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Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant
This is the first comprehensive biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's notorious police chief and for many years his most powerful lieutenant. Beria has long symbolized all the evils of Stalinism, haunting the public imagination both in the West and in the former Soviet Union. Yet because his political opponents expunged his name from public memory after his dramatic arrest and execution in 1953, little has been previously published about his long and tumultuous career.
338 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1993
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October 23, 2021
Amy Knight's biography of Beria, who Stalin referred to as his Himmler, was written at a transitional point in the historiography of the Soviet imperium between the Cold War history created out of guesswork and propaganda and the post-perestroika opening up of Russian archives.
It is an excellent book in that context. Beria the man is not very interesting. He is the type of the intelligent corporate psychopath who helps keep complex and otherwise chaotic systems in place but Beria as part of the construction of a unique form of totalitarian governance is fascinating.
The weakness of the book is that Knight still had to rely on a number of very unreliable 'testimonies' (whether Khrushchev's, Svetlana Alliluyeva's, Sergo Beria's and many others) for lack of data at key periods and still cannot entirely escape the preconceptions of 'her side' in the 'war'.
This can, however, be put to one side to a considerable degree because she was able to access important original research in the Soviet archives that added considerably to our picture of how the Soviet regime operated and the undoubted crimes perpetrated to ensure its survival.
She was perhaps one of the first to demonstrate that the Soviet regime could not be reduced to the tyranny of one man (Stalin), any more than you could explain national socialism by reference only to the Fuhrer. It was also a system with surprising stability of personnel between purges.
Similarly she argues cogently for Beria as an eventual reformer along the lines of Andropov when he was able to acquire serious power, arguing, though this is not quite demonstrated, that both men could see the flaws in the Soviet system precisely because of their intelligence role.
The first 'discovery' has tended to be confirmed as the years have gone by. Men like Kaganovitch or Malenkov were not mere cyphers but exercised, alongside others, a form of collective leadership centred on intermediation between party and state that operated independently of Stalin.
Stalin would, of course, have the last word, could trigger decisive policy change, could remove anyone at any time, demanded total loyalty as head of state and party and would play people off against each other but the system was run by a surprisingly stable collective after the 1930s.
Beria entered this collective as one of the 'new men' after the purges of the 1930s had destroyed the potential for a collective in which Stalin was only one member rather than ultimate arbiter. He was rapidly positioned as one of the top two or three - in charge of state security and so much else.
He entered as a loyal brute who had shown his mettle in handling purges in Transcaucasia (notably Georgia, Stalin's original homeland), first against Menshevik resistance to Bolshevik rule and then those designed to consolidate Stalin's power. He knew how to handle 'intellectuals'.
During these years he established what can only be described as a propensity towards 'evil', not merely doing the corporate psychopath's job of implementing what his boss wanted but exceeding instructions to (by all acounts) satisfy private Georgian vendetta claims and sexual desires.
The book is limited on the context for the criminality which is down to the necessity for authority to be not too choosy about the sort of men it would make use of in meeting political and ideological needs and then turning a blind eye to their methods. Success was what counted.
Beria was successful. Transcaucasia was turned from a potential centre of insurrection against central authority into a secure asset valuable as centre of the oil industry, barrier to Turkey geostrategically and, of course, as no threat to the reputation of the Georgian-origin Soviet leader.
The rest of the story is one of Beria's rise to power and dramatic fall in Moscow as he solved practical problems - including the creation and oversight of Russia's equivalent to the Manhattan Project - until he 'got too big for his boots'.
Whether he was instrumental or not in the curious story of Stalin's death by medical neglect or not, his shift from problem-solving under policy direction to becoming a policy-maker for six months alienated the 'collective' (or at least part of it) that succeeded Stalin.
For a brief period (the comic film 'The Death of Stalin' is, of course, a travesty of history even if it is very very funny) Beria pursued policies related to East Germany, Yugoslavia, the West and economic reform as well as the nationalities question that undermined 'collective' orthodoxy.
Knight seems to think that Beria redeemed himself somewhat (though not too much) by adopting policies that would have brought the Soviet Empire into more alignment with Western norms but that is the special pleading of an American academic.
The truth is that the Soviet Union still saw itself in an existential struggle for survival based on ideological positions for which huge amounts of blood had been spilled. Beria was beginning to threaten the consensus in a way that might create a 'split in the ruling order'.
Led by Khruschev, whose nerve at taking on the monster with his security state resources, must be regarded as courageous, a faction of the 'collective' persuaded the rest to collaborate in a 'coup' that would result in Beria's swift arrest and extra-judicial (to all intents and purposes) murder.
Khruschev had at his disposal a closer connection to the Party and brought the military into play as well as greater Russian feeling at the risks of letting loose the nationalities and weakening control of Eastern Europe in the middle of the Cold War.
The American view was and seems to be (if Knight can represent the post-Cold War present) that Beria got what he deserved but for the wrong reasons and that he should have been tried and shot for his murderous role in the transcaucasian and subsequent purges and the Gulag.
The list of crimes is tremendous - the deportation of peoples, purgation by quotas dictated by Stalin personally, the murders of the Polish elite (of which Katyn Wood is the one that we are all aware of), extra-judicial arrests and executions. To that extent, the 'Americans' are right.
The 'collective' post-Stalinist leadership were also no angels and were all complicit in the events of the 1930s and toleration of the Gulag slave labour system (very similar to Himmler's) so their list of crimes charged against Beria carefully avoided that era.
However, we can say that, although Beria should have been charged with all those crimes in any decent and stable society and that some of the charges against Beria invented by the Kruschev gang were absurd, the deeper substance of the charge against Beria was probably correct.
For Knight, the destruction of the Soviet system looked inevitable because of what happened in 1991. Therefore, the centrifugal tendencies of the empire looked equally inevitable because that is what happened in stages after the fall of Ceaucescu and the Berlin Wall.
But that is not how it looked in 1953 and it might have been reasonable to believe that centralised authority could deliver the economic goods under communism in peace time after the destruction of revolution, civil war, consolidation of power and invasion.
Beria's position on the nationalities question (especially given his own favouritism to his Mingrelian minority group and the ambiguity of his quasi-nationalist-communist approach to transcaucasia), then on East German reform, might have looked very threatening.
It might have suggested a major new policy turn. Much as Trotsky had promoted the export of revolution in one direction, Beria might have been suggesting in some eyes a complete abandonment of the revolution in favour of a collective of national communisms.
We have to remember the time scales here. The great purges took place only two decades after the revolution (that is, the time from now to the Millennium) and Stalin's rule ended only 36 years after it. In other words, people could still remember a time before communism.
Communism was extremely vulnerable to memory, especially nationalist memory carried through family or clan lines. Think of South Yorkshire communities still nursing grudges over pit closures today. The regime was not actually as secure as the totalitarian narrative likes to make us believe.
There is not enough information in this particular book to make a judgement here but it is fatal, in our view, to assume any inevitabilities in the trajectory of history because the final fall of the Soviet Empire was to be more complex than a simple failure to 'reform'.
