Lavrenty
Beria was born in Merkheuli, Russia, on 29th March, 1899.
He joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and
was active in Georgia during the October
Revolution.
After the
revolution Beria joined the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for
Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka).
He eventually became head of the Peoples Commissariat for Internal
Affairs (NKVD) in Georgia.
In 1938
Joseph Stalin brought Beria to Moscow
and appointed him to serve under Nikolai Yezhov,
the head of the NKVD. Soon afterwards Yezhov
was arrested and Beria replaced him.
With the
murder of Leon Trotsky in 20th August,
1940, all the leading figures involved in the Russian
Revolution were dead except for Joseph
Stalin. Of the fifteen members of the original Bolshevik
government, ten had been executed and four had died (sometimes in
mysterious circumstances).
The armed
forces suffered at the hands of Beria and the NKVD.
It has been estimated that a third of all officers were arrested.
Three out of five marshals and fourteen out of sixteen army commanders
were executed.
Beria prospered
under Joseph Stalin and he became a member
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In February, 1941,
he became deputy prime minister and in 1946 joined the Politburo.
After the
death of Joseph Stalin in March, 1953,
Beria attempted to replace him as dictator of the Soviet Union. He
was defeated by a group lead by Nikita
Khrushchev, Vyacheslav Molotov and
Georgy Malenkov. Beria was arrested
and accused of conducting "anti-state activities. Lavrenty Beria
was found guilty and was executed on 23rd December, 1953.
Beria
with Stalin and his daughter, Svetlana.
(1)
Milovan
Djilas,
Conversations With Stalin (1962)
Beria was also a rather
short man-in Stalin's Politburo there was hardly anyone taller than
himself. He, too, was somewhat plump, greenish, and pale, and with
soft damp hands. With his square-cut mouth and bulging eyes behind
his pince-nez, he suddenly reminded me of Vujkovic, one of the chiefs
of the Belgrade Royal Police who specialized in torturing Communists.
It took an effort to dispel the unpleasant comparison, which was all
the harder to forget because the similarity' extended even to his
expression - a certain self-satisfaction and irony mingled with a
clerk's obsequiousness and solitude. Beria was a Georgian, like Stalin,
but one could not tell this at all from the looks of him. Georgians
are generally bony and dark. Even in this respect he was nondescript.
He could have passed more easily for a Slav or a Lett, but mostly
for a mixture of some sort.
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