Beria

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Beria Degenerate
Introduction The Abkhazian Candidate Chapter One Fathers, Daughters & Sons Chapter Two The Company Man Chapter Three The Heart of a Chekist Chapter Four The Servant & the Cult Chapter Five The Graveyard of Utopia Chapter Six His Masters Voice Chapter Seven Going for Coffee with Beria Chapter Eight The Kremlin Complexion Chapter Nine Masters & Slaves Chapter Ten The Kremlins Civil War Chapter Eleven The Trial of the Henchman Postscript Evil, Trash & History 4 7 10 13 17 21 26 31 36 44 48 55 59
INTRODUCTION :
The Abkhazian Candidate

S AN OLD BOLSHEVIK, Nestor Lakoba couldnt have expected anything else. Like other Communist Party leaders in the Soviet Union but especially in the Caucasus, Lakoba rolled the dice with his future and his life every day. Until now, he had won every time. Lakoba sided with Lenin against his Party enemies and reaped the rewards. He threw his weight behind Stalin in his battle with the leftists and the rightists and climbed over the bodies of the Partys enemiesreal and imaginedto ever higher posts and accolades. Nestor Lakoba knew the rules by which the game was played. As an intelligent man, he also must have known that to keep playing the game would increase the odds that he would someday lose. This was Stalins universe at the close of 1936the prelude to the Great Purge. The revolution had devoured its enemies and turned its ravaged appetite to its children. Like so many of his comrades, Lakoba would have no objection to shoveling his friends into the yawning maw of the Stalinist death machine. Unfortunately for Lakoba, his friends got to him first. Nestor Lakoba was the Communist Party chief of Abkhazia, an autonomous enclave within Georgia that hugs the Black Sea. With more than 15 years at his post, he was firmly ensconced in the popular mind as one of the Old Bolsheviks, the pre-war Party members who had robbed, bombed, and bled for the victory of the Socialist Revolution. He knew Stalin wellwell enough to call him Koba, his nom de guerre as an underground revolutionary, without any trace of pretension. In fact, most of the Party leaders were his friends. His resum would ensure job security and a gold watch upon his pensioning age in normal countries, in normal times. As it was, his loyalty, camaraderie and tenure made him an ideal candidate for the Great Purge. Lakoba did have one black mark on his record, though it didnt harm his case in the
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least. Nestor Lakoba was fated to die: nothing would have changed that. But Lakoba had found occasion to gossip with his old friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a senior Bolshevik leader from Georgia and a powerful member of Stalins inner-circle, about an upstart young man known to both of them. Lakoba told his friend that the Party chief for Georgia and the Caucasus, Lavrenti Beria, had been badmouthing Ordzhonikidze. Ordzhonikidze was furious. Beria was enraged. The young veteran of the secret police, who relied upon Ordzhonikidze as his patron and protector in Moscow, had to fire off a series of ingratiating letters to get back into his masters good graces. Their relationship would never be the same. Nestor Lakobas death wouldnt be enough to pay for his impertinence. In true Stalinist fashion, his family would owe the balance. As far as one can tell through the distortions of time and a state-controlled press, Nestor Lakoba was genuinely popular in Abkhazia. Though he carried out the centralization policies dictated from Moscow, Lakoba was seen as one of us by a people who had long been ruled by outsiders. Making a rare accounting for public sentiment, the Party resorted to more subtle methods than the three-ingredient recipe of the Great Purgethe denunciation, the show trial and then summary execution. Instead, Lakoba was called in for a meeting with Beria at Party headquarters in Georgias capital, Tbilisi. Less than a week later, newspapers announced he had died of a sudden heart attack. How and by what instrument Lakoba was felled, no one knows. A The most familiar photograph of Beria, large, almost operatic funeral was staged, with dating from approximately 1948. The thousands of Abkhaz queued up to pay their Soviet artists who touched up this and respects to their fallen chief. other pictures of top Kremlin leaders To take account for Lakobas local popular- took to using stills from motion pictures ity, the ordinary process of the Great Purge was as they were easier to work from than reversed. Now dead, the denunciation began (a photographic film. trial, of course, would no longer be necessary). Months after he was lain to rest, the Party accused Lakoba of fomenting an insurrection and organizing a counter-revolutionary plot to kill Beria as well as Stalin himself. In October 1937, Nestors brother Mikhail was found guilty at a show trial of participating in his late brothers wacky conspiracy. As was the case when the public was allowed to view the proceedings, all defendants had already confessed their guilt in the dungeons of the political police. Mikhail had also been a party official in Abkhazia. The murder of the Lakoba broth-
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ers was thus a matter of state policy. Now it was time to settle scores. Nestor Lakobas wife was the first victim. Beria ordered her arrest and special treatment to coerce her confession for imaginary crimes. Berias NKVDthe latest in a dizzy array of acronyms for the secret policewould rouse the young woman every morning, beat her senseless, and drag her limp body back to her cell at sundown. When she refused to sign a document stating that Lakoba had told her of a plan to sell Abkhazia to imperialist Turkey, Beria ordered that her 14 year old son, Rauf, be brought to the jail as well. After threatening to kill him, NKVD agents contented themselves with beating Rauf bloody in front of his powerless mother. Irritated by her continuing resistance, the NKVD pushed her too far during one session and killed her. Rauf Lakoba was shunted off to a labour camp set up specifically for children whose parents had been convicted of political crimes. According to Russian historian Roy Medvedev, Rauf later wrote a letter to Beria personally, asking if he and two of his friends at the camp might be allowed to return home to continue their education. After reading the letter, Beria had the three boys sent for. Instead of being permitted to return to school, however, they were taken into the courtyard of an NKVD jail in Tbilisi and shot. Nearly the entire Lakoba family had been annihilated, thrown through the familiar transit of prison to the wall and to their death. Yet not even in death were they safe from sacrilege. According to Nikita Khrushchevs memoirs, Beria ordered Lakobas body disinterred and burned, the ashes scattered across a land turned over in preparation for still more mass graves. In destroying his enemies, Beria was literally pursuing them beyond the threshold of death. Two years after Lakobas death, Beria had proven himself. He not only survived the purges, but prospered, largely because his enemies were never permitted the opportunity to avenge their injuries. The young provincial Party chief with an eye for detail had pleased his boss enough that he was finally called up to the big leagues. Beria had graduated. He moved on to Moscow.
Beria Degenerate
CHAPTER ONE :
Fathers, Daughters and Sons

He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Partys purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.
HE WINNERS WRITE HISTORY, but failures still have dutiful sons. Even before the Soviet Unions merciful collapse, Russians and Westerners packed the bleachers to watch a tawdry spectacle as scions of three of the Soviet Unions bloody titans battled one another to vindicate their family names. Their skirmish of anecdotes and tell-all memoirs was merely a continuation of a war frozen in place more than fifty years ago, taken up by their children with the gentler means of a new eragentler than the bullet, the truncheon or the concentration camp, at least. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalins prodigal daughter, struck the first blow against her adversaries, although she was once offered in marriage to one of them. In 1967after the battle of the Red Czars was long decidedHarper & Row in New York published her memoir, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Alliluyeva could be frank and disarming when it came to her fathers well-earned reputation; after all, shed be hard put to erase twenty million deaths as some kind of inexplicable accident. But she stressed that her father was often ill, and that his lackeys and toadiesNikita Khrushchev for one, but especially his feared secret police chief, Lavrenti Beriahad manipulated and brought out the worst in him. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalins unlikely successor, had a chance to warp history with his bare hands when his own memoir was smuggled out of Russia to the United States on the eve of his death. It was a terribly one-sided accountthe literary equivalent of the papershredding party in the Soviet archives held after Khrushchev strengthened his grip on power. His son, Sergei Khrushchev (now an American citizen) was himself quite frank about his fathers shortcomings, though he essentially confirmed his fathers account of the Kremlins bitter civil war.
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Fathers, Daughters & Sons
Alliluyeva and Khrushchev had many bad things to say about each others beloved ancestors, but on one matter they agreed. Lavrenti Beria, they said, was one of the most evil men who had ever lived, a towering monster loathed by their parents and all rightthinking men. But with the collapse of the Communist system in Europe, a new knight galloped over the hill to avenge the slanders of history: Sergo Beria, the son of the henchman Stalin once introduced as my Himmler. Only a handful of Berias close collaborators survived his downfall by Khrushchevs hand after Stalins death, and his wife, Nina (or, in her native Georgian, Nino) Gegechkori gave only a single interview after she was rediscovered in 1990 before she passed away. Sergo Beria therefore took the limping industry of Kremlinology by storm, bowdlerizing scholars with his amazing version of alternative history. At issue werent just Berias vociferous claims that his father had been grotesquely maligned by his colleagues, his collaborators and thus by history. Sergo presented a sequence of possibilitiesmany of them, he claimed, eyewitness accountswhich diverged radically from what historians believed about Stalin and his circle. The secrets for the atomic bomb, Sergo stated, had been leaked to his father by physicist Robert Oppenheimer during a secret visit to Berias dacha in 1939. His father had catThe next most familiar photograph of Beria: at Stalins dacha near the Black Sea, with an imp- egorically refused to participate in the ish Svetlana Alliluyeva perched unhappily on his massacre of captured Polish officers in the lap. Stalin is in the rear in a white tunic, assidu- Summer of 1940an atrocity so ously doing evil; the man rocking out with the appalling that like Hiroshima and Auschwitz its recalled by a single name: headphones has never been identified. Katyn. Furthermore, the commonly accepted account of his fathers captivity and trial six months after his arrest in June 1953 was false. Lavrenti Beria had been executed immediately, Sergo said. Hed even seen a stretcher carrying a body from his home. Sergos dutiful efforts would have been touching, had his father not been justly considered one of the most evil men in history. It reached a new apex of absurdity when he pursued an appeal to the Russian Supreme Court in 2000 seeking to rehabilitate his father as a victim of Communism. In Sergos view, his father was merely Stalins underling, carrying out his orders from fear. Lavrenti BeriaStalinisms jack-of-all-trades, but who specialized in the refined, bureaucratic dispensation of painwas in this sense as much a victim of Stalinism as anyone else. Or so he would have us believe. Toward the end of his life (he died a few months after the Supreme Court rejected his
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appeal with a biting commentary), Sergo Beria told reporters that he looked forward to the day when the Russian state archives would be opened. He believed that they would vindicate his father and unmask Stalin, Khrushchev, and the other Party leaders as the real villains. Yet the opposite has been true. Nearly every testimony from any individual who came into contact with Beria painted a grotesquely unflattering portrait of Stalins Himmler, and the trickle of documents from the state archives have confirmed what people had long believed. There is no evidence that Oppenheimer visited Berias dacha with the secrets of atomic energy in 1939. Beria took a starring role in the mass murder of imprisoned Polish officers at Katyn and other locations. And Beria was not only cooped up and tried after a six month imprisonment, but even wrote pitiful letters begging for his jailers to spare his life and apologizing for his boorish behavior. It might be wise to be cautious when all the information points to one conclusion. Beria the Henchman, Beria the Murderer, Beria the Pedophile and Rapist have become accepted to the point of caricature. A re-evaluation of Berias role in some of historys worst crimes has been underway for more than a decade, but to no avail. In the case of Beria, the common knowledge turned out to be true.
Beria Degenerate
CHAPTER TWO :
The Company Man

There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past. Repeat it, if you please. Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
PPROPRIATELY FOR THE STALINIST par excellence, little is known for certain of Lavrenti Berias early life. He was born in 1899 (twenty years younger than Stalin) in Merkheuli, the Sukhumi District of Georgia. His parents were peasants. His mother had probably married twice, Beria being a product of the second marriage to a man named Pavel, who died when he was in middle school. In a Party questionnaire he filled out in 1923, Beria claimed to have a sister, who was born a deafmute and about whom nothing else is known. Beria was born a Mingrelian and not, as dim-witted but persistent neo-Nazis would later howl based on photographs and dog-eared copies of the local Klan Kronicle, a Jew. As of 1992, at least, before many Mingrelians were driven out of Abkhazia during the civil war there, a number of Berias kinsmen survived and testified as their clans ethnic background. There were, in any case, only a handful of Jews in what was an extremely impoverished farming area. Mingrelians have long been looked down upon as the most backward peoples of Georgiaa distinction they shared with the Abkhaz, though little else ever was. Yet all Georgians and many Mingrelians will insist they are the best Georgians of all. About the only time distinctions are made, in fact, is when pointing out that the second most famous Georgian in history was a son of Mingrelia. Its a fairly common practice for latter-day participants in successful revolutionary movements to be a bit loose when dating when their own commitment to the struggle began. In Fascist Italy, it was a running joke for Mussolinis youthful disciples to claim prior membership in party cells when they were all of five years old. Beria had no romanticism for the revolutionary tradition in Czarist Georgia, and was actually the greatest fal-
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The Company Man
sifier of the socialist movement in Georgian history. His age precluded him from having taken part secretly in the movement during the first decade of the 20th century, though the same limitation would not apply to Stalin. Nevertheless, its plausible that Beria participated in several Marxist student cells at secondary schools in Sukhumi in 1915, as his official biography once stated. He was not yet a member of any party; a lucky stroke, since if he had he almost certainly would have joined the wrong one. Georgias social democrats represented the first legal and genuinely popular socialist party in Imperial Russia. A number of socialist politicians won office as mayors and members of city councils. But Georgia was the stronghold of the Mensheviks, the other side in the Bolshevik split engineered when Vladimir Lenin, in exile, fractured the Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1904, Mensheviks led a tremendously successful general strike in Georgia. Alarmed by his adversaries growing strength, in that year Bolshevik missionaries arrived with orders from Lenin to increase agitation and sharpen the sometimes petty differences Dear Sergo, I have raised the question of my between the two factions. departure with you more than once. This is not Never one to be accused of political a caprice, or something of that sort, but a seribrinkmanship, Beria joined the Bolshevik ous necessity [I]f it is not possible for me to wing of the Social Democrats only in study, then at least transfer me to other work. March of 1917. He was then studying After all, I cant argue with everyone for my architecture in Baku, Azerbaijan, a entire lifetimeit will ruin my nerves. Allow Bolshevik island in a Menshevik sea. In me the possibility to work in another area, if June 1917 he was conscripted and sent to only in the area of industry (where the basis of the front in Romania where, he later all our construction lies!) and I will prove that claimed, he spread Bolshevik propaganda I can not only uncover hostile crimes and criminals, but also carry out creative work. I in the ranks. beg you, please help me somehow, for I feel I Beria returned to Baku in 1918, and a cannot go on much longer. year later received a degree in architecture. Lavrenti Beria to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, 1929 The three great states of the Transcaucasus had in the meantime taken advantage of the disintegration of the Czarist rgime to declare independence. Georgia was led by Noe Zhordania, once a colleague of Lenins before his heresy of aligning with the hated Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks in Baku were besieged by an advancing Turkish army before being overthrown by a bizarre coalition of ethnic Armenians and a Marxist sect known as the Social Revolutionaries. The British occupied Baku for a time, but withdrew just in time to watch
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The Company Man
the advancing Turkish army massacre the citys Armenian population. By 1918, the Musavat had taken control of Baku and Azerbaijan. Formed in 1911-12 by Marxist dissidents, the Musavat evolved into a nationalist party dominated by the homegrown Azeri bourgeoisie. Beria had evidently kept in touch with his old Party colleagues, because in the Autumn of 1919 he was given his first intelligence mission that we know of. The Bolshevik underground in Baku ordered Beria to penetrate the ranks of the Musavat. This was a fateful decision. Over the decades to follow, his Party enemies would discover and rediscover this little nugget of info and spread rumours to the effect that Beria the great persecutor of hereticshad actually joined one of the counter-revolutionary organizations which so obsessed him. As early as the 1920s, he was called before one of Lenins commissions of inquiry to answer for his membership in the Musavat, and the charge lived on to grace the pages of his official indictment more than thirty years later. Its not known what if any information Beria gained from his espionage against the Musavat, but he was apparently successful enough to be dispatched on follow-up missions to his native Georgia. He was twice arrested for espionage in Georgia (once when working as a secretary for the Russian embassy) and deported back to Baku in May 1920. It was only a matter of time before the Red Army, spurred on by Stalin and his faction of the Communist Party, overwhelmed the weak and feeble states of the Transcaucasus. From all indications, Beria didnt immediately bank on his good deeds in espionage for a sinecure in the new government. He actually tried to leave state service altogether. Like George Costanza, it seems that young Lavrenti Berias heart was set aflutter by the pursuit of architecture. Often over the next ten years or so, when riding the murderous waves of denunciation that would become such a charming feature of Stalinism, Beria would react to trouble by begging his superiors to let him leave the Party to pursue the building of socialism with concrete rather than the truncheon. His protests, however, were a pose. Beria, in spite of his area of specialization, consistently pursued the dirtiest jobs the Party could offer. Accordingly, after his expulsion from Georgia and his enrollment in the Baku Polytechnic to further his studies, he continued to work for the Azeri Central Committee, and then for the fabulously named Extraordinary Commission for the Expropriation from the Bourgeoisie and Improving the Welfare of the Workers. And when this body was dissolved in February 1921 (to the thrill of typesetters everywhere), after a brief stint back at the university, he plunged himself into the filthiest line of work of all as a footsoldier for the Azeri branch of the Soviet secret police: the Cheka.
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The Company Man
CHAPTER THREE :
The Heart of a Chekist

