Leader
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria · 1899–1953
Official photograph. Wikimedia Commons.
Beria stabilized the organs after Yezhov by releasing some prisoners and arresting others. He is also the best-documented sexual predator in the leadership, which his colleagues were willing to say out loud only after Stalin was dead.
Origin and religion
Born in Merkheuli, Abkhazia, to a Mingrelian family, a Georgian subgroup with its own language. Rose through the Caucasus Cheka. NKVD chief from 1938.
Mingrelian Georgian, Orthodox cultural background. Atheist.
Responsibilities
- First secretary of the Georgian party, then NKVD chief from 1938
- Deputy premier
- Overseer of the atomic project’s police side
As NKVD chief he ran the wartime deportations of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachays, and others. He sat on the State Defense Committee. He supervised the labor behind parts of the Soviet bomb project.
The record
After Stalin’s death the surviving bosses arrested him. At the closed proceedings in December 1953 they charged him with treason and with rape and abduction. The treason charges are political. The sexual crimes are corroborated by testimony collected for that case and by later biographical research (Amy Knight; Simon Sebag Montefiore). He was shot on 23 December 1953.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.