Lavrenti Beria

Lavrentiy Pavlovitch Beria (Géorgien: ლავრენტიბერია, Russian: Лавре́нтийПа́вловичБе́рия) (March 29th 1899 - December 23rd 1953) is a Soviet civil servant who chaired NKVD, body which will give rise to MGB then with the KGB. He was member of the Politburo of 1946 with 1953.

Beginnings and promotion

Like Stalin, Beria is originating in Georgia. Born with Merkheuli in Abkhazie, architect of formation, Beria begins its career with the Tcheka, the secret police founded by Felix Dzerjinski, and becomes secretary of the party in his country, where it organizes the first purgings for Stalin. Very unpopular among the Communists géorgiens, it owes its promotion only with the protection of the supreme leader of the USSR.

In November 1938, Stalin names it with the head of NKVD, the secret police of the Soviet Union to replace Nikolaï Iejov which it helped to eliminate. Beria remains faithful to the principle posed by Stalin, when this one had named Iagoda with the head of Guépéou in 1934, to make shoot his predecessor, principle which Iejov had respected while making shoot Iagoda.

The supreme leader of the political police (1938-1953)

Beria continues and completes first of all the Grandes Purgings. He does not hesitate to extend terror until the center even of the police machinery, which he purges largely of the men of Iejov and the executives having been useful before the years 1930. Cruel and sadistic character, that which Stalin will present to Roosevelt like " our Himmler " do not hesitate to chair itself certain meetings of torture in its office of the Loubianka or the prison of Lefortovo. Manifestly libidineux, it will sometimes happen to him to remove women right to satisfy its sexual desires.

It organizes arrests in mass and executions of dissidents or people innocent. It is responsible in 1940 for the execution of the large director Meyerhold, the writer Isaac Babel and the journalist Mikhail Koltsov. Virtuoso, just like his predecessors, of the extortion of delirious confessions, he cynically praised himself to be able to make acknowledge under 12 midnight with any individual fallen between his hands which he was the king of England. When the Pacte germano-Soviet makes it possible the USSR to extend in Poland, in Finland, with the Baltic States and in Moldavie, Beria méticuleusement plans the massive deportations of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of all ages and all social classes. Master of a Gulag whose manpower are then with their apogee, it tries to rationalize the exploitation of the prisoners. He creates in particular the Charachka, where captive scientists are constrained to work with military projects, in a strict discipline but while profiting from better living conditions that the majority of the prisoners.

Beria makes also war crimes during the Second world war. It writes the order of execution which leads to the Massacre of Katyń during which 25.700 Polish officers were eliminated.

In 1941, NKVD of Beria plans the Déportation German of the Volga, and in 1944, that of the Tchétchènes, Tatars of the Crimea and ten of other wrongfully shown people of collaboration with the Germans.

In 1944, Beria is in charge of the nuclear program and makes a success of the first military test in 1949. On this occasion, Beria mobilizes considerable means in resources human and industrial, largely drawn from the Gulag, and it starts to thus constitute a State in the State. Stalin then asks him to manufacture the first Soviet bomb H. Conscious that it would be eliminated afterwards, Beria lets trail work and starts to wake up suspicions in the spirit of Stalin, who organizes against him the Complot of the white blouses (February 1953).

According to this plot, a group of doctors, as a majority of origin Jewish, in charge of the health of the Soviet leaders would have sought to poison them, which would prove the failure, even complicity, of the security services directed by Beria. This business arrives in a context of anti-semitism of State which prevailed at the end of the lifetime of Stalin - to which Beria had partially contributed, for example by eliminating on its orders the large actor Yiddish Solomon Mikhoels (1948).

Stalin dies the March 5th 1953 after a meal with Beria, Gueorgui Malenkov, Nikolaï Boulganine and Nikita Khrouchtchev, of the continuations of a Brain hemorrhage. However, in its memories published in 1993, the politician Viatcheslav Molotov affirms that Beria was praised near him to have poisoned Stalin; no proof makes it possible to support this assumption. On the other hand, it is proven that Beria refused a medical intervention whereas Stalin had been unconscious for a few hours, under pretext that this last was only sleeping.

After the death of Stalin

Beria is regarded then as the natural successor of Stalin. During the three months when it has the freehands, the incarnation of police terror paradoxically appears a champion of the liberalization of the mode. As of on April 4th, it slackens the victims of the Complot of the white blouses and stated that their consents had been extorted by torture, first time that the Soviet State recognizes a fault. It makes promulgate an amnesty which releases a million prisoners of the Gulag, all of the common rights - nothing not having been prepared to reintegrate them, this mass of old condemned will break on the country by making a wave traumatisante flights, rapes and murder. It restores the Gulag with the ministry for the Justice, limiting thus partly the arbitrary one which reigned there, and it denounces with full knowledge of the facts its economic uselessness like its hypertrophy. It makes vote with the Politburo the removal of the portraits of leaders in the processions and demonstrations, measurement which will not survive to him. He decides inside for a better treatment of the national minorities, and outside for a solved policy of Détente with the Occident, it was paid abandonment of GDR and reunification of Germany in exchange of its demilitarization.

The fall and death

His/her colleagues remain very being wary in front of this man who always holds a considerable police capacity. Its policy of liberalization to any hair seems to them a means of gaining a popularity which would help it to reach the supreme capacity with their costs. The working revolt of East Berlin (June 17th, 1953), against which Beria and its colleagues makes give the tanks, is the first revolt of the Déstalinisation. It seals the fall of Beria, discredited among her colleagues. Hardly three months after the death of Stalin, the chief of the NKVD, which however will have had time to make watch of real capacities of statesman, are évincé by Khrouchtchev and decree in full meeting of Politburo (June 1953). The marshal Joukov that Béria showed to plot against Stalin, carries out itself this arrest, gun with the fist, in the enclosure of the Kremlin.

Shown plot and of espionage imaginary according to methods which he knows well, Beria is carried out in December 1953 some share in the suburbs of Moscow. He is the last Soviet leader to lose the life at the same time as the capacity. Its last letters before its death show a man begging and ploughed up.

In March 2000, the Supreme court of Russia refused to rehabilitate it, its crimes against humanity having been proven.

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