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
HERE WERE NO EVILS done by the NKVD, the MVD or the KGB that were not invented by their predecessor among Soviet internal security organs, the Cheka. Formed by Felix Dzerzhinsky in December 1917, the Cheka was Communisms boot in the face to aristocrats, democrats, priests and reticent peasants. In places where the new order was on life support, the Cheka was the seismic force that leveled the earth so the commissars could move in unmolested to build human happiness. Chekists were charged with smashing largely imaginary conspiracies and making examples of notorious criminals who tried to cheat on the massive appropriations of grain the new government was taking from their stores. They were permitted to conduct summary judgment on most people who were unlucky enough to fall into their hands, with one notable exception: they were not to molest any member of the Communist Party. The Caucasus, with the exception of a few pockets of Bolshevik sentiment here and there, were uniformly hostile to the new order, and it was here that the Cheka was driven to its most bloody excesses. The Cheka was abolished across the Soviet Union in 1922 by a new security forcewith the exception of the Caucasus, where it remained in existence until July 1926. Lavrenti Beria, from all accounts, excelled at this type of work. He propelled himself through the ranks with unfathomable speed, leaping over his superiors on the ladder of promotion. In 1921, he became chief of the Secret Operative Department of the Azeri Cheka and deputy leader of the whole bloody enterprise in the republic. He was only 22 years old.
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Considering his youth, his inexperience in the Party (having been a member for, at most, four years) and his lack of knowledge of anything more complex than the fundamentals of Marxism, Berias advancement through the Cheka is at first glance puzzling. Yet this was precisely the profile of the average Chekist and the child soldiers preferred by the Politburo in Moscow (the only body the Cheka answered to). They were zealous in their outlook and uncorrupted in their personal lives, unattached to either the Czarist rgime or by lingering ties of friendship to the Mensheviks. They viewed the Party as the greatest hope of mankind, and their own role as midwives of Utopia. What were decrees, books, agitation in the factories? Out in the fields, in the prison courtyards where thousands were marched, their wrists bound behind their backsheres where Socialisms victories were being won. The Chekist was, in a sense, a kind of priest. He held the powers of life and death in his hands. Humiliation and redemption were at his command. Party leaders talked. The Chekist, cradling his rifle in his hands, purified society.
N NOVEMBER 1922, BERIA was transferred to the Georgian Cheka, holding approximately the same post and rank as he held in Azerbaijan. Always a social climber, the previous year he had married Nina Gegechkori, niece of one of the Old Bolsheviks from the previous generation, and his transfer had probably been by his own request. The Cheka was if anything still more powerful in Georgia than in Azerbaijan. After Lenins death, a seemingly minor policy dispute in Moscow had turned the Communist Party into a battleground between two factions. The first was led by Trotsky, and was characterized, broadly, as moderate on the issue of centralization. They believed power in all of its forms should be devolved to the local republics and their Party leadership. The second was led by the increasingly powerful Iosif (in Georgian, Soso) Djugashvili, alias Stalin, the Man of Steel. Together with his allies, he held the line for absolute centralization and the concentration of power in Moscow. Holding sway over the Party in Moscow, he began to implement his ideas of direct rule and massive industrialization while Trotskys faction was driven to write obscure treatises and essays on how their own ideas were the truly Leninist ones. The Cheka was Stalins weapon of choice to beat the Caucasus into a shape of his desire. Beria cultivated ties with Stalins factionparticularly with the man who would become his patron, the Georgian Sergo Ordzhonikidze. As he hurdled his more enfeebled colleagues through the ranks of the secret police, Beria took to writing long, sometimes pathetic letters to Sergo, filled with chatty gossip, shameless self-aggrandizement and an almost nauseating obsequiousness. In time, these letters would be given more weight than his official reports. It was probably through his letters to Ordzhonikidze that Beria made indirect contact with Stalin, who still took a languid interest in affairs back in his home-
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land. Soon Beria developed an avuncular interest in the welfare of Stalins mother, very much alive in Georgia though her prodigal son paid her less and less attention until he even failed to show at her funeral. Beria, naturally, stood in for him. Beria also managed to ingratiate himself with both his patron in Moscow and his boss in Tbilisi, Georgias capital, through a living arrangement common in the early days of the Soviet Union. He lived in a communal apartment with his superior in the Georgian Cheka, and never passed up an opportunity to use this backdoor for his own self-aggrandizement. Ordzhonikidzes brother lived in the same building. By the Summer of 1923, Beria knew he had backed the right horse: Stalins faction in the Central Committee had triumphed. As a practical ramification, full-scale retribution against former Mensheviks began in Georgia. Mensheviks who had elected to remain in Georgia rather than going into exile had sometimes been protected by bonds of friendship with Old Bolsheviks from the days of the united Social Democratic Party. Now, the Chekists in Georgia were pitiless, carrying out retribution beyond individuals and factions down to the arrest and execution of Mensheviks wives and families. The repression led to an ill-starred uprising by Mensheviks several months lateran uprising which appeared to have been encouraged by the Cheka to provide a pretext for an even wider terror campaign. The repression actually became so harsh that, in a farce which would become a trademark of Stalinism, a commission led by one of those who had in fact encouraged the violence (in this case, Ordzhonikidze) The young Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a participant in the 1917 revolution was dispatched to correct errors in the work of the and one of Stalins confidants. He secret police. Beria escaped censure, however, and it played a conspicuous role in the may be out of gratitude or simply good politics that a latters early purges of both the few months later he named his and Ninas only son left opposition around Trotsky after his patrnSergo Ordzhonikidze. and the right opposition around From 1923 onward, Beria took a leading role, at Nikolai Bukharin. Ordzhonikidze first locally, regionally and finally nationally, in every attempted to use Beria to build his one of Stalins demented strategies to transform the own powerbase independent of Soviet Union from a one-party into a one-man state. In the Kremlin in the Caucasus, but 1928, it was the campaign against the kulaks, or sup- soon found himself under attack posedly wealthy peasants, which was carried out by his bossand his protg. after the fashion among their wives and children as well. In the late 1920s, it was forced collectivization. In 1930 and 1931, it was Stalins purge of officials for the errors of the forced collectivization campaign he had himself conceived. In 1932, it was the campaign against Stalins
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former comradesthe Old Bolsheviksmurdered for the sake of Stalins personality cult. In 1936, it was the purge of anyone by everyone. Every step of the way, even when separated by a great physical distance, Beria was there alongside Stalin, condemning Stalins enemies (Marxists who were rotting in the Czars prisons when Beria wore shortpants) and taking advantage of the chaos of the purges to rid himself of his rivals. With so many of his superiors on the outs, Beria continued his rapid advancement. In 1926, when the Chekas of the Caucasus were finally dissolved, he became chief of the Georgian branch of its successor, the GPU (State Political Administration). In 1927, he was named to the Georgian Central Committee. In 1930, he became a member of the Georgian Politburo. Stalin, the least sentimental of men, even promoted Beria alongside and finally over the head of his own family. As a more literal manifestation of his centralization drive, in 1922 the republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were grouped together in the Transcaucasus Republican unwieldy structure which simply imposed another layer of Party, police and state on top of the republic branches. Stalins brother-in-law, Stanislav Redens, was the head of the Transcaucasian GPU, and together with Beria was called to the Kremlin for a special meeting with the Vozhd (Leader) on March 2, 1930. Stalin had just published his famous article, Dizzy with Success, which called for a halt in forced collectivization due to more of those errors in the execution of his own orders. Redens and Beria seconded one another in blaming local Party officials for the hitches in grouping peasants together on collective farms, arguing, understandably enough for two Chekists, for still greater repression. A year later, Redens became obscenely drunk after a late-night party at Berias house in Tbilisi and caused some sort of scene, the details of which are unknown. Beria was obviously on somewhat familiar terms with Stalin by this point, for he took the initiative to describe the incident to his master in one of his gossipy letters. In response, Stalin transferred Redens to Belarus. Beria took over his job as head of the Transcaucasus GPU, keeping his old post in Georgia simultaneously. Six months later, in September of 1931, Stalin called the Caucasus Party leadership to Moscow for consultations and proposed Beria as the deputy secretary of the Transcaucasus Communist Party. A number of the officials managed to screw up their courage to challenge Stalin, calling Beria a charlatan. Stalin gave them a kick in the ass and sent them on their way. The officials took an appeal to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, to no avail. As the Georgians had feared, within a year, Beria had squeezed out his rivals and became the First Secretary of the Transcaucasus Republics Communist Party as well as the First Secretary of Georgias. He was only 32 years old.
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CHAPTER FOUR :
The Servant and the Cult