Perhaps we should look more at an unintended consequence of the Khruschev coup - the introduction of the military into Soviet politics alongside party and executive. This shifted expenditures into a wasteful military-industrial complex and economic promises were not met.
Knight's book is already thirty years' old and a great deal of work has been done since but it remains an excellent starting point for an understanding of the Soviet system (almost certainly flawed and doomed from inception) through the biography of one of its leading figures.
The research into Beria's network within the Soviet security apparat. The close attention to its origins within Georgia is exemplary and builds a picture of a totalitarian security system that managed to be simultaneously oppressive and chaotic.
Overall, the biography continues to contain many of the unfortunate prejudices of American historiography but it remains an achievement in outlining the reality of the psychopathic exercise of 'corporate' power in the Soviet Union and something of the complexity of its ruling system.
The 'Soviet experiment' was a disaster but a disaster constructed out of the incompetence of the previous Tsarist regime and of the 'bourgeois' revolutionaries who succeeded it, compounded by the insistence of Western interests in interfering and creating a siege mentality.
It was a tragedy of epic proportions as a new ideological elite seemed to have no alternative for their survival than Chekist terror and the employment of ruthless 'new men' to enforce its will while trying to maintain the administrative capability to defend the country and feed the people.
Beria was a creature of this system - a ruthless and rather vile opportunist of undoubted natural intelligence, hard-working, socially skilled, manipulative and ambitious. He is a symbol of the moral degradation that inevitably follows from inherent system weakness.
For the point here is that all this terror and totalitarianism designed to show strength was actually a sign of an inherently weak regime that had no room for manouevre if it was to survive. The only existential alternative to its survival at all costs was its total destruction.
When it crashed in 1991, it crashed because of that inherent weakness and Beria's 'reforms' would simply have crashed it earlier. Maybe it would have been good if Beria had crashed it but only if you assume that what would have replaced it would have been preferable by then. That is unclear.
September 30, 2021
Despre gangsterii de la Kremlin sau biografia celui de-al doilea georgian din conducerea URSS:
reglări de conturi, cinism, sânge rece, cruzime, amoralitate. Beria a fost unul dintre cei care au întemeiat un ţinut al absurdului, dominat de crimă, groază, suspiciune şi nesiguranţă. Pe drum, şi-a amorţit conştiinţa cu un cocktail ameţitor de privilegii: vile, maşini, amante, mâncăruri rafinate şi alcool scump. Niciunul izbăvitor precum ultimul remediu, glonţul.
reglări de conturi, cinism, sânge rece, cruzime, amoralitate. Beria a fost unul dintre cei care au întemeiat un ţinut al absurdului, dominat de crimă, groază, suspiciune şi nesiguranţă. Pe drum, şi-a amorţit conştiinţa cu un cocktail ameţitor de privilegii: vile, maşini, amante, mâncăruri rafinate şi alcool scump. Niciunul izbăvitor precum ultimul remediu, glonţul.
July 12, 2013
Having just read this, the only book-length biography of Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's most powerful henchman, I wondered if I would have survived in Beria's world. Office politics in the Stalinist USSR was not just about bitching by the water cooler and trying to suck up to the boss (although such elements were also present, writ large). Even surviving in such an environment required degrees of political acumen and sheer nastiness that very few people need to demonstrate in our herbivorous times. Even as an apparatchik reached his goal of near-absolute power (say, Yagoda, Ezhov or Zhdanov) he would find himself subtly undermined. Even as someone was appointed to the Central Committee he would find that key associates carefully placed across the state and party apparatus were being removed to the coziness of the Lubianka or Kolyma.
In this world, which was described quite well by Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter titled "Why the Worst Get on Top", Beria was almost bound to rise (although, for political reasons, Hayek was describing Nazi Germany rather than the USSR). He was a Mingrelian, a minority ethnic group in Georgia, and, like Stalin, he was brought up by his mother after his father's early death. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the political police and eventually managed to become Georgian and then Transcaucasian party boss (he even killed a few competitors in the way). Ezhov's "Great Terror" of 1936-1937 paved the way for a takeover by Beria, who consolidated his position during the war and then by heading the nuclear weapons project. A brilliant manager, who was able to get on well with those he worked with (but who had no compunction about delivering them to their deaths if it served his purposes) he always delivered. Unlike Stalin, he was not interested in praises (although he organised his own personality cult for practical reasons) and was reasonable enough to tell the difference between real enemies and loyal followers. Women were his weakness. Ms Knight, a serious historian, does not indulge her readers with lurid stories about girls picked up in Moscow streets and then killed in the basement of Beria's town house, but she does mention that Beria was treated for siphilis during the War. As Stalin aged, be became more and more deranged and eventually wanted to be rid of Beria and his Mingrelians. Unlike other historians, such as Edvard Radzinsky, the author does not speculate about Beria's possible role in Stalin's demise in March 1953, although she concludes that only this saved Beria from the destiny of many of his predecessors. While Beria's energetic attempts at de-Stalinisation were already known (Beria's lieutenant Pavel Sudoplatov had already mentioned them in his book "Special Operations"), Ms Knight elaborates on how wide-ranging they would have been had Beria succeeded in consolidating his grip on power. Indeed, it is quite possible that glasnost might have come more than 30 years before Gorbachov came to power, and that it would have been implemented from a position of strength rather than one of weakness (in 1953 the Soviet Union was at the top of its power, having succeeded in launching a Hydrogen bomb and having established control over North Korea). German re-unification might have happened in the 1950s rather than the early 1990s, and would have been much less costly and disruptive. On the other hand, it's also possible that Beria might have backtracked after attaining his goal, which was only power for himself. As Ms Knight shows, Beria, like most Soviet politicians had only very slight concern about policies, reserving most of his time and effort for power politics. His downfall was swift, and to be frank, required significant courage from Kruschev and Malenkov. Kruschev comes out of this book (like he did in Volkogonov's Stalin) as a devious henchman who was no less guilty than Beria, but far less able.
It is interesting to see that the downfall of Soviet leaders in the period 1948-1990 was associated with failures to control events in their zones of influence. Beria's downfall started with the breakup of Soviet-Yugoslav relations in 1948 and concluded in 1953, due to demonstrations in Eastern Germany. Kruschev's downfall came in 1964, after he badly miscalculated the risk in transporting nuclear warheads to Cuba. Gorbachov's fall was associated with failure over Germany in 1989. As it was, Kruschov's de-Stalinisation was probably much less comprehensive than Beria's would have been. A nice complement to Ms Knight's book is Sergo Beria's recently published "Beria My Father". One last comment: Ms Knight's book is not for the casual reader. Even for someone who has read Conquest, Pipes, Volkogonov, Radzinsky, Bullock and Ulan it is sometimes difficult to keep straight all the unfamiliar names and party organisations, especially in Transcaucasia. The book would have gained from a few charts illustrating who worked when and where with Ezhov, Beria, Kruschev, Zhdanov or Malenkov. A "power map", with Stalin on top and the various top leaders and their key protegees would also have been useful. If you haven't read much Soviet history you should probably stay clear of this book, as it probably is not the most suitable one for a novice.
