Lavrentiy Beria – The Most Evil Man in Soviet History Documentary-ZZ

During the birth of Soviet Russia, holding office  as a politician was a dangerous occupation.

One man, known for his ruthlessness and brutal  enforcement, served as a key member of the Stalin administration, leaving behind him a wake of death  and destruction, which earned him the epithet, ‘The Architect of Terror’.

Although he was a man  of modest origins, he would soon rise to become one of the most powerful figures in the USSR, a  position he attained through his cunning and his use of brutal force.

However, he was not immune  to the red terror that was the Soviet Union, and his eventual fate would be dictated by the  political turmoil which followed the death of Josef Stalin, one of the 20th century’s most  ruthless dictators.

He would eventually pay for his crimes with his life, at the behest of the  communist leadership in Russia.

The man’s name, Lavrentiy Beria, the longest serving  head of the Russian secret police.

The man known to history as Lavrentiy Pavlovich  Beria was born on the 17th of March 1899, in the village of Merkheuli, near Sukhumi, in present  day Georgia, which was then part of the Russian Empire.

He was born into a land-owning family  within the Abkhazia region.

His father was Pavel Khukhaevich Beria, of Mingrelian ethnic origin,  a people native to Georgia and the south Caucasus and considered distinct from other ethnicities  in the region.

His mother was Marta Jaqeli of the Jaqeli family, who belonged to the feudal House of  Dadiani in Western Georgia and who were related to the Princes of Mingrelia.

Marta was a widow and  had another son prior to marrying Beria’s father, with whom she had another three children.

She was  known as a pious woman who was heavily influenced by the Georgian Orthodox Church, and as such had  strong ties within the local religious community, something that she also instilled in her children.

Beria grew up as a peasant in an area that was influenced considerably by the Romano-Byzantine  and Romano-Greek worlds, rather than the Slavic, Russo, Turkish, or Persian traditions of  neighbouring regions.

He was said to have had a full brother born to both his parents, and  yet according to the Russian government, he had only one sister, Anna who was deaf, and two nieces  who were dependent upon him, suggesting perhaps that his brother had either died, or else he no  longer maintained a close relationship with him.

In high school, Beria successfully   studied maths and the natural sciences, and while  there, he was given the nickname ‘detective’, due apparently to his skill in retrieving stolen  items for pupils and teachers.

He was also accused however of hiding the items himself, perhaps  to manipulate others into believing in his good nature, displaying at a young age, an ability to  manipulate the emotions of others.

He graduated from the Baku Polytechnical School for Mechanical  Construction in 1919, where he was viewed as a mediocre student.

He later claimed that he had  become politically active after joining the Bolshevik cause in 1917 whilst still a student.

In  1919 at the age of 20, he gained a position within the security service of the Azerbaijan Democratic  Republic, and the state surveillance operations that he carried out, marked the beginning of his  ascent into the upper tiers of Russian government.

It was said that Beria did not share the same  Marxist-Leninist ideology as his comrades, but he nonetheless became a supporter of Stalin’s  regime, perhaps in part because they were both raised in Georgia, something that the Russian  dictator may later have seen as an asset, since they were the only senior members of  the Soviet government from that republic.

His increasing political activity came at  a time of growing instability across Europe following the trauma of the first world war, and  the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires, the redrawing of borders and  the emergence of new nations.

Closer to home, there had been growing discontent in Russia  at the ineffective rule of Tsar Nicholas II, and memories of the horrific Russian losses in  the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 to 1905 were still fresh.

The war had been initiated by the Tsar  himself in the face of Japan’s imperial expansion in Asia.

At a planned peaceful demonstration  in January 1905, the Tsar’s officers fatally wounded participants in what became known as the  Bloody Sunday Massacre, which took place close to the Winter Palace, Tsar Nicholas’ residence in St.

Petersburg.

This incident led to unrest throughout the remainder of 1905, with peasants, workers  and military personnel all rebelling against the ruling-classes.