In the end the nagging voices broke him down more completely than the boots and fists of the guards. He became simply a mouth that uttered, a hand that signed, whatever was demanded of him. His sole concern was to find out what they wanted him to confess, and then confess it quickly, before the bullying started anew.
AVRENTI BERIA HAD COME to power with orders from Stalin and his mentor, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, to reverse the errors in collectivization and the deadly spread of bourgeois nationalism in the Caucasus. Beria, of course, had little experience on the farm except in turning fields into mass graves. His true mission, to judge by what was done rather than what was said, was to direct an all-out assault against the Communist Party apparatus in his neck of the woods. In this, he would excel. On December 1, 1934, one of the most powerful members of the Communist Party, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated. Kirov, the Party chief of Leningrad, was very popular within the ranksso popular that Stalin had to rely upon assassination, rather than judicial murder, to eliminate him. Kirovs death is generally regarded as the Soviet Unions Reichstag Firea pretext for Stalin to unleash his unprecedented assault on his colleagues, their families, and perfect strangers suspected of unorthodoxy. In fact, Kirovs death may have had a deeper significance for our story, in that it could have been the first bond of murder personally shared between Stalin and the man who would become his most obedient servant. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Berias patron in Moscow, was Kirovs best friend, and the days had not yet arrived when Stalins closest collaborators would say nothing while their boss arrested their wives, brothers and friends. A month before Kirovs murder, Ordzhonikidze was dining with Beria and Berias underling in Azerbaijan, Mir Jafar Bagirov, when he was stricken by violent stomach pains. He was hospitalized with internal bleeding and bedridden for
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The Servant & the Cult
a month, unable to leave the Caucasus until Kirov was already dead. His malady was never medically explained. The search for Kirovs assassins was about as substantial as OJ Simpsons search for the real killers of his wife, but the special law on detention and the use of torture (which he had coincidentally signed just prior to Kirovs murder) gave Stalin a pretext to round up his enemies within the Party. A further baby step toward the mammoth purge that Stalin was planning was undertaken a few months later, when the Central Committee announced an audit of the Party rolls to weed out any spies or imperialist lackeys who had managed to slip in over the years. Thousands were expelled, usually unjustly, leaving them legally defenseless from the terror that was to come. Extraordinary charactersthose who Stalin acts as a pallbearer at the funeral for had been lauded by press and Party, and Sergei Kirov; a poster of the guest of honour who appeared in numerous photographs is on the face of the building at right. Kirov was and articles alongside Stalin and even considered Stalins chief protg and his likely Lenin himselfwere to be handled with successor before his death. It was rumoured special care. Georgia, where Stalin had later that Stalin had asked Kirov to write the hislaboured for years in obscurity, suffered to tory text upon which his cult of personality was some degree not a greater tragedy but a based but, having declined to do so, this chore more bitter one than the rest of the Soviet fell to Lavrenti Beria instead. Union. After the substantial nobility was wiped out, the clergy drawn and quartered and the kulaks exiled or sent to concentration camps in Siberia, after the Mensheviks were brutally crushed and scattered to the four winds, it was now the turn of those who had been unfortunate enough to have been among Stalins acquaintances. The purge of Stalins former confidantsthe Old Bolsheviks of Georgiabegan, inevitably, over a minor quibble of Bolshevik dogma. Stalin had written a letter to a local periodical to criticize the generally sloppy stature of the history texts drawing upon the legacy of the Bolshevik faction in pre-revolutionary Georgia. Of course, not a few leaders have railed against those writers and professors Benito Mussolini called worthless chatterers, but few had the power, or the inclination, to take history as a personal insult. The worthless chatterers then writing Georgias Bolshevik history were not exactly scholars in the traditional sense, either. The most notable was Avel Enukidze, a prominent Old Bolshevik and, at one point, a member of the Soviet Central Committee in Moscow.
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Enukidze was also a notorious sexual predator with a fondness for teenage ballerinas and Bolshoi dancers that rivaled only the grotesque appetites of Beria himself. But it wasnt his sexual aggression that brought him down, but Stalins almost insatiable thirst for acclamation. Enukidze had written a bookhailed as a masterpiece by the press (which, of course, Beria controlled)on the history of a famous Bolshevik printing press in the Caucasus which had bombarded Russia with Lenins commandments during the Czarist period. Enukidze was accused by the media of having deliberately diminished Stalins contributions to the printing press and to Bolshevism in general, though Stalin in fact had almost nothing to do with it. In July 1935, Enukidze was called to account before a Central Committee plenum in Moscow, where the head of the secret police, Nikolai Yezhov, took the floor and demanded he be held accountable for his unpardonable crimes against the Leader. Beria (who had continued his unstoppable advance by becoming a member of the Central Committee of the USSR the previTo our shame, it must be admitted that even ous year, though he was still based in the now we do not have a single scholarly and aca- Caucasus) leapt to his feet repeatedly durdemically sound history of our party and the ing the denunciation of Enukidze, shouting revolutionary movement in Georgia. The his- insults and demanding harsher punishment tory of our party, of the whole revolutionary than the next. Enukidze was expelled from struggle in Georgia and the Transcaucasus the Party immediately, and three years from the very first days of its awakening are later, arrested, tried and shot. inseparably linked with the work and name of The smell of blood was in the air, and Comrade Stalin. It is not possible to refer to a Beria, as he had before, anticipated the single significant fact from the history of the next tune with a musicians intuition. It struggle for Lenins position which was not was his first and most notorious contribupermeated by the ideas of Stalin. tion to the body of world literature and his Lavrenti Beria, speech before the 9th Party Congress most overt contribution to Stalins cult of of the Georgian Communist Party, January 11, 1934 personalityoutside of all of the corpses he created, that is. It was called On the History of Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia. As the title would suggest, Berias book aint exactly summer reading. Berias book, however, wasnt even written by Beria. While no one would dare to call him anything but a leading theoretician of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism while he was still breathing, after his death Berias closest collaborators and henchmen doubted he had the vaguest idea of
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advanced Marxist thought. Such claims were of course self-serving for those who said them, but they were most likely true. As a result of Berias incompetence in ideological matters, Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia was written by a committee of approved historians in Georgia under the lead of a professor named Bedia, though no one other than Beria was credited. The unapproved historians were the target of their wrath. The books only purpose, aside from laying the groundwork for Stalins most delicate move after the assassination of Kirov, was the aggrandizement of the Leader in the face of all common sense. Berias book makes Stalin a Bolshevik before such a thing existed. The young Iosif Djugashvili becomes a leader when he was still a wet-behind-the-ears teenager, and omits the dozens of contemporaries who were actually responsible for underground political agitation. A number of the deleted Bolsheviks, as a matter of fact, had already been purged as Trotskyists or some other primal enemy of the people. As the years went by, Berias book would go through periodic revisions to delete more personalities later accused of treason to Party, State or Leader. Beria sent a copy of the manuscript to Stalin, who corrected still more errors before giving it his seal of approval. A copious scribbler Marxist prose himself (though, he would later admit, Ilych edited his best works), Stalin apparently prided himself on being easy to edit. How else can one explain that the Vozhd failed to correct quotes from his own mouth which had been doctored to eliminate the young Bolsheviks praise of his elders and self-denigration for his own significant but far from indispensable role in the Communist Revolution? In any case, Berias book served a practical purpose which Stalin no doubt had in mind (and theres evidence that the whole thing was his idea all along). Every single historian but for oneand many of them were also influential Party officialswho was criticized for having failed to recognize Stalins pre-eminent role in pre-revolutionary Georgia was shot. The all-out assault on the Old Bolsheviks in the Caucasus and elsewhere received a new stimulus, and Stalins cult grew in such magnitude that, for the first time, there were whispered jokes about history being brought up to date. And for Beria, it meant still more acknowledgment from the Leader, which led naturally to his own promotion. As for the anonymous Professor Bedia, the true editor and main author of the book? According to documents released after his downfall, Beria had the historian arrested and shot in 1937. Berias thugs apparently had Bedia confess to membership in an anti-Soviet organization and repudiate his participation in the book project, but Bedia recanted when he was brought face to face with his former literary collaborator. As with Berias rival in Abkhazia, Nestor Lakoba, Bedia would have died anyway. His intransigence merely made it more painful.
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CHAPTER FIVE :
The Graveyard of Utopia

One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor.
O LAVRENTI BERIA AND his growing circle of henchmen (most of whom would follow in his wake to higher positions until his downfall), the 1930s were fraught with danger. One false stepone sign overlooked, or hint misunderstood, or simple bad luck dooming your caseand you would join the ranks marching silently to death in the dungeons of the secret police. If everything was played correctly, one could still die on Stalins whim, the avarice or jealousy of a neighbour, the sadism of perfect strangers. There was no template for surviving a purge; one simply tried to remain above it, to ride the wave and hope that it left you on your feet when you landed. There was, sometimes, a greater logic to the various phases of the purges. Aside from taking out Old Bolsheviks, Stalin was clearing the Party ranks and suborning those who survived to the only element in the USSR with a proven record of efficiency, however macabre: the political police. The strategy had begun with Berias own appointment to the highest regional Party leadership positions despite his ideological ignorance, but now whole wings of the security services streamed into senior Party positions. Theres no consensus among historians over when the Great Purge began, and no event which marked its conclusion. For most, the murder of Kirov in late 1934 marks the onset, though the machinery of mass murder didnt kick into overdrive until Nikolai Yezhov was named as head of the NKVD (a new acronym for the secret police, standing for the Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs) in 1936. In fact, repression meted out by the security services had always been a tool for the authorities, with the few winds growing in
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velocity into a cyclone of violence. Yezhov was a perfect protagonist for the Purge: a man of dwarfish height, hysterical, cruel, and usually described by contemporaries as a sociopath. In December 1936, Yezhov denounced Nikolai Bukharin, one of Lenins intimates and at one time Lenins chief of agitprop. Beria, who was present at the meeting, is described in the transcript as jumping up numerous times, screaming for the swine and scoundrel to be arrested on the spot. Bukharin went to his death after having exacted a promise from Stalin that a final letter would be delivered to his wife. In fact, the letter remained in the secret police archives for 55 years before it was Nikolai Yezhov salutes, far left, at the height handed to her in 1992. of his power in November 1937. To his right is Sergo Ordzhonikidze too soon felt the Anastas Mikoyan, followed by Lazar Kaganclaustrophobia of death closing in on him. ovich and Vyacheslav Molotov. Yezhov would Several of his deputies in the soon concentrate his attack on Mikoyan and Commissariat of Heavy Industry, which Kaganovich, who were joined by the Caucasus he headed, were arrested as the tempo of overlord Beria in plotting for his downfall. the purge increased. His 50th birthday party was interrupted by news that his brother, Papulia, had been arrested in Georgia. Sergo intervened with Beria, who had by now developed a direct line with Stalin and other members of his inner-circle and was his old patrons equal. Beria responded to Sergo in a cold manner, saying that he had looked into the case and had Papulia released. Sergo was furious by the betrayal of his former disciple, though it soon dawned on him that the impetus for Papulias arrest had come from Stalin. One month after the denunciation of Bukharin, Ordzhonikidzes deputy in the Commissariat of Heavy Industry was arrested and executed. He had become despondent. On February 18, 1937, Sergo had a bitter argument with Stalin by telephone. After hanging up the receiver, Sergo drew his revolver from his desk and shot himself in the head. Suicide by someone of Sergo Ordzhonikidzes stature was of course forbidden. It had happened, but it did not happen as far as the authorities were concerned. Instead, the story handed to the press was that Sergo had died of a (especially grisly) heart attack. Many of Sergos friends, however, persisted in the belief that suicide too was an alibi, and thought Beria had something to do with it. After his death was announced, Beria visited his widow, Zinaida, to pay his respects. According to witnesses, she tried to attack him and had to be restrained. Beria later had Papulia Ordzhonikidze arrested again and handdelivered his confession that he wanted to kill Stalin to the fortunate man who had been saved from this devious conspiracy.
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N FEBRUARY 23, 1937, Stalin spoke at a Party plenum, screeching that the Soviet Union was crawling with imperialist and fascist spies. The Great Purge kicked into high gear with a wave of denunciations. Headlines one day praised a Party official for breaking up a nest of enemy agents, and next day condemned the same official for being an enemy agent himself. The frenzy was dizzying, but would be hastened further still. On July 2, 1937, Stalin released another resolution on enemy infiltration and Yezhov cracked down. Across the Soviet Union, NKVD chiefs announced the discovery of plots and conspiracies, including within their own ranks. Within a week of Stalins resolution, Beria had announced the execution of 17 members of the Georgian NKVD for conspiracy, and the arrest of several Old Bolsheviks (including his predecessors as Georgias Communist Party boss) for trying to kill him in separate murder plots. Over the next four months, the NKVD across the USSR would arrest more than a quarter of a million individuals. Of these, some 75,000 were shot immediately. To judge by one statistic, the purge conducted by Beria in Georgia was even more ghastly. Of the 644 delegates to a May 1937 Party meeting in Tbilisi, 425 had been murdered by the end of the year. That Beria and his underlings (for the most part) survived the Great Purge is a testament to his political acumen, his powerful grip on the local NKVD and his unreserved appetite for groveling. To men of the older generation such as Bukharin, Stalin was less a deity to tremble before than a comrade to crack a dirty joke with. Their casual attitude sealed their fate. A decade later, Milovan Djilasthe only outsider to provide an in-depth testimony of the notorious late night dinners of the Kremlins chieftains at Stalins dacha noted that while Stalin played practical jokes on people, and other Soviet leaders mocked one another with a touch of sadism, Stalin himself was never the butt of a joke. As Djilas explained, Divinity remains divinity only if it behaves like divinity. Beria never forgot this lesson in theology. He would show remarkable skill in manipulating Stalin, but he feared his anger and fed his craving for acclamation as if his life depended on it (and it did). He was destined to go down in history as Stalins henchman, but a better aide no ruthless dictator would have.
Y JANUARY OF 1938, the Great Purge was beginning to wind down, at least as far as Party personnel were concerned. In his customary manner, on January 14 Stalin blamed the leaders of the Soviet republics for having gone too farthey were once more dizzy with success. Still, NKVD headquarters in Moscow ordered their constituent units to clean up the job, with 57,000 more arrests; each republic was even given a numerical quota of prisoners to apprehend. Yezhov for his part was not entirely pleased with the way the purge had gone down in the Caucasus, as Berias clients were virtually untouched. With the Party a smoldering ruin
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and the Red Army now under attack, Beria had actually come out as the big winner. Of his faction, only two notable officials had been purged, and both had been replaced from Berias bottomless well of disciples. If Yezhov and Beria were to co-exist, some understanding would have to be established between them. Such a modus vivendi was, of course, anathema in Stalinism. The USSR had broken down into a dozen or more spheres of influence, feudal fiefs, political clans bound to their leader as he was bound to Stalin. Historians of the USSR once listed each of Stalins chief deputies by their titles, though these were almost meaningless. True power in the Soviet Union was carved up between the competing clans, jostling one another to reap greater rewards at the right hand of the man who was power personified. The clans were bound to come into conflict, not only as a matter of course but because Stalin remained atop the pyramid by setting them against one another. He would often give two men of two separate government or Party departments the same task, with the understanding that they would denounce one another and the stronger would prevail (in theory, at least. The young Nikolai Yezhov, aka the More often, the one who best stroked Stalins vanity Ranting Dwarf. Having replaced would come out on top.) New figures, not bound by the purged Genrikh Yagoda, ties of loyalty to any existing clan, were brought in Yezhovs assault on the powerful from the provinces to strike at political clans which political clans would ensure he were growing too powerful. This refined form of shared the same fate. state terrorism would bring about paralysis at the bottom sectors of the state and the Communist Party but a vicious civil war at the top. So it was perhaps Stalins nimble footwork which brought about the most titanic (but at the time, unacknowledged) power struggle in the USSR during the purge. Yezhov and Beria eyed each other warily, and then moved to strike. The ranting dwarf never had a chance. Yezhov had made no inroads in undermining Berias clan, which totally dominated the Caucasus. After a few feeble attempts, he appears to have lost his nerve, and ordered the arrest of Beria himself. It was a tactless move. Rather than hosing the blood off the wall for a new victim, the head of the Georgian NKVD, Sergei Goglidze, merely passed the matter onto the intended victim. Goglidze was Berias man. Beria raced to Moscow and appealed to Stalin, who countermanded the order. The provincial from the Caucasus found an anti-Yezhov movement already in full-swing in the Kremlin. The NKVD chief had spread himself thin and left a number of hardened political
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warriors wounded but not slain. Among Berias eager collaborators was Lazar Kaganovich, a bestial relic who had survived primarily because he possessed the same qualities which set Beria apart: utter ruthlessness, boundless cruelty and an almost scholarly efficiency. With Kaganovich and Beria dropping dark hints, the two were able to prompt Stalin against his chief executioner. He created a special commission to look into NKVD abuses. Like all such commissions, of course, its verdict was well-known in advance. Among the presiding members were Beria and Andrei Vyshinsky, the USSRs chief prosecutor and inquisitor at the show trials of Bukharin and other leading Old Bolsheviks. Even before the commission delivered its verdict, Yezhov experienced the dread of watching his deputies arrested one after another. Beria named his own men in their place, and moved permanently to Moscow. Becoming a deputy leader of the national NKVD was at best a demotion from his unrivaled power in the Caucasus, though he must have known his subordinate position wouldnt last long. Yezhov began to drink heavily, which hardly stabilized his already demented personality. On November 17, 1938, the commission delivered its verdict. The NKVD, it said, with as straight a face as a packet of unread pages can hold, had been infiltrated by enemies of the people. The commission recommended that the NKVD be forbidden from conducting mass arrests and prohibited from exiling Soviet citizens to Siberia. Six days later, Yezhov submitted his resignation. Beria took over the leadership of the NKVD and called for his family from Tbilisi to move permanently to Moscow. It was probably what Stalin intended all along. The Vozhd aside, Beria was now the most powerful man in the country.
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CHAPTER SIX :
His Masters Voice

Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human facefor ever.
S HARD AS IT IS to reconcile with our view in retrospect, the appointment of Lavrenti Beria as chief of the NKVD in late 1938 was actually greeted with some optimism. His predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov, had the charm of a rabid hound forcefed a diet of gunpowder and raw meat. Beria, by contrast, appeared to be rational, perhaps cold but certainly not ranting and hysterical. His appointment, coming at a time when the effects of the purges on the general population began to ease, and with the biting verdict of the special committee charged with investigating NKVD abuses fresh in everyones mind, appeared to auger a less bleak if not less oppressive era. Unfortunately, Berias accession to the head of the secret police meant nothing in the way of moderation. While the Great Purge was officially dubbed the yezhovshchina, or Yezhovs Thing to distance the new leadership from his policies, Berias NKVD continued to carry out and tidy up the cases that remained on its ledger. Moreover, he appeared to do so with enthusiasmeven relish. Some of the cases involved settling old scores. Stanislav Redens, Berias old boss in the Caucasus and Stalins brother-in-law, had been shunted off to the NKVD in Kazakstan during the Great Purge. Like most people with a bond of kinship with the Leader, he soon found himself arrested and facing the firing squad. His wife appealed to Stalin directly, but he brushed her off on Beria, who advised her in the strongest possible terms to forget about him. Probably close to 40,000 officers from the Red Army were purged under Yezhov. Like all good Soviet functionaries, Beria had a deep mistrust of the military and made few
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His Masters Voice
friends among them. Marshal Vasili Blucher, arrested in October 1938, was been beaten so severely he had lost an eye. Though Beria had nothing to do with his arrest, the high office Blucher held led Beria to conduct the interrogationand the beatingpersonally. Bluchers wife, too, had been arrested and tortured by Beriaout of sadistic curiosity, she said. Unlike some Nazi chieftains or the sawdust caesar in Italy, Beria had always taken a hands-on approach to matters of torture. He directed and even participated in brutal interrogations his whole career, though obviously not as frequently as he once did as a Chekist in the Caucasus. Sometimes it was because he had reason to fear the victim might implicate him in one of the fantastic confessions NKVD interrogations routinely produced, but on other occasions there appears to be no other reason than, as Marshal Bluchers wife called it, sadistic curiosity. His more earthy passions were also given free reign once Beria moved to Moscow. He became a tireless, even legendary sexual predator and the terror of young ballerinas at the Bolshoi, from among whom he had his pick. There were few long-lasting affairs but many anonymous encounters in his limousine with girls who caught his momentary fancy and were raped on the spot. Upon his arrest, a list was found on one of Berias bodyguards containing the names of 39 Moscow women, along with their phone numbers and addresses. However, when the full 47 volumes of the criminal case against him were shown on Russian television on January 23, 2003, a list with literally hundreds of womens names and telephone numbers was produced. In 1993, construction on the plot of land which once held his home turned up several corpses buried in the courtyard. Speculation had it that these were the remains of other rape victims who died during the attack or caused trouble by going to the authorities afterward.
HE UNSTABLE YEZHOV DEPOSED, Stalin now permitted a much more capable and ambitious man to expand the dominion of the NKVD into foreign affairs. Maxim Litvinov, the long-standing and generally respected Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was replaced by a humourless and mechanical mannequin named Vyacheslav Molotov. As in other high-profile cases, Beria oversaw and sometimes participated in the interrogation of Litvinovs arrested deputies personally. Soviet embassies had always been dens of espionageBeria himself had been employed as a secretary carrying out espionage at the Soviet embassy in Tbilisi prior to the Bolshevik takeover of Georgia. Now, just as NKVD officers had flooded into the Party hierarchy before and during the purges, ranking members of the security services began to fill the ranks of the foreign ministry. A number of members of Berias political clan, which had now spread beyond the Caucasus to Moscow, Belarus and beyond, took over as accredited ambassadors. Vladimir Dekanozov, a former pre-med student who became one of Berias most trusted deputies, became Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs and, beginning in 1940, the Soviet Unions ambassador to Germany.
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His Masters Voice
The latter was an especially sensitive position. From all indications, Beria was an enthusiastic proponent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, initialed on August 23, 1939, which bound Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to a treaty of non-aggression while carving up Eastern Europe between them. The secret annex dealing with the Soviet Unions westward expansion soon gave Berias NKVD more work to do. As Stalin put it wryly to the German Ambassador in Moscow, Comrade Beria will handle the accommodations for our new Baltic guests. Sovietization of the new territoriesone half of Poland, and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia took precedence over all other security concerns. In the Baltics, the NKVD was ordered to carry out a mass deportation (so much for the commissions recommendations) of the entire intelligentsia and upper class as well as much of the bourgeoisie. To Soviet leaders, the brief taste of independence these states had enjoyed in the lull between the two world wars couldnt be beaten out of them, as it had been with the Georgians, Armenians and Azeris. Any memory of freedom had to be annihilated. About 140,000 Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians were exiled to labour camps in Siberia, collectively known as the gulag (originally an acronym for the Vyacheslav Molotov, left, stands alongside Main Administration of Corrective Stalin as German Foreign Minister Joachim Labour Colonies). A similar campaign von Ribbentrop initials the Non-Aggression was carried out in Soviet-occupied Poland, Pact on the eve of World War II. Once the pact where 400,000 Poles were sent to the was signed, Beria was given responsibility for gulag. The latter number would have been suborning the Soviet Unions new territories to higher, but Beria had already cut down the central control. The methods he used were, in number of Polish prisoners by several a word, genocide. thousand, in the woods near Katyn. It was a member of Berias political clan, Lavrenti Tsanava, who probably first brought the thousands of Polish POWs to official notice. As the NKVD chief of Belarus, many of the prisoners were in his care. Tsanava passed word of this problem up the chain of command to Beria, who in turn presented his novel solution before his Kremlin colleagues. In October 1996, producers for Ted Turners grandiose ego trip, the CNN documentary Cold War, sat down with Berias son Sergo and listened to him lie through his teeth about his fathers role in the massacre he himself proposed to his Kremlin colleagues. My
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His Masters Voice
father refused to take part in this action Stalin agreed to allow my father not to take part in this action. Later on, my father tried to explain his position: he said that it was not because he loved people very much and he was altruistic, but he said that this was on the eve of the war, and thats why we must save all these people and make them fight against the Germans. Sergo really may have believed what he was sayingafter all, his father could certainly never be accused of being altruistic or of loving people very muchbut the above statement should be highlighted by a warning that just about everything Sergo Beria has said in recent years has been proven to be untrue. In this case, the top secret execution order, dated March 5, 1940 and addressed to Comrade Stalin and signed Peoples Commissar for Internal Affairs of the USSR, L. Beria, spoke of 14,736 former officers, government officials, landowners, policemen, gendarmes, prison guards, settlers in the border regions and intelligence officers, all of whom were sworn enemies of Soviet authority [and] full of hatred for the Soviet system. They could be dealt with by apply[ing] to them the supreme penalty: shooting. Stalin, Commissar of Defense Kliment Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, nominal Soviet President Kalinin and Lazar The first page of Berias execution order on the Kaganovich all signed off on the measure. problem of Polish prisoners of war, which led No other punishment is suggested, and its to Katyn. The military and police officers in the exactly what they received. camps are attempting to continue their countAccording to this document, the haner-revolutionary activities and are carrying out dling of the operation was entrusted to anti-Soviet agitation. Each of them is waiting three agents, two of whom (Vsevolod only for his release in order to start activity Merkulov and Bogdan Kobulov) were struggling against Soviet authority. The organs long-time soldiers in Berias clan and now of the NKVD in the western provinces of Ukraine and Belarus have uncovered a number high-ranking members of the security services. Merkulov committed a gaffe of counter-revolutionary rebel organizations. three years later when Polish officers requested the release of several officers in Soviet custody to fight the Germans. Theyre gone, Merkulov told them. We allowed a tremendous error to take place with them. The evidence on Katyn was clearespecially because Merkulov and Co. had carelessly left all personal effects on the prisoners before executing them, allowing the Nazis, who
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discovered a mass grave of 4,000 officers in 1943, to identify them. The evidence regarding Berias involvement is also unequivocal. The Soviet government denied the truth until its dissolution; Sergo Beria, likewise, swore his fathers innocence until he went to his grave. Including the 400,000 Polish prisoners, between 1.6 and 3.5 million people were in the gulag at its height, scattered between dozens of camps and invariably living and dying in utterly horrid conditions. Sometimes they were used as a massive slave labour force, particularly in the munitions industry during the war. Other times they were used as cannon fodder, or lumberjacks, or an ad hoc construction force. Prisoners with some sort of specialtyscientists, for instancecontinued their trade in special NKVD labs under the aegis of the Special Technical Bureau. Among them were AN Tupolev, the famous aircraft designer, and a number of physicists who would take part in the USSRs first steps in the development of atomic energy. Oversight of this massive body was a huge task, requiring thousands of bureaucratic personnel and still more guards, yet it was but one part of the NKVDs increasing area of responsibility under Beria, who in early 1941 had become deputy chair of the Council of Peoples Commissars (another of Stalins ephemeral state bodies) as a manifestation of his clans growing importance in both Party and state. The NKVD was in charge of all prisons in the Soviet Union, including those for ordinary criminals. The NKVD also had a hand in railway and road security, ordinary policing, fire prevention, border controls, special Interior Ministry troops as well as their own heavily-armed militia. It was perhaps because of overextensionbut more likely a matter of Stalins periodic undercutting of his vassals that foreign intelligence and counter-espionage duties were temporarily walled-off from the NKVD in the form of a new agency, the NKID. The division was only partial, however, not least of all because Beria continued to exert a strong influence on espionage in the new agency. More pressing matters would lead to the NKID being absorbed back into its mother organization in short order.
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His Masters Voice
CHAPTER SEVEN :
Going for Coffee with Beria