Stalin once famously introduced Beria to some Americans as "Our Himmler" (Ms Knight has ommitted this anecdote, and I wonder whether that was because she didn't believe it really happened). If one compares Ms Knight's Beria with, for example, Peter Padfield's Himmler (although his book is clearly much less scholarly than Ms Knight's) one can see that Beria was much more realistic and efficient than Himmler. The correct comparison is between Beria and Heydrich. Had the Third Reich truly been a totalitarian state, Himmler would have gone the way of Yagoda and Heydrich would have been Hitler's Beria. With Goering liquidated during the purges that would have followed, the entire foreign service culled for unreliable elements such as Ambassador Schulenburg and the Wermacht rid of likely conspirators such as Claus von Stauffenberg, it is possible that the War might have ended otherwise. But that's a different subject.
In this world, which was described quite well by Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter titled "Why the Worst Get on Top", Beria was almost bound to rise (although, for political reasons, Hayek was describing Nazi Germany rather than the USSR). He was a Mingrelian, a minority ethnic group in Georgia, and, like Stalin, he was brought up by his mother after his father's early death. He rose rapidly through the ranks of the political police and eventually managed to become Georgian and then Transcaucasian party boss (he even killed a few competitors in the way). Ezhov's "Great Terror" of 1936-1937 paved the way for a takeover by Beria, who consolidated his position during the war and then by heading the nuclear weapons project. A brilliant manager, who was able to get on well with those he worked with (but who had no compunction about delivering them to their deaths if it served his purposes) he always delivered. Unlike Stalin, he was not interested in praises (although he organised his own personality cult for practical reasons) and was reasonable enough to tell the difference between real enemies and loyal followers. Women were his weakness. Ms Knight, a serious historian, does not indulge her readers with lurid stories about girls picked up in Moscow streets and then killed in the basement of Beria's town house, but she does mention that Beria was treated for siphilis during the War. As Stalin aged, be became more and more deranged and eventually wanted to be rid of Beria and his Mingrelians. Unlike other historians, such as Edvard Radzinsky, the author does not speculate about Beria's possible role in Stalin's demise in March 1953, although she concludes that only this saved Beria from the destiny of many of his predecessors. While Beria's energetic attempts at de-Stalinisation were already known (Beria's lieutenant Pavel Sudoplatov had already mentioned them in his book "Special Operations"), Ms Knight elaborates on how wide-ranging they would have been had Beria succeeded in consolidating his grip on power. Indeed, it is quite possible that glasnost might have come more than 30 years before Gorbachov came to power, and that it would have been implemented from a position of strength rather than one of weakness (in 1953 the Soviet Union was at the top of its power, having succeeded in launching a Hydrogen bomb and having established control over North Korea). German re-unification might have happened in the 1950s rather than the early 1990s, and would have been much less costly and disruptive. On the other hand, it's also possible that Beria might have backtracked after attaining his goal, which was only power for himself. As Ms Knight shows, Beria, like most Soviet politicians had only very slight concern about policies, reserving most of his time and effort for power politics. His downfall was swift, and to be frank, required significant courage from Kruschev and Malenkov. Kruschev comes out of this book (like he did in Volkogonov's Stalin) as a devious henchman who was no less guilty than Beria, but far less able.
It is interesting to see that the downfall of Soviet leaders in the period 1948-1990 was associated with failures to control events in their zones of influence. Beria's downfall started with the breakup of Soviet-Yugoslav relations in 1948 and concluded in 1953, due to demonstrations in Eastern Germany. Kruschev's downfall came in 1964, after he badly miscalculated the risk in transporting nuclear warheads to Cuba. Gorbachov's fall was associated with failure over Germany in 1989. As it was, Kruschov's de-Stalinisation was probably much less comprehensive than Beria's would have been. A nice complement to Ms Knight's book is Sergo Beria's recently published "Beria My Father". One last comment: Ms Knight's book is not for the casual reader. Even for someone who has read Conquest, Pipes, Volkogonov, Radzinsky, Bullock and Ulan it is sometimes difficult to keep straight all the unfamiliar names and party organisations, especially in Transcaucasia. The book would have gained from a few charts illustrating who worked when and where with Ezhov, Beria, Kruschev, Zhdanov or Malenkov. A "power map", with Stalin on top and the various top leaders and their key protegees would also have been useful. If you haven't read much Soviet history you should probably stay clear of this book, as it probably is not the most suitable one for a novice.
Stalin once famously introduced Beria to some Americans as "Our Himmler" (Ms Knight has ommitted this anecdote, and I wonder whether that was because she didn't believe it really happened). If one compares Ms Knight's Beria with, for example, Peter Padfield's Himmler (although his book is clearly much less scholarly than Ms Knight's) one can see that Beria was much more realistic and efficient than Himmler. The correct comparison is between Beria and Heydrich. Had the Third Reich truly been a totalitarian state, Himmler would have gone the way of Yagoda and Heydrich would have been Hitler's Beria. With Goering liquidated during the purges that would have followed, the entire foreign service culled for unreliable elements such as Ambassador Schulenburg and the Wermacht rid of likely conspirators such as Claus von Stauffenberg, it is possible that the War might have ended otherwise. But that's a different subject.
August 13, 2022
The first forty years of Soviet communism until 1956 were tumultuous years. Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky were the leaders who stood out in this period. It was a frightening time for the Soviet citizens who endured midnight terror calls, gulags, the second world war and dictatorship. Stalin reigned supreme from 1924 to 1953, while several second-tier leaders helped him run the Soviet system. Lavrenti Beria was the most important of them during the years 1938 to 1953. He was the chief of the secret service, NKVD, and then was to manage the Soviet atomic bomb project. When Stalin died in March 1953, Beria seized power. But the Party executed him a few months later. I was not interested in Beria’s persona, personal life, or his role in the Soviet terror purges. I got curious about Beria through a statement in another book on Stalin. In the book “Stalin - the court of the Red Tsar”, the author Simon Sebag Montefiore, says Beria had another vision for the USSR after Stalin’s demise. Montefiore says Beria believed in restoring private property, wanted to ‘free’ Eastern Europe, close the gulags and allow the ethnic minorities in the USSR to return to their traditional homes. Further, he wanted to build an outward-looking Russia. It sounded like what Gorbachev wanted to do thirty-five years later. I had not known about this facet of Beria’s outlook till then. I hoped this book by Dr. Amy Knight will throw more light on Beria and his purported liberal outlook.