Then in 1906, a Russian  parliament, the Duma, was formed under a new Russian constitution, which gave greater rights  to commoners.

However, the Tsar had ceded only a nominal amount of power in order to shore up  his weakening empire and he still wielded a great deal of authority.

Surrounded by corrupt  and incompetent advisers, the people found the situation too much to tolerate.

Tsar Nicholas  II abdicated in February 1917 ending centuries of rule by the Romanovs.

Russia descended into  civil war, with Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik’s overthrowing a provisional government later that  year and establishing a socialist regime.

The Bolsheviks ultimately emerged victorious and the  Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, was formed in December 1922.

Russia was a difficult country to govern,  due to the size of the empire and the wide range of nationalities and ethnicities,  each with their own regional traditions, thus preventing an overarching Russian national  identity to emerge, and so unity as a nation, proved difficult to achieve.

At the time of  Beria’s birth, Georgia had become a hotbed of political activity.

However, despite being  a client state of it’s more mighty northern neighbour, it largely favoured a transition  from an autocracy to democracy.

Following the Bolshevik parliamentary coup of 1917, Georgia  had refused to recognise the new regime, and two years after the October Revolution, the  country remained in an unpredictable situation regarding the issue of the sovereignty of Russia  over Georgia.

It faced political intervention from both the Kemalism movement in post-Ottoman  Turkey, and from Bolshevism in Russia, which Georgia saw as a threat to its autonomy,  and had even lost the coastal port of Batumi for a short period to the Turks.

In the wake of the  German-Russo pact which followed in 1918, Georgia and the rest of Transcaucasia, was left alone to  arrange their own political affairs but they were now vulnerable to the volatility of regional power  politics, and so in that same year, Georgia joined the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic,  a geo-political agreement that included its southern neighbours, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The  entity had been created to strengthen the region, yet the Republic only lasted a month, due to  disunity between the three countries.

Georgia claimed its autonomy on the 26th of  May 1918, the first time in 116 years that the country had been fully independent, with the  Social Democratic Mensheviks being the politically dominant party in the country.

The Menscheviks  favoured land reform, whilst also retaining the national identity of the country, and avoiding a  revolution similar to the one which had occurred in Russia to the north.

Despite dispersing  pockets of resistance across the country, and engaging in the Georgian-Armenian War, Georgia  was ultimately unable to prevent itself from being consumed by the massive Russian state.

Despite Russia’s recognition of Georgia as a  country in 1920, Stalin led the Bolsheviks in invading the small Eurasian state in 1921, which  resulted in Georgia losing the sovereign status it had briefly held, and transforming it into  a new Soviet constituent, known as the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.

At that time Bolshevik  domination in Russia became supreme.

Vladimir Lenin had emerged as the founding father of Soviet  Russia, and the Communist Party had moved to arrange the assassination of the Romanov family.

In 1922, Lenin and the man who would eventually succeed him, Josef Stalin disagreed on the fate  of the Transcaucasian state, in what became known as the Georgian Affair, with the former  suggesting that Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia should become semi-independent within the Russian  Soviet, whilst Stalin and Beria wished to fully incorporate the region into Russia itself.

In May of 1922, Lenin suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and although he remained  active politically, he did not retain the power needed to run the state at the same level that  he had done previously.

During the latter part of that year, Stalin became the General Secretary  of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, officially taking over as the new leader of the  Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

By this time, Lenin had suffered two strokes, with a third  occurring in March 1923, and although there had been a positive prognosis after a slight recovery,  he died on the 21st of January, 1924, leaving behind a new Russian landscape that was to last  until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Beria’s life mirrored the confusion of the times.

By 1920, Beria was no longer an undercover agent and had begun working for the Baku Customs House  in Azerbaijan.

In April that year the Red Army captured the city and he was arrested.

With  the support of his contemporaries, the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Bolsheviks, saved  Beria from execution when he faced charges of spying on the ruling party, even though it was  not uncommon for junior members of the movement to be asked to spy on their enemies, and so this  may have confirmed his innocence in the eyes of the party.

