Poland found itself caught in the middle between two lunatics.

Brutality and mercilessness weren't hallmarks adopted solely by the Nazis, thousands of Polish troops were rounded up by the Russian forces and confined in camps, anxiously awaiting their fate. Little did they anticipate the horror that awaited them: utter annihilation at the hands of their Russian captors. Referred to as the Katyn Massacre, due to the discovery of one of the significant burial sites in the Katyn Forest, this egregious act of mass murder targeting Polish prisoners of war was directly orchestrated by Beria in 1940. Beria forwarded a memo to Stalin proposing the execution of the prisoners, citing them as a potential threat to the newly established Soviet regime in Poland. As a result, 22,000 soldiers, doctors, priests, and others met their demise.

The USSR initially attributed the Katyn Massacre to the Nazis, persisting in this denial of responsibility for the atrocity for decades. It wasn't until as late as 1990 that the Soviet Union officially acknowledged and condemned the involvement of the NKVD in carrying out the killings, as well as the subsequent cover-up orchestrated by the Soviet government.

During 1941, Beria initiated yet another purge, this time targeting the Red Army. More than 500 NKVD agents and a staggering 30,000 Red Army officers met their demise. To grasp the magnitude of this figure, it's essential to note that it constituted the loss of three out of five marshals and fourteen out of sixteen army commanders. The Red Army high commanders had a phrase they had for being purged which was "going to have coffee with Beria".

The Death Of Stalin

Beria openly expressed his elation when Stalin, revered as a formidable deity-like figure within the Soviet Union, passed away from a cerebral haemorrhage in March 1953.

In Khrushchev’s memoir he described, Beria as “spewing hatred” and “mocking” Stalin as he was incapacitated and slowly dying. Upon Stalin's eventual passing, It was plain to see that Beria’s ecstatic, and thus began his manoeuvring for the top job.

"Beria was more treacherous, more practiced in perfidy and cunning, more insolent and single-minded than my father. in a word, he was a stronger character.."

- Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva

Beria seemed perfectly positioned to take over the top job — his ally, Georgy Malenkov, ascended to the role of supreme leader, and Beria's extensive dossier of incriminating information on his adversaries, amassed during his tenure as chief of the secret police, seemingly granted him significant leverage. However, fate had other plans. Malenkov proved to be a feeble leader, swiftly eclipsed by Khrushchev — the unlikely contender who managed to derail Beria's ambitions in a stunning turn of events.

According to the most widely embraced narrative, the pivotal moment occurred during an ostensibly routine gathering in June 1953 when Khrushchev unexpectedly launched accusations against Beria, branding him a traitor to the Soviet Union and even insinuating his collaboration with British intelligence. in short order, Beria's fellow officials joined the chorus, culminating in a surreal uprising punctuated by the sudden arrival of soldiers to apprehend him. As one rendition recounts, Beria was left stunned and filled with dread by this unforeseen onslaught — a reaction entirely warranted.

In 1953 Beria stood trial, it had became apparent to all that he had committed numerous rapes during his tenure as NKVD chief. Historian Simon Montefiore explained that the evidence from the trial "reveals a sexual predator who used his power to indulge himself in obsessive depravity". After his death, charges of rape and sexual abuse were disputed by people close to Beria, including his wife Nina and his son Sergo.

According to the testimony of Colonel Rafael Semyonovich Sarkisov and Colonel Sardion Nikolaevich Nadaraia – two of Beria's bodyguards – on warm nights during the war, Beria was often driven around Moscow in his limousine. He would point out young women that he wanted to be taken to his dacha, where wine and a feast awaited them. After dining, Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them.

His bodyguards reported that their duties included handing each victim a flower bouquet as she left the house. Accepting it implied that the sex had been consensual; refusal would mean arrest. Sarkisov reported that after one woman rejected Beria's advances and ran out of his office, Sarkisov mistakenly handed her the flowers anyway. The enraged Beria declared, "Now, it is not a bouquet, it is a wreath! May it rot on your grave!" The NKVD arrested the woman the next day.