Lavrenti Beria was born in March 1899 in Merkheuli, Georgia. He studied in the Baku polytechnic before joining the political police, Cheka, in Azerbajdzhan and then moved to Georgia. A decade later, he became the first secretary of the Georgian communist party and then rose to be the first secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Party committee. Stalin took notice and brought him to Moscow, elevating him to the Chief of the notorious NKVD, the secret service, in 1938. After WWII, he became the head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Beria rose to a full politburo member in 1946 and took over as the chief of MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was the de facto no.2 in the Party and fancied himself the successor to Stalin. Stalin died in March 1953. Beria took control and brought a dizzying array of reforms before his rivals in the Politburo arrested and executed him in a coup in June/Dec 1953. Beria was no innocent soul. He managed the Gulag and his hands dripped with blood, like Stalin and the other Politburo members. Amy Knight gives credit to Beria for understanding how important psychological manipulation is in politics. Beria played on Stalin’s psychological needs artfully and became his alter-ego. However, my interest in Beria was only in the reforms he carried out and the fuzzy details of his death. I was also keen on what the author had to say about the Soviet Union taking a different course had Beria survived the Kremlin coup.
Ever since Khrushchev exposed Stalinist atrocities in 1956, communists around the world have been speculating with wistful scenarios. What if Lenin had lived longer? Would communism have realized its theoretical potential then? Trotskyites wonder if the USSR may have been more humane and prosperous had Trotsky succeeded Lenin instead of Stalin. After the Soviet collapse, liberals in the West have wondered if we would live in a peaceful world had Gorbachev succeeded in his reforms. However, I have never come across anyone wondering, ‘What if Beria had succeeded Stalin instead of Khrushchev?’ This book tells us it is an equally legitimate question as the other ones. Author Knight scrutinizes this question and answers it with scholarship by focusing on fundamental problems within communist regimes that address all these speculations.
Author Knight draws on historian Graeme Gill’s argument that the Soviet state early on became dependent on a system of personalized networks. It made political institutions instruments of powerful figures rather than organs governed by set rules and norms. This resulted in the Stalinist political system becoming a patrimonial power structure. Stalin had the power of appointing and removing sub-national leaders. This gave them a share of the institution he headed. In return, they acknowledged and deferred to his authority. However, in their backyards, they were the ‘regional Stalin.’ They appointed their minions and conferred favors on others. Knight says such a patrimonial power structure bred tyrants. For every Beria in the Kremlin, there were mini-Berias in the republics, districts and towns, fostering their own personality cults and arbitrary rule. Hence, it is absurd to view Lavrenti Beria as an aberration or an exception. Even if Beria had outmanoeuvred Khrushchev in 1953, he would not have succeeded in liberalizing the USSR. Stalinism is integral to the Soviet system. If one tries to de-Stalinize by freeing the society, it will crash the entire edifice. This was perhaps why Gorbachev too failed. This is perhaps the reason the Chinese communist party clings to Stalinism, even at the expense of economic and social progress.
Amy Knight confirms Beria implementing a series of impressive reforms within the first three months of capturing power. Three weeks after Stalin’s death, Beria passed a decree freeing a million inmates from labor camps. It included women with children under ten, youths under eighteen, pregnant women and those serving sentences of five years and less. A week later, he repudiated the notorious Doctor’s plot, rehabilitating the doctors arrested earlier by Stalin. He made rapprochement with Yugoslavia and the US to mend relationships, expressing a desire to bring a truce in the Korean war. Beria, being an ethnic minority himself, believed in curbing the Great Russian chauvinism. He called for the return of non-native officials from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine and appointed ethnic cadres in those republics. East Germany was in massive revolt in early 1953. Beria advised the East German communist leaders to cease forcing socialism on the people and work to create a united, democratic, peace-loving, independent Germany. He wanted individual citizens’ rights and an end to unfair judicial treatment. All of this reflects well on Beria’s credentials as a revolutionary reformer. However, Knight cautions that this has to be balanced with Beria’s record as NKVD chief when he sent millions to the Gulags and to the firing squad. He oversaw slave labor in the gulags. The Second World War left the Soviet Union in deep economic distress. A new cult of personality and continuing the ‘NKVD terror’ had become untenable after Stalin’s death because none of the new leaders had Stalin’s charisma. So it became a necessity to install reforms to pacify the population. Beria may have acted out of necessity and survival instincts rather than a genuine commitment to liberal ideals.
On the personal side of Beria’s life, it was fascinating for me to know that Nino Beria, Lavrenti’s wife, lived until 1991. She even gave an interview to a Georgian newspaper in 1990, where she lamented about the fate of Lavrenti, Stalin and other Georgian leaders. She believed they struggled for larger ideals! Sergo Beria, Lavrenti’s son, died in 2000 after writing a book correcting the image of his father. He lived much of his life in the Ukraine, working as a scientist in anti-aircraft defense technology. The author didn't interview him for the book, even though he was alive when she wrote the book. This book got published in 1993, two years after the USSR’s collapse in Dec 1991. The Russians opened the Soviet archives only in 1992, giving access to scholars. Hence, the author relies on accounts of Nikita Khrushchev, Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin’s daughter) and Sergo Beria for validating or invalidating various claims about Lavrenti Beria. For example, Sergo and his mother Nino deny everything about Lavrenti’s alleged womanizing. It is difficult to trust any of their accounts. Khrushchev and Svetlana had vested interests in denouncing Beria, while his son had an equal interest in cleaning up Lavrenti’s image.
On Beria’s death, we do not get a clear answer. The Khrushchev clique says they gave him a fair trial, sentenced and executed him in Dec 1953. But Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, alleged that Beria was executed a few days after his arrest, following a staged trial in June 1953. She claimed she got this information from the chief army surgeon, A. A. Vishnevsky. Georgian journalist Georgii Bezirgani argued it is not believable that the ruling clique waited six months before executing a dangerous rival. If Soviet history tells us anything, it is that they decide in advance a person’s guilt before conducting a show trial. Sergo Beria too believed that his father was dead even before the trial and the Party had doctored the trial transcripts. Hence, important questions about Beria’s death remain without definitive answers.
Towards the end, the author recounts a statement during the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s by Hermann Goering, creator of the Gestapo and chief of the Luftwaffe. Goering conceded that the common folk do not want war, be it in the US, England, Russia or Germany. Why would they risk their lives in war when the best outcome for them can only be to return home in one piece? It is the leaders who make policy and drag the people to war. Whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, freedom or no freedom, Goering believed the leaders can always drag the people along to do their bidding. Though this admission comes from a Nazi, I think it is an insightful and humbling revelation. We have seen wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya in recent decades and we see one raging in the Ukraine and another one threatening us in Taiwan. In these days of heavy rhetoric on wars being about democracies and dictatorships, Goering’s admission should make us pause and think.
This book would interest those who have a desire to understand the Stalinist era in modern Russian history and Beria’s role in it. It is a scholarly work and hence not fast-paced. I did not find new revelations, but found it interesting.
Lavrenti Beria was born in March 1899 in Merkheuli, Georgia. He studied in the Baku polytechnic before joining the political police, Cheka, in Azerbajdzhan and then moved to Georgia. A decade later, he became the first secretary of the Georgian communist party and then rose to be the first secretary of the Transcaucasian Regional Party committee. Stalin took notice and brought him to Moscow, elevating him to the Chief of the notorious NKVD, the secret service, in 1938. After WWII, he became the head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Beria rose to a full politburo member in 1946 and took over as the chief of MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was the de facto no.2 in the Party and fancied himself the successor to Stalin. Stalin died in March 1953. Beria took control and brought a dizzying array of reforms before his rivals in the Politburo arrested and executed him in a coup in June/Dec 1953. Beria was no innocent soul. He managed the Gulag and his hands dripped with blood, like Stalin and the other Politburo members. Amy Knight gives credit to Beria for understanding how important psychological manipulation is in politics. Beria played on Stalin’s psychological needs artfully and became his alter-ego. However, my interest in Beria was only in the reforms he carried out and the fuzzy details of his death. I was also keen on what the author had to say about the Soviet Union taking a different course had Beria survived the Kremlin coup.