While he was in prison, he formed a  romantic connection with his cellmate’s niece, Nina Gegechkori who was 17 at the time and  a trained scientist, and the two eloped on a train once Beria was released.

They would marry  in 1921 and have a son together called Sergio who later became a writer.

Back in Georgia he was soon arrested again, this  time alongside the entire Georgian Bolshevik Central Committee, for spying on the Menshevik  government and for setting up secret contacts with enemy politicians.

He was subsequently released  into exile, with instructions to leave Georgia within three days, but Beria refused and remained  in Tbilisi taking on a secret identity and working for the Russian Embassy.

Around this time, he  enlisted in the Cheka, the first Bolshevik secret police organisation, and he became the deputy  head of the Georgian branch of the organisation in 1922.

In 1924, during the Georgian nationalist  uprising he played a role in the arrest and execution of an estimated ten thousand political  opponents of the Russians.

To end the rebellion, Beria had advised the political prisoners that  they should inform their counter-revolutionaries to abandon their objectives, and put down their  weapons, so the mass executions of their comrades would come to an immediate end, but his promises  would not be kept and armed raids soon followed, wiping out entire civilian communities.

He was  awarded the Order of the Red Banner for what was seen as his ruthless efficiency and made the head  of the political division of the Transcaucasian OGPU, the successor to Cheka.

Georgia subsequently  became a Soviet Socialist Republic.

Beria became the head of the Georgian OGPU in 1926, which  facilitated his association with the communist leader and fellow Georgian Josef Stalin.

Beria, now began to provide security details to the communist party leader Josef Stalin, as  he travelled more frequently to Georgia, allowing their personal relationship to grow.

In 1925 both  Stalin and Beria became caught up in controversy, when the leader of the Transcaucasian Cheka, also  a proud Trotskyist, Solomon Mogilevsky, and two senior officials, died in a plane crash, following  the detonation of an explosive device, on the aircraft in which they were travelling.

Rumours  suggested that Mogilevsky had information on Beria and Stalin, that could effectively harm their  political reputations, but a resulting internal investigation cleared both of their names,  and they would escape unpunished, due to the inadequate evidence linking them to a crime that  even prominent Soviet politician, Leon Trotsky, did not believe they were responsible for.

At  the time of the incident, Trotsky had reported, that there had been three anti-Stalinist officials  on the way to visit him, and it was possible that Beria and Stalin took the opportunity, to  eliminate the opposition, Beria also using this as a chance not only for promotion but also  to forge a deeper relationship with his superior.

Beria impressed Stalin, and soon he   joined the Joint State Political Directorate under  the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, overseeing the Georgian region.

As his power grew  he began to attract unwanted attention and was increasingly viewed with suspicion, often disliked  by those around him.

By 1927, almost ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Beria was promoted  to a position on the Georgian Central Committee, continuing to fight anti-state terrorism, and even  punishing civilians for what was termed “national chauvinism”, when expressing nationalistic  traditions, inconsistent with the communist government’s stance.

By virtue of his position  as an intelligence agent, Beria had considerable leverage and an easy route to the Russian capital.

This was evident in his correspondence with the prominent Communist Party official, Grigory  Ordzhonikidze, to whom he passed on illicit information about his once trusted colleagues,  after growing wary of their intentions.

In 1931, Beria became head of the Joint State  Police Directorate, a position he achieved by muscling out his opposition, giving him the  ability to keep close tabs on any information that may have harmed him, often shutting down  investigations before they could tarnish his image.

Stalin also made him second secretary of  the Georgian Communist Party Central Committee and of the Transcaucasian party.

He was soon  hitting the headlines, and was reported on the front page of the Zaria Vostoka newspaper in  Georgia, addressing the country’s collectivisation policies.

During his first appearance as party  chief he blamed the previous leader Lavrenty Kartvelishvili for failing to carry out government  orders, while using the volatile situation, to justify violent measures to overcome his  opposition.