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war.
HE NKID AND NKVD together produced a prodigious stream of information about Germanys war preparations. Much of it came from simple observationGerman reconnaissance planes had been flying deep into Soviet territory, marking the airbases which would be wiped out in the first hours of the offensive. German spies were also spotted mapping Soviet ground fortifications which were under construction. As it was, Beria, in charge of border security, had ordered that the old fortifications be stripped down and their materials used to build new ones at the USSRs new western frontier after the absorption of Poland and the Baltic States, with disastrous consequences. According to the German military intelligence chief on the Eastern Front (and later head of West Germanys spy agency) Reinhard Gehlen, Beria had a spy in the highest levels of the German governmentthe chief of the Nazi party apparatus, Martin Bormann. After Rudolf Hesss bizarre landing in Scotland in 1941, Bormann took over the organization and (according to Gehlen at least) tied Hitlers command capability in knots. Gehlen was an inveterate braggart, however, and there has been no conclusive evidence that Bormann escaped Hitlers bunker in the last days of the war and spent his remaining years as an advisor to the Soviet government, as Gehlen suggested. Gehlens embroidered fantasies were quite unnecessary anyway, since the Soviet spy organs were also recording the incredible candor of German officials who thought Hitlers plan of conquestcodenamed Operation Barbarosaa work of madness and tipped off their would-be enemies.
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Whatever confidence Beria had in his trusted lieutenant in Germany, Vladimir Dekanozov, was mooted when Stalin pronounced his almost religious belief that Germany would not attack. Beria not surprisingly cowered before questioning the divine oracle in his Kremlin office, instead adopting his attitude of smug infallibility. When Dekanozov was tipped off about war preparations by a German diplomat, Stalin quipped We shall consider that disinformation has now reached the level of ambassadors. Dekanozov later sent an urgent cable on June 21st warning that Hitler would attack the next day. Beria showed his concern by cracking that Dekanozov should be recalled. In fairness, even Germanys allies were incredulous when they received reports of Hitlers war plans. Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolinis son-inlaw and Foreign Minister, also wondered about the competence of his ambassador in Germany who had been tipped off about Hitlers plan to invade Poland in 1939. Italy had based everything on Hitler pursuing a peaceful policy which would strengthen Germany at the expense of her weak neighbours without risking a wider European war. But never did Italy receive such high-level intelligence about Hitlers war plans. The rare display of initiative by Soviet officials was met with Vsevolod Merkulov, a member of blunt rebuffs and crude mockery. Vsevolod Berias clan from the early days of the Merkulov once forwarded a report based on Cheka, in an undated photograph information from a German air force officer on (the uniform has been touched up, behalf of an official who dared not risk Stalins probably to account for a promotion in ire. Merkulov paid for his impertinence with rank). Merkulov was an ethnic abuse. Comrade Merkulov, Stalin replied, you Armenian, one of three prominent Armenians in Berias clan. There were, can send your source from the staff of the anti-Semites would be surprised to German air force to his fucking mother. This is know, a total of only two prominent not a source but disinformation. Jews. The head of military intelligence, which was producing most of the hard evidence of Germanys imminent attack, was denounced as a fraud and a liar by Beria on June 21, 1941, who assured Stalin, My people and I, Iosif Vissarionovich, firmly remember your wise prediction: Hitler will not attack us in 1941! So it was written. Beria, who might have been able to wrap his mind around doublethink but certainly wasnt crazy, must have suspected Stalin was wrong. But he wasnt going to be the one to say it. Had they known of Stalins prophecy, neither would Dekanozov or Merkulov. Thus, the flames kicked up around Moscow and the Red Czars
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fiddled the night away.
S DEKANOZOV AND MERKULOV had warned, on June 22nd the Werhmacht punched through the Soviet Unions western frontier. Border defenses, with their incomplete fortifications, were totally overwhelmed, and the Luftwaffe destroyed nearly the entirety of the Soviet airforce west of Moscow. It was left to Molotov, whose name was burned forever in human memory due his masters plan to reach a concord with Germany, to announce the beginning of the war to the Soviet citizens who werent already in the midst of it. Despite his well-earned reputation as a human zero, Molotov gave a rousing speech. Stalin wasnt heard from until July 3rd, which led to speculation that he had either suffered some sort of physical collapse or even a power struggle for leadership within the Kremlin. It wasnt until the publication of Nikita Khrushchevs memoir, if we can believe it, that we were able to get some glimpse of Stalins condition during the first days of the war. As per Khrushchev, Stalin was a wreck, inconsolable. Weve lost, he told Beria. I give up. Lenin left us a proletarian state but weve been caught with our pants down and the whole thing has gone to shit. Its hard to imagine Stalin saying these words, but its also difficult to imagine him kissing his daughter, having an orgasm or enjoying a strong bowel movement, and were pretty sure he did those things, too. Whatever the case (and Khrushchev did admit hearing it second-hand from Beria), Stalin quickly recovered his senses. The day after the attack, he created the General Headquarters of the Soviet High Command, or the Stavka; and a week after, the State Defense Committee. Beria had a high position in both bodies, which were the supreme organs of state, military and party during the war years. The State Defense Committee consisted of only five members: Stalin, Beria, Molotov, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, and Central Committee Secretary Georgi Malenkov. Stalins first order of business, of course, was repression. Beria was only too eager to find scapegoats, particularly in light of the way the Germans had sliced and diced his border defenses. On July 16, political commissars were re-introduced into the army. During the civil war, these could idealistically be said to be in charge of educating the soldiers in Communism. Now, however, they were little more than snitches. On July 25th, about 1,000 deserters were shotmost of them, it seems, were not deserters at all but men who had been encircled by the rapid German advance and fought their way back from behind enemy lines. Two days later, Beria had his pound of flesh: nine high-level officers were sentenced to death, among them the commander of the forces on the German border. Beria had missed his chance to conduct the brunt of the Red Army purge, which had been undertaken (literally) by Yezhov. The mass executions of July however were just the beginning. Throughout the war, and with Stalins consent he unleashed the NKVD on the Red Army, arresting and torturing officers and building evidence against some of the
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USSRs most talented soldiers. He arrested Marshal Georgi Zhukovs chief of staff on the Soviet Unions Western Front and throughout the war kept tabs on the hero of the Battles of Moscow and Berlin with an eye toward his eventual prosecution. NKVD arrests of officers were common enough for the practice to become a euphemism: Going to have coffee with Beria, they called it. In light of the persecution of an army fighting desperately for its life, its remarkable that none of Berias fanciful army plots ever became a reality. The story of Nikolai Pisarev, a Soviet prisoner of war, is perhaps extraordinary in its details but illustrative in its gravity. Pisarev had been captured by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz, where 600 Soviet POWs and 250 Polish political prisoners were the first to be gassed. Pisarev had been dispatched to work on the railroad in town under the strict watch of the Auschwitz guards. After being warned of their eventual fate, Pisarev and other inmates attacked their guards and ran for a nearby wood. A fugitive hundreds of Keeping an eye on the Red Army: Stalin and miles behind enemy lines, Pisarev was Marshal Budyonny having a chat; next in line eventually recaptured in Krakow, though a behind them are Georgi Malenkov, Secretary of member of the Polish underground in his the Central Committee, and Lavrenti Beria, cell managed to cover his Auschwitz camp oddly wearing an ordinary suit and tie rather tattoo with another. than his uniform. Pisarev was assigned to a German forced labour brigade for the duration of the war. Together with some 350,000 other POWs, he was repatriated in 1944. One out of every ten of these men, including Pisarev, were immediately arrested by the secret policea unit staffed heavily by Berias cronies and called, with a touch of the absurd, SMERSH, or death to spies. Pisarev was tortured for more than month by SMERSH before he was eventually released. He was prevented from obtaining any sort of job which might provide an adequate living long after the war and the downfall of Beria. Despite being technically an invalid, he was also refused a disability pension.
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HE PURGATORIAL SUFFERING IN the gulag was further intensified during the war. The prison complex in Siberia became an unwieldy munitions complex, though at a horrific cost. An estimated 620,000 prisoners died during the warwhich was almost equal to the number of agents and troops the revamped NKVD had in its ranks to deal with counter-intelligence, rear-guard combat and, of course, torturing their own military heroes. When the danger of a German victory passed, this shadow army was put to work fighting their traditional enemy: the Soviet peoples themselves. On February 20, 1944, Beria arrived in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, with his longtime deputies Ivan Serov, Bogdan Kobulov and Stepan Mamulov. Over the next two weeks, supported by some 19,000 security troops and 100,000 NKVD soldiers, they deported the entire Ingush and Chechen population to Kazakstan. The mass round-ups had hardly begun when Beria fired off a letter to Stalin with the helpful suggestion that another ethnic group in the Caucasus, the Balkars, should be deported too. March 8th and 9th, about 300,000 Balkars joined the 500,000 Chechens and Ingush, 68,000 Karachai, 93,000 Kalmyks already in freight cars heading west to Central Asia. On May 10th, Beria suggested that the 180,000 Crimean Tatars should be deported as well. It was done. The Volga German Autonomous Republic was abolished and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans were sent west. Solomon Milshtein, one of Berias old cronies, wrote Kobulov to brag that he had discovered an ingenious way to save the proletariat time and money during the deportations: by cramming 45 Chechens and Ingush into every cattle car, rather than the proscribed allotment of 40. He had taken this decision himself, he said, when he noticed that many of the deportees were children and thus didnt require as much breathing room as adults.
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CHAPTER EIGHT :
The Kremlin Complexion

Later he was to realize that all that then happened was merely a preliminary, a routine interrogation to which nearly all prisoners were subjected. There was a long range of crimesespionage, sabotage, and the liketo which everyone had to confess as a matter of course. The confession was a formality, though the torture was real.
HE NKVD WAS SPLIT after the Germans began their retreat from Soviet territory, with the chastened Comrade Merkulov placed in charge of the NKGB, or Peoples Commissariat of State Security. In 1946 the security organs were reorganized once again, with the NKVD becoming the MVD, the NKGB the MGB. If the printers office and telephone operators became disconcerted, Stalin was obviously pleased with himself. Merkulov was Berias creature, so the blow of Stalins latest ukase against a too-powerful subordinate was not as great as it may have seemed. Beria also presided over the Council of Ministers (which, in a similar fashion, had replaced the Council of Peoples Commissars, with the ex-commissars receiving ministerial titles after the western fashion) and a full member of the Politburo. Perhaps to mark their importance, both Beria and the Commissar/Minister of Defense, Nikolai Bulganin, were designated with the rank of marshal (neither had served in the military since conscription), while officers in the security organs received an equivalent military rank. Stalin himself took the rank of generalissimo to keep one up on the Joneses. But to even mention Berias various officesof which there were many more than those listedis to give pretense more attention than it deserves. Offices and titles were only manifestations of the true power of the patrn and his clan. Nowhere was the informal power hierarchy of Stalins henchman better represented than at the infamous, late-night dinners that would take place at the Kremlin or at Stalins dacha. Two notable individuals left accounts of these soires with Stalins inner-circle. Churchill gave a rather colourful account of them in his memoirs, but the dinner was rather
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improvised. Furthermore, Stalins lackeys showed some tact in dealing with his allies in outward appearances, dropping the use of comrade for mister in conversations and restricting discussion accordingly. This was not true of the second Boswell, Milovan Djilas. As a member of the Yugoslav Politburo, Djilas was given an insiders view; the Soviet leaders let their hair down and spoke freely, with broad jokes about Roosevelt and Churchill and how the Yugoslav Communists, then fighting a guerrilla war, could best trick the West into recognizing them as the legitimate government. According to Djilas, these dinners at which the fate of nations and men were decided began around 10:00 pm and lasted from four to six hours. There was a lot of rambling conversation, jokes and even the odd philosophical discussion. But in actual fact a significant part of Soviet policy was shaped at these dinners [T]he destiny of the vast Russian land, of the newly acquired territories, and, to a considerable degree, of the human race was decided. Djilas noticed that the late hour and inebriated state in which most of Stalins inner-circle departed Every crime was possible to Stalin, for there was was the reason few of the Soviet not one he had not committed I was more inter- Unions most prominent leadersand ested, and am more interested, in how such a dark, thus some of the most important men cunning, and cruel individual could ever have led in the worldarrived at their offices one of the greatest and most powerful states, not before noon. just for a day or a year, but for thirty years! Until preFood was served on silver plates. cisely this is explained by Stalins present criticsI Stalin, Beria, Molotov and the others mean his successorsthey will only confirm that had of course extensive household in good part they are only continuing his work and staffs (the German tutor of Berias son that they contain in their own make-up those same Sergo had been saved from deportaelementsthe same ideas, patterns, and methods tion by his wife Nina), but here all that propelled him. would serve themselvesreal existMilovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin ing egalitarianism, one might call it. Stalin never sat at the head of the table, as one might expect, but always in the first chair to the left of the head. Seating arrangements for the others were improvised. Stalin drank red wine and vodka during Djilas first visit in 1944, moderately and never to grotesque excess, whereas I could not say the same for Molotov, and especially
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not for Beria, who was practically a drunkard. Stalin goaded his subordinates to toast more, drink more, and, when blitzed on the sauce, played practical jokes on them or encouraged others to do so. The dinner began with someoneit seems to me that it was Stalin himself proposing that everyone guess how many degrees below zero it was, Djilas recalled, and that everyone be punished by being made to drink as many glasses of vodka as the number of degrees he guessed wrong. Luckily, while still at the hotel, I had looked at the thermometer, and I added to the number to allow for the temperature drop during the night, so that I missed by only one degree. I remember that Beria missed by three, remarking that he had done so on purpose so that he might drink more glasses of vodka. At his masters elbow, Lavrenti Beria shows Djilas, who had navely romanticized Stalin the special vodka-dispensing control the motherland of Socialism, was panel on his yacht. Beria, who prospered for his appalled by the vacuity of such a life. abilities to satisfy Stalin like a petulant child, An American, of course, would note the easily adjusted to the Vozhds growing senility similarities of these drinking games to col- even after Stalins temper tantrums were legiate contests like Quarters or Hi increasingly aimed at his own political clan. Bobthe pointless diversions of amateur drunks to pass the time while imbibing still more booze. But the men around Stalin, without the slightest check to their behavior, collectively followed the Leader into the foggy twilight of senility and the childishness that comes with old age. These men shut up in a narrow circle, Djilas wrote, were capable of inventing even more senseless reasons for drinking vodkathe length of the dining room in feet or of the table in inches. And who knows, maybe thats what they do! At any rate, this apportioning of the number of vodka glasses according to the temperature reading suddenly brought to my mind the confinement, the inanity and senselessness of the life of these Soviet leaders gathered about their superannuated chief even as they played a role that was decisive for the human race. Foreign or domestic, most who have left some personal recollection of their encounters with Beria have described a loathsome troglodyte. Brigadier George Hill, a representative from British intelligence in Moscow to consult on matters of partisan warfare, said that the more I saw of him, the less I liked him; an evil, sinister creature. Andrei Sakharov, recruited in 1948 by Beria to take part in the atomic bomb project, recalled the dread of realizing he was face-to-face with a terrifying monster. Djilaswho was close friends with the future head of the Yugoslav secret police, Aleksandar Rankovic, and elsewhere stated that he would have taken the odious job himself if he had been so summonedhad
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much the same impression. Beria was a rather short man, Djilas wrote, noting Stalin rarely kept around Politburo members who were taller than himself. Beria was somewhat plump, greenish pale, and with soft damp hands. With his square-cut mouth and bulging eyes behind his pince-nez, he suddenly reminded me of Vujkovic, one of the chiefs of the Belgrade Royal Police who specialized in torturing Communists. It took an effort to dispel the unpleasant comparison, which was all the more nagging because the similarity extended even to his expressionthat of a certain self-satisfaction and irony mingled with a clerks obsequiousness and solicitude. At his last dinner at Stalins dacha, Beria pushed a glass of peretsovka, or pepper vodka, on Djilas. Sniggering, Beria explained that this liquor had a bad effect on the sex glands, and he used the most vulgar expressions in so doing. Stalin was on the verge of bursting into laughter, but held out when he noted Djilas sour expression. Later, Stalin played a gag record where an opera singers voice was replaced by the howling of a dog. Its the kind of thing that an adolescent weaned off the Teletubbies would find uproarious, but since Stalin roared with laughter, so did everyone else. Djilas however didnt understand, and Stalin took the needle off the record. Well, still its clever, devilishly clever, he said, almost apologetically.
URING THEIR RETURN TRIP to Belgrade, Djilas and the Yugoslav delegation stopped over in Ukraine, then ruled by the clan and person of one Nikita Khrushchev. Compared to the leaders in Moscow, infected by a malady that officials there called the Kremlin Complexionpale with red, ruddy cheeks from their nocturnal crawlsthe comically roly-poly Khrushchev appeared as a man of the people who had unexpectedly struck it rich. According to Stalins daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, her father had come to dread Beria and the power he had amassed. There is an element of truth in this, in that Stalin was paranoid of the power of everyone. But the game he was playingwould continue playing until the end of his lifewas one perfected during the Great Purges, before Beria had come to Moscow, and which enabled his rise to begin with. When Khrushchev was brought to Moscow in December 1949he had been a high official for some years, but never part of Stalins inner-circle before thenBeria took little measure of him. Privately, he called Khrushchev a moon-faced idiot. Stalin didnt think much better. He once tapped Khrushchevs bald pate with his pipe, cracking Its empty! Empty! And as if to illustrate Khrushchevs worth, he dumped his ashes atop that empty vessel. Beria had much more to fear for now in the rise of a certain Viktor Abakumov. Like Beria in 1938, Abakumovs chief asset was his total lack of connection to any of the clans in Moscow. Beria had survived the rise of another of Stalins pet rottweilers, Andrei
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Zhdanov, just after the war and must have felt vulnerable to a new onslaught. Zhdanov and the Central Committee Secretary, Georgi Malenkov, had gone to war, with Beria taking Malenkovs side and Stalin probably spurring them both on. Malenkov was temporarily exiled to Central Asia, then recalled when Zhdanov became ill with heart disease. Zhdanov died in August 1948. His precipitous rise and fall left his own clan, coalesced mostly in Leningrad where he had been Party chief, at the mercies of his rivals. In what was euphemistically called the Leningrad Case, about 500 of Zhdanovs cronies were dismissed or arrested for spying or ideological deviation. Abakumov, now chief of the MGB (for the first time in a decade, led by someone other than Beria or his underlings), busied himself with the purge of Zhdanovs clan but he still had time to spare to take on the living as well as the dead. From all appearances, Beria was one of his targets. Abakumov began the typical Soviet noisy investigation of a supposed Mingrelian Nationalist Conspiracy. This was not a subtle move against Beria, a Mingrelian who carried a disproportionate number of his fellow Mingrelians in his orbit. Unlike Nikolai Yezhovs hamhanded attempt to arrest Beria in 1938, Abakumov was advancing slowly and deliberately. At the last moment, however, Stalin hesitated. One can only guess as to whyperhaps he lost heart, or fell victim to Berias aggressive obsequiousness. Quite abruptly, in June 1951, Abakumov Stalin and Marshal Georgi Zhukov during hapwas arrested. He wrote pitiful letters to pier times, paying their respects to Lenins pickBeria, complaining of being tortured by led corpse. Milovan Djilas noted a rumour cirhis former MGB subordinates. Beria culating to the effect that Zhukov had looted ignored them. jewels in Berlin, observing that when they want Its likely that just about all of Stalins to get rid of someone in the Soviet Union but inner-circle but the man himself had lack convincing reasons for this, they usually worked in unison, in some sort of confed- spread some infamy about him through agents eracy of scoundrels, to undermine the new of the Secret Police. But Zhukov would live to kid on the block and preserve the status get his revenge. quo. They had temporarily united behind Abakumov when the latter, presumably on Stalins orders, went on the offensive against the popular Marshal Zhukov, who was then presiding over the Soviet military administration in East Germany. Beria had gotten a member of his clan, Ivan Serov, appointed as the chief of the civilian administration in Germany. Serov was of course a Chekist, seasoned by the mass deportation of the Chechens as well as the persecution of counter-revolutionaries in occupied Eastern Europe, and did little other than continue to build a case against his nominal superior. After several of
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Zhukovs deputies were arrested, the Marshal was called to Moscow where Stalin, Beria and Lazar Kaganovich accused him of conspiracy. Zhukov was stripped of all the Party positions he had acquired during the war and shunted off to exile as head of a minor Ukrainian military district. While Zhukov (and thus the military) was clearly demoted, it wasnt like Stalin to leave him alive. Whether he was making a rare concession to popular opinion or not, Abakumov was blamed for failing to produce (i.e., to manufacture) clear evidence of Zhukovs involvement in nefarious plots against the leadership. Another enemy lived on in Yugoslavia. Tensions between the Soviet Union and what was dubbed Satellite Number One in the American press had been simmering following the very public exchange of notes between the Yugoslav and Soviet leadership, criticizing each other in convoluted prose over minor deviations from Leninism. Following the full rupture of relations between the two countries, most observers believed that Stalinist hardliners would overwhelm and bring Josip Broz-Tito, well into middle age, enjoying down Marshal Tito and the Yugoslav a laugh with UN Secretary General U Thant in deviationists. Instead, the handful of a forest of bland suits. After Yugoslavias expulmembers of the Yugoslav Central sion from the Communist Bloc (then gathered Committee that dissented from the majorin a new and typically ephemeral construction called the Cominform), Tito brokered a series ity announced their sentiments publicly of agreements with the West which perma- and were quickly arrested and probably nently fractured the monolithic Communist murdered in jail. The former chief-of-staff of the Yugoslav Peoples Army, Arso movement. Jovanovic, sided with Moscow but rather than organize a putsch stole for the frontier with Romania, where he was shot by border guards. The Soviets had recruited a number of technicians from Yugoslavia, as well as other members of the Party, but aggressive counter-espionage measures appear to have staved off any real danger of risk to the leadership. The failure to overthrow Tito certainly wasnt for lack of trying. According to the the Medvedev brothers Unknown Stalin, a handful of letters were found on Stalins desk after his death. One was from Lenina celebrated letter complaining of Stalins brusque and rude treatment of Lenins wife as well as other Party comrades, written during one of Vladimir Ilychs moments of lucidity during his illness. A second was from Nikolai Bukharin, addressing the recipient by his nom de guerre, Koba, and asking why he needed Bukharin to die. The third letter was from Tito, and might be some indication of Stalins displeasure with Abakumov. The letter, had it been written or received by anyone but fellow dictators,
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probably would have resulted in a phone call to the police. Tito demanded that Stalin stop sending assassins to murder me, and if he did not, threatened that I will send one man to Moscow. There will be no need to send another. Its safe to say that no other man had spoken to Stalin in this way in his life and lived to tell about it. Abakumovs place wasnt taken by Merkulov, Tsanava or one of Berias other cronies, however. Instead, comrades of Nikita Khrushchev, brought with him from Ukraine and coalesced in Moscow as his own clan, began to staff senior jobs in the security services and the Party apparatus. Beria did not especially mind. He regarded Khrushchev as a lightweight, one of the useful idiots who could be slapped down easily if he overstepped the boundaries of propriety. Put another way, as Stalin told Milovan Djilas on some abstruse point of foreign policy, Once kings, when they could not agree over the booty, used to give disputed territories to their weakest vassal so they could snatch them from him later at some opportune moment.
ERIAS CHIEF DUTYONE among manyin the immediate postwar years was his role at the head of the atomic bomb project. From his deputies in the NKVD, Beria knew that the other major powers were working on developing atomic power (so indeed did non-nuclear aspirants, such as Japan, which had determined that it would simply be beyond their capabilities). Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, had originally been given the task of coordinating atomic development with Soviet scientists, but a month before the holocaust at Hiroshima, Beria took over. Its been known for many years that the Soviets were passed sensitive information about the atomic experiments at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos by scientist Klaus Fuchs. More recently, Berias son Sergo claimed that Robert Oppenheimer had visited his dacha before the war and would later leak details of the American initiative, codenamed the Manhattan Project, to Soviet agents. In the early 1990s, a member of Berias clan, Pavel Sudoplatov, also wrote a memoir in which he claimed Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr passed along information as well. None of this has ever been proven. Nevertheless, the stream of information gathered by Soviet intelligence agents in the West (as well as from scientists captured in Germany) greatly aided the Soviet effort. A year and a half after Beria took the reins of the project, the USSRs first atomic reactor went online. Aside from acquiring know-how, Beria was tasked with locating and obtaining the raw materials necessary for atomic research and development from within the USSR and the newly conquered territories of Eastern and Central Europe. But Soviet initiative and inventiveness also played a great, even decisive role in the discovery of atomic power. On August 29, 1949well ahead of Western intelligence estimatesthe Soviets successfully detonated their first plutonium bomb. Beria was present for this crowning achievement, and rushed to phone Stalin with the news. He should have known better.
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Stalin delighted in using even a device as neutral as a telephone to get the better of people. After a friend of Russian writer Boris Pasternak was sent to the gulag, Stalin allegedly telephoned him to say that We Old Bolsheviks never deny our friends. Pasternak had no idea what this meant but was absolutely mortified by the possibilities. Getting Stalins direct line from Central Asia, Beria began an excited and garrulous report. He was immensely proud of the accomplishment, which in the long run guaranteed a sense of parity with the United States despite the inferiority of the Soviet economy. Stalin, however, interrupted Berias chatter, cut him off by saying he had already heard about it, and hung up.
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CHAPTER NINE :
Masters and Slaves

Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bedno escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
ESPITE THE TIMELY DEATH Of Zhdanov and the arrest of Abakumov, the campaign against Beria did not let up. In fact most, and possibly all, of the chieftains in Moscow were then under assault. Several were easily cast aside. In March 1949, Molotovregarded in protocol as Stalins first deputywas sacked as Foreign Minister. The Minister of Foreign Trade, Anastas Mikoyan, was also sacked and his wife (who was Jewish) arrested in 1948. Neither Molotov nor Mikoyan were as weighty as Beria, nor could they claim, as Beria did, to have a wide support network in the security services, to say nothing of a territorial fief consisting of the whole of the Caucasus, where loyal deputies continued to serve at his behest. The latter was his stronghold, but it was also his greatest vulnerability. Without the services an Abakumov or Zhdanov, Stalin took aim at it himself. On November 5, 1951, the internal boundaries of Georgia were altered, essentially splitting the republic and watering down the power of established officialsall of whom were part of Berias clan. Four days later, without informing the Politburo, Stalin published a new decree on the Mingrelian Nationalist Conspiracy. The plotwhich sounds like one of the ludicrous conspiracies a young Beria might have come up withclearly hadnt been abolished with the unfortunate Abakumov. Three high-ranking Georgian officials, all Beria men, were arrested, and a full-scale purge of the Georgian party apparatus began. According to most of those around him, Stalin had gone through a precipitous mental decline after the war, possibly on account of a stroke during its later years. Stalin had always been paranoidit was an essential part of his characterbut now, it was said, he had become demented, obsessed with spies. They pointed to the so-called Doctors Plot,
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Masters & Slaves
where a circle of Jewish physicians were accused of conspiring to poison senior Soviet leaders, including the Vozhd. Medical treatment was sabotaged, with Zhdanovs corpse dragged out as an example of what the capitalist powers and their agents armed with stethoscopes had done. Yet there was absolutely nothing about the Doctors Plot which doesnt correspond to earlier purges, when Stalin was presumably as sane as he ever was. Zhdanov, at least, had died of a real illnessand like Sergei Kirov, killed by Stalins assassins, his corpse used as a pretext to whip up hysteria against potential enemies. Moreover, as we have seen, enemies (and friends) had often been accused of attempting to personally murder Stalin in the past, such as Mikhail Lakoba and Papulia Ordzhonikidze. The Doctors Plot was itself a carbon copy of the useful calamity which in the hands of the master could be used for a sudden, dramatic leveling within the Party. Stalin may have gone nuts, but if so, it was only a more intense version of his everyday, default-level dementia. The Doctors Plot came in tandem with other traces of antiSemitismparticularly the show trial of Czech party chief Rudolf Slansky and his deputies in Prague, who were accused of being apprentices of Zionism and executed for espionage and treason. But Stalin had been an anti-Semite for years. In January 1948 he bragged to Milovan Djilas On our Central Committee there are no Jews! then tried to goad Djilas into making anti-Semitic comments himself. (The claim was not strictly true: Beria was fond of referring to Lazar Kaganovich behind his back as Lazar the Israelite.) There is ample evidence that the targets for this and other conspiracies were the men who had been a part of Stalins inner-circle for the previous decadeincluding Beria. In October 1952, Stalin dissolved the Politburo and replaced it with the larger Presidium a repeat of his old game of renaming, abolishing or re-vamping existing structures simply to throw everyone off-balance. A second resolution on the Mingrelian Nationalist Conspiracy was passed in March, and by the time the Presidium came into being, the purges of Berias clan in Georgia had been ongoing for almost a year, with the practical effect that his support network back home had been almost totally wiped out. Only a handful of Berias deputies remained in office. The effect had been to destroy the highest level of the Georgian Party, replacing Berias old cronies with younger, hungry and largely nonaffiliated officials from below.
PPROPRIATELY, THERE IS NO definitive narrative for the most momentous event in the history of the Soviet Union. Several of the people involvedand one who was not involved, but knew the cadaver as well as any of themleft their own accounts, which are often at odds with one another. Moreover, in the last 14 years a number of the minor figures and eyewitnessesusually soldiers, who were regarded as hardly more than furniture by the gathered prelates of the Partyhave come forward with interesting, if uncorroborated, details.
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Masters & Slaves
On February 28, 1953, Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev and the other court jesters had gathered at the Kremlin, moving on to Stalins dacha for dinner and a movie and the usual drunken orgy. Khrushchev remembered leaving early the next morning, with Stalin (and probably all of the others) having imbibed massive quantities of alcohol. The next night, worried by their masters failure to appear, Stalins guards (in alternate versions, his maid) entered and found the Man of Steel lying on the floor, his trousers wet from having pissed himself. What happened next is a contentious issue. Stalins daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, claimed that Beria, Khrushchev and the others who had been summoned by the guards refused to call a doctor until 10 or 12 hours had passed from the time of the Vozhds discovery in such an un-divine state. She says that Stalins household help and his guards demanded a surgeon be called, but Beria brushed them off by saying that nothing has happened. He is sleeping. Look! It The moon-faced idiot slides in for a photo-op seems highly unlikely that anyone would with Stalin (with a strategically placed fedora to demand anything from Beria, though the prevent any jokes at his expense). Of all the spectacle of the incapacitated Leader may rogues gathered in Stalins inner-circle, Nikita Khrushchev had the most to fear from Stalins have trumped his sinister reputation. The most interestingand oft-repeat- sudden death, and Beria the most to gain. edaccount of Beria in Stalins last hours Hardly was the Vozhds body cold before the two owes its currency to Nikita Khrushchev. began to prepare for war. Beria, he said, kneeled before the prone body of his fallen master, alternately cursing Stalin to the devil when he began to fade and swearing eternal loyalty and kissing his hand when he perked up. This comical picture of Beria is almost too profane, too penetrating to the soul of Beria to be true, but Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote something about it as well. Beria, she claimed, was trying so hard at this moment of crisis to strike exactly the right balance, to be cunning, yet not too cunning He went up to the bed and spent a long time gazing into the dying mans face. From time to time my father opened his eyes but was apparently unconscious or in a state of semiconsciousness. Beria stared fixedly at those clouded eyes, anxious even now to convince my father he was the most loyal and devoted of them all. Alliluyeva accused Beria (as well as Khrushchev) of complicity in her fathers death by their failure to deliver timely medical care. While this is likely, it probably had less to do with their malevolence than the fact that, given the recent developments in the Doctors Plot, Stalins return to health would probably be fatal to everyone around him. Beria in particular was going to be purged had Stalin hung on for much longer, so he wasnt likely to have broken a nail to save Stalins life. But one of the problems with establishing motive
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in the last hours of Stalins life is the bizarre climate in which the comrade-in-chief lived. To help or to bring harmboth could be rewarded with the same punishment. With more than a hundred million people across the Soviet Bloc swearing devotion in catechism, not one of their best and most capable representatives was willing to stake their life on a definite course. In the end, apathy reigned. The last living participant in the soap opera of Stalins death was Vyacheslav Molotov, shunted off to a series of increasingly meaningless jobs and excluded from Stalins innercircle. Owing no doubt to his low vitality and failure to hold a single conviction after the year 1917, Molotov outlived all of his contemporaries and was by some considerations the last living major protagonist in the Russian Revolution. In interviews published shortly after his death (which are, characteristically, about as exciting as watching the advance of gangrene), Molotov coughed up a bone which not even Alliluyeva or Khrushchev had gnawed on. Beria poisoned Stalin, Molotov said, and this, not apathy, explained his reluctance to call the doctors. The source for Molotovs extraordinary claim is Beria himself: after the dear Leader was dead and gone, Beria reportedly blurted out, I did it! I saved all of you! Whatever the truth of thisan autopsy was supposedly performed on Stalins body, and presumably no trace of poisoning was detectedBeria left Stalins dacha with a scarcely-concealed arrogance. Stalin had died, and with him all of the intrigues against him were halted. If Beria had kept his wits about him, though, he probably wouldnt have felt victorious. Though Beria didnt know it, he had entered the hour of his greatest danger now that his master and tormentor had passed on. Stalin undoubtedly would have killed him if he had lived just a few months longer. Stalin, however, had found him useful. He may have come to despise Beria, but he didnt fear him, and no one else could have taken Beria out without Stalins blessing. Now, however, he was surrounded by men who both feared and despised him, and were in a race for their lives to get the rejuvenated spy chief before he got them.
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Masters & Slaves
CHAPTER TEN :
The Kremlins Civil War