Ever since Khrushchev exposed Stalinist atrocities in 1956, communists around the world have been speculating with wistful scenarios. What if Lenin had lived longer? Would communism have realized its theoretical potential then? Trotskyites wonder if the USSR may have been more humane and prosperous had Trotsky succeeded Lenin instead of Stalin. After the Soviet collapse, liberals in the West have wondered if we would live in a peaceful world had Gorbachev succeeded in his reforms. However, I have never come across anyone wondering, ‘What if Beria had succeeded Stalin instead of Khrushchev?’ This book tells us it is an equally legitimate question as the other ones. Author Knight scrutinizes this question and answers it with scholarship by focusing on fundamental problems within communist regimes that address all these speculations.
Author Knight draws on historian Graeme Gill’s argument that the Soviet state early on became dependent on a system of personalized networks. It made political institutions instruments of powerful figures rather than organs governed by set rules and norms. This resulted in the Stalinist political system becoming a patrimonial power structure. Stalin had the power of appointing and removing sub-national leaders. This gave them a share of the institution he headed. In return, they acknowledged and deferred to his authority. However, in their backyards, they were the ‘regional Stalin.’ They appointed their minions and conferred favors on others. Knight says such a patrimonial power structure bred tyrants. For every Beria in the Kremlin, there were mini-Berias in the republics, districts and towns, fostering their own personality cults and arbitrary rule. Hence, it is absurd to view Lavrenti Beria as an aberration or an exception. Even if Beria had outmanoeuvred Khrushchev in 1953, he would not have succeeded in liberalizing the USSR. Stalinism is integral to the Soviet system. If one tries to de-Stalinize by freeing the society, it will crash the entire edifice. This was perhaps why Gorbachev too failed. This is perhaps the reason the Chinese communist party clings to Stalinism, even at the expense of economic and social progress.
Amy Knight confirms Beria implementing a series of impressive reforms within the first three months of capturing power. Three weeks after Stalin’s death, Beria passed a decree freeing a million inmates from labor camps. It included women with children under ten, youths under eighteen, pregnant women and those serving sentences of five years and less. A week later, he repudiated the notorious Doctor’s plot, rehabilitating the doctors arrested earlier by Stalin. He made rapprochement with Yugoslavia and the US to mend relationships, expressing a desire to bring a truce in the Korean war. Beria, being an ethnic minority himself, believed in curbing the Great Russian chauvinism. He called for the return of non-native officials from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine and appointed ethnic cadres in those republics. East Germany was in massive revolt in early 1953. Beria advised the East German communist leaders to cease forcing socialism on the people and work to create a united, democratic, peace-loving, independent Germany. He wanted individual citizens’ rights and an end to unfair judicial treatment. All of this reflects well on Beria’s credentials as a revolutionary reformer. However, Knight cautions that this has to be balanced with Beria’s record as NKVD chief when he sent millions to the Gulags and to the firing squad. He oversaw slave labor in the gulags. The Second World War left the Soviet Union in deep economic distress. A new cult of personality and continuing the ‘NKVD terror’ had become untenable after Stalin’s death because none of the new leaders had Stalin’s charisma. So it became a necessity to install reforms to pacify the population. Beria may have acted out of necessity and survival instincts rather than a genuine commitment to liberal ideals.
On the personal side of Beria’s life, it was fascinating for me to know that Nino Beria, Lavrenti’s wife, lived until 1991. She even gave an interview to a Georgian newspaper in 1990, where she lamented about the fate of Lavrenti, Stalin and other Georgian leaders. She believed they struggled for larger ideals! Sergo Beria, Lavrenti’s son, died in 2000 after writing a book correcting the image of his father. He lived much of his life in the Ukraine, working as a scientist in anti-aircraft defense technology. The author didn't interview him for the book, even though he was alive when she wrote the book. This book got published in 1993, two years after the USSR’s collapse in Dec 1991. The Russians opened the Soviet archives only in 1992, giving access to scholars. Hence, the author relies on accounts of Nikita Khrushchev, Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin’s daughter) and Sergo Beria for validating or invalidating various claims about Lavrenti Beria. For example, Sergo and his mother Nino deny everything about Lavrenti’s alleged womanizing. It is difficult to trust any of their accounts. Khrushchev and Svetlana had vested interests in denouncing Beria, while his son had an equal interest in cleaning up Lavrenti’s image.
On Beria’s death, we do not get a clear answer. The Khrushchev clique says they gave him a fair trial, sentenced and executed him in Dec 1953. But Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, alleged that Beria was executed a few days after his arrest, following a staged trial in June 1953. She claimed she got this information from the chief army surgeon, A. A. Vishnevsky. Georgian journalist Georgii Bezirgani argued it is not believable that the ruling clique waited six months before executing a dangerous rival. If Soviet history tells us anything, it is that they decide in advance a person’s guilt before conducting a show trial. Sergo Beria too believed that his father was dead even before the trial and the Party had doctored the trial transcripts. Hence, important questions about Beria’s death remain without definitive answers.
Towards the end, the author recounts a statement during the Nuremberg trials in the late 1940s by Hermann Goering, creator of the Gestapo and chief of the Luftwaffe. Goering conceded that the common folk do not want war, be it in the US, England, Russia or Germany. Why would they risk their lives in war when the best outcome for them can only be to return home in one piece? It is the leaders who make policy and drag the people to war. Whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, freedom or no freedom, Goering believed the leaders can always drag the people along to do their bidding. Though this admission comes from a Nazi, I think it is an insightful and humbling revelation. We have seen wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya in recent decades and we see one raging in the Ukraine and another one threatening us in Taiwan. In these days of heavy rhetoric on wars being about democracies and dictatorships, Goering’s admission should make us pause and think.
This book would interest those who have a desire to understand the Stalinist era in modern Russian history and Beria’s role in it. It is a scholarly work and hence not fast-paced. I did not find new revelations, but found it interesting.
June 23, 2017
After all my other reading on the Gulag and Stalinism, I was really afraid this would become another maze of difficult names and horrible tortures or assassinations/executions. It very well could be, with Beria's rich history of filling the Himmler role in Stalin's Russia. But instead Knight keeps it to policies and actions, and leaves the gory details to others. Not that she is any less forgiving of this cynical muderer. Rather we are taken through the policies, politics and activities of Beria's life, from Georgian roots to his eventual downfall at Kruschev's hands, with a constant focus not on the gore he left behind, but rather how the Soviet Machine worked. Knight may strain all the possible euphemisms for "killed", "tortured"and "raped", but she does keep the work away from a depressing gory maelstrom. This is a book any age reader can comprehend, although only real Soviet-Era hounds will love it. The torrent of Russian and Georgian names is daunting, but the trip is worth it.