The testimony of Sarkisov and Nadaraia has been partially corroborated by Edward Ellis Smith, an American who served in the US embassy in Moscow after the war. According to historian Amy Knight, "Smith noted that Beria's escapades were common knowledge among embassy personnel because his house was on the same street as a residence for Americans, and those who lived there saw girls brought to Beria's house late at night in a limousine."

Women also submitted to Beria's sexual advances in exchange for the promise of freedom for imprisoned relatives. In one case, Beria picked up Tatiana Okunevskaya, a well-known Soviet actress, under the pretence of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead he took her to his dacha, where he offered to free her father and grandmother from prison if she submitted. He then raped her, telling her, "Scream or not, it doesn't matter". In fact, Beria knew that Okunevskaya's relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag, which she survived.

Stalin and other high-ranking officials came to distrust Beria. In one instance, when Stalin learned that his then-teenage daughter, Svetlana, was alone with Beria at his house, he telephoned her and told her to leave immediately. When Beria complimented Alexander Poskrebyshev's daughter on her beauty, Poskrebyshev quickly pulled her aside and instructed her, "Don't ever accept a lift from Beria". After taking an interest in Voroshilov's daughter-in-law during a party at their summer dacha, Beria shadowed their car closely all the way back to the Kremlin, terrifying Voroshilov's wife.

Before and during the war, Beria directed Sarkisov to keep a list of the names and phone numbers of the women that he had sex with. Eventually, he ordered Sarkisov to destroy the list as a security risk, but Sarkisov retained a secret copy. When Beria's fall from power began, Sarkisov passed the list to Viktor Abakumov, the former wartime head of SMERSH and now chief of the MGB – the successor to the NKVD. Abakumov was already aggressively building a case against Beria. Stalin, who was also seeking to undermine Beria, was thrilled by the detailed records kept by Sarkisov, demanding: "Send me everything this asshole writes down!"

In 2003, the Russian government acknowledged Sarkisov's handwritten list of Beria's victims, which reportedly contains hundreds of names. The victims' names were also released to the public in 2003.

Evidence suggests that Beria also murdered some of these women. In 1993, construction workers installing streetlights unearthed human bones near Beria's Moscow villa (now the Tunisian embassy). Skulls, pelvises and leg bones were found. In 1998, the skeletal remains of five young women were discovered during work carried out on the water pipes in the garden of the same villa. In 2011, building workers digging a ditch in Moscow city centre unearthed a common grave near the same residence containing a pile of human bones, including two children's skulls covered with lime or chlorine. The lack of articles and the condition of the remains indicate that these bodies were buried naked. According to Martin Sixsmith, in a BBC documentary, "Beria spent his nights having teenagers abducted from the streets and brought here for him to rape. Those who resisted were strangled and buried in his wife's rose garden." Vladimir Zharov, head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Moscow's State University of Medicine and Dentistry and then the head of the criminal forensics bureau, said a torture chamber existed in the basement of Beria's villa and that there was probably an underground passage to burial sites.

Additionally, an American report from 1952 quoted a former Muscovite as having "learned from one of Beria's mistresses that it was Beria's habit to order various women to become intimate with him and that he threatened them with prison if they refused."

He was imprisoned and eventually put on trial in December of 1953 for a number of heinous crimes, including treason and terrorism, with his role in the purges being highlighted. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, and – if the recollections of his executioner are to be believed – he did not meet his fate bravely.

His executioner’s wife later told the media that, just before being shot dead, Beria had “implored him for mercy, grovelling on his knees”. The executioner had bluntly responded by saying, “In all that you have done, so loathsome, mean and nasty, can you not find enough courage in yourself to accept your punishment in silence?”

All the evidence points to Beria being a monster. However, it was an era rife with monsters, and many of Beria's contemporaries were likewise entangled in various forms of brutal violence. What's particularly intriguing about Beria is the paradoxical inclination he displayed towards steering Russia towards a more liberal path. Despite being Stalin's infamous henchman, had he ascended to power, he could have potentially emerged as a peacemaker and reformer akin to Gorbachev in the 1980s.

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