A thousand times better he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the Party kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose.
TALIN HAD IMPRINTED HIS features on the very face of the Soviet Union. The state, the Communist Party and the greater society was a ferocious machine, and though the pilot was passed out drunk in a pool of his own urine, the engine continued to hum. At some point during Stalins death throes, Lavrenti Beria and Georgi Malenkov, who had been driven together against Zhdanov after the war, worked out a rough alliance to seize power and preempt any potential challengers. Perhaps they even shared a few words within Stalins death chamber, since as Beria well knew it was likely the only room in the entire country which one could be sure was not bugged. On March 6, per their agreement, Beria spontaneously nominated Malenkov as chairman of the Council of Ministers. Malenkov in turn nominated Beria his deputy. His first order of business was to solder together the state security bodies back into a united MVD, with Beria as its chief. Molotov was recalled from obscurity to serve as the weak pillar of a triumvirate, possibly to present some further continuity from Stalins glory days. There were other pretenders to Stalins gleaming throne of bones, but they went along with the putsch. Nikita Khrushchev was the exception. Stalins passing and the assumption of his earthly mantle by the triumvirate was accompanied by Khrushchev losing his position at the head of the Moscow branch of the Communist Partya potent source of powerthough he remained on as secretary of the Partys Central Committee. It was a wound, but not a fatal one. Recent research into the days following Stalins death has promoted the seemingly
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absurd theory that Beria actually represented a sort of proto-Khrushchev, standing at the forefront of de-Stalinization. Theres something to this theory, though given that Beria was directly responsible for more than two decades of repression, its hard to swallow it. They point to several issuesa softening of Moscows position on Korea, Yugoslavia, and East Germany, amnesties, and most of all, the revelation of the hoax behind the Doctors Plot. Almost immediately after taking over the MVD, the major adherents of the plot found themselves arrested or sacked, and Soviet state media denounced the case as a fraud. Beria had several motives for coming out against the Doctors Plot, and a secret identity as a liberal in a Chekists trenchcoat is the least plausible. The plot had in fact been one of many tools Stalin was using to destroy Berias clan. At the same time Pravda was ridiculing the hoax which it had so breathlessly promoted, Beria was carrying out a counter-purge in Georgia, arresting and demoting the figures Stalin had recently promoted and bringing his old associates back, in some cases from the jail cell straight to the central committee. The Mingrelian Nationalist Conspiracy the most blatant attack on Beriawas also denounced. Two of his most trusted henchmen, Vladimir Dekanozov and Stepan Mamulov, took seats on the No, hes just resting. It may sound like a Georgian Party Central Committee to macabre joke, but Stalin, like Kim Il-Sung of ensure resumed loyalty to their patron in North Korea, never really died. According to the Moscow and to help reverse the tide. official release sent out of the Kremlins press In fact, the revelation of the Doctors office, the heart of the comrade-in-arms of Plot was simply an exercise in crude Lenin, the wise leader and teacher, had Stalinist statecraft: the old tried and true ceased to beat. formula of discrediting yesterdays pretext for the purge in order to carry out another one. The intensity of Berias counter-purge across the USSR varied, with some state and Party bodies suffering much higher turnover than others. The MVD, of course, was his baby, and recent appointments from Khrushchevs clan were demoted or sent into professional exile. Hundreds of MVD agents abroad were recalled, some never to be heard from again. It appears another possible excuse to purge was being cooked up when Beria came out against the practice of appointing ethnic Russians to Party leadership positions in nonRussian areas (the best example at hand, of course, being Khrushchev during the war in Ukraine). Beria also passed a substantial amnesty for prisoners in the gulag. Beria knew better than anyone what an enormous drain the gulag was on state resources, even when slave labour on a starvation diet was taken into consideration. He had ruthlessly exploited the
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gulag as his own empire during the war years, though the quality of production in such conditions left much to be desired. He had also decreed a postponed but definite death sentence on thousands of prisoners that he had sent to mine uranium for the atomic bomb project, and ordinary civilians who lived in the testing areas in Central Asia. His decision to dramatically reduce the gulag population had little to do with liberalism or a reforming spirit. Stalin, after all, had prized Beria in equal measures for his ruthlessness and efficiency. His ruthlessness had left millions to die on his watch; his aptitude for practical matters led him to decide that so much blood spent for so little was counter-productive. Detecting a faint trace of liberalism in these and other policies, a number of historians have compared Berias role after Stalins death favourably with Yuri Andropov, another Chekist who as General Secretary supposedly eased off on the repression of the Brezhnev years and paved the way for Mikhail Gorbachevs reforms. But if Berias course after his masters passing smacks of liberalism, it stands out all the more because his chief enemies were then advancing the opposite position. The dying tribe of Sovietologists in the West may amuse themselves with the notion that Berias reforms, if successful, could have led to glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachevs main reform programs, twenty years earlier. But there is no indication that his position could be taken in good faith; that, having crushed his enemies in the Party on the basis of their reactionary beliefs, he would not have reversed course himself. He had, after all, learned such a technique at the knee of the master himself.
TILL, THERE WAS A muted sense of surprise in Western capitals at the trickle of information coming from the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. Some considered the whole shift in course the result of Malenkovs leadership, though he was never more than a malleable puppet in more cunning hands. In a matter of two months, Beria who most in the West regarded as much as creature of Stalins creation as Yezhov and Abakumovhad cemented power behind the scenes. And just as he appeared to triumph, the ground was being mined beneath his feet. Beria had clearly underestimated Khrushchev from the time Stalin had summoned him to his inner-circle. Beria once would have crushed such a rival for the thrill of it, but he never grasped the danger the comical peasant/commissar presented. Unlike Beria, who had only visited the frontlines twice during the war and was regarded with a sense of dread by the Red Army, Khrushchev had expanded his clan to include several military officers he had worked with as a political commissar in the army during the war. Moreover, he had a soft touch with the people in the way that none of his colleagues in the Party hierarchy ever did. While he might embarrass elderly diplomats with his crude jokes and folk epigrams about animals screwing and men dropping their trousers, his manner of earthiness had the appeal, as Milovan Djilas had noted, of the man of the people suddenly come into riches. More importantly, Khrushchev had only the usual personal enemies in Moscow. Beria
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was regarded as a sinister figure by whole sectors of the country. Though he had once begged Stalin to participate in a troika and exterminate several thousand class enemies and traitors, Khrushchev also had a relatively pure record in the Party apparatus, permitting him to play the liberal or the hardcase depending on political expediency. Throughout the Spring of 1953, after Stalins death, Khrushchev had been making quiet overtures to the Party elitecareful, no doubt, since his adversary was more than capable of eavesdropping on his conversations. A few were won over immediately: Khrushchevs clan, of course, but also Nikolai Bulganin, who Beria had once tried to fire from his post as Defense Minister. Only a handful conspirators were really required. Khrushchev knew that career commissars like Lazar Kaganovich, eager to protect their clans but without any delusions of taking the top job themselves, would go over to whichever side came out on top. One of those crucial collaborators was the new Vozhd himself, Georgi Malenkov. Dimwitted, plodding, and with the manners and appearance of a trade union boss The eternally flatulent Georgi Malenkov, daring grown fat off of union dues, Malenkov to draw attention to the inch or so he had on was hesitant to get involved. He also had Stalin in height. Malenkov and Beria stood ties with Beria going back to the 1940s. together as Stalins lead pallbearers, and even They had survived in the trenches of promoted a short-lived cult of personality Kremlin warfare among Stalins under- around the pudgy commissar. The Western lings for more than a decade, and it was press and governments eagerly promoted the probably Beria who impressed upon Stalin myth that Malenkov was calling the shots as the the need to bring Malenkov back from new Communist bogeyman, paying scant attention to the true titans duking it out for Stalins exile after Zhdanovs demise. With all of this in mind, it would be mantle. natural for Khrushchev to summon a bit of tact when broaching the subject of a Party coup detat. Khrushchev, however, was born with a debilitating lack of tact, and the atmosphere of Kremlin politics had been so warped that internecine conspiracies were probably regarded as blas. Look, Comrade, Khrushchev said he told Malenkov, dont you see where this is leading? Were heading for disaster. Beria is sharpening his knives. Malenkov could have sealed Khrushchevs fate immediately by reporting this conversation back to Beria. Though he was not prepared to sign off on the pudgy commissars plan, he kept this foreknowledge of it to himself. For all of his faults, he, too, was a seasoned Stalinist, and in this world there were no absolutes, merely possibilities.
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ONE COULD QUESTION HIS mastery of the Soviet Union, but it would be Berias blind interference in international affairs that would spur Khrushchevs conspiracy into action. After the war, Stalin had insisted upon the transfer of massive wealth from Soviet-occupied East Germany as a form of reparations. Whole factories had been dismantled and dragged to the Soviet Union to rebuild its devastated economy, as well as to aid in the development of atomic power. Furthermore, the city of Koenigsburg and the territory around it had been annexed and renamed Kaliningrad (after the blind, senile president of the USSR), and the borders of Germany and Poland shifted. On June 2, 1953, East German leader Walter Ulbricht came to Moscow for a series of meetings about the German problem. Ulbricht himself was a hardline Stalinist and had little concern about the widespread discontent in his country. But five days earlier, Beria had promoted several members of his clan to high positions in East Germany. Someone of Berias stature was free choose his own device in a duel, and liberalism was again his weapon of choice. At meetings with Ulbricht over the next two days, Beria took the offensive, accusing the East German leadership of those ubiquitous errors and urging Ulbricht to make concessions in the interest of easing the workers plight. Thousands of Germans had fled to the West, and it was creating bad publicity for the architects of heaven on earth. From later accounts, it appears that the meeting Lavrenti Beria looks down solemnly at the hole in the ground where Khrushchev is preparing to became quite heated, with Ulbricht denybury him. His wife Nina, in white, is to the left. ing that anything was seriously wrong and She and their son Sergo (named after the Beria shouting at him. patron he had crawled over to reach the knee of Exactly two weeks later, on June 16, Stalin) would share in his downfall in the protests broke out in East Berlin. In a mat- Stalinist fashion, though not to the extent that ter of hours they had spread throughout Berias own victims did. East Germany. The following dayin what would become a familiar scene over the years, in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968the Red Army blitzed through the country, and crushed the uprising by brute force. It was the stimulus for still more dramatic events in Moscowanother component of the same pattern, to be repeated through the years when someone in the Kremlin needed a scapegoat. Nikita Khrushchev, for his part, was at least as outraged by the uprising in Germany
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as he was three years later, when he ordered tanks into Hungary. Insurrection was the tool of the oppressed worker; in anyone elses hand, it was brought about by class enemies, traitors, bandits. Moscows control in Germany had been reestablished almost immediately, but someone would have to take the fall for it. Given Berias untimely intervention into the realm of foreign affairs, the unrest provided an excellent pretext for what Khrushchev had been planning.
KREMLIN MEETING OF THE Presidium (Stalins misfit creation lived on) was planned for June 26, 1953, nine days after the army put down the uprising in East Germany. Beria arrived as per usual with a dozen or so bodyguards and assistants. Even aside from this personal escort, he had reason to feel safe in Moscow, if he had any inkling of what was being planned against him. The guards in the Kremlin itself were MVD personnel, and two divisions were stationed permanently in Moscow. Malenkov chaired the meeting, and immediately gave the floor to Nikita Khrushchev. The latter began without a prepared text, speaking of Berias imperious manner, his errors, and so on. Beria expressed total surprisethe man who had denounced millions, and probably hundreds personally, was, horror of horrors, being denounced. He interrupted Khrushchev. Whats going on Nikita? Whats this youre mumbling about? Like all Communist Party meetings, the topic of discussion before the Presidium had been decided well in advance, at least by some of the members. Khrushchev had won over Malenkov at long last, as well as Molotov. These two diehard Stalinists had probably been moved by the recent events in East Germany and Berias conspicuous role in it, though Khrushchev feared the fumbling Malenkov might back out at the final moment. Molotov claimed that Beria had called him before the meeting to win him over to his group, which seems to suggest that Beria expected some kind of a conflict in the Presidium, though probably not the one that actually happened. The only other member of the Presidium who had with certainty joined Nikitas crusade was Bulganin. The execution of the plot left something to be desired. Anastas Mikoyan was aware of Khrushchevs scheming, but not sensing the gravity of what was happening, began to defend Beria when it was his turn to speak. Malenkov was sent into a panic, either because of this lone voice of dissent or out of general nervousness. After Khrushchev demanded that Beria should be stripped of all of his posts, he jumped the gun and pressed a button beneath his desk which signaled Berias captors to enter the room. Berias bowels must have made the molecular transformation from solid to liquid as soon as he glimpsed the man at the head of the security detail. It was Marshal Zhukov. If one can believe Khrushchev, he had merely stumbled across Zhukov in the Kremlin, informed him of the undertaking and obtained his participation and loyalty in this most sensitive aspect of the coup detat. It just might be true, however; apparently the plot to
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topple Beria came together in such haste that his captors only had a single gun between them. One can only imagine Berias face as the Marshal, who Beria had once gored with the ferocity of a drunken animal, ordered his tormentor to spread em and began to pat him down. From the corner of his eye, Zhukov spotted a piece of paper on which Beria had repeatedly scribbled the single word ALARM, hoping to pass it off his bodyguards for his rescue. They had already been diverted, however, and were kept preoccupied while Beria was taken to a secret Red Army bunker in Moscow. Bulganins participation in the coup, along with the revivified Marshal Zhukovs prestige and Khrushchevs contacts, mobilized the Red Army on the side of the conspirators. Before Berias deputies at the MVD could have known what was happening, armoured columns poured into Moscow, though there was no need for an ostentatious display. After Berias arrest, every member of the Presidium came out on the side of the conspirators, just as Khrushchev had predicted. Several of the most loyal members of Berias clan in the MVD, including Ivan Serov, also betrayed their patrn. With the situation apparently under control, Khrushchev was spotted the very next day, watching with delight a production of the Bolshoi Theatre. The subject of that evenings performance? A coup detat in the making.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN :
The Trial of the Henchman