December 20, 2020
A good academic biography of Stalin’s third secret police chief, the one who managed to not get killed by his boss. Beria survived Uncle Joe only to be outsmarted by a man he considered to be beneath him – Khrushchev. Done in by the same system that had crushed so many. Although the author doesn’t make the point, Beria’s story could be that of a gangster’s rise and fall. Behind the Marxist rhetoric, Stalin seems like an overly paranoid Mob boss ruling over a cohort of backstabbing lieutenants.
Some readers may find the prose a bit dry, but author Amy Knight has mined the sources available at the time to produce a fascinating portrait of Beria. Good background information on Georgia and its culture and its influence on Beria (and Stalin) is provided. Beria’s role in the Soviet nuclear weapons program (he ran it) is ably shown. Also shown is how Beria slavishly followed Stalinist orthodoxy while the dictator was alive, but promoted liberalization of the Soviet regime after Stalin’s death. His proposed reforms went too far for his fellow oligarchs and helped lead to his downfall. Along with the fact that, having just survived one, they didn’t want to be ruled by another murderous thug.
Some readers may find the prose a bit dry, but author Amy Knight has mined the sources available at the time to produce a fascinating portrait of Beria. Good background information on Georgia and its culture and its influence on Beria (and Stalin) is provided. Beria’s role in the Soviet nuclear weapons program (he ran it) is ably shown. Also shown is how Beria slavishly followed Stalinist orthodoxy while the dictator was alive, but promoted liberalization of the Soviet regime after Stalin’s death. His proposed reforms went too far for his fellow oligarchs and helped lead to his downfall. Along with the fact that, having just survived one, they didn’t want to be ruled by another murderous thug.
January 20, 2020
The many passages of the book reciting who was in, then out, then back in various government & party positions was a little dry, but I enjoyed the last few chapters that covered Beria's attempted reforms after Stalin's death, the successful efforts to overthrow Beria, and the discussion of what could have been.
By no means an apologia, the book does well to cover the many sins, both professional & personal of the man, while at the same time acknowledge much of our understanding of Beria reflects how his successors portrayed him.
By no means an apologia, the book does well to cover the many sins, both professional & personal of the man, while at the same time acknowledge much of our understanding of Beria reflects how his successors portrayed him.
October 15, 2011
A fairly short, dry (i.e., not terribly interesting) "revisionist" (by the author's own account) history, purporting to show that Beria -- despite certain flaws (like being a mass murderer and serial rapist) -- loved his son and was the reformer, while Khrushchev (who had Lavrenti murdered... in cold blood)... was actually the totalitarian.
Proof that scholarship abhors a vacuum.
Specialists may find the book of more use.
Proof that scholarship abhors a vacuum.
Specialists may find the book of more use.
December 14, 2015
I don't have taste for such pseudo psychological biographies. As well, the author makes too many assumptions (i.e: apparently it is possible that Beria poisoned Ordzhonikidze so he would not interfere with Beria's possible involvement with Kirov's possible murder) and her views are noticeably influenced by traditionalist historiographical trends. She tries to vilify Beria and Stalin at every step of the way, which is a bit unscholarly for my preferences.
February 25, 2021
Beria was Stalin's top aid. He put him in charge of gaining America's Nuclear secret. He did it in a remarkably fast in less than 2 years. He had the Soviet Union made into the second World Super Power. When Stalin died he wanted to help the poor in the Soviet Union put he was killed by Khrushchev who afterwards took over as leader of the Soviet Union.
December 18, 2017
I did not learn much about Beria as a man. I appreciate that some of the archives were recently opened but I still would prefer to wait until more is known before I read another book. His grandchildren are still alive; there was no interview with them, for example.
July 24, 2021
هنگامی که لاورنتی بریا در یکی از نخستین روزهای ماه مارس سال ۱۹۵۳ در کنار بستر مرگ ژوزف استالین ایستاده بود، حاضران مشاهده کردند که او به دشواری میتواند شادی خود را از اینکه شاهد آخرین لحظات زندگی رهبر است پنهان سازد. این دو تن از زمانی که در دهه ۱۹۲۰ برای نخستین بار با یکدیگر ملاقات کردند، حوادثی بسیار را در کنار هم از سر گذرانده بودند. در واقع، بریا، که سرپرستی سازمان پلیس شوروی را به عهده داشت و سالها یکی از اعضای اصلی حکومت استالین بود، در خلال بعضی از مهمترین بحرانهای رهبری استالین در کنار او قرار داشت. اما در حدود سال ۱۹۵۰ روابط آنها، گرچه به ظاهر هنوز صمیمانه بود، چرخشی شگفتآور یافت. استالین به بریا بدگمان شده و مشغول دسیسهچینی برای خلاص شدن از دست او بود. بریا این نکته را میدانست و بنابراین، بی دلیل نبود که از مرگ استالین شاد باشد.
اما مرگ استالین تنها فرصتی موقت برای بریا فراهم کرد. سه ماه بعد همکاران او در کرملین، به رهبری خروشچف، در یک ضربه نمایشی او را بازداشت کردند. مخالفان بریا برای توجیه کار خود او را جاسوس و خائن خواندند. بریا به دنبال یک محاکمه سری – یا شاید حتی پیش از آن – در دسامبر ۱۹۵۳ اعدام شد و نام او به طور رسمی از حافظه عمومی زدوده گشت. به عنوان نمادی از «لاوجودی» او، ویراستاران دایرهالمعارف بزرگ شوروی برای همه مشترکان خود یادداشتی محرمانه فرستادند و در آن به آنها توصیه کردند که با یک چاقوی کوچک یا تیغ، مقاله مربوط به بریا را برند. به جای آن، مقاله ای درباره باب برینگ برای آنها فرستاده شد. در سی ساله بعدی، در هیچ تاریخ با کتاب درسی شوروی با زندگینامه های مجاز رسمی نامی از بریا برده نشد – مگر اشارات گهگاهی به او به عنوان یک جانی یا بدکار.
با اینهمه، آنهایی که از دوران استالین جان بدر بردند بریا را فراموش نکردند. بریا، که یادآور پلیس ترسناک شوروی بود و مخالفانش در کرملین به او برچسب خائن زده بودند، به صورت نماد تمامی شرارت های آن دوران در آمد و تا به امروز بر تخیلات مردم سایه افکنده است. در حالی که هنوز ممکن است بعضی کسان نسبت به استالین احساسی دوگانه داشته باشند و به خاطر قابلی
اما مرگ استالین تنها فرصتی موقت برای بریا فراهم کرد. سه ماه بعد همکاران او در کرملین، به رهبری خروشچف، در یک ضربه نمایشی او را بازداشت کردند. مخالفان بریا برای توجیه کار خود او را جاسوس و خائن خواندند. بریا به دنبال یک محاکمه سری – یا شاید حتی پیش از آن – در دسامبر ۱۹۵۳ اعدام شد و نام او به طور رسمی از حافظه عمومی زدوده گشت. به عنوان نمادی از «لاوجودی» او، ویراستاران دایرهالمعارف بزرگ شوروی برای همه مشترکان خود یادداشتی محرمانه فرستادند و در آن به آنها توصیه کردند که با یک چاقوی کوچک یا تیغ، مقاله مربوط به بریا را برند. به جای آن، مقاله ای درباره باب برینگ برای آنها فرستاده شد. در سی ساله بعدی، در هیچ تاریخ با کتاب درسی شوروی با زندگینامه های مجاز رسمی نامی از بریا برده نشد – مگر اشارات گهگاهی به او به عنوان یک جانی یا بدکار.
