The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

At a Central Committee meeting in July 1953, Khrushchev delivered a speech in front of a shocked Beria, accusing him of crimes against the state. In a carefully planned maneuver, a buzzer was pressed under the table and ten armed men burst into the room, seizing the most feared man in the Soviet Union. Apparently spontaneously, a Politburo bodyguard then stepped forward to inform them that Beria had raped his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. It was a common accusation made against the secret police chief, who was known to cruise the streets of Moscow in his armored limousine looking for young girls to abduct. Four decades later, the workmen at the site of Beria’s former mansion at No. 28 Kacholovna Street—now the Tunisian embassy—discovered a dozen skeletons buried in the grounds.