He confessed to the assassination of eminent Party members, the distribution of seditious pamphlets, embezzlement of public funds, sale of military secrets, sabotage of every kind He confessed that he had murdered his wife, although he knew, and his questioners must have known, that his wife was still alive.
MONG THE STARTLING REVELATIONS made by Sergo Beria after Communisms fall (characterized by historian Vladislav M. Zubok as this mishmash of absurdities) was that his father had been murdered immediately after his arrest, and the trial which was announced by the press and the 47 volumes which made up the prosecutors case nothing but an elaborate fabrication. He claimed to have seen a stretcher bearing a corpse being carried from his fathers home. At the time he had little opportunity to protest, since he and his mother were also arrested just after his fathers downfall. In direct refutation of Sergo Berias claims, Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1994 published three letters written by his father after his arrest which had been found in the Soviet archives. The letters appear to be authentic, putting to rest still another claim by the henchmans devoted son. In one letter to Malenkov, Beria begins by apologizing for his particularly grave and inexcusable behavior toward his former friend (or whatever one chooses to call such a miserly relationship). I am the guilty party, one hundred percent. He also admitted his inadmissable rudeness and insolence toward Khrushchev and Bulganin during the session at which he was arrested. He further characterized his behavior at various times as idiotic and overly familiar. He recalled Khrushchev at the Presidium meeting swearing at Beria strongly and furiously, which I wholeheartedly accept, denied trying to have Bulganin fired, and concluded with a plea to Malenkov to save his life (without doing so directly) and give him any job, anywhere, no matter how lowly.
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Such letters had little effect, and were probably not even read. It may be alluring to imagine Beria being torturedcertainly some of his victims were not beyond wishing for their revengebut theres no evidence that he was. A confession from the man who had beaten so many out broken men in his day was not necessary for what they had in mind. The conspirators kept Beria under heavy guard in preparation for a trial. Before the trial could commence, however, the Presidum presented their case to the Party. Beria may have been the most hated man in the Soviet Union by some estimates, but he was still a man who had hovered at the periphery of supreme power for fifteen years, subject of his own personality cult in the Caucasus, with streets, schools and other edifices blessed with his name. Each of the conspirators took turns Dear Georgi, I am seeking your understanddenouncing Beria at the July plenum, ing, since you know me better than the others before passing the microphone on to more Of course, after what has happened, I should recent converts. Mikoyan, the only mem- be called strongly to account, put in my place, ber at the session of the Presidium to and dressed down so that I would remember it defend Beria, joined in the hate fest. So too until the end of my life Send me wherever you did the man who must have loved Beria wish, to any kind of work, one most insignifibest of all of his colleagues, Azeri Party cant [sic]. See me out, I will be able to work ten chief Mir Jafar Bagirov, who had worked more years and I will work with all my soul and by his side as his loyal deputy for more complete energy. I am saying this from the bottom of my heart, it is not true that since I held than 30 years. With the Party won over, the purge a prominent post I would not be able to perbegan in earnest. Georgia, as one might form a small one Comrades, please excuse expect, was heavily purged (for the third that I write somewhat disjointed and badly as a time in half a dozen years). The officials result of my disposition and because of the that Beria recalled from jail to the central poor light and the absence of my pince-nez. committee returned behind bars, with the knowledge that their verdict this time was final. While the methods employed in Georgia and the Caucasus were not pleasant, arrest and execution was the exception rather than the rule. Of some three thousand officials in Georgia purged after Berias downfall, most were subject only to losing their Party membership cardsa virtual guarantee of poverty, but a rather lenient reprisal by Stalinist standards, or Berias. On December 17, 1953, Berias trial was announced in the press, to begin the next day.
Lavrenti Beria to Georgi Malenkov, July 1, 1953
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He was standing in the dock with six accomplices, making it a virtual trial of Berias clan rather than the man personally (the others were Vladimir Dekanozov; Bogdan Kobulov; Sergei Goglidze, the official who had protected Beria when Yezhov tried to arrest him; Pavel Meshik; Lev Vlodzimirsky; and Vsevolod Merkulov, who had written a lengthy confession in late July, this one doubt pulled out of him under torture). Aside from not dealing at all with Berias true crimeswhich Khrushchev, Molotov, Malenkov and the others had taken part inthe body which heard the case was probably illegal under the Soviet constitution. Beria was judged by a special military tribunal; he and others from the spy services had been granted military ranks during the war but had never served under their jurisdiction. Presiding over the trial was a panel led by Marshal Ivan Konev. This was hardly fair, given the seething hatred the military had for Beria, but Party meetings were not the only proceedings in the Soviet Union whose verdicts were decided in advance. Under the law, neither Beria nor any counsel were supposed to be present during the trial, though they were. Its not clear why the conspirators, eager to do away with Beria as quickly as possible, permitted this. However, a military tribunals verdict was final, and not subject to appeal. This, of course, was followed to the letter. Some of the charges against Beria were that he had used the MVD to seize power (with the intention of restoring capitalism, of all things); that he had spied for both the Musavat government in Azerbaijan as well as the Mensheviks in Georgia; that he had persecuted Sergo Ordzhonikidze and other Old Bolsheviks, and so on. The trial lasted from December 18th through the 23rd, with the predictable sentence handed down and carried out on the final day. Among the interesting, if uncorroborated, stories to surface in the years after the Soviet Unions demise was the account of one Hizhnyak Gurevich, who claims to have been one of Berias guards as well as his executioners. Interviewed by Mark Franchetti for the Times (UK) in 1998, Gurevich stated that Beria was sent to the secret military bunker in Moscow as the official reports had it, where he was housed for six months (which is also in concord with the official story). He said Beria had at first behaved petulantly, hurling food against the wall and such, but eventually mellowed and adjusted to life interrupted. Gurevich claimed that his commanding officer had issued orders to the effect Beria was to be shot immediately if the bunker were attacked, a sign that the conspirators were not overconfident about the unlikelihood of a counter-coup. A bit of a sentimentalist, Gurevich said he had written three times to Sergo Beria to inform him of his fathers last days, but Sergo never responded. Gurevich claimed that Beria was set before a firing squad. Major General Pavel Batitsky, chief of staff of the Soviet air force, shot first, followed by the others. Gurevich was charged with taking Berias remains to the Donskoy Crematorium, and scattered the ashes into a fan. It was a fitting endthe body obliterated, not a trace remainingfor the man who persecuted Nestor Lakoba beyond the grave.
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ONE OF THE SIX accomplices at his trial survived Lavrenti Berias death. While the sickeningly vicious purges of Stalins epoch may have ended, there was no mercy to be shown to his lieutenants as Berias clan was torn to pieces. Beria himself had bagged the first corpse of his clan when he arrested Lavrenti Tsanava, one of his old Mingrelian cronies. Tsanava, whose complaints about the mass of Polish POWs had led to the massacres in and around Katyn, was universally reviled as a sociopath in service of the state; he may have somehow betrayed Beria during the opening salvos of the Doctors Plot. Beria sent him to prison shortly after Stalins death, though no one knows why. Khrushchevs group seems to have forgotten about him, since his name was rarely mentioned in most of the printed denunciations of the Beria clique. He allegedly committed suicide in prison on October 12, 1955. Avksentii Rapava and Nikolai Rukhadze were shot in 1955, officially charged with the persecution of the Old Bolsheviks in Georgia. Mir Bagirov had been sacked as the godfather of Azerbaijan, after probably setting some kind of endurance record as the head of a republic in the Soviet Union. After a series of obscure assignments he was arrested and tried in April 1956, and executed immediately thereafter. His name resurfaced at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961 when Khrushchev accused Malenkov, Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich of protecting Bagirov as a pretext for Khrushchev to purge his fellow conspirators from the Party. Nina Beria served a year in prison for no other crime than being married to a monster. After her and Sergo Berias release, they were forcibly prevented from returning to Moscow. They settled in Ukraine, where Nino died on July 7, 1991. Sergo died in October 2000, four months after his motion to vindicate his father as a victim of Communism was quashed by the Russian Supreme Court.
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POSTSCRIPT :
Evil, Trash, and History

AVRENTI BERIA IS THE ultimate posterboy for trash history. His life, by any cultures moral or any objective standard, was totally without meaning. He accomplished absolutely nothing save destruction, including his contribution to the project to develop the most destructive weapon in the history of mankind. Several generations later, whole segments of the population in Kazakstanthose unfortunate enough to live in what Beria callously considered a low-population areacontinue to suffer from the effects of the atomic blasts in the area. In a sense, and aside from the shadows of men who emerged from the gulag in shattered fragments, Beria continues to kill more than fifty-one years after his own demise. One does not want to draw caricatures in place of real menbut what to do when a cartoon of a scheming, bloody spook is the most accurate portrait? Even the real photographs of Beria were touched up by artists trained in this most perverse form of Socialist Realism before they were released. A handful of men who encountered Beria were able to admire his efficiency and officious manner over his brutality and appetite for cruelty, though no one ever praised his humanity. Its not incorrect to say that Beria was a creature of Stalinism. But Stalinism in its usual manifestation promoted the desk murderer and the ruthless overseer above more colourful figures. When Beria gathered for the usual Roman brunch with Stalins inner-circle, he was surrounded by other men who had snuffed out thousands of lives by a stroke of the pen. Stalin ensured such complicity was spread among his cohorts, as in the case of Katyn. But Beria was the only one present who could write a scholarly thesis distinguishing the different types of screams people make when subjected to different kinds of torture. There is
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Evil, Trash & History
ample evidence that he not only ordered mass murder from the confines of his comfy chair, but took part in the process, personally, for his own amusement. That he was inflicting unbearable pain on men far more accomplished and talented than himself was a perverse pleasure; to bring down the mighty to ones own level was, after all, one of Communisms best selling points to the masses. For the last sixty years, intellectuals have attempted to explain evil, to look for the moment when a Hitler or a Beria experienced the intense internal rupture which permitted the conscienceless crimes which followed. Beria is a special case. Unlike most Nazi and Communist true believers, he was totally ignorant of the Partys esoteric tomes, much less the ideological justification for specific amendments made by Lenin and Stalin. Faith had little to do with his transgressions of humanity. Right-wing moralists and other cheap politicians might linger over the Soviet Unions disavowal of God and attribute Berias profane existence to the logical result of a nation adrift without some sort of Mosaic moral compass. But that doesnt seem satisfying either. Amateur psychiatrists have speculated that Stalin, Hitler, and others among of the 20th Centurys greatest mass-murderers were clinically insane. Toward the end of their respective lives, that rings true enough. Perhaps the detachment from reality that comes from being a president-for-life with a controlled press and subordinates licking your boots is an occupational hazard of dictatorship. But if Stalin was mad, Beria was not. He, and the rest of the commissars that duked it out after their leaders death were merely servants of Stalins madness. And for the mass murder of millions of men, there were thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of individual killers. It seems a debasement of every human instinct to suggest that the murderer of one is less culpable than the murderer of millions, but few, if any, paid a price for the crimes of the Stalin era (or those which came before and after). As the main cog in the Stalinist death machine, Beria bore an awesome responsibility for what happened. Its impossible to feel sorry for him, even if its lamentable that the entirety of the Soviet hierarchy wasnt issued a handgun and two bullets. One they could use on their greatest enemy, for one last bit of personal satisfaction. The other they could use on themselves.
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Evil, Trash & History
Suggestions for Further Reading

There is only one biography of Lavrenti Beria in EnglishBeria: Stalins First Lieutenant, by Amy Knight. The book suffers in large part (through no fault of the author) as Sergo Berias fantastic claims were circulating but not yet discarded at the time of its publication in 1993. Knights narrative is often confusing however, with discursive detours from Berias own life which appear neither illuminating nor especially interesting. She also has the somewhat annoying habit of referring to important personages only by their initials, such as M. Bagirov or L. Vlodzimirsky. Four primary sources however are very useful, if they all require some caution. Khrushchev Remembers is the title of the future First Secretarys memoir, translated by, oddly enough, the future Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, Strobe Talbott. His time in office, coupled with that of Condoleeza Rice, should result in Kremlinologists being forever prohibited from ever making the jump to political office again. Khrushchevs The Last Testament serves as a supplement to the first volume. Svetlana Alliluyevas Twenty Letters to a Friend appears to be out of print (so much for respect for yesterdays idols). Milovan Djilas Conversations with Stalin was published in the West in 1962, for which its author was sentenced to a jail term by his former comradesin-arms in Yugoslavia. Djilas edited many passages of Conversations with Stalin for use in his final book, The Fall of the New Class. Where there was a substantial divergence between the two (most of his changes were for style rather than content), Ive quoted from the latter. Of recent works, Martin Amis Koba the Dread is an entertaining read, though nothing said there had not been said before. Roy Medvedevs work, on the other hand, is extraordinary: his Unknown Stalin is among the best books ever written about Stalin and his inner circle. The Court of the Red Czar, by Simon Montefiore, is also worth reading. I am deeply indebted to Mark Irkali for providing me with translations from his copious archive of Georgian books and articles, and would have named him co-author of this piece if modesty hadnt prevented him from accepting. Of particular use were articles from Literaturuli Sakartvelo from 1988 to 1992, particularly the interview with Molotov pub-
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lished on October 27, 1989. Numerous books which mention Beria or the purges were published from the 1940s onward, and range from vapid to incisive. Terror and Communist Politics, edited by Jonathan Adelman, is certainly useful. Less so is Robert Conquests Inside Stalins Secret Police, which though published in 1985 and filled with interesting information is poisoned by the authors utter inability to write a page of coherent and provocative prose. Reinhard Gehlens unmasking of Bormann as a Soviet spy is in The Service, which is probably shelved forever on account of Gehlens notorious translator, David Irving. The quotes preceding each chapter are of course from 1984. While Orwells novel has nothing in particular to do with Lavrenti Beria, the time spent by the reader in the dystopia of Oceania is probably the closest those who never lived under a totalitarian system will come to experiencing life contorted into tragic absurdity.
Cali Ruchala October 2004
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