با اینهمه، آنهایی که از دوران استالین جان بدر بردند بریا را فراموش نکردند. بریا، که یادآور پلیس ترسناک شوروی بود و مخالفانش در کرملین به او برچسب خائن زده بودند، به صورت نماد تمامی شرارت های آن دوران در آمد و تا به امروز بر تخیلات مردم سایه افکنده است. در حالی که هنوز ممکن است بعضی کسان نسبت به استالین احساسی دوگانه داشته باشند و به خاطر قابلی
March 3, 2023
A better title for this meticulously researched biography of the monster comes from a History Channel special, BERIA: STALIN'S CREATURE. Lavrentii Beria, Stalin's police chief and chief executioner, is practically forgotten today and almost completely unknown in the West, yet he did more damage, political and personal, than almost any other twentieth-century figure. He was not, as many insist, "Stalin's Himmler". Himmler had a colorless personality and no political imagination. Beria had a thirst for killing matched only by his drive for sex, and raping female political prisoners, and their daughters, was a favorite pastime. Yet, on a more serious note, he turned the GULAG camps from a motley collection of incarceration centers into a prison-industrial complex that made a tidy profit for the Soviet state, particularly in gold and timber production. He also came up with an original way of dealing with prisoners in the way of the advancing Germans after June 1941: Shoot the political prisoners, as they are likely to collaborate with the Nazis, and free the common criminals, who will only cause trouble for the Wermacht. Still, after the war Stalin demoted him and Beria would almost certainly have been shot had the vozd lived only a few more months. There are reports he spit on Stalin's corpse in March of 1953. I am not convinced by Knight's assertion that Beria, had he assumed power, would have become an embryonic Gorbachev, loosening both Soviet life, particularly in the economy, and granting more autonomy to the Eaastern European states. Thanks to Khrushchev's classy rubout of the man, we will never know. This is a first-rate biography on the opportunism of evil.
August 5, 2022
Beria este fără îndoială o lucrare impresionantă atât ca scopul propus cât și ca rezultatele oferite. Amy Knight a profitat de relativa deschidere către vest a Federației Ruse din timpul lui Elțîn, obținând acces la foarte multe documente și materiale de arhivă până atunci ascunse lumii exterioare.
Fără îndoială că Beria este o figură controversată și susceptibilă unor interpretări sau portretizări care nu corespund realității (cum s-a întâmplat recent cu filmul Moartea lui Stalin, care a ficționalizat multe aspecte ale luptei pentru putere, schimbând inclusiv caracterul lui Beria). Amy Knight reușește să construiască un portret al vieții lui Beria, în mod paradoxal călău și liberal, care demonstrează că sadismul lui Beria și sângele de pe mâinile sale nu au fost niciodată scopul lui, ci puterea. Mai mult, Knight punctează foarte elocvent că oamenii ca Beria nu erau o excepție, ci constituiau o regulă în înfiorătorul sistem politic sovietic.
Cartea este foarte exhaustiv scrisă, cu lux de amănunte, ceea ce o face o biografie ideală, dar greu de urmărit. Lipsa unui glosar în care să fie trecute personajele recurente ale cărții și explicate funcțiile lor sau relația cu Beria mi-a îngreunat considerabil lectura. Multitudinea notelor de subsol au sporit calitatea textului și cantitatea de informații, demonstrând că nicio parte a acestuia nu este fabulație (încă o dovadă că Beria este o lucrare excelentă), însă completările mai lungi, care nu se limitau la simple trimiteri la surse, ar fi trebuit, în opinia mea, integrate în textul cărții.
Fără îndoială că Beria este o figură controversată și susceptibilă unor interpretări sau portretizări care nu corespund realității (cum s-a întâmplat recent cu filmul Moartea lui Stalin, care a ficționalizat multe aspecte ale luptei pentru putere, schimbând inclusiv caracterul lui Beria). Amy Knight reușește să construiască un portret al vieții lui Beria, în mod paradoxal călău și liberal, care demonstrează că sadismul lui Beria și sângele de pe mâinile sale nu au fost niciodată scopul lui, ci puterea. Mai mult, Knight punctează foarte elocvent că oamenii ca Beria nu erau o excepție, ci constituiau o regulă în înfiorătorul sistem politic sovietic.
Cartea este foarte exhaustiv scrisă, cu lux de amănunte, ceea ce o face o biografie ideală, dar greu de urmărit. Lipsa unui glosar în care să fie trecute personajele recurente ale cărții și explicate funcțiile lor sau relația cu Beria mi-a îngreunat considerabil lectura. Multitudinea notelor de subsol au sporit calitatea textului și cantitatea de informații, demonstrând că nicio parte a acestuia nu este fabulație (încă o dovadă că Beria este o lucrare excelentă), însă completările mai lungi, care nu se limitau la simple trimiteri la surse, ar fi trebuit, în opinia mea, integrate în textul cărții.
March 6, 2019
Nici un regim totalitar nu poate fi construit şi impus fără complicitatea şi ajutorul unor indivizi lipsiţi de scrupule, care văd în noul regim o şansă personală de parvenire. Epoca stalinistă poate fi considerată un model în acest sens. Deşi Stalin a fost figura centrală, în jurul său au apărut şi dispărut de-a lungul anilor o serie de personaje care au rămas în mentalul colectiv ca întrupări ale răului şi cruzimii. Unii dintre ei s-au aflat pentru o perioadă în lumina reflectoarelor - până când au ajuns în puşcărie sau au fost executaţi, alţii au avut intuiţia de a rămâne oarecum în umbră, urzindu-şi de acolo cariera şi având grijă să se menţină în graţiile dictatorului. Unul dintre cei din urmă şi care a reuşit să îi supravieţuiască lui Stalin a fost Lavrenti Beria. Ironic, deşi a reuşit să se strecoare prin hăţişurile şi intrigile din perioada stalinistă, Beria a fost executat la ordinul lui Hruşciov după moartea dictatorului.
https://atelier.liternet.ro/articol/2...
https://atelier.liternet.ro/articol/2...
July 26, 2023
I'd already began to wonder from reading snippets of Beria's life in other texts, just how different the course of history would have been, if Beria had won through in the power struggle just after Stalin's death?
This meticulously researched book does nothing to change those thoughts and confirms Beria's downfall for the crimes he didn't commit and for reasons the book explains was left relatively alone for the crimes he did commit!