Two and a half weeks later, he once again used his newly acquired position, to call  out former party members, for the under-performing Transcaucasian economy, and he also took the  opportunity to speak about class-vigilance and class-awareness, which he believed was why the  region was doing so poorly.

During his speeches, Beria would speak positively about Stalin,  likely using this as a means of securing a route to the Kremlin, and over the next four  years, proceeded to remove the old-Bolshevik grip on Georgia.

During his term, Beria instigated  further reforms of the Kolkhoz Programme, which was the collectivisation of agriculture in farming  communities, including the political suppression of the better off farmers, known as Kulaks,  and anyone else opposing Bolshevism, sending at least 335 Kulak families into exile, whilst also  equalizing workers’ wages.

It is clear that Beria achieved some of his objectives using devious  tactics, and he soon forced Soviet Politician, Mamia Orakhelashvili, out of his job, as the Chief  of the Transcaucasian Party, and then offered him a transfer to Moscow, to take a demotion, as the  Deputy Chief of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism.

During this period, Beria assumed Orakhelashvili’s  job, and soon took control of the Georgian party leadership in 1934, and once again began  overseeing the entire South Caucasus region, while he continued to work on his next  promotion, a move to the Kremlin in Moscow.

In 1937, Beria was responsible for carrying out  the purge of the Georgian NKVD secret services, where up to 17 high-ranking officials were tried  and executed for being part of an underground anti-Bolshevik movement, associated with  Polikarp Mdivani, who was responsible in part, for the anti-Stalinist movement in Transcaucasia.

Noticing his leadership style and ruthlessness, in 1938 Stalin appointed Beria as a Deputy member  of the Russian secret police, also known as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, later,  the KGB, due to his meticulous planning skills, and execution of government led operations.

Beria also played a major role in Stalin’s political purge, when approximately 40% of the  ruling elite were killed by Stalin’s agents, with only 35% of party members surviving to old  age, or dying of illness, making it safe to say that Beria enjoyed greater freedom within the  party, than his contemporaries.

And yet he soon found himself on the NKVD hit list and only  survived by asking for Stalin’s forgiveness.

The Great Purge also saw the persecution of  public figures such as scientists, engineers, and police officers, who did not follow the state’s  extremist ideology, even extending the wrath of the red terror to ethnic persecution, when the  Politburo directed their operations to Bulgaria,   Macedonia, and Afghanistan, amongst others.

By December 1938, Beria was made leader of the NKVD, upon the demise of his predecessor and  general commissar, Nikolay Yezhov.

In the wake of Stalin’s purge, and through the influence of  Beria himself, Yezhov was removed from office and executed in February 1940 due to his  alleged counter-revolutionary activities, which implicated his family members and close  associates.

Perhaps the most high-profile assassination to occur under Stalin and Beria,  was the August 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, who was exiled to Turkey in 1929, and  later relocated with his wife to Coyoacan, in Mexico City where, under armed-guard, the  architect of the Russian Revolution and close ally of the late Lenin, was murdered by Spanish  communist and NKVD officer, Ramón Mercader.

In 1941, Beria became the second most-powerful man  in Russia, when he was made Deputy Prime Minister, and he soon became infamous for  his involvement in kidnappings,   rape and torture.

He was often referred to as “our  Heinrich Himmler” by the Russian dictator himself, comparing him to the leader of the German Nazi  group, the Gestapo, even introducing him to U.

S.

President Franklin D Roosevelt in this manner,  during their diplomatic conference in November of 1943.

As Beria rose to prominence, testimony by  labour camp prisoners, recounted that Gulags had existed before Beria’s arrival, but expanded  significantly under his direction, hence, his comparison to Himmler of the Nazi party,  as well as his fierce and hostile reprisals, in response to those who dared to oppose  Leninist and Stalinist traditions in Russia.

In 1938, Russia had again entered into conflict with Japan after they extended their control onto  mainland Asia in Mongolia.

They were soon forced to retreat in 1939, and entered into a Treaty with  the Russians, forcing Japan to temporarily abandon their imperialist objectives.