With this book having been written in the early nineties, it still at that time was unfortunately, an incomplete picture, but that doesn't or shouldn't detract from an excellent piece of writing and had me moving through a gamut of emotions regarding this man, who I think if given time would have dismantled Stalinist Russia completely out of existence in a relatively short period of time! But as history shows, he seriously and fatally underestimated Khrushchev in a bitter power struggle.
This meticulously researched book does nothing to change those thoughts and confirms Beria's downfall for the crimes he didn't commit and for reasons the book explains was left relatively alone for the crimes he did commit!
With this book having been written in the early nineties, it still at that time was unfortunately, an incomplete picture, but that doesn't or shouldn't detract from an excellent piece of writing and had me moving through a gamut of emotions regarding this man, who I think if given time would have dismantled Stalinist Russia completely out of existence in a relatively short period of time! But as history shows, he seriously and fatally underestimated Khrushchev in a bitter power struggle.
September 29, 2023
Fairly well-done work about one of the more complicated political figures of the century. The book was written in the early 90s, when the Kremlin first opened its archives, and Knight does some heavy-duty research. At times, the research and the writing style together results in mind-numbing paragraphs filled with one to two dozen names and a variety of Soviet acronyms. If you can get beyond these obstacles without being overwhelmed, you will find the book worth it.
November 24, 2018
Отлична биография на Берия от Найт. Не залита по крайностите, а като един грамотен историк ��исува портрета на Лаврентий Павлович умерено, базирайки се на изворовите данни. Е, тук-там допуска някои грешки, като предположението, че Берия е замесен в убийството на Киров. Но това са дребни кахъри на фона на цялостното правдиво изложение на личността на дясната ръка на Сталин. Препоръчвам.
May 5, 2023
sec, plictisitor, prost conceput: ignoră aspecte extrem de importante, precum gulagul sau războiul,tratează superficial personalitatea/viața sa personală și relația cu Stalin, exagerează cu tratatarea infinitelor intrigi și bizantinisme inerente multitudinii de potentați comuniști.
Nerecomandat.
Nerecomandat.
January 13, 2020
As a Georgian, I found it extremely interesting to read about Beria and his dark life! There were some facts I’ve never heard before until I read this book. If you are interested in Soviet era related history, pick up this one! 📖
November 20, 2019
Not the best piece of historical writing and a little dry at times but interesting. This book was another reminder that much truth is lost to history.
October 16, 2024
This book is a reframing of comrade Beria in the context of the evilness of the system.
The book smashes myths about who really pushed hard for de Stalinizing Russia.
Very very good read
The book smashes myths about who really pushed hard for de Stalinizing Russia.
Very very good read
December 15, 2011
Lavrentii Beria was a Stalin hatchet man who is usually seen as one of the Soviet Union's greatest villains. This book takes an in-depth look at his life and why and how he came to power. While calling Beria a monster, author Amy Knight attempts to place him in the context of the Kremlin at the time.
Some of the revisionism falls flat for me though.
For instance, it is difficult to credit Beria for his apparent attempts at liberal reform after Stalin's death. After all, Heinrich Himmler tried to make peace as Germany collapsed in World War II, saying he wanted to "bury the hatchet" with the Jews. History correctly and obviously remembers that as an attempt to save his own skin, and not a sincere change of heart.
Here's what I would call Knight's basic thesis:
"It is thus not surprising that a man like Beria emerged in the leadership, however tempting it might be to view him as an aberration. To portray him as an exception, who rose to a powerful position because of a fluke, is to misrepresent the very nature of the Soviet system during the Stalinist period. If Beria was an exception, it was not because he was amoral, sadistic, and cruel. Rather, it was because he was intelligent, astute, and devoted to achieving power. He was also adept at the kind of court politics that prevailed in the Kremlin and below. His deviousness and two-faced behavior was an asset in this environment, particularly in dealing with Stalin. Beria never ceased to maintain his flattering tone -- 'As usual, you have hit the nail on the head, Iosif Vassarionovich' -- though by the end he was heaping scorn on Stalin behind his back."
Some of the revisionism falls flat for me though.
For instance, it is difficult to credit Beria for his apparent attempts at liberal reform after Stalin's death. After all, Heinrich Himmler tried to make peace as Germany collapsed in World War II, saying he wanted to "bury the hatchet" with the Jews. History correctly and obviously remembers that as an attempt to save his own skin, and not a sincere change of heart.
Here's what I would call Knight's basic thesis:
"It is thus not surprising that a man like Beria emerged in the leadership, however tempting it might be to view him as an aberration. To portray him as an exception, who rose to a powerful position because of a fluke, is to misrepresent the very nature of the Soviet system during the Stalinist period. If Beria was an exception, it was not because he was amoral, sadistic, and cruel. Rather, it was because he was intelligent, astute, and devoted to achieving power. He was also adept at the kind of court politics that prevailed in the Kremlin and below. His deviousness and two-faced behavior was an asset in this environment, particularly in dealing with Stalin. Beria never ceased to maintain his flattering tone -- 'As usual, you have hit the nail on the head, Iosif Vassarionovich' -- though by the end he was heaping scorn on Stalin behind his back."
June 7, 2019
A short book, just over 200 pages long, and while it went over the main details of what Beria did and who he interacted with, it felt lacking. There was not much on motivation or personal aspects of him, more a chronological series of events that lacked any context. This may be a consequence of Knight writing when access to the Soviet archives was literally just starting to happen (she notes these difficulties in more than one place), but it leaves the reader wanting to know more. While a good source to read, as the only major biography of Beria out there, it would certainly have been helped if it had waited a few years for some more key materials to emerge from the archives, documents that may have allowed a more comprehensive look at one of the most important figures of the Stalinist era.
June 25, 2011
Beria is a terrifying tool who carried out Stalin's crimes with little to no compassion for his victims. The face of evil of the Soviet regime during the late 30' through to Stalin's death. His machinations after Stalin's death alone make this book worth reading. Totally absorbing.
August 5, 2011
Very informative read.
The first part of the book offers a really interesting look at the psychological influences of Georgian culture for both Beria and Stalin, which I think is an important part in understanding these guys.
I'll probably add more to this later.
The first part of the book offers a really interesting look at the psychological influences of Georgian culture for both Beria and Stalin, which I think is an important part in understanding these guys.
I'll probably add more to this later.
August 18, 2012
Very thorough and informative. It seemed relatively unbiased from my limited view. It was difficult for me at first due to the number of foreign names I needed to keep straight in my head, but overall I'm glad I read it.
August 15, 2023
An incredibly deep and comprehensive study of one of the 21st century's most viscerally terrifying figures. Amy Knight provides a history that is immensely fascinating. Most definitely a valuable read for anyone interested in the history of the Soviet secret police.
May 8, 2007
A sadist of the highest order. Beria was a shadowy figure allowed to indulge his appetite for murder and rape b/c he was Stalin's stooge.
July 8, 2012
The book seemed to make Beria a hero that wanted to open up to the West by allowing German reunification.....Me thinks thats bullshit...
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